Josh Sawyer Q&A Thread

[KVVRR]

Deadfire is weird everyone agrees they did most of the crucial things right but still feel as if something is lacking and no one can point out exactly what it is. It's as if someone put a curse on Sawyer that every game he makes should turn out to be hollow.

I think the setting being entirely within a 'sailing/pirate' theme was a bad choice. I liked PoE1 quite a bit but the setting change was off-putting in the initial marketing. Even after playing it I've yet to finish it and the tonal changes, especially in returning characters, is my main turnoff to this day.

My real guess as to why Larian is a runaway success while other crpgs are middling is that the world environment is very interactive and that is known going in. Lots of clutter and objects that can be interacted with, as well as environmental combos with those objects. Throw them, light them up, etc. It doesn't matter if throwing a barrel or chest on an enemy is tactically useful, it matters that it can be done. Similar to Elder Scrolls, the mind loves the idea that objects and environments aren't just visual dressing but tangible things. Similar effect to open world games providing that sense of endless possibility at the outset, then tapering off quickly when the player finds out how constrained it is. But compare that to PoE or Solasta where you press a key, highlight the dev placed objects, and then just loot it.

If I were to be making a crpg, I'd make high environmental interaction be a key priority if I want sales. The tactical use of it matters less than that it just exists. I can throw the crate, light it on fire, and put it out with rain.

Chucking people at eachother then starting throwing my own legendary-tier items once nobody's close and I can't close the gap has, in fact, been super fun to do even if it's very inefficient.

 

[turkishronin]

Deadfire is weird everyone agrees they did most of the crucial things right but still feel as if something is lacking and no one can point out exactly what it is. It's as if someone put a curse on Sawyer that every game he makes should turn out to be hollow.

I think the setting being entirely within a 'sailing/pirate' theme was a bad choice. I liked PoE1 quite a bit but the setting change was off-putting in the initial marketing. Even after playing it I've yet to finish it and the tonal changes, especially in returning characters, is my main turnoff to this day.

My real guess as to why Larian is a runaway success while other crpgs are middling is that the world environment is very interactive and that is known going in. Lots of clutter and objects that can be interacted with, as well as environmental combos with those objects. Throw them, light them up, etc. It doesn't matter if throwing a barrel or chest on an enemy is tactically useful, it matters that it can be done. Similar to Elder Scrolls, the mind loves the idea that objects and environments aren't just visual dressing but tangible things. Similar effect to open world games providing that sense of endless possibility at the outset, then tapering off quickly when the player finds out how constrained it is. But compare that to PoE or Solasta where you press a key, highlight the dev placed objects, and then just loot it.

If I were to be making a crpg, I'd make high environmental interaction be a key priority if I want sales. The tactical use of it matters less than that it just exists. I can throw the crate, light it on fire, and put it out with rain.

Trannyfinder outdid Pillars2 without doing any of these things

 

[Roguey]

Deadfire is weird everyone agrees they did most of the crucial things right but still feel as if something is lacking and no one can point out exactly what it is. It's as if someone put a curse on Sawyer that every game he makes should turn out to be hollow.

I have articulated exactly what I disliked about Deadfire https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads...ow-with-turn-based-combat.123213/post-8264372

 

[santino27]

A lot of people have. This revisionist idea that "everyone agrees they did most of the crucial things right" is batshit crazy. Some of the mechanics changes were improvements. Some were not. The story and most aspects of said story sucked. A lot of people weren't as fascinated by muh colonialism setting (OR pirates 0.1) as the devs clearly thought they would be, and of course, it was building off of a game that most agree was overlong and mediocre outside of its expansions.

 

[luj1]

everyone agrees they did most of the crucial things right

grade 1 bullshit

instead of fixing rotten core systems from Pillars 1 they focused on eye candy and pathetic shite like talking parrots

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Bohrain]

Don't think the setting or any lack of environmental interaction were the reasons for Deadfire's lack of success. It doesn't satisfy the itch for the number crunching grognard since the combat and character building options feel so homogenous. And it doesn't satisfy storyfags because the writing is dull and it doesn't have cheap hooks for weird girls like pretty boy anime males.

 

[gurugeorge]

lolwhut, the "circle of unhinged egomaniacs plastering their names all over spells," even the formalization as a loose association, is a direct lift from Jack Vance, as it was in D&D. They just changed the names in the Pillows series, whereas D&D openly acknowledged the inspiration and some of the original Vancian names.

I mean, I suppose it's barely possible that they came up with the general concept all by themselves, but it's fairly common nerdy knowledge so I doubt it.

 

[Infinitron]

Of course it's copied from D&D.

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

lolwhut, the "circle of unhinged egomaniacs plastering their names all over spells," even the formalization as a loose association, is a direct lift from Jack Vance, as it was in D&D. They just changed the names in the Pillows series, whereas D&D openly acknowledged the inspiration and some of the original Vancian names.

I mean, I suppose it's barely possible that they came up with the general concept all by themselves, but it's fairly common nerdy knowledge so I doubt it.

I think that Jack Vance might've been inspired by old timey medicine ads. Obsidian obviously lifted them from DnD like everything else.

 

[Desiderius]

But Vance probably wrote something anti-trans. Have they canceled LeGuin yet?

 

[ropetight]

But Vance probably wrote something anti-trans. Have they canceled LeGuin yet?

She lead the cancelling, maybe she will get cancelled too.

Thematically, she was pioneer of gender studies propagators tainting SF with questions of gender and sexuality as most important themes.

Gender and sexuality are prominent themes in a number of Le Guin's works. The Left Hand of Darkness, published in 1969, was among the first books in the genre now known as feminist science fiction, and is the most famous examination of androgyny in science fiction.[137] The story is set on the fictional planet of Gethen, whose inhabitants are ambisexual humans with no fixed gender identity, who adopt female or male sexual characteristics for brief periods of their sexual cycle.[138] Which sex they adopt can depend on context and relationships.[139]

Le Guin's attitude towards gender and feminism evolved considerably over time.[141] Although The Left Hand of Darkness was seen as a landmark exploration of gender, it also received criticism for not going far enough.

Le Guin responded to these critiques in her subsequent writing. She intentionally used feminine pronouns for all sexually latent Gethenians in her 1995 short story "Coming of Age in Karhide", and in a later reprinting of "Winter's King", which was first published in 1969.

Ursula was one of the main actors over the years in making military SF helmed by Heinlein's Starshup Troopers and other Golden Age writers persona non grata on the awards.

preferred reading Virginia Woolf and Jorge Luis Borges to well-known science-fiction authors such as Robert Heinlein, whose writing she described as being of the "white man conquers the universe" tradition.

On a banquet night in Berkeley once, when somebody jogged my arm and my beer went straight down the back of Mrs. Robert Heinlein’s dress, I slunk away into the crowd. I felt it would be unwise to identify myself. Mr. Heinlein was already extremely upset about the Communists at the university.

Science fiction of the fifties—called by its admirers the Golden Age—had been a gender ghetto, occasionally infiltrated by a woman wearing a false mustache, calling herself Andre, or using her first initials only.

https://archive.ph/8j3Xf

Other significant actor would be pederast actvisit and Marxist promoting Afrofuturism Samuel R. Delany.

His novels, too, turn on the serendipity of urban life, adopting the “marxian” credo that fiction is most vital when classes mix. Gorgik, a revolutionary leader in Delany’s four-volume “Return to Nevèrÿon” series, rises from slavery to the royal court in an ancient port city called Kolhari, where he learns that seemingly centralized “power—the great power that shattered lives and twisted the course of the nation—was like a fog over a meadow at evening. From any distance, it seemed to have a shape, a substance, a color, an edge. Yet, as you approached it, it seemed to recede before you.”

Even before Delany “came out” to readers—a post-Stonewall rite of passage that he’s criticized as oriented toward the straight world—his fiction explored homosexuality in the context of polyamory, sadomasochism, and speculative future kinks. (In “Babel-17,” which drew on his marital threesome, only throuples can reliably crew starships, learning their daredevil coördination from the intricacies of group intimacy.)

So, if her fellow feminists cancel her posthumously as they canceling other writers they don't like, it will be you reap what you sow.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[ropetight]

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

you claim to hate it but you made a game based on it. i am very intelligent.

 

[whydoibother]

you claim to hate it but you made a game based on it. i am very intelligent.

No, its based on Bethesda's Fallout 3, and not the city of Las Vegas. I am very intelligent.

 

[santino27]

Please, by all means, fuck off to Berlin. I'm sure there are some prostitutes there looking for company.

Also, look at all these sad californians hating on Vegas. Humorously, Vegas hates Californians right back, despite being ~50% former Californians.

 

[rojay]

Also, look at all these sad californians hating on Vegas. Humorously, Vegas hates Californians right back, despite being ~50% former Californians.

Nobody actually likes Vegas except the marks.

 

[ropetight]

Please, by all means, fuck off to Berlin. I'm sure there are some prostitutes there looking for company.

Also, look at all these sad californians hating on Vegas. Humorously, Vegas hates Californians right back, despite being ~50% former Californians.

Exactly.
It is more telling about his Californian attitudes and positions that he loves Berlin, than his hate for Vegas.
And it is probably not KristalNacht approval, but all the anarcho-socialist & Antifa squatting and artistic faggotry that are predominant in Berlin these days.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

“THE CANCELLING” sounds like a movie.

 

[Desiderius]

Please, by all means, fuck off to Berlin. I'm sure there are some prostitutes there looking for company.

Also, look at all these sad californians hating on Vegas. Humorously, Vegas hates Californians right back, despite being ~50% former Californians.

Exactly.
It is more telling about his Californian attitudes and positions that he loves Berlin, than his hate for Vegas.
And it is probably not KristalNacht approval, but all the anarcho-socialist & Antifa squatting and artistic faggotry that are predominant in Berlin these days.

It's the buggery, and that goes back a lot further than these days.

The park is nice, I'll give it that.

 

[goregasm]

I lived in Chicago for 9 of the past 10 years. Got out, sold our place, bought a house in a rural area last year.

This dude is fuckin crazy saying it's under rated. Crime is legitimately everywhere, even in his bullshit lakefront bike paths and northern enclaves, traffic is insane, taxes are bullshit, the government is corrupt, the pizza sucks dick, the sports fans too.

Schools are some of the worst in the nation for those of us with kids too, but not all of us aspire to be aging androgynous bicycling twitter cunts going on about "crunch" in an industry where you sit at a desk.

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

ALL DEM states are nearly copy/pasta same shit, same crimes, same stupidity in sone form. It is BAD!!

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

ALL DEM states are nearly copy/pasta same shit, same crimes, same stupidity in sone form. It is BAD!!

this is america

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Possibly the world.

Maybe the Galaxy…

Or the universe….

Maybe the omniverse….

And maybe the afterlife….