Obsidian Entertainment - Josh Sawyer Interview

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Sector interviewed Josh Sawyer about game development:

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Josh Sawyer Reflects on Design Evolution: From Icewind Dale to Pentiment

Josh Sawyer is a name that has been familiar to RPG fans for decades. He's worked on Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights 2, Alpha Protocol, Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and most recently Pentiment.

How did he get into game development, how has his design philosophy changed over the years, and why did he decide to do Pentiment a little differently? He answered all these questions for us during the GDS conference in Prague.

Your work is often associated with intricate narratives and designing complex systems. Could you discuss your design for these systems, and how did this philosophy evolve over the years?

Yeah, I do think it's changed. Initially, when I started working at Black Isle, the first game I worked on was Icewind Dale, even though it had a strong combat focus, it came right after Planescape Torment, which obviously was known for very big branching dialogues. And the studio in general, Black Isle and later at Obsidian, was very, very into big branching dialogues with a lot of question nodes you could loop through and lots and lots and lots of options, and also a lot of reactivity to your build choices and ways to complete quests that unlocked in that way.

And then that kind of migrated towards such a reliance on question nodes, not flooding the player with as many options, especially if the options felt superfluous, like they weren't really adding anything. And on New Vegas, one of the things that we noticed is, in contrast to Fallout 3, which had percentage-based checks. We went with flat checks, either you made it or you didn't, which on the one hand is good and it's satisfying that your build is rewarded, but also it was always clear, like I should always pick this option. So the role playing element kind of went away because it implied that if you ever saw your option come up, you should pick it.

This continued into Pillars and Deadfire because, at the time, they didn't have a super great idea of how to handle it. On Pentiment, the way I've tried to approach it is that there are almost never any question nodes. Every conversation has a through flow. It's about a thing, and you never reach a point where you're kind of circling back and looping. It has an arc that ends, and I feel like that makes the conversations feel much more natural. You can still put in all sorts of cool branching, but it's all sort of moving towards the end goal that you know as a writer when you start the conversation. And then the way that I've tried to handle using checks and dialogue is if you unlocked it, you can pick it, but sometimes it's not actually a good idea to do that.

In Pentiment, characters very often get aggravated when you pick those options. So you kind of have to think about the character and the situation that you're in and whether or not the character is going to respond positively or negatively to you sort of saying that thing. And I think that's a nice balance because the player is clearly being given more options because they're backgrounds, but they still have to role play and read the social situation to get the outcome that they want. And sometimes though they might say like, „I don't care about getting an ideal outcome, I want to pick this option," and that's totally valid as well.

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