J.E. Sawyer

I dream of a day when 1-bit alpha will go away. It looks terrible. There are excuses for why we have to do it right now, but MAN does it look bad. Tree leaves with 1-bit alpha? Horrible. Hair with 1-bit alpha? Awful. I have a dream. Share this dream with me. Together... we can make it real.

No work has been done on the project recently; I've been splitting time between three projects. I'm confident that I can start work in earnest in July, after I move.

That was a pretty nuts-and-bolts interview. What's "hypey" about it?

* Being part of a nasty organization/cult was fun. I like cultish groups. * I liked riding around on my horsey and having my horsey stomp on people. * I enjoyed the alchemy system even though I think it could have been a lot better. Finding reagents was fun (never got old for some reason), especially since they were all over the landscape. I put poison on everything and I loved watching enemies rapidly die from poison. * I made a game out of stalking and murdering people who made racist comments toward me. I'd wait for them in their houses and stab them with poisoned knives. Good times. * I liked shooting things with my bow. I thought the melee was terrible but I liked shooting. It wasn't flashy or anything, but it was enjoyable. Especially with poisoned arrows. * Exploring was just fun. The areas are so huge that it was nice to just run and run (or ride and ride) to see what there was to see. * I liked stealing from people. I think the stealth mechanics had a good level of complexity for an RPG. Sneaking into a person's house and robbing them blind was satisfying. * I liked the fact that there was stuff everywhere. Plates, cups, knives, pants, boots, mushrooms, loaves of bread, bottles of wine. I could pick all of this stuff up or knock it over or steal it when no one was looking. * Water was not an impenetrable barrier. I am not a big fan of swimming mechanics, but it was nice to be able to jump into water and not hit a wall. There was often stuff in the water too, which was nice. * Though I think the punitive system in the game could use some work, I have always liked that guys try to arrest/fine you sometimes instead of just attacking you. The abstraction is possibly a bit too lenient, but at least there's an alternate system in place. * I have liked the idea of charged weapons since I read a Dragon magazine article about it fifteen years ago or so. There was never "one weapon" I always used. I switched between them due to charging factors, secondary effects, etc. In fact, the equipment in general was pretty nice. It looked good and the stats/effects were varied enough to make choices difficult. The places where I feel Oblivion is most lacking: * Lack of meaningful reactivity / no meaningful choices / no branching. * Spastic melee. * Throw-away dialogue with an uninteresting, rote mini-game on top of it. * Lockpicking mini-game on PC. Bad news. * AI. For every one time that it looks brilliant, there are three times that it looks really bad. * Crafting interface. "Click on everything to find out what this might make" = terrible. * Skill bonuses were pretty shallow and there were no choices in how any individual skill's bonuses advanced. * I think horses should have been able to stomp or otherwise trample folks with you on the back. Getting off every time was kind of annoying. * Dynamic difficulty scaling. I hate it.

One of the most important attributes of a good designer is the ability to apply critical thinking to any aspect of a game. At a convention recently, a bunch of game developers kept repeating how important critical thinking was. An audience member asked, "Well, what is that really?" There's this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_Thinking but that doesn't necessarily give anyone a good idea of how that is applied to game development. One thing we often ask applicants at Obsidian is what their favorite or least favorite games are and why. The "and why" is the most important part of the answer. Anyone can spit out a list of titles to show a wide range of tastes, but that doesn't give us any idea of what he or she found of value in those games. Understanding why -- really why -- you enjoy or dislike games helps you understand what other people may find appealing or distasteful in games. Lately, I have been trying to take this further. I believe that it is a sign of truly elegant design when you are able to observe a game and determine the goals of the designer of any given system -- and all systems together. Often, you are able to recognize these elements because the game's design leads the player how to figure out when the use of any given tool is appropriate. I think Pikmin is a good example of a game with elegant design. Practically speaking, the player only has three tools to work with: red, blue, and yellow Pikmin. Reds resist fire and are strong fighters. Blues can swim (and save other Pikmin from drowning). Yellow Pikmin can be thrown higher than other Pikmin and (in the first game) can carry bombs. There are many cases in the game where the player is confronted with a field of hazards and it is up to him or her to determine how to best apply Pikmin to the situation. Often, there is only one "right" way to navigate to the goal, but the player does still have to figure it out. And because the solution can be deduced logically, players typically feel smart -- not dumb -- when they do so. Additionally, the game requires enough moment-to-moment skill in managing Pikmin that player talent is also very rewarding. Another (very harsh) example of elegant game design can be found in one of my favorite games: Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox. Though not every element of Ninja Gaiden is elegant, many aspects of the combat system are. Ninja Gaiden teaches you through experience that blocking is required in the game. On the first level of the game, the player essentially survives because of blocking. Excepting the boss, no enemy on the level will ever break Ryu out of block. Additionally, enemies attack with relatively low frequency. The player grows to understand that there is a pattern to enemy attacks, typically one, three, or four hits long. When the chain ends, the player can immediately respond (and respond easily, as block hit reactions turn Ryu to face the source of the attack) with his or her own attacks. This changes when encountering sorcerers on a subsequent level. The sorcerers' fireballs, which are telegraphed by a distinctive sound, will always knock Ryu out of his block if they hit him. The player learns to listen for the sound and instinctively roll at the right time to avoid the attack. Later, the player encounters groups of ninjas that attack with great speed and frequency but (at least in the core game) still do not grapple Ryu. Around the same time, Ryu finds a scroll that teaches the player about counter-attacking out of block hit reactions. The player eventually figures out that counter-attacking is by far the safest way to deal with such enemies. Similar "revelations" occur throughout the game with different weapons, types of attacks, etc. Think about the games you love and hate and try to figure out why -- then try to figure out what the designers were attempting to accomplish by making the game as they did. It can lead to some amazing discoveries.

It looked like an appropriate teaser. Though some people are complaining about tiny details, the overall style, mood, and atmosphere are solid. It would have been nice to have some more solid info, but I wasn't really expecting to get any of that at this stage.

It is, especially if/when the player is forced to reconcile conflicting "virtuous" resolutions to an event. There's a glimpse of that sort of stuff in the gypsy character creation segments, but it isn't often realized in the Ultima games themselves. I still believe there's a great potential for it in the setting.

Sure. And if you think that the difficulty sliders should have better AI control, I agree. But I'm certainly not underestimating the capabilities of the truly average player. Normal difficulty, especially at the earliest stage of the game, should be very easy-going. I never liked Heart of Fury mode in the IWD games, but I thought the level of tuning control we had for level of difficulty in those games was pretty good. I never got the feeling it was especially good in NWN/2.

The people that post on these boards are not indicative of the average player's experience and abilities.

Extracting the duergar at the point when I took over as lead would have been even more disruptive than leaving them in. But since they were in, having them use invisibility and enlarge powers would have been overkill. PCs have enough difficulty hitting at that level. They don't need a 50% concealment penalty stacked on top of it -- not within the first hour of gameplay.

Yes clearly this is an appropriate challenge for a party of three 2nd level characters.

I certainly don't hate to admit it. I think it's pretty weak. Allowing the player to only save so often or at certain locations emphasizes the importance of resource management over time. I think it adds an interesting gameplay element. That said, designers have to be very careful about how they space those save points throughout gameplay to avoid frustrating players.

Again, developing all of the logic and code to govern that is real work, and it's of dubious value if a lot of people are going to try avoiding it through a reload -- especially since PC gamers are so insistent on being able to save pretty much anywhere at any time outside of combat.

One of the most basic things to consider is really the time it takes to backtrack to a safe location. In pen and paper, this can take as long as the DM needs to say, "Okay you go back to town." In a CRPG, your characters moving at 1/3rd speed actually have to cover all of that ground in real-time.

The point is that it's an easy option for the DM in annoying circumstances. One that many DMs take because the alternative usually massively irritates the players. In a CRPG, the death rules are what they are -- usually tremendously irritating unless a lot of work has been done to do things like transforming the corpse into a container, allowing the container to be picked up and put in inventory, easily distributing items that blow out characters' encumbrance rules, etc. How many times have you run a game where you force specific tracking of encumbrance of corpses and had the players jump up in joy and say, "HELL YEAH, not only did we win that fight by the slimmest of margins, but now we have to drag our three dead companions back through a swamp and leave half of their gear behind! This is living!" Considering that most players are going to reload in a CRPG to ensure that no one dies, I'm not convinced that "for real" death is something worth modeling in most CRPGs. However, I do think it can work in CRPGs if a lot of time and effort are put into it.

There are a lot of complexities in a computer implementation of D&D that go beyond what you would experience in tabletop sessions. When a character dies in a tabletop game, it's easy for the DM to track and/or gloss where that character's body and equipment are, ignoring things like encumbrance in the process. It's also easy for the DM to allow a simple exit for the party to make it back to a convenient healer.

People who discount Cleaver's ability to ignore armor and shield bonuses aren't really thinking about how BAB works in D&D. It's easy to hit with the first and second attacks out of four or five, but the probability of hitting with the subsequent attacks gets pretty slim. You're at -10 on your 3rd attack, -15 on the 4th, etc.

You're reaching kind of bizarre conclusions about things from what Feargus said. I think the companions in MotB are individually more well-developed than the ones in the core game. They are also (excepting a short period at the beginning) all optional. Core combat in the expansion should be a little easier overall, especially at the beginning, because people are being thrown in with epic level characters. There were battles in NWN2 that a lot of people found challenging. Take Tholapsyx, for instance. Constant Gaw tuned that battle for a long time. A lot of players and testers had a hard time with that fight. I beat her in two rounds. It's pretty hard to tune high level fights so they are fun for both the hardcore player and nubz. I'm pretty sure a magical greatsword was available in Targos and Sherincal drops Winged Blight outside of the Ice Temple. That's just off the top of my head. If people don't consider Winged Blight to be a powerful greatsword, I'm not sure what to say.

I think even when Final came out it was like 20 bux. I never really played that much of it, to be honest. It was a classic traditional shooter like the other R-Types, but they really had a rad array of different ships and a lot of neat environments. I mean, if you like R-Type, I don't think you're going to be disappointed with RTF especially at $20.

R-Type rulz.

Running on everyone in the universe's machine is also what Blizzard excels at.

Considering that there were still tons of bugs in the original NWN after many BioWare patches, I think it is a pretty good excuse. D&D simply has too much stuff in it to implement everything well unless the scope is very limited. BG was hellaciously buggy, BG2 was fairly buggy, IWD was buggy, IWD2 was probably the least buggy (but still buggy), ToEE was buggy, PoR:RoMD was nuts, and NWN was quite buggy too. When players are expecting a fairly in-depth D&D game, the question shouldn't be "Will this be buggy or not?" as much as, "How buggy will this be on a scale of 'kind of buggy' to 'Amazon rainforest'?"

Have you ever opened a .2da like feat.2da or spells.2da and looked at exactly how many things are in this game? There are literally thousands of entries. Abilities like stealth are extremely complicated. It's an ability that is supposed to function differently against a variety of factions depending on circumstances and different forms of it can be canceled or bypassed by individuals and groups in different ways. We're not just running around here slipping on banana peels and puddles of drool. Some of these (many) things are actually pretty hard to diagnose and make work properly, much less to the expectations of players.

My color-blindness made Double Agent pretty hard to play. I never got very far in it. Hopefully this will be different.

Thanks for the thanks, but just in case there is any confusion over this: I did not leak the demo, nor do I know who did. I'm not exactly busted up that it's out on the net, but I was not involved in it getting there.