Infinitron
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https://www.ign.com/articles/josh-sawyer-pentiment-mystery-medieval-manuscript
Obsidian's Xbox-Exclusive Pentiment Is a 16th Century Mystery Styled Like a Medieval Manuscript
Follow a medieval artist who keeps getting wrapped up in murder cases.After a number of rumors, the next project from Obsidian's Josh Sawyer has finally been revealed: it is indeed called Pentiment, and it's a narrative crime story of sorts set in 16th century Bavaria and styled like a medieval manuscript.
While we got a look at a visually fascinating trailer at Xbox's showcase today, IGN spoke with Sawyer ahead of the announcement about what exactly Pentiment is. As Sawyer explains it, Pentiment follows a medieval artist named Andreas Maler, an educated journeyman who's near to becoming a master artist. While visiting an abbey to make an illuminated manuscript, a monk who is also Andreas' friend and mentor is accused of a murder he claims he didn't commit. Since no one else steps in to solve the case, Andreas dedicates himself to finding the real killer.
Sawyer tells us that key to Pentiment is that it never explicitly tells you who the murderer really is. Andreas will have to decide who he thinks committed the murder, or at least who he thinks should be punished for it even if it isn't the actual murderer. And those decisions will ripple out through the rest of Pentiment, which covers a span of around 25 years and multiple crimes and murders that Andreas keeps getting caught up in.
Though there are mysteries at its heart, Sawyer is adamant that Pentiment isn't explicitly a detective game, because it doesn't contain typical detective mechanics. He says it's more of a narrative adventure with mystery and murder elements, and as per his past work, lots of player choice.
"There will be familiar elements in terms of choice and background development and consequence for people who like our RPGs," he says. "But it really, at its heart, is a narrative adventure story."
And he's also adverse to the comparison with another narrative detective story, Disco Elysium.
"We never set out to make a game that's like Disco Elysium," Sawyer says. "Structurally, it is much more similar to a game like Night In The Woods or Mutazione. I think our dialogue is pretty good, but it simply is not structured and developed the way that Disco is. Obviously, the viewpoint is very different. But the whole focus of the game is just not the same. So yeah, please don't hold us to that standard."
We spoke to Josh Sawyer at length about the development of Pentiment, and you can find our interview here. And he's not the only person at Obsidian we spoke to. We also chatted with Adam Brenneke about Grounded as it approaches its full 1.0 launch, and we spoke to studio head Feargus Urquhart about Obsidian's relationship with Xbox and the future of Obsidian -- stay tuned for our interview in the coming days.
https://www.ign.com/articles/what-is-obsidian-pentiment
What Is Obsidian’s Pentiment?
We spoke to Josh Sawyer about his decades-old ideas for Pentiment, and how he finally brought this medieval mystery to fruition.Josh Sawyer’s just-announced medieval narrative mystery, Pentiment, has been in development for about four years now. But if you ask Sawyer, it really started way, way back in 1992.
At the time, Sawyer was enjoying an RPG called Darklands, developed by Microprose Labs for MS-DOS. It was set in the Holy Roman Empire in the 15th century, but with a supernatural bent that left room for demons and Templar conspiracies. Sawyer fell in love with its approach to historical fiction, and as he went on to get a degree in history and subsequently work in games, the idea of a historical fiction game stuck with him.
Sawyer first pitched the seed of what would become Pentiment to now-Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart back when they were still working at Black Isle together. There, Sawyer was a designer working on projects like Icewind Dale 2 and the original, cancelled Fallout 3. As Sawyer explains it, Urquhart was “not into” his pitch at the time, and felt people who wouldn’t know history wouldn’t want to play it.
But Sawyer disagreed, and the idea came up once more years later when the two were reunited at Obsidian Entertainment, where Sawyer was the lead designer on Fallout: New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity, and the director on Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire. During the lull after Deadfire, while discussions about a Microsoft acquisition were floating around, Sawyer revived his old pitch as a narrative adventure game. It was not quite a murder mystery, but with mystery elements, with a strong visual style and gameplay, like Night in the Woods, Mutazione, or Oxenfree. It would incorporate exploring, talking to people, and little puzzles sprinkled throughout. Sawyer knew what he pitched would be niche, so he wanted a fairly small team and didn’t want to do anything too mechanically complex.
This time, his pitch won out, and Sawyer got to work on Pentiment: a 16th-century narrative adventure set in Upper Bavaria. As he explains it, you play as Andreas Maler, a journeyman on the cusp of becoming a master artist who’s traveling around Europe, taking on odd jobs as he goes. While staying at a Benedictine abbey and working on an illuminated manuscript, his friend and mentor is accused of the murder of a prominent individual. His friend claims innocence, but no one seems especially interested in investigating who the real murderer is. That leaves Andreas to step up to the job, becoming a medieval detective of sorts as he speaks to the many suspects.
“One of the key things in the game is that we do not ever definitively tell you, canonically, [who] the murderer [is],” Sawyer explains. “You have to investigate, find as much evidence as you can. You make your decisions based on whatever you think is most important. You are basically deciding who's going to pay for the crime. That can be the person that you think actually did it. That can be the person that you think should be punished, whether or not they did it. Maybe it's the person you like least. Maybe it's the person you think that the community will miss the least.”
But the scenario Sawyer describes is just the beginning of Pentiment. In total it covers a span of about 25 years, during which multiple crimes, murders and conspiracies occur that Andreas gets roped into somehow or another. But despite the detective story bent of Sawyer’s explanation, he’s averse to calling Pentiment a detective game, because he says it’s light on detective game mechanics. It’s a narrative adventure, he says, with mystery and murder elements, and where choices have consequences. For instance, Andreas is an artist with a university education, but players can choose what he excelled at in school. That choice will dictate the kinds of conversations he’s able to have with others as he tries to find information about various crimes.
Aside from its narrative, one of Pentiment’s core elements is one that immediately stands out in its trailer: the art. Sawyer says without art director Hannah Kennedy’s ideas and execution for the style, Pentiment may never have even existed. In fact, for a time early on in the project, Pentiment was mostly just the two of them. “I really believe that if I had gone to Hannah and said, ‘Hannah, I have this idea for this style,’ and she either wasn't interested, or just [couldn’t make it work], I would’ve dropped it. I wouldn’t have done it,” Sawyer says.
His pitch to Kennedy was a pretty specific and strange one: Sawyer wanted to mix late medieval manuscripts with woodcuts and engravings and early print, to better show off the transitory period between late medieval and early modern art. And Kennedy delivered.
“One of the things that I think is really great about her is that she is very good at critically analyzing how a piece of art is put together in terms of line weight and color, where colors go and where they don't, where blacks go and where they don't, when ink is used rather than paint, and things like that,” Sawyer says. “So she was able to deconstruct a lot of these images that we were looking at for reference, and then reconstruct a style guide so that she and the other artists on our team were able to synthesize this new style, which I just think is really compelling.”
For some, medieval manuscripts might be a bit daunting to look at, with their stylistic font choices. Sawyer reassures that accessibility was taken into account with an easy font mode, which he says was made possible in part due to Xbox’s support and interest in the project and access to its accessibility teams. In fact, the Xbox acquisition of Obsidian in 2018 brought a number of benefits to Pentiment specifically, and Sawyer says he had always conceived of it as an ideal GamePass game.
“I think that Microsoft and Xbox have access to a lot of accessibility,” he says. “Their accessibility labs are extremely helpful. “This game is not really supposed to be hard. … So having the accessibility labs to give the game to people who have different limitations than you or I might, it's really great to get feedback like, ‘This text is hard to read. We need better contrast. We need more options. We need text to speech.’ All sorts of things like that are extremely helpful to us. We normally wouldn't have access to those resources.
“Also, honestly, Microsoft's access to localization is really important. This game is very text heavy, [it’s] an Obsidian game. Especially when people play it not in English, the quality of the localization is going to make or break their experience.”
Sawyer says that while the setting and style are quite different, Pentiment explores a number of the same themes as his past work on New Vegas and both Pillars of Eternity games, in particular death, social transformation, and class conflict. Specifically, Sawyer says Pentiment examines these ideas by showing a broad, diverse portrait of medieval society and the numerous types of people who made it up.
“I wanted to show a wide spectrum of people in this community, which is why it's not just monks, but it's monks, the nuns that live in the house near them,” he says. “It's the peasantry, the crafts people, the smith, the miller who everyone hates because he's awful, as is often the case. I wanted to show the breadth of society and portray it as well as I could.”
While Sawyer is aware that Pentiment is a bit niche, with its deep exploration of medieval history, art, and culture, he feels that watching the trailer shown today at the Xbox Game Showcase is a pretty good benchmark to gauge whether or not an individual will like it. But he also says he wants to capture an audience interested in history or medieval art who may not necessarily be dedicated gamers or familiar with his past work. And his ultimate goal for Pentiment is for it to be, at least on some level, educational for anyone who picks it up.
“If people don't know anything about history, and they just like the look of it and the idea of it, I want them to play it and passively absorb knowledge as they go through it,” he says. “I want them to enjoy the story, be entertained by it, but also gain a greater understanding of how people lived in the 16th century.”
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QuoteRecently revealed by Jeff Grubb on his premium Grubbsnax show, Obsidian's "indie"-style effort is emerging from a small team led by Josh Sawyer, famed for his leadership on what is arguably the best Fallout game; New Vegas, as well as a personal fave, Pillars of Eternity.
I recently revealed the game's name with my co-host Rand_Al_Thor_19 on our Xbox Two podcast. It's being called "Pentiment," which refers to "an underlying image in a painting, especially one that has become visible when the top layer of paint has turned transparent with age," according to the dictionary. This naming convention hints at the game's premise, by which you act as an investigator in 16th century Europe uncovering the truth behind a grisly murder.
Grubb mentioned that Pentiment takes cues from the likes of Disco Elysium and the branching narrative designs Josh Sawyer is known for. You'll be able to investigate and make accusations against the characters in-game, which could lead to cascading consequences if you're wrong. It'll be a dialogue-heavy game with decisions to make and response options to choose from, which will shape your experience as you unwrap the murder conspiracy before you.
I am told that Pentiment is being built by a small team of around 12 people, and is more of a narrative RPG adventure than something combat-oriented. The art asset above may represent some of the designs the game is gunning for. Jeff Grubb also mentioned that Pentiment is exploring "experimental" gameplay elements, too, although they may ultimately not make it into the final release. Speaking of which, Grubb also noted that Pentiment is indeed gunning for a 2022 launch.
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/908360/Monomyth/
QuoteMONOMYTH is an immersive, first-person dungeon crawling RPG in the vein of Ultima Underworld, Arx Fatalis, and the King’s Field series.
Travel through an open, highly interactive game world, unrestricted by scripted sequences, hard-coded barriers, or tiled movement.
Use swords, daggers, hammers, maces, bows, or a wide range of versatile spells to overcome your enemies in real-time combat!
Remain unseen and unheard by sneaking through the shadows of eerie dungeons deep below the surface of the world.
Talk with the inhabitants of the underworld via a detailed, keyword-based dialogue system. Trade with them or press them for information. But don’t go too far or you may suffer the consequences!
Experiment with a wide range of utility items: Speed potions, water arrows, lockpicks, and many more!
A highly interactive world awaits you! Douse torches, bake bread, drink from fountains, and even play instruments!
Unravel the mysteries of Lysandria as you uncover hidden passages, dive through flooded caves, and overcome the living nightmares that inhabit the ancient halls far below the mighty fortress.
Demo: https://rattower.itch.io/monomyth-kickstarter
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Emphasis on only. Does that mean the new star system we'll visit in TOW2 will have a larger representation for some sort of Earth Directorate civilian authority (and not just a pathetic "Earth Minister" who is a hostage in his own home)?
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https://store.steampowered.com/app/1393111/The_Outer_Worlds_Murder_on_Eridanos/
Reviews:
Game Revolution 8.5/10
GameSpew 9/10
IGN 7/10
MMORPG.com 8.5/10
Noisy Pixel 9/10
PC Invasion 7.5/10
Screen Rant 4/5
VG247 4/5
Wccftech 7/10-
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This was posted to the Pillars of Eternity website for some reason. @Shyla
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16 minutes ago, Theonlygarby said:
I love obsidian but it is kind of their fault for signing the epic deal.
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Reviews:
Attack of the Fanboy 4/5
Destructoid 8/10
Easy Allies 7.5/10
Game Revolution 4.5/5
GameSkinny 8/10
GameSpew 7/10
GamingTrend 75/100
IGN 7/10
Noisy Pixel 9/10
PC Invasion 8/10
Press Start Australia 7.5/10
Screen Rant 3/5-
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https://www.ign.com/articles/hands-on-with-the-first-hour-of-the-outer-worlds-peril-on-gorgon-dlc
https://blog.playstation.com/2020/09/02/unraveling-the-mysteries-of-the-outer-worlds-peril-on-gorgon/
https://www.shacknews.com/article/120127/check-out-the-outer-worlds-peril-on-gorgon-dlc-gameplay
https://www.pcinvasion.com/outer-worlds-peril-on-gorgon-preview/
https://www.mmorpg.com/the-outer-worlds/previews/the-outer-worlds-peril-on-gorgon-preview-2000119298
https://www.gameinformer.com/video-feature/new-gameplay-today/2020/09/02/new-gameplay-today-the-outer-worlds-peril-on-gorgon-dlc
https://fextralife.com/the-outer-worlds-peril-on-gorgon-preview/
https://press-start.com.au/previews/2020/09/02/ive-totally-forgotten-how-to-play-the-outer-worlds-peril-on-gorgon-hands-on-preview/
https://powerup-gaming.com/2020/09/02/hands-on-the-outer-worlds-peril-on-gorgon-preview-hardboiled/-
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We have a name for the second expansion - Murder on Eridanos: https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/07/30/the-outer-worlds-peril-on-gorgon-expansion/
Seems like Obsidian were in the mood for mystery-themed expansions.
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1 minute ago, kanisatha said:
Thanks.
Do we also know who is project/game director?
I don't think they've said, but it's widely assumed to be Chris Parker.
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TBH, what flusters me the most is the game being set in the Living Lands rather than in Aedyr like everybody assumed.
In retrospect maybe Aedyr never made sense, though. It would be unwise for Obsidian to set their first game of this size and scope in the heavily populated imperial homeland, rather than in another frontier zone like the Dyrwood and Deadfire Archipelago.
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Unconfirmed infodump at ResetEra: https://www.resetera.com/threads/xbox-game-studios-otx-you-had-me-at-halo.246538/page-252#post-40806123
QuoteAs I previously mentioned before the announcement, Obsidian is working on Pillars (I assumed this regarding the info) game as back then I did get confirmation that game contains “spore-like” creatures with few other vague descriptions of The Living Lands.
So, I did get new informations about Avowed:
- fully open world, much much larger than Skyrim (very differently “larger”, more proper word would be “denser” and “more contrasted” at the same time)
- primarily set in the The Living Lands region of Eora (not sure if it’ll go like that as explicit later on, but that was starting point)
- big focus on world-reactivity, lighting and next-gen AI systems and physics (special focus on physics with magic systems - have no clue what would that mean)
- realtime whether system (don’t have full details but fog is very important as realtime element, rivers will have specific micro physics systems regarding this)
- very advanced character creation tool (didn’t get more info)
- mod support (for now PC is/will be very dominant as creation tool, but I’ll be playable fully on Xbox)
- very large number of fractions but very different approach than with Skyrim
- you’ll be able to have companions (different than Outer Worlds)
- storyset: fight against incoming threat of tyranny (independent from previous stories)
- game has bosses planned and some of them are very very large
- Gods will have special say in the game
- great focus on iconic landmarks, statues and buildings
- two large cities planned with many smaller ones with strong focus on contrasting wild-areas, rivers, mountains and desolated areas (yes, you’ll be able to swim)
- fully respecting POE creatures lore with new additions
- dynamic presentation of dialogue
- for now idea is to keep “you can kill everyone in the game” option
- around 100 people are on the project for 2y (smaller number for 7m of preproduction), in total 2y 7m
- full production is already a thing
- team will still grow
- target date: late 2022/early 2023Keep in mind that some parts of this can change during the development process.
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Pentiment - Josh Sawyer's upcoming historical murder mystery RPG set in 16th century Europe
in Pentiment: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Posted
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1205520/Pentiment/