Pentiment - Josh Sawyer's upcoming historical murder mystery RPG set in 16th century Europe

[Infinitron]

https://www.windowscentral.com/new-upcoming-xbox-exclusives-project-midnight-compulsion-and-pentiment-obsidian
 

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Recently 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.

 

Edited November 12, 2021 by Infinitron

[kirottu]

Can I roleplay as Hercule Poirot? What kind of mustache options the character generator has?

[Humanoid]

Hey, I asked Black Isle for a combatless RPG back when I registered in 2002. I'll take it.

[Bartimaeus]

My biggest gripes with how J.E. Sawyer designs games have been predominantly around making all aspects of combat (including things only indirectly related to combat) tedious as hell. ...So a game that takes all of that out and instead focuses on a cool idea in a unique setting? Yeah, I'm interested.

Edited November 13, 2021 by Bartimaeus

[Jozape]

Nice to see another RPG that steers away from combat. Disco Elysium proved there is an audience for it beyond Planescape: Torment. Not sure that Sawyer is really up to the task as the main writer though, I hope someone is there to help out a lot in that department.

[Gromnir]

On 11/13/2021 at 12:57 PM, Jozape said:

Nice to see another RPG that steers away from combat. Disco Elysium proved there is an audience for it beyond Planescape: Torment. Not sure that Sawyer is really up to the task as the main writer though, I hope someone is there to help out a lot in that department.

am suspecting the game will be conceptual intriguing but prohibitively dull. no doubt josh wants to make an umberto eco inspired crpg, but it has been our observation that the more josh is involved with narrative, the more the story elements o' a game suffer. poe2 had good writers. the problem for poe2 were not individual characters or dialogues. josh has had the benefit o' quality help. josh needs something other than help. distance from the narrative is a good start. 

have other concerns, but delivered all at once is gonna make sound as if we believe josh is incompetent, which is decided not true. even so, unless we hear more/different, am not optimistic 'bout this title.

HA! Good Fun!

 

[Pidesco]

28 minutes ago, Gromnir said:

am suspecting the game will be conceptual intriguing but prohibitively dull. no doubt josh wants to make an umberto eco inspired crpg, but it has been our observation that the more josh is involved with narrative, the more the story elements o' a game suffer. poe2 had good writers. the problem for poe2 were not individual characters or dialogues. josh has had the benefit o' quality help. josh needs something other than help. distance from the narrative is a good start. 

have other concerns, but delivered all at once is gonna make sound as if we believe josh is incompetent, which is decided not true. even so, unless we hear more/different, am not optimistic 'bout this title.

HA! Good Fun!

 

Speak for yourself. I'm all in for a Foucault's Pendulum CRPG.

[Gromnir]

1 minute ago, Pidesco said:

Speak for yourself.

thought that went w/o saying, but ok.

HA! Good Fun!

[ComradeYellow]

16th Century

Murder Mystery

"RPG"

I mean how much very back side of the bottom drawer can you get? xD

[Helz]

On 11/16/2021 at 2:59 AM, Gromnir said:

it has been our observation that the more josh is involved with narrative, the more the story elements o' a game suffer.

I don't agree with that. Lead Designer for NWN2 and Fallout NV, and both have drastically better narratives than the games that immediately preceded them. I have my own criticisms with the Pillars' main narrative, but they're still top shelf. Keep up the good work, Josh!

[Gromnir]

32 minutes ago, Helz said:

I don't agree with that. Lead Designer for NWN2 and Fallout NV, and both have drastically better narratives than the games that immediately preceded them. I have my own criticisms with the Pillars' main narrative, but they're still top shelf. Keep up the good work, Josh!

add enough qualifiers and anything is true, and am not sure if "drastic" is appropriate.

nwn weren't s'posed to have a narrative, not full game narrative at least. the lizard queen stuff was not part o' the original plan. were other issues, but nwn story, as a whole, had significant hurdles and is justifiably criticized. use as measuring stick is curious. 

fallout nv is a project josh admitted he were more removed from narrative. while he were project lead, he admitted that he were far more involved in the mechanics o' the game than the story, with the exception o' ceaser's legion, which predictable were forgettable and reminded us o' dealing with yxunomei in iwd for good reason. that is what set honest hearts apart as josh took lead on story. am not gonna once again get into criticisms o' honest hearts.  in fact, honest hearts is likely your best predictor for what pentiment is gonna play like given how josh were the genuine driving force behind story and deign o' that dlc. personally we do not find such to be reassuring.

HA! Good Fun!

[Helz]

2 minutes ago, Gromnir said:

add enough qualifiers and anything is true, and am not sure if "drastic" is appropriate.

It was drastic. True, NWN and FO3 set a low bar, but its still rare for the sequel/spinoff to have the better story. Twice in a row suggests good leadership to me.

Sawyer has been lead-developer for 3 of my all-time favorites, including both Pillars games. So I am happy he's in charge of a new project.

[Gromnir]

3 hours ago, Helz said:

It was drastic. True, NWN and FO3 set a low bar, but its still rare for the sequel/spinoff to have the better story. Twice in a row suggests good leadership to me.

Sawyer has been lead-developer for 3 of my all-time favorites, including both Pillars games. So I am happy he's in charge of a new project.

yeah, but you specific failed to mention iwd2, where story elements got worse than the original... or poe2, which even if you like the game (as does Gromnir btw), am gonna suggest you are taking liberties if you claim narrative qualities improved compared to the original. of particular note, as referenced earlier in this thread, josh benefitted by having excellent writers for poe2 and unlike iwd2 we weren't talking 'bout a rush job. iwd were a major rush job btw, and still impresses us how beautiful that game looked and sounded... and still looks and sound. david ogden stiers narration coupled with the storybook slides as 'posed to clunky cgi effors, advanced a story which we has on numerous occasions observed exceeded bg1 even if iwd had no companions and were so much more limited in terms o' storytelling opportunities. 

twelve man team for penitent? then compare to honest hearts, 'cause josh ain't gonna be able to rely on others or be able to focus on mechanics to cover for his narrative limitations. 

'course maybe you are right, and josh, final getting creative freedom shows he has always been a game design poet limited by the misunderstanding o' others and the realities o' o' constant being asked to direct a sequel or dlc as 'posed to genuine designing a title one may attribute almost entire to josh, though how many developers ever get such an opportunity, eh? no more excuses. after decades, penitent is the title josh fans has been waiting for, yes? more than were ps:t chris avellone's baby ('cause that were still 2e d&d rules with which to contend and the nameless one's tale were set in the planescape universe, requiring wotc approval for so many things) penitent is josh's creative progeny. josh gets credit if penitent is a win, but please recall this thread and this post following release. no excuses--not microsoft or advertising or sunspots. josh.

HA! Good Fun!

Edited November 23, 2021 by Gromnir

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

Well that looks quite interesting. I'll check it out when it drops.

[Infinitron]

 

Edited June 12, 2022 by Infinitron

[Infinitron]

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.”

[Infinitron]

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1205520/Pentiment/

[kirottu]

So Sawyer finally got to make his Words: The Game.

[Leferd]

So it’s Sawyer’s Name of the Rose Sierra game? I dig it.

[Wormerine]

So it seems we will be playing as multiple protagonists. Interesting.

[Gorth]

I seem to have acquired a spontaneous case of dyslexia... I keep treading that title as Penitent

[Wormerine]

6 minutes ago, Gorth said:

I seem to have acquired a spontaneous case of dyslexia... I keep treading that title as Penitent

I definitely think that the title and artstyle will be those things that will hurt the game for being too smart. I struggled to find the game on steam due to a typo.

It is an interesting title though.

 

[Melusina]

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Josh Sawyer's upcoming historical murder mystery RPG set in 16th century Europe

I can't imagine this being open world.