Josh Sawyer at Digital Dragons: Deadfire post-mortem

Anyone who has done Early Access also knows there are dangers to this. For those of you who want to do this type of thing, understand that your audience is self-selected to the most hardcore and enthusiastic people. They give very big feedback, but it is also feedback for psychotic gamers.

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Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=xChOXFJ83-g
forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3856099&perpage=40&pagenumber=387#post489657293
twitter.com/SFWRedditGifs

>youtube.com/watch?v=xChOXFJ83-g

Sawyer really dropped the ball. He whines that the beta testers weren't the target audience, the ship combat was the most expensive thing for Deadfire, says full VO was added due to streamers giving feedback.

oh sorry, can't hear him over the sound of BG3's announcement

It was what they did to Ydwin, Josh is just a fucking idiot. GTFO the industry and open your bike shop, Josh.

That explains why he ignored the backer forums for tumblr and somethingawful

Worked out well for him, didn't it?

>the ship combat was the most expensive thing for Deadfire
Fucking how? It was dice roll 'combat' at it's bare minimum.

How did he made something horrible? He designed New Vegas for fuck's sake

some of the most expensive shit in games is shit that never makes it to final product

Going from mediocrity to garbage is way easier than going from mediocrity to quality.

hope you enjoy being Microsofts bitchboy until your company dies

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Link?
Also who are the 'psychotic gamers' he is referring to?

he piggybacked off F3 and the work modders already did better

Fans of the franchise.

Avellone is literally a schizo though.

Ok so the tumblr sjws are the sane ones and his main audience are psychotic?

I’m just guessing here but
>rpg fans are autistic and not hip and cool
>we wanted to make a new, revolutionary rpg for modern gamers
>so we decided to take the feedback of streamers, casuals and trannies
>now the autists are saying our game is shit, the cool streamers aren’t buying it, and we’re mad at those entitled autists for not buying our revolutionary cool rpg with fish sex and gay pirates

I'm sure you've picked up on this, but in case you have haven't Sawyer is just desperately trying to explain why the game failed without shouldering any of the blame.

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Totally. If he was aiming to kill the ip he did a great job.

Avellone's problem was with Feargus.

The video? An user posted it here
The psychotic gamers are the beta testers. He said the only people who'd want to beta test are the hard core grognards who he says people should avoid listening to.

while im here, anyone have cowboy josh?

even if we entertain that as true, it begs the question as to why they decided to pick one of the worst genres ever for some sort of progressive game design.

Iso RPG's are probably the most niche out of all RPG's, it's more nostalgia bait than anything IMO. The people who love these games are the traditional tabletop fans who loved games like Baldurs Gate. It's not exactly the kind of genre who walk into and start shitting on.

>even if we entertain that as true
I mean he outright says it user.Here's the full quote.

>"There's some tricky things about backer betas - it's very limited content and it's a very limited audience," he told the audience at Digital Dragons.

"Anyone who has done Early Access also knows there are dangers to this. For those of you who want to do this type of thing, understand that your audience is self-selected to the most hardcore and enthusiastic people. They give very big feedback, but it is also feedback for psychotic gamers. They have the strongest opinions, they're going to grind your game into the dust. It is very valuable, but it can skew your understanding of how your game plays for a wider audience. Also, the longer a beta goes on for, it becomes a well-trod path. Unless you're going to put a load of new content out every time you update the backer beta, people are going to run that over and over again and it can lead to a very strange perception of difficulty, for example, or quality of writing. No writing seems that great if you've seen it 20 times. There's a little bit of a problem sometimes with content that is overused and over-iterated on."

PoE2's biggest problems were:
>PoE1's atmosphere and world did not carry over to PoE2, felt like a completely different universe
>Even returning characters had fundamentally different personalities
>The pirate theme is best left as a section of a game, not the entirety of a game
>The major overhanging storyline was deeply disappointing and almost irrelevant
>PoE1 felt superior in every way except graphics and combat
I went directly from PoE1 into PoE2 and it took all of 15 minutes before my optimism vanished.

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>even if we entertain that as true
He called the backer beta players psychotic and took zero feedback from them. The game is easy now but before it was braindead easy. Veteran Mode was practically easy mode. Not to mention they changed the difficulty names because people on SA had their feelings hurt. He mentioned that in another interview.

>why they decided to pick one of the worst genres ever for some sort of progressive game design.

Well the first game was made without that nonsense. For whatever reason they decided to do a 180 and switch to the more progressive audience. People whined that PoE 1 was too depressing and serious so they went stupid far in the other direction.

>cringey new writing staff
>pillars franchise in the trash
>outer worlds looking like shit
>lost bid for baldur's gate 3 to larian
quick josh double down

Why is he acting as if Obsidian listened to their backers? Josh spent all his time in the SomethingAwful forums and the rest of the team spent time in the Tumblr Discord.

Obsidian's been dead for some time to me, fuck them.

He is trying to offload the autistic and fundamental changes he made to the system to "hardcore fans". When the "hardcore fans" said the PoE1 combat feels floaty because of high DR and armour penetration weapons are objectively better he didn't have to go back to drawing board and make an even more autistic system instead of refining the last one. Completely throwing off even the people who were okay with first game because his streamlining became insolvent.

For example, here is an example of the insolvency of the streamlining. Weapons like stiletto and estoc, which had 3 DR-bypass slapped on to their otherwise identical damage to other weapons of same speed were functionally just 3 more damage than rest because no armour had less than 3 DR. Instead of just reducing their base damage and increasing their DR-bypass as a reasonable person, he instead insisted on his autistic streamlining of keeping every weapon of same speed the same damage. Not only that, the only weapon which had more base damage which also proved to be objectively better than others because of this reason, was just given a 10% damage modifier and had the base damage reduced to same as others. Combat also felt floaty because all armours increased in same numbers with quality, so the gap between light and heavy armours became less as quality increased, making even light armoured targets take less damage from light weapons as game went on.

To be fair, most MMOs I've played have been completely ruined by listening to the 0.1% of hyper-hardcore players.

Fair point however I was there during the beta. We told Obsidian that it was too easy and they didn't listen. When the game released POTD mode was piss easy and "I don't mean the hurr durr I'm so good so it's easy", it was legit easy. They spent months fixing it and now it's finally challenging.

Plus not to mention some romance was influenced from outside the backer forums. An user posted a SS in the old /poedg/ threads but some discord tranny convinced the writers for all aloth being a faggot.

I haven't been following this, but he seems to have called SA a bunch of psychotic autistic fuckheads. How are they taking it?

He specifically said it's the people who backed the game and played the beta. Not the SA faggots. Hardly any of them were even in the beta.

>full VO was added due to streamers giving feedback
So they basically watched Cohhcarnage saying it was tiring reading the lines for his chat and decided to spend big bucks for VAs.
Well I hope it was worth it for the 200k(?) sales they got

What was the reaction from SA to the game. Did they like this shit?

Funny thing is if you look up any streamer playing Deadfire they skip through the VO's lines just like fucking everyone else.

shitting on fans that
>paid money
>spent time testing
>gave gameplay feedback
>supported the fucking series
what is he doing

I believe they liked it yeah. Josh went on to SA and whined about Deadfire tanking compared to the first game. I'll post it if I can find it.

>Activison in the sponsors
WTF?

Huh, he actually admits that and claims responsibility in the video.
He says he dismissed beta tester claims that the game was too easy because he assumed it was just that they were all good players, then found out the testers were right and the game was too easy when it finally launched.

He also admits they were mostly right about everything.

Yeah I give him kudos for fixing it but fucking hell he could've avoided all that if he had actually listened in the first place.

Nah the bigger streamers all read it, it's fucking tedious. Seen dan constantly complain any time a game doesn't have voice actors read everything. Idiots don't fucking comprehend that chat and viewers don't give a fuck about reading every throwaway piece of text. Just skip it, skim it yourself, and get on with the fucking gameplay.
Listening to streamers in any capacity as a dev is utter cancer, because they do not play games as gamers, they play it as a fucking entertainment job and everything they want you to do is just to make their job easier, not make the game better.

>forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3856099&perpage=40&pagenumber=387#post489657293

>Admits he's wrong about ignoring beta backers
>Still says you shouldn't listen to them
...What's his angle?

Because these people are retarded. They don't understand demographics anymore, they constantly believe there's a magical wider audience that will totally play their game if they just pander to them a bit with whatever bullshit is the thing at that particular time.
Also the fact that idiots like sawyer are incapable of doing anything else, but they want to constantly "make a difference" and virtue signal to the crowds they align with. If he could do anything else and be more successful at inserting that bullshit, he'd be doing it.

You know what's the one thing Obsidian did that pissed me off and isn't mentioned much? The game was ready and they released it a full week early exclusively to streamers. Not streamers and backers. Just fucking streamers.

the game still isn't ready

Brain damage.
>It's just a one off, it's just a fluke, we just got unlucky, it wasn't really our fault or our decisions, just a roll of the dice, we'll be successful next time doing the exact same shit!

It's kinda funny seeing Obsidian backpeddle on all the Tumblr/SA story feedback. You know how the Gods act like retards in Deadfire? With the new 3.0 patch Woedica tells you privately that she and all the other Gods are just acting for your sake. When you're not around they don't do that shit.

I'm annoyed that he looks the way he does on purpose.

everyone that takes care of themselves makes themselves presentable

I wanna ride bikes with ropekid

I think that's the issue I have here. He looks like someone dragged him through the women's section of the salvation army after drawing random shit all over his arms.

hes wearing khaki pants and a workers union shirt, what should he wear?

Then he's got that weird hair that looks like he was standing right next to a jet as it took off while trying to do himself up like Marylin Monroe and there's that weird lipstick and his fly is just glinting in the stage lights... He looks a complete mess.

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Deadfire could have been perfect bros. Why did the team go so wrong? What was their goal?

Y'all think Microsoft will make better use of the IP?

look at their writing staff

Wouldnt any veteran designer be able to tell them that spending so much resources on fucking ship combat in an old school rpg is a bad idea? How long has obsidian been around really?

>The fans who paid to have this game made were not our target audience.

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nu-Obshitian deserves to fail. Haven't made a single good game this decade

Josh didn't want that shit. Feargus and the heads demanded it for some reason.

Video confirms Deadfire did not do as well ad the first one.

So hes a spineless rat who cant tell them theyre wrong?

Seems like a lot of issues stem from Streamers and them trying to casualize the game.

the games arent casual at all
I think you got confused and wanted to post in the divinity os threads

Sounds like someone doesn't want to be co-owner anymore ;)