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Josh Sawyer has quite the resume as an RPG game developer, contributing design to notable games like Fallout: New Vegas, Alpha Protocol, and the recent Pentiment. In a roundtable with PC Gamer, Sawyer said that the two Pillars of Eternity games were the “most compromised” projects that he worked on, and said that happened for a variety of factors, including fan expectations.
During the roundtable, Sawyer said that he’s been playing D&D and other tabletop role-playing games since 1985, which gave him a lot of ideas to contribute to games like Icewind Dale. When he returned to the top-down CRPG mold in 2012 with Pillars of Eternity, he wanted to make changes to the fundamental formula of that sort of game. However, since Pillars was a crowdfunded project that was sold as a return to the Infinity Engine games, Sawyer felt obligated to give fans a “classic D&D” experience in order to appeal to that sense of nostalgia.
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“I did feel a sense of obligation,” he said, “but also I felt like I was making bad design decisions ultimately, like I was making a game worse to appeal to the sensibilities of the audience that wanted something ultra nostalgic.”
As a whole, though Sawyer said that he feels that the Pillars of Eternity games were held back by that format, he doesn’t regard them as failures. Making them was a “very weird experience,” but he’s proud of the games overall. Sawyer’s latest game is Pentiment, a medieval murder mystery strongly influenced by Umberto Eco’s seminal novel The Name of the Rose.
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