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A lot of responses in this thread are concerned with narrative or aesthetic issues, especially romance. But Sawyer's odyssey has little to do with that and more about the nitty-gritty of systems and RPG design. Sawyer is borderline traumatized by his stint as lead of both Pillars of Eternity games. Both were games where he attempted to re-design many of the core assumption of the CRPG subgenre. Which, up until the 2010s renaissance, had mostly comprised of people creating ever more faithful adaptations of D&D.
Pillars 1 saw a very contentious design period, with people opposing many if not most of Sawyer's ideas on the obsidian forums. A lot of it was knee jerk reactions to changes from Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, but Pillars was still experimental and Josh was not a genius developer who could outpace all the playtesting involved with original tabletop gaming just like that. The first game was a success (arguably on the back of kickstarter and the general CRPG renaissance) while Deadfire otoh was a demoralizing flop at release (arguably on the back of terrible marketing combined with a less familiar setting). Deadfire got a long tail, with good sales after the fact. But it still didn't justify the work and finance put behind it. That's why Sawyer thinks he doesn't have the pulse of the CRPG audience. At least not any more.
The tragedy with Josh, I think, is that he and Obsidian became lost on the growing pains of creating a new ruleset for a CRPG and don't realize how unfocused these games were. Pillars of Eternity 1 was trying to be Baldur's Gate 1/2, Planescape Torment and also Icewind Dale. All into one. Deadfire was no better with a story that also didn't know wether it wanted to do Big Metaphysical Stuff or delve into the issues surrounding colonial warfare and settlement. Sawyer in particular is a good lead when you have a deadline to finish and want to deliver a mostly bug-less product. But he's old, experienced and unlikely to take risks. Compare that to the Pathfinder developers who deliver insane projects that are more bugs than code. Hell, compare that to Sawyer's attempts to improve on what was a disastrous game under him: the spirit meter from the Mask of the Betrayer DLC was pretty much universally well received. Sawyer himself said he wouldn't have implemented it today.
More successful developers like Larian and Owlcat Games simply adapted 5e and Pathfinder, while focusing on their own strengths. Sawyer was fully occupied creating a whole ruleset for Pillars, only to see mixed to negative reactions from anything but a core audience. All the while forgetting that Obsidian's real strength is writing these little stories self contained stories. You see that in New Vegas, as well as in Pillars' DLCs. You're unlikely to see it in Avowed, just as you had to strain your eyes to see it in the main storylines of Deadfire and so on.
Writing RPG systems is very hard, and then translating them to CRPGs where you can't have the DM interpret things and handwave corner cases is even harder.
Just to be clear, he was writing a CRPG system from the start. It's just that what with Pillars of Eternity being an unfocused mess that promised to be 4 games at once, Sawyer was also juggling design philosophies that were diametrically opposed. The most innocuous Pillars of Eternity design row went like this:
Sawyer wants to use milestone levelling instead of monster kills for granting experience points. After all, that gives the player the option to pick their battles in a game where some spellcasters have limited resources.
Some players complain, after all they are used to the gameplay loop of getting experience points for every monster. Sounds petty, but they are kinda right. If you remove a skinner box mechanic don't want to leave a void in its place.
A compromise is reached: kill enough of this monster to unlock their beastiary entry for extra experience points.
Neither Larian nor Owlcat had to waste effort here because this was never up for discussion.
One of the real prickly issues was
Do you want to go with the 3E/Pathfinder design philosophy of build diversity by giving players a bunch of classes and subclasses, some of which are straight up useless? Or do you want to go the 2E/5E route of disincentivizing absurd multi-classing and making sure classes are great at their jobs out of the box?
Neither. Sawyer is designing a computer game and doesn't need to sell splatbooks. So he wants to maximize build diversity by making stats more abstract. Instead of strength you have might. Might increases all damage dealt, so it's useful for wizards and fighters. Intelligence increases all areas of effect, as well as ability duration. So it's also useful for fighters who use area of effect abilities and self buffs, while the intelligence wizard is different from the might wizard.
While Larian and Owlcat had their design philosophies outright chosen by their ruleset, Sawyer turned his game into an acquired taste with no installed fanbase. It's easy to sell Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous and Baldur's Gate 3 to the same person today. But Pillars of Eternity came out in 2012. It's promise was to be part of the CRPG renaissance. And the fans of that sort of thing were used to specific design philosophies when it comes to character building. Pillars did away with that by choice.
Nowadays of course there's fans of Pillars. And I'm sure there's people trying those games out after trying out Pathfinder or Baldur's Gate 3. But Deadfire came out in 2018 with an unconventional setting. It wasn't the time to try something new, but to bring back something that was dead.
That was one of the hardest things about Pillars for me. I went in to the old Infinity Engine D&D games knowing how AD&D2E worked, so I was already in an environment I understood. With POE I didn't have knowledge of the system goinmg in an d that made it very hard for me to make decisions.
A lot of responses in this thread are concerned with narrative or aesthetic issues, especially romance. But Sawyer's odyssey has little to do with that and more about the nitty-gritty of systems and RPG design. Sawyer is borderline traumatized by his stint as lead of both Pillars of Eternity games. Both were games where he attempted to re-design many of the core assumption of the CRPG subgenre. Which, up until the 2010s renaissance, had mostly comprised of people creating ever more faithful adaptations of D&D.
Pillars 1 saw a very contentious design period, with people opposing many if not most of Sawyer's ideas on the obsidian forums. A lot of it was knee jerk reactions to changes from Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, but Pillars was still experimental and Josh was not a genius developer who could outpace all the playtesting involved with original tabletop gaming just like that. The first game was a success (arguably on the back of kickstarter and the general CRPG renaissance) while Deadfire otoh was a demoralizing flop at release (arguably on the back of terrible marketing combined with a less familiar setting). Deadfire got a long tail, with good sales after the fact. But it still didn't justify the work and finance put behind it. That's why Sawyer thinks he doesn't have the pulse of the CRPG audience. At least not any more.
The tragedy with Josh, I think, is that he and Obsidian became lost on the growing pains of creating a new ruleset for a CRPG and don't realize how unfocused these games were. Pillars of Eternity 1 was trying to be Baldur's Gate 1/2, Planescape Torment and also Icewind Dale. All into one. Deadfire was no better with a story that also didn't know wether it wanted to do Big Metaphysical Stuff or delve into the issues surrounding colonial warfare and settlement. Sawyer in particular is a good lead when you have a deadline to finish and want to deliver a mostly bug-less product. But he's old, experienced and unlikely to take risks. Compare that to the Pathfinder developers who deliver insane projects that are more bugs than code. Hell, compare that to Sawyer's attempts to improve on what was a disastrous game under him: the spirit meter from the Mask of the Betrayer DLC was pretty much universally well received. Sawyer himself said he wouldn't have implemented it today.
More successful developers like Larian and Owlcat Games simply adapted 5e and Pathfinder, while focusing on their own strengths. Sawyer was fully occupied creating a whole ruleset for Pillars, only to see mixed to negative reactions from anything but a core audience. All the while forgetting that Obsidian's real strength is writing these little stories self contained stories. You see that in New Vegas, as well as in Pillars' DLCs. You're unlikely to see it in Avowed, just as you had to strain your eyes to see it in the main storylines of Deadfire and so on.
That's too bad. Poor guy.
Writing RPG systems is very hard, and then translating them to CRPGs where you can't have the DM interpret things and handwave corner cases is even harder.
Just to be clear, he was writing a CRPG system from the start. It's just that what with Pillars of Eternity being an unfocused mess that promised to be 4 games at once, Sawyer was also juggling design philosophies that were diametrically opposed. The most innocuous Pillars of Eternity design row went like this:
Neither Larian nor Owlcat had to waste effort here because this was never up for discussion.
One of the real prickly issues was
While Larian and Owlcat had their design philosophies outright chosen by their ruleset, Sawyer turned his game into an acquired taste with no installed fanbase. It's easy to sell Pathfinder Wrath of the Righteous and Baldur's Gate 3 to the same person today. But Pillars of Eternity came out in 2012. It's promise was to be part of the CRPG renaissance. And the fans of that sort of thing were used to specific design philosophies when it comes to character building. Pillars did away with that by choice.
Nowadays of course there's fans of Pillars. And I'm sure there's people trying those games out after trying out Pathfinder or Baldur's Gate 3. But Deadfire came out in 2018 with an unconventional setting. It wasn't the time to try something new, but to bring back something that was dead.
That was one of the hardest things about Pillars for me. I went in to the old Infinity Engine D&D games knowing how AD&D2E worked, so I was already in an environment I understood. With POE I didn't have knowledge of the system goinmg in an d that made it very hard for me to make decisions.