Reputation Overload - The Evolution of RPG Reputation Mechanics

A presentation on how WRPG reputation mechanics have evolved from the early 90s through 2020.

[@Kurvits]

hey joshua! very interesting talk. a couple of notes on Disco Elysium's reputation systems (which you correctly analyzed and identified, btw :) 1. modifiers (what we called local/global mechanical check leverage ) do not actually take a lot of pre-planning :) they're surprisingly easy -- just hang those booleans everywhere. they're amazingly low cost -- and were super easy thing to develop. (unlike almost everything else). 2. there are thought-cabinet-like "internal reputation" systems one could come up with, that would not look derivative. do it in dream sequences? with flashbacks? maybe just... the player has a journal and it's stylized as notes? anything you can hang integers on, count, then give them out as internal tags would work. anyway, cheers and thanks for the talk!

[@xthetenth]

What about a game that treats the party as a larger self, and uses internal reputation as a way to represent aspects of the player character's relationship with their companions? So instead of an aspect of oneself, it's something that the character feels comfortable voicing?

[@zagobelim]

Hey Marat Sar, is there somewhere we can learn more about Disco Elysium's reputation systems and how they were implemented?

[@Kurvits]

@@xthetenth why not! all kinds of tricks can be done by rephrasing structures. larian does "talking to yourself" moments in baldur's gate 3, but instead of skills, you talk to the narrator -- who is you in the future. it's a really smart twist, allowing for moments of introspection and roleplay similar to the skills talking to you -- only more D&D and low key. I like to flatter myself and say it's inspired by Elysium :)

[@Kurvits]

@@zagobelim Maybe when the brain lesions from 5 years of devving heal -- the swelling in our cerebral cortexes goes down -- and the, you know, global pandemic resides, we might make some lectures :)

[@zagobelim]

@@Kurvits please do! And congratulations on making such a wonderful game!

[@superspartan243]

Me: Good lord! My professor's video presentation is 45 minutes long? I can't be bothered with that Also Me: omg Fallout man talk about game reputation mechanics I watch asap

[@hbomberguy]

OH MAN

[@rinshiwell]

OH BOY

[@DarkSoulsSauron]

one of my favorite things about Disco Elysium is that all the 4 major abilitys, psy, phys, int, and motor ALL have skills that feed the player explicitly expository information: Inland empire, shivers, encyclopedia, and reaction speed being the primary ones. it's such a good way of ensuring that first time players will never be without a clue no matter how they build their harrier.

[@ozymandiasramesses1773]

"Harrier" lmao.

[@AyCe]

@@ozymandiasramesses1773 lmao?

[@simonblackwell3576]

@@AyCe maybe they didn’t know that Harrier is Harry’s name but even still, Harrier does sound like the kind of name a kid would get bullied for…… It’s gonna be the name of my first born son 😂

[@RealHumanBeing1]

1 1 1 1 Suck on that, I built him bad on purpose.

[@8BitsOfFun1323]

​@@ozymandiasramesses1773 Harrier is his Canon name. It's a word that to attack or wage war

[@icechiller8073]

punished sawyer, a developer denied his masterpiece

[@Ma1q444]

All the good devs always. while the frauds get to loath in money

[@JB-xl2jc]

@@Ma1q444 Wouldn't say frauds just mainstream. It happens in pretty much every artform. The stuff that critics love is not necessarily the stuff that sells the best. The most "skilled" artists or musicians or what have you that create beautiful complex pieces of art or multilayered compositions are outsold by someone with a catchy beat and autotune.

[@domi_wizza]

@@JB-xl2jc kzbin.info/www/bejne/a5bFepywnaqarsk This person talks about what you said in this video when he talks about Hellblade around the middle.

[@chanlennox8133]

New to his channel, what’s the context of the comment?

[@dfkman]

@@chanlennox8133 A lot of the games that he's been in charge of in some capacity (Fallout New Vegas, more recently Pillars of Eternity 2) have been screwed over by the powers that be (NV's tight schedule, PoE2's adding of features [ship combat] that took away resources from the main game)

[@bryanrickens4575]

Man, Deadfire really massacred our boy. It’s very respectable to see a video game designer actually take responsibility and admit their shortcomings, but it’s almost brutal to watch the level of sincerity he takes it. I hope he maintains his confidence during his new secret project. He’s a good designer, I just don’t want to see doubt cripple him moving forward.

[@ScoutSniper1990]

It’s inspiring and refreshing.

[@ryanc5572]

Deadfire is one of my favourite games, and I really didn't find any fault with it, except for the mediocre and plothole filled story. I wonder why it did so terribly

[@JB-xl2jc]

@@ryanc5572 Sawyer himself originally reacted similarly, basically he was looking at reviews on how much people that actually played it enjoyed it and typically they did. I remember hearing that he basically said that was even more aggravating, because it didn't really suggest a specific REASON that Deadfire did worse than PoE 1, despite both being highly critically reviewed.

[@ryanc5572]

@@JB-xl2jc That makes so much sense. A shame, truly. Maybe if it had more success they'd make a third. That would be a dream come true

[@JB-xl2jc]

@@ryanc5572 It deleted my reply I think, probably because it had a link to Sawyer's Tumblr where he discussed it. But basically I had said yeah I agree, and it sounds like they're redesigning things and making Avowed in the same universe (though Sawyer is NOT the lead on that, possibly by his own choice or possibly not, can't speculate). And since KZbin hates links, here's the full text of Josh's answer to whether there will be a POE 3 from his Tumblr in 2019: "That is not something that I get to decide, but I do think that the relatively low sales of Deadfire mean that if we consider making another Pillars game in this style, we’re going to have to re-examine the entire format of the game. It is difficult to know exactly why a sequel sells worse than its predecessor if both games review relatively well. Is it because the first game satisfied the existing need and the audience just wasn’t interested in the second? Is it because awareness was lower for the sequel? Is it because despite the strong reviews and the strong sales for the first game, people didn’t “really” like it? Maybe it’s a combination of all of these things. The problem is that without really understanding the reason(s), it’s hard to know how to move forward. It would be easier in some ways if Deadfire were also a colossal critical failure and we could point to the massive screw-ups that we needed to address. Players did criticize the low difficulty at launch and the main plot, which I think are fair and reasonable, but those problems alone don’t really explain the difference in sales. And while player reviews were weaker for Deadfire than for Pillars 1, professional criticism tended to say that Deadfire was an improvement over the first game in most areas. (Yes, Deadfire has an 88 Metacritic and Pillars 1 has an 89 Metacritic, but IMO Pillars 1′s review scores benefited from a nostalgia bump.) Players who hate RTwP combat will say that it’s because Deadfire continued using RTwP combat, in contrast to the phenomenally better-selling (and better-reviewed) turn-based Divinity: OS2. Even if that’s true, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which generally had lower review scores than Deadfire, sold better than Deadfire and had RTwP combat. I’m sure some of the people reading this think they know precisely why Deadfire sold worse than Pillars 1. I don’t have that confidence, which is one of several reasons why I am leery about trying to direct a sequel. I couldn’t give our (Obsidian’s) audience the game that they wanted and without understanding where I went wrong, I would be guessing at what the problems are and how to remedy them."

[@00Morm00]

I'd like to point that Disco Elysium has a much smaller scale than a game like Deadfire. It's easier to hard-code world responsiveness when you don't have several cities with hundreds of side quests ; and that results in every single minor NPC having a shitload of lines to write.

[@ubikubique2780]

Perfect point!

[@wormerine8029]

And it makes an agressive dive down in terms of quality and reactivity halfway through. Still Deadfire overshot with reputation system, with more harm then good. I did like dispositions in PoEs - not ideal, but I think so far my favourate implimentation of that kind of system.

[@SaulGoodman3D2049]

⁠@@georgefloyd6438In fairness to Disco, the game takes place in a small district of a city in a larger world. We see and hear of the other districts and their cultural distinctions and the world at large through other non-local characters or our skills, but our perspective is contained entirely to Martinaise, which as the game doesn't exactly portray as a melting pot, there's hardly any reason for there to be distinct cultures between areas. Disco isn't going for anywhere close to the scale of New Vegas or Deadfire; while those games spanned states and different nations, Disco is going for (just choosing a borough at random since I've never been to New York) a playable space the span of Brooklyn.

[@jak3legacy]

Definitely a depth vs. Breadth choice

[@DarkSoulsSauron]

also, thank you for standing against a centralizing force in disseminating game design knowledge and working to democratize access to your experience and knowledge!

[@suplextrain]

Starts at 7:00

[@TerrorBlades]

Thank god for you.

[@harktischris]

the irony of the deadfire topic system is that while i (as a player who tends towards min-maxing than role-playing) never paid too much attention to the actual companioncompanion interactions, i *did* really enjoy seeing those little nuggets of "eder hated you punching that boar" "pallegina liked your athiestic comment". just *that* bit of reactivity was fun, and just having that might have drastically simplified the whole topic workload/balancing.

[@kaptenteo]

32:24 While I recognize how much of a pain this must have been to actually design and create, and didn't quite work as intended all the time, I really loved the topic system as a player. It gave the reactivity among companions a bit more flair and also helped flesh out their respective personalities in an interesting way.

[@Neunzehnsechs]

I finished pillars 2 some days ago. What a masterpiece. The graphics are incredible. The writing and campanions are so good. The world is so interesting to explore. I can't express how much I love it. I really hope we see a pillars 3.

[@yarbles]

never played the series! do u recommend starting with pillars 2?

[@yarbles]

@@linkfreak404 thanks for the tip, i think ill start with 1 then since it's supposed to be a good game and 2 will always be there

[@JB-xl2jc]

@@yarbles I enjoyed both but I did enjoy 1 slightly more (storywise I find it to be superior, combat and gameplay-wise it is more limited). Hope you have since beaten both and had a fun time!

[@StephenYuan]

Pillars 2 is a great game. However its commercial failure seems to have nipped Obsidian's crpg efforts in the bud. But hopefully Avowed, set in the same universe, will use a lot of of the same design. Pillars 2 is a bigger and more ambitious game than 1 imho. I love the world and the map.

[@callsignfatbeard2637]

@@yarbles you should always start at the beginning

[@jabberw0k812]

One comparison between Fallout karma and Mass Effect (or even KotOR). To my knowledge, Fallout never really treated karma as a skill. I could be wrong about this, but at least the results of a check would've been hidden from the player. Mass Effect, on the other hand, had a lot of visible paragon and renegade checks that locked out possibilities if the relevant alignment was too low. The result was that it felt like the game was punishing you for playing the middle ground, because you would end up locked out of both skills. And sometimes, these skills were the only way to solve a specific problem, so it felt very punitive. If Fallout did anything like this, it was at least invisible to the player, so existing in the middle ground still felt like a legitimate place to be.

[@davidbodor1762]

Tyranny is by far my favorite of the modern RPGs. It's such an amazing game, the level of choices and the spell and reputation systems were amazing

[@musicmusic6595]

Being honest, i am playing pillars of eternity 1 now and finished tyranny, and i have a similar opinion to you. I am loving POE, but tyranny has got something seriously special in the story line and choices, it gripped me instantly from the first few minutes and i haven't had a game do that to me since the early 2000's. If tyranny had been longer and more developed it had so much freaking potential, really that game has such a different feel/approach story being big part of it then game play and choices to follow.

[@rhiannon3599]

Looking forward to listening to this later! Thank you for the best hours of gaming I've experienced

[@ZacharyRap]

I love the work you do josh. Im 25 and I've been enjoying the games you worked on for over 10 years now

[@AlexGorskov]

Yeah man, he's awesome! I started with Icewind Dale II; I was around 13 back then. The game was pretty hard, but served as a gateway to DnD for me.

[@armandoguerra7658]

Since 2008 till today, I’m still playing New Vegas and I thinks it’s a despicable move to re-re-re-re-remake skyrim for every single device, but leave the best fallout game in a 12 year gap. Anyway, I can’t thank you enough for being involved in my 2nd favorite game ever, and could listen to you talk about this matter for days, for not talking about your past experiences in your life

[@dannymckenzie8329]

@@blaiseprzybyla8621 the terms of the contract between Bethesda and obsidian regarding fallout new vegas were basically "we, bethesda, will pay your company 2 million dollars to develop a fallout game which was licensed to us when we bought it from black isle studios, however you must have the game in whatever state it's in at the time we demand ready to release by a date of our choosing, and in order to receive any percentage of the profit from the titles sales from now to the end of time is if the game gets an 8.7 score on METACRITIC in the early months following its release". So essentially, bethesda approached a struggling development company, offered them payment for a game contract IF they agreed to waive any rights to the intellectual property and henceforth absolve themselves of a percentage cut from the overall profit gained from their labor (something they could barely afford to do and had little to no choice if they wanted to continue having jobs), A contract of which ultimately left obsidian in bad standing with their parent company who was shady as fuck to begin with, and eventually lead to future projects being forcibly cancelled and the rights handed away to other publishers and their various developing studios.... one example being how zenimax would not allow obsidian to complete development of the southpark game they were working with trey parker and Matt stone to produce, and then the contract along with the early core game production/ art/ mechanics finished by obsidian were given to ubisoft who soon after announced " the stick of truth" was coming soon (which is a notably out of character game design coming from such a linear stealth oriented dev studio as ubisoft who at the time was continuing to ignore ever having advertised a new rainbow six game, handling the release of splinter cell blacklist, and building multiple assassins creed titles, while patching past iterations, and beginning development on farcry 4, and writing the consept for the division (which would change multiple times during development and lead to the release of a game that was nearly the opposite of what was shown in the earliest gameplay advertisements). Seriously, for being as inconsistent as ubisoft I find it hard to believe they recieved a half finished game from zenimax with "obsidian" written on it and scrapped everything to start from scratch. No, they probably polished it up real nice, finished the animations and got all the voice lines recorded and released it basically as they got it without changing the creative direction much at all because the sole purpose obsidian was making the game was because Matt stone was a fan of black isle and obsidian and trusted their style to deliver and interactive and fun way to explore a southpark open world

[@MicoSelva]

Great talk! Can we look forward to your breakdowns of other RPG systems? Also, here's hoping to you overcoming your Deadfire fatigue and designing another RPG in the near future. It will be awful in CRPG world loses you permanently.

[@zagobelim]

Couldn't agree more. Josh is a boon to our niche!

[@AlexGorskov]

Josh, if you read this, we love you man! You are in my top 5 game dev heroes! Icewind Dale II changed my life as a gamer.

[@francoismoutou2303]

thanks for taking the time to do & share this talk.

[@zaccaustin]

Wow this went up fast! Glad I got to watch it as it happened. Great talk. I hope you do more of them!

[@Squisheeism]

This was a very informative video, I really appreciate the work you've done and still do to make games for us Josh!

[@user-rm8wr4gq2i]

nice to see you again after a while!

[@MartinPurvis]

Love your talks, saved this for when I can watch in full

[@lastgamebender]

Great talk as always, Josh. Thanks for all your work!

[@Artcaneon]

You're amazing, J! I've always loved your insights to game design :)

[@hesychia-9582]

Thank you, Josh! Your videos are very informative and interesting!

[@joe_rogan]

Great presentation, as usual. Thank you Josh.

[@tiemx2039]

great talk. your decades of insights are incredibly valuable and your presentation is well put together AND it's out here for free. you should link your twitch in the description so people know how to find you!

[@bonseez]

cant wait to watch this, thank you josh.

[@WiiWarior23]

This is the man i owe a lot of my joy in life too. glad i found your channel :) thank you for the hours you invested into some of the greatest games of all time... You’re the man josh!

[@NGill-pt1vr]

A different type of game, but Total War: Three Kingdoms introduced a relationship system where characters get bonuses/detriments when interacting with other characters with whom they have a previous relationship. So a character who has fought alongside another character with a similar personality and values will get a bonus when fighting alongside them, and go into a rage if that character is wounded or killed. Characters with differing personalities might begin to hate eachother with extended interaction though. And opposing generals/leaders can develop rivalries based on past defeats and betrayals. So you can situations like where you kill someone's friend in battle and now they will go out of their way to attack you endlessly - it really adds to the experience.

[@clownworldhereticmyron1018]

Oh damn that's really cool!

[@christiancordoba9654]

Joshua:If u don't know who I am, I don't know how u got here Me one hour later: how did I get here?

[@MatthewBrown-yu1hs]

Thank you for this stream/video. I know Deadfire had some elements that didn't work out, but it is one of my fav cRPGs :) I think of it fondly, often

[@StoneAngles]

One interesting side effect of this talk for me: Made me realize that Baldur's Gate rep system had conditioned me into "lawful good" behavior in fantasy RPGs for a couple of decades. It took watching my partner make a bunch of morally ambiguous characters in Pillars to finally break free of that expectation. So these systems can have some weird consequences...

[@LPgamedev]

Been really enjoying disco elysium, and I agree that the way they have your choices impact the game narratively/mechanically is quite clever and elegant. Thanks for the talk and insight of how various games have handled reputation systems! Looking forward to more of these insights if you plan on doing more talks on this channel. Sorry to hear about gdc troubles

[@michaelvicente5365]

this was great, I'm a 3D artist but I love listening to game design talks, very inspiring.

[@ThisistheMaasster]

Very interesting to see the opinions of a game designer on the mechanics of game design. Super talk, 10/10

[@Marandal]

Thanks for the stream. it was a great listen!

[@piotrw3366]

Hi Joshua! Thanks for this lecture on Reputation systems! Fallout 1 and 2 and later New Vegas made me fall in love with games and directed me few years back to pursue indie game dev career. I am really grateful that you share your knowledge with others! Take care! -Peter

[@AdThe1st]

Josh is such an inspiration to me as a game dev 🤩

[@TimmacTR]

Great! Love these in-depth analyses..Thanks a lot! Also think no one who wants to do an RPG in the future will be able to ignore Disco Elysium.

[@MattyFez]

I'd very much like to see more content like this

[@Zetsubou2k9]

Thanks for all your videos and talks, incredibly interesting :) I love PoE and Deadfire

[@travistreadway3180]

I still play new Vegas for the story alone without mods on the ps3 I have more fun with mods but the game by itself is the best fallout. Thank you for working on literally my favorite game I still play to this day

[@josephsilberstein1577]

thanks for the great video. really appreciate your honesty and being blunt about GDC. their prices are outrageous. if I would ever goto GDC again, i'd skip buying a pass, hang out on the nearby lawn and just goto parties.

[@whade62000]

I've always loved what Planescape: T did with the 2-way DnD alignment system.(Good-Neutral-Evil and Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic) Because suddenly had a lot more depth other than just the classic 2 choice saint or mass murderer just by this simple addition, but you had a lot of choice when writing dialouge: you could offer 2-3 answers on one scale , you could have 4-5 answers moving on a combined scale (LG, LE, N, CG, CE), you could have 6-7 answers when one side was simple and the other combined, or you could go up to offering 9 or even more with multiple answers leading to the same aligment with different justifications, or ones that check the severity of one scale( eg. mildly Chaotic and very Chaotic answer). Arcanum did something similar and replaced the Lawful-Chaotic scale with pro-Magic to pro-Technology. (It wasn't a true reputation scale though as your magitech alignment depended mostly on the character skills you chose to level and not your NPC interactions.) Arcanum did another interesting thing where NPCs screens would show their attitude towards you (Hate, Dislike, Suspicious, Neutral, Courteous Amiable, Love), though these were tags for a +100, -100 scale, determined on first meeting by a Reaction Modifier based on the Beauty stat, but by your actions afterwards and tracked individually for each NPC. There were limited options to change this, but they were not just conversation and quest based, like siding with one NPC might flip a switch to lower another NPC's reaction explained by them "hearing" about helping their rival.

[@tylerrobinson6450]

I have 600+ hours in PoE and PoE 2 combined. Deadfire is easily my favorite game of all time. I think you're a little hard on yourself for how it turned out. Fantastic talk, great answers to questions! Keep up the good work and I can't wait for your next game!

[@hairmachine1284]

I have to say, even though the implementation was a bit messy, I really like the ideas behind and the ambition of the topic system. I do hope that ideas like this don't get put aside forever, there's a lot of potential for really dynamic and interesting gameplay there!

[@Ash__Adler]

Hey Josh, thanks for making this. It was nice getting your overview on the history of reputation subsystems and pros/cons of various steps along the way 🙂 Also, while it's always good to acknowledge mistakes in order to learn from them, I think you should be nicer to yourself about Pillars 2. If you didn't aim for the moon with the reputations/topics/etc. there, you wouldn't have found out that the sky is the limit. Granted, that's easier for me to say as a fan of the game rather than having been one of the key developers, but the fact that you did something which provoked a strong reaction is arguably better than having made something so milquetoast that nobody cared about it. At least it gave you a clear signal of how much is too much so that you can be better equipped for design choices in the future 🙂

[@tylertuthill5121]

You and Dave Gilbert are the best game devs on the planet!

[@ScorpyX]

Thank you for this talk very interesting

[@ericthompson5875]

JESawyerLands and/or Pillars 3 when? Deadfire was still an excellent game, the rest made up for the sometimes silly Topic problems you mention here, play it if you haven't people. Looking forward to whatever comes next from you.

[@asherett]

From his twitter, tumbler blog etc it seems he doesn't think there will be another Pillars game, and if there will be, Josh most likely won't write it. He was really disappointed in Deadfire's reception. It apparently sold pretty badly. I personally agree with you though, it was a great game!

[@moiseman]

I think Deadfire sold so poorly it basically killed the franchise

[@AliIKarimi]

Deadfire was bad. I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it. And that’s from someone who loved pillars of eternity to death.

[@alexh8952]

@@AliIKarimi I've never heard someone say it was outright bad, what didn't you like about it?

[@AliIKarimi]

​@@alexh8952 I've actually been wanting to write a review about it, and I keep meaning to go back to the game to finish it. But I always just look at the title in steam and think I'd rather do other things, but I finished all the sidequests/islands except the Forgotten Sanctum and the big boss fights. But maybe this can be a chance to vent some of the frustrations. I played both Pillar games right after each other - so there was no gap in between and remember both fairly well since I played them about 5-6 months ago. I thought although Pillars was not a breakthrough original game it knew what to do and where to go with its setting and for the most part executed a Baldurs Gate style experience fairly well. It had its post-kickstarter issues (backer avatars in the game, and a backer structured set of content checklists) as well as pacing issues (White march feels like a missing chapter which somehow occurs mid-late game rather than after the conclusion) but was overall a fairly focused and interesting take on Gods and reincarnation in a fantasy setting. Eder, Durance, Pallegina were all interesting companions and the world, music and art was all fairly beautiful and specific - there isn't really a character like Durance in any other game. Now with Deadfire, it felt like the stakes were higher. Sequels in the Black Isle/Bioware generation were always bigger and better than the first game. To start Deadfire does a few things better than PoE 1 - the graphics, the locations, and to some extent the class design and combat (although its debatable, it felt more innovative and in some ways more interesting). Where it drops the ball is its inability to find a clear take on the deadfire archipelago, and to create a system that makes the navigation of the islands expansive and large rather than minigame island hopping. I think the game suffers from a weak open-world, a disjointed story arc, and is missing things that you go into an Obsidian game expecting. Instead of a consistent narrative tackling the problems of colonalism, piracy or even island life we get random island adventures with no common thread and no clear take-away or experiential goal. It just felt like the minigames and map travel took you out of the experience that the Deadfire archipelago promised - which made the game world seem smaller rather than more expansive. There are some good moments in Deadfire, but overall the game has no focus or clear direction and feels to me like a game that did not know what it was aiming to do and how it was going to do it - there was a lot that should have been cut out. The DLCs were tired and I won't say much about those - there's one or two moments in SSS, Beast of Winter and Sanctum were not particularly inspired or deep, extremely forgettable.

[@deveus1]

I love that Josh Sawyer is a big fan of Darklands. As one of the few people who remembers (and loved playing) that game, it makes so much sense now.

[@kaptenteo]

I'm back again, two years later, just to swoon over Josh's inspirational way of talking about game design and sharing his own personal experiences. I'm sorry the development for Deadfire was as taxing as it was, and that it wasn't received in the way you had hoped. I do love the world of Eora, though, so I hope Obsidian keeps making games in that setting.

[@CoffeePotato]

Darn, would have been cool to hear your take on Chaos Frame from the Ogre Battle/Tactics Ogre games. It had such a crazy web of reputation, individual actions, and active gameplay.

[@praxis22]

The subjective difference having Skyrim Reputation installed is huge. I tend to mod more than play, but having actually done a few quests, the guard's responding to me really adds to the experience. Props to the Algorithm for recommending this, clearly it spies on me more than expected.

[@huskyxtooth]

will you do more of these? I would love to watch these live

[@lachumayo]

ey the talk starts at 7:01 for anyone thats really really impatient. have fun watching this awesome, awesome talk

[@Ava6581]

Cool Video!

[@bw126]

Josh is a good teacher.

[@ProrokLebioda]

Late to the party, but here's what I wanted to say: Great talk! Really like to hear more from experienced developers. Especially in CRPG genre, it's having it's renaissance for some time, but it's not a mainstream genre. While I wouldn't personally attempt to create CRPG, due to working alone, I really admire people who do. GDC was a good gateway, but I agree that their policies are weird. Twitch and other streaming platforms allow greater accessibility and reach. Currently playing PoE. Can't wait to see what's cooking next.

[@gordo6908]

This is awesome. Where did he advertise this talk? Would have been awesome to watch it live.

[@thehappynihilist1843]

Also can confirm G.d.c has uploaded the "choice architecture, player expression and narrative design in fallout new vegas" talk as a Vod. :)

[@AgamemnonTWC]

Darklands looks fascinating! It reminds me of some of my favorite parts of Mount and Blade. I need to pick that up sometime.

[@rymcmanus]

I guess I must be the only person who loved Deadfire's topic system, but I definitely understand that it was a pain to design. I agree that Disco Elysium is awesome, but actually if you think about it what DE does is similar to what most DMs do in DnD: adjust the DC of checks based on the player's previous actions. It's actually surprising that with so many DnD-based cRPGs that hasn't been done before. Anyway, I look forward to your next game, since it sounds like you are taking inspiration from DE.

[@olly3231]

this is awesome

[@dancinginfernal]

So weird to go back and see you without the beard.

[@katamarankatamaranovich9986]

> made some of the best RPGs in the world. > struggles with PowerPoint I guess I'd prefere it this way, instead of wise versa.

[@ertrick3693]

"This'll make things easier!" *Proceeds to make a system that makes more work for designers and is cumbersome for the player to work with* When big brain designer choices become *too* big brain. Still, I can at least appreciate the dedication to trying to make a richer player experience... even if it just made it more convoluted, lmao. Fallout: New Vegas's reputation system is still my favorite, and I like the "what the hell do we do with you" reaction you get from, say, NCR troops when you have a mixed rep with them.

[@ertrick3693]

@@blaiseprzybyla8621 To my knowledge, there were a few times Bethesda had to tell Obsidian to change or abandon certain plans due to the engine limitations. People have made mods for the game that expand all its systems in incredible ways (including stealth and perhaps reputation), but modders work well outside games' development cycles and also only really make content for the PC versions of games (yeah, Fallout 4 and Skyrim SE have console mods, but those have limitations). So you can judge what the engine is capable of based on what modders do with the game, but you can't say for sure if any of it is possible in a regular development cycle. For this particular instance, I'd have to assume that it's a similar reason Bethesda had to scale back the radiant AI in Oblivion - all options they had presented problems, so they went with the one that did the least harm. Considering the Mojave is a big, mostly empty wasteland where you could just run into random members of some of the bigger factions, it probably would've been more problematic to make every stealth kill against a faction member count as a mark against one's reputation. Of course, they did set a script so that certain character deaths resulted in immediate hostility no matter what (namely Colonel Moore and Caesar), but I believe those are special scripts/flags and activate as soon as they die, whether or not the Courier did the killing (90% of the time it'd be the Courier simply because no creature or NPC that's hostile towards them would spawn even remotely close to their cells, so you'd have to facilitate their deaths this way through console commands or mods).

[@hondshoven8477]

@@lilmanbigtalk7488 With additions like mixed reputations that allows to make "grayer" characters (instead of the binary idolized / hated spectrum) and companion reactivity adding some personal impact to your actions. So yeah, they start from the same basis but built on it instead of copy pasting mindlessly.

[@tharwab]

i cant believe j sawyer talking about disco elysium happened over a year ago and i literally just found it

[@LOLquendoTV]

Everytime I see anything Josh said after Deadfire I realise Pentiment was greatly foreshadowed lmao

[@hemangchauhan2864]

KZbin algorithm blessed this on my feed

[@mdawni6933]

Thank you

[@MusashiHunter3]

Thanks for the points about GDC's policies at the end. I'm also quite disappointed about GDC's policies in a number of areas.

[@ArnaudCastaner]

7:01 Is when the talk actually starts

[@Thurrak]

I'm really sad I never knew about these videos on youtube when they came out, oh well I am seeing them now. Hoping you have time to add some more these are great!

[@MidlifeCrisisJoe]

I liked Dispositions in PoE (1, haven't played 2) and felt they worked very well. Didn't really perceive them like the sort of wishy washy universalism of karma, more like the notion that you can sometimes quickly get a vibe off someone who does something repeatedly. Like how if you talk to someone who works in sales, a lot of their casual conversation ends up sounding salesman-like, even if they don't intend it, because they're so practiced from the habit of selling things all day. Stuff like the notion that someone "has an honest face" because they genuinely were honest most of the time and they couldn't hide it.

[@balda7942]

Interesting presentation. All of this tagging, pre-planing and other things remind me of corpus linguistics. Basicly, all of this dialogs are forming a corpus, so maybe tolls that linguists use in corporas might be usefull in game development, or maybe developers already using it and this obsidian's dialog toll is already uses corpus technology and only now i get that.

[@chadproductions9566]

Balanceman laying down the FUNK

[@jacketbox4573]

Is the guy some kind of Game developer from what he’s talking

[@JAIMEGARCIA-gw9re]

Avowed is going to be so great. I can't wait.

[@Mikhavoc]

king

[@Lundah]

While reputation/disposition might not have worked that well in Deadfire. But don't forget that in PoE1 disposition worked out really well.

[@wilddogspam]

Not really. He said, you could be honest 5 times in a town and get everyone taking about your honest you were. I was certainly surprised by that early on. The game was great, but dispositions didn't really make it that way.

[@Carpetf]

doing the Leo pointing meme when Josh mentions Darklands

[@verumamo2668]

All the cool kids know Darklands. The really cool kids were in the Yahoo group for Darklands and still have spreadsheets filled with cities and their saint and alchemical offerings somewhere on their hard drives.

[@suwannajai-in2205]

2020 is a great year

[@donniedewitt9878]

Great vid

[@Joeofiowa]

Though these critiques are valid, Deadfire remains my most played and one of the top 3 games for me. It was an ambitious sequel with great ideas, and i wish it had received the commercial succcess to keep the franchise going.

[@thefoxoflaurels3437]

GOD

[@mooferoo]

Hi Josh. I hope you're keeping ok.

[@NoOne-hr9ti]

Is the hanged man in Disco Elysium a reference to Joshua Graham in Van Buren?

[@Triconomicon]

I'm watching this and I'm thinking this could be a potential use for AI. I understand AI is a big, scary word these days, but I think if you tuned it carefully to specifically adjust some parts of characters' lines to fit a specific context, that could be incredibly powerful. Like it could make a RPG so much more immersive if characters had responses that would be tailored specifically for what has happened, the order things happened, who was there when it happened, etc, etc. Like covering so many variables in ways that you correctly identified as being too work intensive for designers. That said, I don't think AI tools right now are mature enough to be used this way, but maybe they can be in the future. Probably someone like Obsidian would have to create those tools... Also, I think the Disco Elysium system sounds absolutely brilliant (actually I just bought it based on your description of it, I gotta play this). I think the way it clearly describes in the tooltip what caused a dialogue option to be available, that kind of specific reactivity makes the game much more immersive because you really see in a tangible way how your decisions led to an outcome. You could also use this system to have a really nice log for the player to refer to, where you can see what happened and which decisions led up to it. I think in general, while I understand that it's more work intensive, it's really powerful to be able to show like exactly what led up to a certain outcome. Like the problem with abstracted systems where your actions simply contribute to a paragon/villain value, the problem is that it all just kind of ends up feeling nebulous. Like you could do bad things but it just doesn't matter as long as you have enough good boy points, the characters will never reference the bad things you did anyway, so it's like it never happened. It's always much better if, like, characters will specifically reference things. Then it stops feeling like "just a game", and more like a world that you can believe in and get immersed in. From my own experience with games like BG2, you end up gaming the reputation system really hard for maximum benefit, which makes it feel shallow and non-immersive. That's how I feel, anyway. Big fan. Cheers from Sweden.

[@SenkaZver]

36:33 maybe one solution would have been to collect all tags that were inside of a single dialogue instance, exclude duplicates, and then adjust reputations based on that. That way even if an anti-religious statement tag occurred twice or more in a conversation, it'd only trigger reputation change once. Which would feel more natural, probably.

[@Trashloot]

Haven't played Deadfire because I never got in to the first game. But the reputation system sounds pretty cool to be honest. I like games like Dragon Age Origins where you need to get to know the people you are talking to in order to make them like you. And what you described the Deadfire system in that style. I don't think that a complex friendship system is a bad thing. I am way more annoyed by games where you know that the upper right answer is always the "good" answer which makes everyone like you. It was really hard to get some of your followers to really like you in Dragon Age Origins and it was interesting too. There was this one character who would romance you if they liked you enough (around 80%) but if you maxed out their friendship this option was not possible and you were really good friends instead. Since playing Dragon Age Origins I'm always on the hunt for games where i have to think about what I'm saying instead of just choosing paragon. So i might give Deadfire a try :3.

[@trompell0]

Deadfire is amazing dude. Blew my mind. Wonderful rpg. And yeah dragon age origins was amazing the origins system too gave alot of depth to the rog side. I'm surprised another game hasn't copied it properly. Where your origin leads into the game and also has dialogue and story changes based on your start.

[@tannermedlin9309]

Is this the same gdc you tweeted you would do in reference to disco Elysium and how it fixed a problem you had been trying to crack for years

[@superskateboardingentertai9228]

What are your thoughts on Morrowind?

[@dukiwave]

ily

[@arkadiuszjandylewski152]

You have made great games Josh. I have one suggestion though. Main character in Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 should have more attribute points than everyone else. Hero of the story should always be better than his allies.

[@fafofafin]

27:36 Hit squads in FNV where not as pernicious as in BG1 but they were the exact right amount of pernicious.

[@josuebarboza9809]

Hi. I love you. Bye.