Taking a break from answering questions about Fallout: New Vegas for a while. ~*

#extradirty


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@jesawyer
Taking a break from answering questions about Fallout: New Vegas for a while. ~*

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I've watched a good chunk of your youtube videos now. Something I've noticed is just how much you stick to the systems design approach. Nothing wrong with that or expertise, of course, but over time, I notice an absence of the other stuff that goes into video games. Things like artistic expression or an emotional core. I wouldn't say it's putting the cart before the horse, but it makes me wonder what's the cart and what's the horse. What do you draw on for artistic, rather than logistical inspiration? Is it more accurate to say art is injected into designed systems, or systems are designed around art? Could more surrealistic games like Yume Nikki or Hylics survive at a company like Obsidian?
In your talk about armor from a few years ago, you ended that talk by mentioning how you would iterate and do a βtierβ system to simplify armor/penetration. Avowedβs equipment seems to be very emblematic of that.
To what extent is Avowedβs armor system what you had in mind for that, and if you could revisit that talk with what you learned from Avowed, what would be your big takeaways?
Thanks, love your videos!
I'll make you proud...

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I've watched a lot of your presentations and talks you've given over the years and you talk a lot about setting goals for your teams which really resonates with me.
However, I'm not sure what your approach is to finding what goals are important. Do your highest level goals start by defining your audience, doing market research, getting feedback from previous games, etc?
It feels very overwhelming and abstract to start with a goal and break it down into a game. "Let's make a game that is like X but has Y" feels much more natural, but is not goal oriented.
Thanks,
Max
Text from the framing manuscript - Act I
Translation:
Hey, I was wondering if you could clear up something about ending slides in the games you've worked on. When deciding what does or doesn't get an ending slide, is that up to the individual writer/designer working on the related questline? or is that more up to the creative director assigning what's "important enough" to get an ending slide?
Isn't this what you bastards always wanted?
[ID from ALT: Graphite sketches of Claus Drucker from the chest up. Claus on the left has a surprised look on his face, glancing at something off the page. Behind that to the right is Claus with a smile, eyes closed, thinking about Bert and Marie, who are doodled on the top of the page. END ID]
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Claus ft. Bert and Marie (who i need to draw more cause she's gorgeous) I didn't forget about Magdalene I swear she will be with us soon π
Pt. 1/??? Of sketches I do during my classes instead of paying attention to the professor

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Fav big Yorgβs quote
Do you have any insights into or thoughts about exposing extremely granular difficulty options to players? One of the first 'gamedev' things I ever did was a Deadfire mod that adjusted the PC's Acc/Def growth per level to let me slide the difficulty curve to however I wanted, and it's sent me straight down the path of a personalized difficulty for every game I can mod it into. Progressively scaling difficulty in Total War, +X to enemy rolls in BG3, percentage damage and scaling modifiers in Cyberpunk and Witcher 3, etc., etc., etc. This could essentially double as a list of my favorite games, and I know that I wouldn't feel the same way about any of them if I hadn't tweaked the difficulty to force greater engagement with the systems on my end.
Are there significant cons to opening up this sort of in-depth difficulty customization to players, or do we just not get it because there aren't enough players interested in this sort of thing and it gets triaged out?
(feel free to add some crazy difficulty sliders to Avowed before my anniversary replay)
Extremely narrow question that probably doesn't apply to the project you're working on anymore, but what would you change about the backer beta process you went through with Pillars 1 and 2 if you had to do it again? I've always been curious. For context, I participated in the first game's backer beta and offered some feedback, but skipped it with the second so that the content would feel more fresh to me (I still watched some videos and checked the discussions). The impression I got was that the balancing work done on that slice of content in Deadfire was good *for* the backer beta, but that once players had the chance to interact with the game non-linearly as intended, the difficulty at release simply was too easy to trivialize. This makes me wonder whether the balancing work done during the beta, in that narrow slice of the content, was valuable for the overall difficulty/balance of the final game, especially considering I remember your team having to do some balance passes pretty quickly after release to tune up various encounters and the various normal/veteran/path of the damned difficulty levels. But also, just in general, I'm curious what kinda lessons were learned during the process, especially since you didn't go on to work on Grounded which had a similarly extensive pre-release testing period, this time with Early Access.
Hey Josh, maybe this is a bit of a difficult question, but as someone who has worked in the videogame industry for a good while, what would you say are the most important skills I need to have to become a game developer? Specifically for a text heavy game. My expertise is in writing and I really like the idea of working on videogame RPGs as a writer, but I feel like that may not be enough. What else should I understand how to do if I intend to work on videogames? I'll be honest, I have no experience at all in videogame development. Are there good starting jobs or certificates I should consider getting?
Self-portrait by Andreas Maler, 16th century.

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Saint Satia/Diana shrine π
for the @palimpsestzine Pentiment Zine: Labours of November
Act III of pentiment you destroyed me
Based on the Window of St. Vitus in Prague by Alphonse Mucha