Looking Back and Moving Forward with Pillars of Eternity

Oh welcome so well that's certainly why welcome to looking back and moving forward with colors of eternity I'm your host Josh Sawyer so there's a few things I should say before we start first is please silence your cellphone's if you happen to be have not done that already also you should be receiving an email about a survey for the session please fill them out it helps GGC determine if my talk is good a pile of trash and if I should never ever be invited back again so let's let's talk about what this talk is about it is about pillars of eternity in fact trying to make it about more than just being a post mortem of how the game went what we did right and what we did wrong it's trying to broaden the focus more to retro style games overall why they appeal to gamers some of the inherent dangers that come with making a retro classic game that has a lot of very passionate fans from the beginning and about our learning experiences in making this game by the way of Facebook reminded me that four years ago today we recorded the video for this is a picture from the video for our Kickstarter campaign four pillars of eternity so that little angel was long gone so who am i i am josh slayer I am the design director at obsidian entertainment of particular relevance to this talk I was the director and system designer on pillars of eternity and I was the director and system designer on Fallout New Vegas and one of the expansions way back when at Black Isle Studios I got my start as a level designer on I Swindell which was my first introduction to designing for infinity Engine style games and then later I was the lead designer on I Swindell - and I got into gaming in part because I've been playing tabletop games for about 30 years so my love affair with this style of game goes back a long way I've talked a lot about pillars of eternity in the past hopefully you're familiar with it if you're not it was a Kickstarter backer project we had about 77,000 backers and raised about four million dollars it was very very successful we did not think so making such a game would be possible at all until Double Fine adventure launched on Kickstarter then we decided no we definitely have to make a game like this it took a while to get our owners convinced that this was a good idea but they they relented and we decided that we would make an infinity engine style game we wanted it to be a combination of elements from I Swindell Baldur's Gate and Planescape torment we wanted it to be Forgotten Realms II and AD and EE so similar to The Forgotten Realms settings similar to the Dungeons & Dragons rule set without exactly copying them because well we don't have the rights to those the Kickstarter campaign was very successful very quickly we really a lot of people don't believe us when we say this but we did not we were not sure that it was going to be successful our original goal was 1.1 million dollars that was reached in 24 27 hours and at the end of the campaign it was I think three point nine so very successful very quickly and we had to do a lot of seat of our pants design for things like stretch goals which wound up being a little bit more than we could handle in terms of development but we'll get to that so what's the appeal of retro gaming anyway there are three things I'll talk about here one is nostalgia that's one of the biggest ones it's it's about passion it's about a longing for a time where we remember playing the games that we loved and how great that made us feel it's about the challenge presented by a lot of older games you can find games that are still challenging that are made today but it's not as common sense gaming has a broader sort of fan base now and it's about wild cards which is sort of the more human element and wacky things that we as human being developers wind up putting in our games that the march of time and the polishing of development has kind of erased a lot of first let's talk about nostalgia these are images that are very nostalgic for me because I grew up in 80s and early 90s playing role-playing games like the original Bard's Tale I played all the gold box games from SSI those were the adat game set in the Forgotten Realms and the dragon Lance settings which were a lot of fun and also dark lands which has gained that almost no one has ever heard of but it's a very cool historical role-playing game set in the Holy Roman Empire and it's a lot of fun and whenever I see pictures like this it draws me back to that time it makes me very excited and passionate I forget all the bad things about those games I just remember all the good things and I wish someone would make more games like that and that's the way people feel when they see a lot of the Infinity engine games is that feeling of nostalgia remembering how fun it was and how much they loved those games the second part is challenge like I said you can still find games being made today that are really emphasizing a very strong difficulty curve things like Dark Souls games like that especially since we have a lot more smaller developers making more focused games for niche audiences you can find very challenging means out there but role-playing games have also broadened their appeal and their fanbase and you see a lot of games that are targeted for a very low level of difficulty a very shallow learning curve and when people think back to games like Baldur's Gate or I Swindell they think of very very challenging fights that might have taken them hours and a lot of cursing and reloading to get through the last thing are wild cards and this is sort of what I said about human beings develop these games and when we were younger we put things in these games that when we look back at we kind of cringe their rough edges and goofy things things like Newburg I don't know if you guys remember newer from Baldur's Gate he was an NPC that would approach you and he would not stop talking to you and it was sort of like coaxing you to kill him very very obnoxious character but people still have fond memories of this guy because he's just he's a wild man wacky dude and then things like the golden pantaloons these goofy clothing items that you can find in baldur's gate so the modern development process in a lot of cases especially with large development teams it kind of files over the edges of these human elements that people they actually find very endearing because they show that people have fun making games that's one of the reasons why we started making games so let's talk about the some of the dangers of making a retro revival game you can hit the wrong target so you can just focus on the wrong things you look at all the things that go into a game and you spend your time working on the things that no one gives a about that's bad you can design for a very tiny image you know we sort of admit that we are designing for a niche audience we're not designing for everybody clearly or not even designing for most gamers were that we're designing for a smaller subset of people but within that niche there are even tinier and tinier niches of people that are more interested in very very narrow elements if you over design toward one tiny niche you will never broaden your appeal at all which can also be bad because you presumably want to continue making games you can also update too much you can look at everything and say you know what let's let's fix and update all of this stuff some of that stuff you don't need to touch at all you can just leave it alone it's totally fine so you can be careful and just say you know what leave that alone let's focus on things that really need to be improved and not you know not change everything and the last part is missing the soul this is a very ephemeral feels based thing but it's very important it's possibly the most important thing because again the reason why you get a lot of people interested in these sort of retro revival games in the first place is because they're very passionate about the game itself and if it doesn't really have the feeling of those games if it doesn't evoke the sort of nostalgia that you're looking for you fail you can even make a good game like that is you know sort of good to some people but you're sort of making it for an audience in the first place and if you miss that then you've missed the point soul is elusive so let's talk about soul which is this very ephemeral thing when people remember the things that they love their memory can be selective they can gloss over a lot of things and most of what they remember is their emotional attachment to it and little things that stick out to them the individual elements that go into it contribute to the whole picture so when you modify things you have to be very careful about what you're modifying you could tweak one tiny thing that turns out to be a very key component of what made that's something very cool and ultimately the spirit of something is more important than actually getting it technically accurate and in many cases it's healthier if you're trying to modernize a game the example I'm wearing my Ducati shirt today I'm glad I packed it because I'm going to talk about how Ducati a motorcycle manufacturer updated the bike on the left is mike hailwood's Isle of Man TT bike from 1978 and the bike on the on the right is a mid 2000s sport classic 1000 they look fairly similar but they're not actually all that similar but they capture the soul of the old bike and that's why that bike immediately sold out and why I can never find one for a good price and I'm going to be mad for the rest of my life about it but it goes to show that the spirit of the thing is what's important it's less important than the exact specific details so let's talk about some of the things we've been pillars of eternity and what went right and what went very not right we decided from the beginning that we are going to be making 2d environments from an isometric rendered perspective that was a core component of all the Infinity engine gains we knew we were gonna raise the resolution a lot but we were still going to hand touch most of our environments because we did a lot of after an environment would be rendered we'd have to de artes go back and touch them up and that we were also going to try to add in a 3d lighting element which was challenging and I covered that in a little talk I did a few years ago but basically we managed to get 3d lighting into a 2d environment and it was great and a lot of the art that we looked at in terms of our inspiration was from the second edition 18 D era so that for me is artists like Larry Elmore Jeff Easley Keith Parkinson Clyde Caldwell Fred fields and Gerald Brahm also just known as haraam over all those artists used less saturated pallets than a lot of contemporary fantasy artists and relatively realistic weapons and armor so they look you know they're not they don't really look historical but they're a little more on the subdued side especially compared to a lot of contemporary fantasy art here are a few key images that we looked at when we were looking at our style the one on the left is by Larry L Moritz from the second edition players handbook the style of the characters weapons and armor is not realistic it's slightly fantastic but the proportions are still semi realistic and the palette overall for both of the images both Keith Parkinson and Larry Elmore is relatively subdued you don't get a lot of really intense colors like you might see in a lot of contemporary fantasy art and we wanted to capture the classic isometric look and feel and as I'll show in the next image we didn't we didn't exactly emulate what we did in the first games but we came close Baldur's Gate to a nice Swindell Baldur's Gate to that's a straight render the image from I Swindell it was heavily painted over that's something at block I'll did that I don't think Bioware really did it all I'm at Black Isle we usually did a lot of painting on our images after we rendered them and gotten a lot of cool painterly details so four pillars of attorneys isometric style we wanted to add dynamic lighting of course we raised the resolution quite a bit and we used a lower angle for how we rendered exteriors if you look back at this image and the angle that we used versus this image this image it's actually lower most players don't really notice it because it's a I think it's only like a seven and a half or degree difference but what it did it has allowed us to emphasize a lot of vertical structures that you see in exterior x' and since you don't necessarily get a lot of tight corridors you don't find up you don't wind up occluding the characters very much when you go into interiors the camera actually goes up seven and a half degrees players didn't really notice it so that's an example of something where we didn't actually emulate it exactly but it created the experience that we wanted to character art was a little more mixed you know we decided right away we're going to use realistic proportions for things you know make them more sort of in the style of second edition AD&D but those realistic proportions made characters hard to read I mean there's a reason why a lot of game artists exaggerated features whether it's armor or body proportions on characters it's because when they're very small on the screen you want to be able to read them very easily it's also why they tend to use a lot of saturated and contrasting colors because it makes characters a lot easier to when they're very small what we committed to doing that and so we ran into some challenges and then because we did not have a level of detail system when those you know simple little teeny characters got blown up on your inventory screen the details are kind of poor and clumsy so if you look at the scale Armour on a dare the scales are really big and kind of clunky looking and we did that so they would read at a very small resolution but then they look kind of goofy when you see them in game and people criticize that which they were fair to criticize and it was also very frustrating for character artists who always loved building the most complex things they possibly can so looking back on how we handled things of the art overall was well-received but the environments were criticized for being too static so we had updated a few elements of them but they were still essentially 2d renders and they didn't have a lot of dynamic elements in them and people also criticized that the characters weren't detailed enough character customization is something that people really enjoy in these games and so if you can't really deliver on that and make the characters look good it's disappointing for people so in the future things that we're looking to do are improve the dynamic elements the lighting shadows dynamic foliage we actually try to dynamic foliage test early on pillars of eternity and we just couldn't figure it out dynamic weather is something a lot of players sort of expect to see in a lot of games now and dynamic cloth which we used a little bit of pillars but we want to use more of the lesson there is that vintage style in a game you can still improve upon with new features we want to use our LED system to create higher resolution and detail character models and also physically based rendering to improve material quality and things like that again features that players expect to see in contemporary games user interface and experience is a very big big part of why so how people sort of attached to these classic games interface design was very different in the 90s and the early 2000s if you recall we decided right away that we're going to use a skeuomorphic GUI which I'll get to in a bit but it's a GUI style that was common to all the Infinity engine games we wanted to use similar hotkeys and a layout that borrowed from ice - and Planescape torment we had to sort of pick a layout style that we wanted to do for our HUD and we determined that we would try to mimic cursors icon style but that we didn't have time for item sketches item sketches were in I think all the Infinity engine games and a lot of people remembered and enjoyed them and they missed them because we didn't include them and I'll get to that in a bit so here are interfaces from all five of the Infinity engine games as you can see they're all skeuomorphic which means that they all look like they're made of physical materials they're not wireframes they're not just floating sort of you know buttons they look like they're made of wood or metal or stone in baldur's gate baldur's gate - and i Swindell it was a new style interface where three sides of the screen were covered with buttons with the portraits on one side one set of icons on another and a third set of icons along the bottom Planescape torment and i Swindell - used a solid bar across the bottom I guess we could have tried to support both of these UI layouts but it was difficult enough trying to build just one UI so we went with a compact style across the bottom that was the style that we used in Icewind Dale 2 and Planescape torment it allowed for pretty efficient Mouse movement that's something that the U style makes very difficult a lot of players use hotkeys and they don't care about that but for people that mostly play with the mouse having a very small loop of movement so you can access all of your icons in a very tiny area was important some people really did not like the fact that our HUD had a lot of open space in it so we offered a solid HUD option where you just basically click an option and it would ground the whole thing so it made all the UI elements sort of go in front of a solid background and separated that from the playable space which is very much like the Infinity engine games this is another place where accuracy people's memory is kind of interesting so there are a few people more than a few people that told us that we had stolen our cursor assets directly from the Infinity engine games like they insisted that we had actually taken the art assets which is weird because if you look at them side-by-side they're not really that similar I mean they're sort of similar but people's memory as insisted they're like no no no you you directly use the art asset we intentionally made them very close because there's nothing wrong with that icon style they all communicated what they needed to very well it captured the feeling and clearly people felt that it was fitting with the style that had preceded it the item sketches on the top are from baldur's gate to there's some of the most powerful weapons that you can find in the game some of you probably recognized them unfortunately when we had the first the game come out we did not have any item sketches we didn't have time to do all the items caches and people really missed them it wasn't make-or-break for people but we could tell that people are disappointed in it so when we made the expansion the white March we had a new type of item called soul bound items and they were very powerful and you leveled them up over time and all those soul bond items have their own sketches and we made them very detailed and cool and people really appreciate it so that was a case where we had omitted something from the beginning for scheduling purposes and then later on we found a way to read it and and people did really appreciate it one thing we did do a lot of in the game is scripted interactions this is something that we added that was not in the Infinity engine games it wasn't dark lands and I love dark lands and more than just loving dark lands it allows designers to create these really cool sequences that would be extremely difficult to do with a small budget on a game that's essentially an isometric a 2-d game so in this case you're on a minecart ride I don't really want to do a party based minecart ride in unity in our RPG engine so you can do it in a scripted interaction which is a choose-your-own-adventure sequence all the little sections are illustrated the player chooses different options and then based on the characters they have or the stats they have things go one way or another they have little sound effects and people responded really well and very possibly to them and they're not that expensive to make also the concept artists really love making them - which is always a benefit remember what I said about people not liking the UI in some cases yeah some people really really liked having that you style interface they don't care about how far away the icons are they don't care because they use hotkeys or they just like the aesthetics and all they want is just that classic style so some matters may the IE mod would change a number of rules but it also changed how the UI worked it really changed it quite a bit and as you can see here you can drag the elements all over the screen and so people can have all sorts of crazy layouts people reskin to the UI which is all very cool obviously mods are not necessarily a solution to your development choices but it is very cool when you have a fan community that is interested enough to actually modify those things and I think the important thing here is that if if people want to modify your game this is pretty common knowledge but let them modify your game unless you're doing something multiplayer where it's very important that they don't mess with it in a single-player game this stuff goes a long way and people it adds a lot of longevity to your game this is a comparison of our interfaces for inventory Baldur's Gate on the left and pillars of eternity on the right we kept the style largely the same we use the fact that we had a higher resolution to incorporate all the character inventories onto one screen this made it a lot easier to manage a lot of that stuff we did find some classic gamers that didn't like that this was managed this way we also included a stash that allowed you to carry everything you found again some class of gamers did not really like that you could carry everything you found and so we included an option to disable that some people just really want the super hardcore experience but most of the players that we found generally play with the stash on they like that it eliminated a lot of the tedium of moving things between a lot of party members or hitting arbitrary limits and that helped a great deal but overall we kept the look in the feel in the style of it very similar to the original infinity action games so looking back some backers really hated the gloaming holy cow if you could see some of the threads on the obsidian forum that got some of the longest threads are about GUI mock-ups and people would mock up their own gooeys some of them are really cool aesthetically a lot of them would never work in a million years there's you know any any UX designers would look at it and say like you didn't include this he did include that but they have a lot of fun talking about it and then they had a lot of fun modding it so no professional reviews that I saw ever had a negative feedback about it you know they'd say like yep classic style interface feels just like the old games so that part of it worked well people did miss our sketches so we did bring them back and they loved scripted our actions so when we made the expansion's we allocated a lot more time to doing scripted interaction images and people really enjoyed them the lesson we learned from all this is that I mean we kind of already knew this but UI can be extremely divisive you can't make everyone happy with your layout choices you can't make everyone happy with how the UI works so try to find something you feel works well obviously you don't want to do something at in fury it's your audience but if you find something that works well stick with it obviously listen to feedback but if you try to make everyone happy you're actually going to make everyone unhappy in the end in the future we want to continue improving our GUI for visit for usability sorry we did make a lot of edits to it in our patches organizing things better offering better tooltips that's something you can always improve and look at we don't ever want to engineer out Hui modding because that's fun stuff for the fan community to do again if someone wants to have their UI look a certain way it's a single-player game it's not affecting anything great letting go nuts and always more scripted interactions because we like making them and players seem to like playing them when it comes to game mechanics there are a few things that we knew right away we were going to make something that was a Dean do you like meaning sort of like second edition 18d third edition D&D we wanted have fewer arbitrary limitations and fewer exceptions in the rule set the reason I'm mentioning that is because I worked on the original infinity engine games or at least two of them and I had a huge amount of experience playing Dungeons & Dragons prior to coming to Black Isle and I was sure that it was super easy to understand and easy to get into if you watch people play these games who don't have experience with DD you find that is not true at all there are a lot there's a lot of arcane lore built up in playing Dungeons & Dragons that is not intuitive to people it doesn't necessarily always need to be intuitive to people but knowing that it was a huge stumbling block for a lot of players it was important to us to make a system that had fewer arbitrary sort of limitations and rule limitations so that you know we didn't limit what races could be what classes we didn't limonade limit who could use certain types of gear or things like that and overall we didn't rely on sort of hidden hard counters that would take players a long time to we also wanted to have a faster combat pace this was done to address a problem in the early parts of the Infinity engine games where combat could be very slow it went on a six-second each round was on a six second timer and each character would typically only perform one action and so at the beginning of the game combat could move very very slowly and be very very boring so he wanted to speed that pace up we did not have party AI at launch that's something a lot of people really missed it was unfortunate we just didn't have time to do it and unfortunately we had limited mod ability the Infinity engine games can be modded very heavily ours could not and that turned out to be not good and finally the stronghold had a very limited time for content implementation so we went for a system heavy implementation and nobody liked it well I shouldn't say nobody but almost nobody liked it the combat pacing changes we made were a mixed bag it did address the problems at the beginning of the game where combat was very slowly paced but once you got a party of about five or six characters combat was very hard to follow it was exacerbated by the fact that we had visual effects that were very overpowering and a lot of monsters on the screen and so people almost all wound up defaulting to the slow combat pace after a few hours of gameplay that's not really the way we want it to go we wanted the normal combat pace to be the one that you typically play out so we we over corrected in that regard these are examples of 2d A's these are two-dimensional arrays this is what Bioware used to drive most of the data in the Infinity engine games also what they used in Neverwinter Nights and what we used in Neverwinter Nights - they're just they're just two-dimensional array it's it's a tab-delimited excel file so you can open it in notepad some people just edited edited things in notepad when I was working on these games and then there are third-party tools or you know come up and edit them a lot more easily the point is that it was really really easy to change things if you didn't like you know the bonus that a nineteen strength gave to a character you could just go in and change it it was very fast and very easy you modify the file you put it in an override directory you run the game and it work our file formats were we used unity and they were all bound up in what unities file formats are and people have trouble getting to them so it made modding not impossible but very difficult and as a result the fan community didn't really do a ton of modding on the game systems and even though I'm a game system designer I love it when people modify that that stuff like that's totally great and fine and I want people to do it but we didn't have time to support it and I think it really hurt us in the long run about halfway through development we realize that the stronghold that we had promised was not going to have time for a lot of content we had only so many area designers and only so many writers and they were all busy making all the path areas and all their dialogues for companions and things like that so there was time on the system design side so I made a little system for it and it had you had a prestige and you had security and you got taxes and nobody cares it's all stupid it wasn't very fun you can see all these little upgrades you can do but they were the same for everybody so as soon as you're done with your stronghold it looked like that it didn't matter what character you're playing it didn't really matter what choices you made along the way because ultimately once your stronghold is repaired it would always look like that stronghold if you compare this to Baldur's Gate 2 Baldur's Gate 2 had a bunch of smaller levels but there are a bunch of them and they had no system behind it you're just like hey you took over dr knees keep your fighter this is your throne hold now congratulations here's a quest great that's what people actually wanted in a stronghold was variety and options to pick from and then cool content to play through we didn't do that so when we finally got around to making our third well it's not our third patch but patch 3.0 we incorporated a lot of new stronghold content we had dilemmas where us the lord of the keep would people would come to you with problems and you could sort of decide as the arbiter of the land like who got to do what or if a guy got hung outside your outside your castle walls and we introduced a new quest line about someone who contends or contests you're right to even own the stronghold that you have culminating in the battle of un wood field and didn't require a huge amount of development time but it was a really cool sequence we have a big scripted interaction where all these different forces that you marshal over time sort of clash against each other and then after you sort of go through the opening stages of the battle you have this huge battle field and depending on the circumstances it plays out in all these different ways and people really liked it and that's that's what they wanted like they wanted a stronghold with a cool quest associated with it so we learned from that so looking back on what we did it was the game ultimately was easier to pick up than 18d 2nd edition but it lost a lot of the tactical complexity that the hardcore gamers really enjoy and the combat became way too fast once you got to about 5 or more party members and the stronghold of course which is disappointing so the lessons we learned about that or it's fine to have some rough edges and exceptions and things that's ok as long as the whole system isn't built around them don't overcorrect which is easier said than done when you when you look at a problem it's easy to pull back way too far you have to be careful and make sure that you haven't done that because otherwise you will piss some people off always allow for modding if possible I'll say this as much as I can because every time I've worked on a game that has mods it's always good I've never seen it go badly pay attention to why people like things that seems obvious but people like strongholds right well sure but why do they like strongholds it's not just enough to have something there that's called a stronghold with a system attached to it if it's not what people really liked about it so in the future we're looking at we already have done adding backend layers of combat complexity especially over the course of the game like once you've been playing the game for 3 4 5 hours you can add in a new layer of complexity after you've planned been playing the game for 20 hours you can add in more layers of complexity that's why it's nice making RPGs you have a lot of hours over which to introduce new concepts try to have more accessible file formats just but modding whenever possible and focusing on stronghold content and integration into the storyline so they don't just feel like this separate thing that doesn't have anything to do with the rest of the game music and voice acting are all very important the Infinity engine games have great music when our composer Justin Bell looked - how to compose for pillars of eternity he looked at the composers that worked on the Icewind Dale and baldur's gate games announcer who worked on Icewind Dale - Jeremy Soule who worked on ice when Dale won and vio Hunnic who worked on Baltar's gage which is a great soundtrack but he also looked at some more contemporary fantasy composers like Howard Shore who composed for the Lord of the Rings trilogy and he really focused on capturing the mood and the feeling and it went very well I think on the development side we were all very happy with it and we got pretty good feedback from our fans whenever we released music and from on the game in general one problem though is that we had a very limited voice acting budget and so we allocated our resources kind of spreading them out across a lot of characters in a kind of strange way so when people played the game it seemed very random when lines would come in or went like you'd have a conversation start and then people would say two lines and then they wouldn't talk anymore and so it seemed like a bug and but then another conversation they might talk through the whole thing and that was kind of us like just looking at these resources and dicing them up way too far apart so the lesson we learned there is when you have limited resources don't don't spread them too thin because in our case once we played the game it was obvious but by the time we played the game it was too late we played it and we said like oh geez the sounds really awkward and buggy in the future we were pretty happy with the style of music that we want up with but we want to experiment more things like light motif incorporating themes of various characters into key story moments and things like that to reinforce the narrative flow of the game and just being smarter about allocating our voice acting resources because it does really seem strange to a lot of people when we set out to design this world we knew that we were going to build a traditional fantasy setting we we knew from the beginning when we're trying to make something really wild and crazy' by the way I know that the torment tides of numenera guys are here and they have a crazy world so if you get a chance to see those guys bug them especially bug Colin McComb because I like it when people bug Colin what our world is going to be pretty traditional pretty standard fantasy setting we wanted to change a few elements so we didn't have halflings or gnomes orcs we do have elves and dwarves we knew a lot of people wanted to play their elves in their dwarves but not not people like no my gnome I can't play my gnome so we do know that people like to play little characters and big characters so we introduced Orleans as our new small race and oh mama as our new big race and they're not really like halflings or orcs but there are a little and big guys so people can play them and then we incorporated godlike and godlike are just a ripoff of Ganassi so if you played mask of the betrayer for never 1 or 2 as soon as we included Ganassi everyone was playing Ganassi and sure enough when people have backer NPCs half of them were godlike so people really liked the aesthetic of those characters so we incorporated them well we did decide we were gonna have a Eurocentric type of setting so a lot of the elements you see from constructed languages to architecture borrows from immediately Central Europe usually very standard and traditional we did try to move the timeline of our setting forward a little bit a lot of fantasy settings are in this vaguely 12th to 15th century english french german kind of place we wanted to set it squarely in the 16th century with a renaissance site-geist that seemed to capture the feeling of a world in change that's something else that I think a lot of fantasy settings feel like for 2,000 years we've had plate armor and people have been casting fireballs and that's it so we wanted to make it feel like this world was actually changing over time we do decide to go with a blank slate character versus pre defining the character that's sort of a mixed thing because later on in the game you do find out that your character does have spoilers some things in a past life because our setting is about reincarnation but in baldur's gate you are a ball Swan and that you are pursued right away as soon as the game starts so that's a part of who your character is and Planescape torment you are the nameless one you can define a lot of things about the nameless one but you're always that dude the companions themes quests and the tone of our dialogue were pretty serious obviously this is all relative but if you compare them to the other infinity engine games it was like serious mode to the point of being too serious so if you look at our companions versus for example the baldur's gate two companions Baldur's Gate two companions were pretty diverse in terms of Dupree serious characters you had totally wacky dudes yo characters with long involve quest lines you had characters that had no quest at all you have characters with romances some characters that didn't have romances and there's a pretty broad spectrum for pillars we had initially eight companions that we expanded to 11 they were super serious that's not entirely true I'm her obvious was kind of a goofy character but you find him very late in the game compared to the other characters and a dare is a funny guy about all the tumors very try so if you compare any of the pillars of eternity companions to someone like Minsk Minsk is a wacky wacky dude by the way I've seen Minsk show up in he wasn't like a new Dean D comic that came out like a month ago that character is still around in doing things so clearly there's a place and people really like these zini zeny characters so looking back on what we did players and reviewers have mixed a favorable reactions about the world and lore a lot of people wish that we had done more like sort of experimental or adventurous or crazy things that's not really what we set out to do it is something we'd like to look at doing in the future there was a lot to learn and keep track of so the beginning of the game especially was extremely dense with a lot of crazy constructed language terms and new ideas and wacky stuff and it was just a lot to absorb very early in the game and a lot of players missed the light-hearted and funny elements that were in especially the baldur's gate cans the tone of your source material the lesson to take away from this is that the tone of your source material is very important if you strike the wrong tone with something again it's not going to really capture the same feeling as what came before it so in the future we do want to introduce more diverse and interesting locations that are all not like the middle of Central Europe no offense I like Central Europe but more diverse locations we have to be more attentive about how we pace lore another game that we're working on an obsidian called tyranny has a very cool system for highlighting sort of key words and getting a little pop up blurbs about things for lore it's very useful we want to use something like that so when you see a term like Rochelle Gwyn or Biel wick and you're like what the hell is that I've seen that word five times you can just hover it and it'll tell you and then you can keep reading and then we also do want to include some sillier characters one thing we've even talked about is having essentially two types of companions one that sort of a story companion that has their own quest and they're incorporated very directly in the crit path and other characters that are specifically designated especially from the player's perspective as being they're more for like you know just kind of their voice set their appearance they're not as deep but that would allow us to get a lot more variety in our characters meat is an early access early access very popular topic these days lots of games coming out and break then early access so it was a two years ago actually was two years ago literally today that we I think so I think that we went into open beta and I'm sorry it wasn't an open beta it was a closed beta but it was immediately following games come and because we were showing the game publicly and because people could come play it we knew we had to launch the beta then or else people would be very justifiably pissed off that beta was buggy as hell and we tried to offer a lot of caveats but there's something you should learn is that no matter how much you say hey everyone keep in mind this is a beta we're not done there's still a lot of features to work on we're still working on things that does not limit how angry people are gonna get they're gonna get so mad they're gonna get furious not everyone will but a ton of people will be very very upset we had people wanting their money back because we had betrayed them and all this stuff but the thing is those betas are good because no matter how strongly people react you do get a lot of good feedback out of them you do need time to iterate though if you don't really have time to iterate there's no point to doing a beta you need to take their feedback let it wash over you bury you in the ground you resurrect yourself you come up you address some of their concerns and you say how about now they punch you in the face you fall down but you have to keep doing that and and your you can't again you can't make everyone happy but you can get a lot of good feedback the vocal minority sometimes does have a point like that's the thing is that don't just become just because their vocal minority does not mean just like it doesn't mean that they're right because they're loud and persistent it doesn't mean they're wrong so sometimes they have a point but also keep in mind that you you do have a broader audience presumably that you want to meet it's not just ten people on your forums arguing about one aspect of your game so try to reach out and find more people to play your game betas and early-access are typically for very hardcore people like even among hardcore people so just be very conscious of of the type of people that are actually playing your game and try to reach out and find more people that are in your audience that might be interested in it so despite the initial criticism that we had our beta did allow for a lot of iteration and it really feet a lot of iteration and the early feedback that was very negative it didn't really seem to affect the launch because the beta period went on for a very long time and once we launch people had forgotten about all the stupid Beatles and horrible gooey bugs and stuff like that like all that's not kind of faded away now they're focusing on new terrible bugs so the lesson there is that beta is an early access are a great way to get feedback from your most passionate players but you have to remember that they're very passionate and so you have to take what they say with a grain of salt you have to try to get other feedback we want to try to offer more betas in the future we want to improve the feedback loop because the faster we can turnaround iterations and get people's feedback on it the better and try to find ways to increase the player base what we found is that we still have patch betas - so we've we've done a lot of post release support and what we found though is that over time there are fewer and fewer people that are interested in being beta testers for our patch so trying to find ways to increase the initial numbers and then keep people interested in beta testing in the future can be very helpful post launch support is incredibly helpful so again you have this very very passionate group of people and you have new people coming in and when you launch even if you've had a beta there's gonna be things that people encounter that make them very mad and very upset and a lot of times it's justified sometimes it's not whatever so you have to pick and choose what you're going to address we've released 12 patches so far between April 3rd of 2015 and July 11th of this year and a lot of our focus is on play balance and UI making the game easier to understand even though it's not necessarily as complex of a system as a TD 2nd edition it still requires a lot of number crunching and a lot of that stuff is not clear to people so we try to make that clearer we tried to improve some classes that people perceive as being very weak like the Ranger and paladin and later the rogue and we also found that we just p.m. too many fights in the game like exploration and combat are two big pillars of the game and we found that combat was very very heavy especially in the late parts of the game so we actually had a patch where we went through and we thinned out the encounters and then the encounters that remained we tried to bolster them and make them more interesting and the last thing is that we focused on restoring some of the lost ingredients the things that we just missed the stronghold we knew when we launched that people are going to be disappointed with a stronghold so we tried to add in stronghold content and patch 3 by the way that was just patched that was a free we realized that we had not hit the mark on that and we wanted people to just get the improvements so they didn't have to get the expansion for that we didn't reduce more hard counters into the combat AI so you had creatures that were completely immune to certain damage types or they were completely in the interest certain affliction type and that would force players to change the tactics a little bit more than the base game did and then more distinctive items in item sketches some people were disappointed that our unique items were not interesting enough or compelling enough and the patches introduced either better properties on those weapons or with the expansions the soul bound items that were pretty darn powerful so at the end of this long and winding road it's important to think about what you want to take from the games that inspire your retro classic and what you want to leave behind things that you're like you know what that might have worked them but it's not working anymore so not every choice that you make when you're developing these games is going to actually get that soul um it's really really I know I mean this is really obvious but like play the game you have a bunch of ingredients that are going into this mix and if you're not like tasting the sauce every once in a while you don't really know how that stuff is going together it's very important also that you play the original games that inspired this passion because then when you move from one to the other you can see what things are actually improving the experience versus either not improving it or worse or detrimental to the experience but everything that you're doing you need to be able to grow for the future so unless unless your goal is really to make a game just for one small audience and then say I'm never making a game again or I'm never making a game like this again you do want to make something that you can improve on and build for the future so that's something to always keep in mind don't back yourself into into a corner with certain designer development choices and the last point is listen to as many of your players as you can obviously you can only act on a small number of those people but I don't don't ignore the vocal minority and also don't ignore the larger player base they're all people who are interested in playing the game some of them are going to be louder and more persistent than others but if you if you believe you understand who your audience is try to reach as many of those people as possible to make a game that they can all enjoy I want to thank my CEO and boss Fergus Burkhart for letting me go on this trip it's a lot of fun caz arooga who helped me collect a lot of art resources for making this talk and of course to all the pillars of eternity backers and players and fans we literally would not have been able to make this game without them and their ongoing feedback and support is helping us make the game even better for the future thank you [Applause] cool does anyone have any questions hello so you talked about how the game is inspired by a D&D second edition and kind of classical medieval fantasy which I feel like we've been doing for a really long time and as the tabletop player you've probably been playing all sorts of diverse and interesting tabletop games as a player or a designer what kind of what kind of these kind of mechanics would you like to see us bringing into it I'm sorry well I could you so so we're still kind of riffing on D&D second edition and tabletop gaming has gotten so much bigger and more interesting than than that over the last 20 or 30 years is there any of those systems or mechanics that you'd like to see us bring into our computer games over the next while yes so that's a great question I think for for this specific type of game there a lot of mechanics that I enjoy from other RPGs that I don't think would necessarily fit in here for example one aspect that I really like about ARS Magica is that it's based around a very long period of time there's a lot of stuff that you do in downtime so every it's about wizards it's about medieval wizards and you all have a covenant and the Covenant is the place where you live and you protect it and it's important and you have a library and you have resources and time is important and you read books to get more powerful reading as power that's all really cool but there's a very very big focus on sort of managing the Covenant and the garage and all these other things that go into it I don't necessarily know that that's something that's appropriate for a D&D type game but it's very cool I will say though that if you've played the darkest dungeon there are a lot of elements from there that are really similar to torchbearer if you've played torchbearer torchbearer has a imagine torchbearer like a low-level D&D but I'm sorry imagine torchbearer like low-level first edition D and E but harsher it's it's it's really brutal I mean it that's sort of the darkest dungeon where everyone just spirals down into insanity and death and so and that's an example I think when you look at torch bearer the system design is so tightly oriented around capturing that feeling that's very very cool whereas I think when you look at something like Dean D Dean D they devolved out of tabletop miniatures gaming on there's a lot of ideas and systems that are just not part of it because the focus is really kind of on these murder-hobos that wander the world just acquiring power and loot so yeah there's a ton of really cool games out there that I think we can borrow in this room any other questions hey when you designs the game it seemed you had a pretty ambitious plan was a gold economy there's a lot of trains going on a lot of consumables and so on and in the final game it feels still that the gold is really piling up so how did that happen how did the gold pile up that's a good question so when we started designing the game we initially had some more sinks in the economy for for where gold went one of those was a durability system ooh people didn't like that that was something that Tim Cain and I worked on and proposed pretty early on and we had a backer update about it and or I mean I won't say everyone liked but there was a significant number of people that were like this doesn't feel Dean D ish this doesn't feel like it belongs in an infinity engine game one thing that came out of that conversation is that a lot of folks on our forum said you know I don't really care that much if I wind up with a ton of gold toward the end of the game that means that I think we could have done a better job balancing the economy I think some of the higher level crafting recipes like if you want to upgrade a weapon to the really high tiers we could have had those cost a huge amount of copper which would have been a big improvement and the stronghold even though it wasn't very compelling for a lot of people people did buy those upgrades and I think those upgrades probably could have served or it probably could have served us better to have those the high-end upgrades be very very expensive they don't necessarily have to be proportional as long as there is something of value that the player can buy and they feel like oh okay like there's something to actually look forward to spending my gold on but no that was that was our fault we didn't designed a few sinks people didn't like them I think they're justified not liking them and then we didn't really do a good job of fixing the economy later on thanks for the talk thank you do you have some features that for one reason or another couldn't didn't make it in the final Bill's game mechanics features or game mechanics that couldn't make it into the final build what you wanted to do yeah there were there were a lot of we wanted to have more diverse abilities for a lot of the characters people remember there are a lot of really weird and wacky spells and things like that in D&D and I can't remember specific ones off the top of my head but if you look through the players handbook as a developer there's a lot of things in D&D where you go like I don't know how I would ever implement that or wow that would be like a week of someone's time to implement that so there were things like that that we wanted to put in where we're like that's really cool but it's just so expensive to put in but then again it is important to have at least some of that stuff by the way so Adam brenneke who's our lead or he's our executive producer and our lead programmer he hates Rangers so much in our game because the animal companions complicate everything but the design of the class is sort of built around having that companion and so that's like so fundamental to it that it was important that know you like we just got to fix it we got to keep on going this is kind of how the class works we did also want to have familiars in the game so that Wizards could have their own little dudes that made Adams mind explode because he's like oh cool we get to have two different types of animal companions for twice the bugs so that was less that felt less important for wizards and so we didn't incorporate that any other questions all right Oh actually I have a question more about the tools you use to build a game because if I looked at a number in tonight's infantry engine games or the Bethesda Ames a lot of them use global variables and plain text files and I'm just wondering if when building a game like that doesn't that cause a lot of problems bugs which are difficult to trace did you use any more custom solutions something which would validate but for new bugs in the content like a missing global variable or something linking to something disappearing so the question is about global variable tracking and things like that so we've tried to build better tools for tracking that stuff over time most of our data editing used the built-in unity tools and that's something about moving away from now again that goes back to file formats and accessibility we want our file formats to be very easy for people to edit but in terms of global variable tracking we have our own tool set for writing dialogue again because of city and obsidian has we put a lot of effort into writing and branching dialogues and also tracking the quest state so we actually have a quest tool that is specifically for setting up quest flow so you can see how the quest is supposed to actually develop over time and we have a testing tool that allows us to set those variables and track them better so we developed tools for the specific needs of making a very complex role-playing game so we can serve define and track those variables more easily and also test them more easily does that answer your question yeah cool any last questions all right everyone thank you very much for coming I really appreciate it [Applause] you

Channel: GDC

Views: 39,456

Rating: 4.938849 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design

Id: F0RW3upLoJI

Length: 53min 18sec (3198 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 31 2019