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[Janet Denzel]

Joshua Sawyer's Formspring posts are a series of Fallout: New Vegas project director Joshua Sawyer's responses to inquires posed to them on Formspring, a defunct question and answer platform.

Do you think computer roleplaying games can go back to the simpler and more focused style they had when Wizardry, Might & Magic, or Pools of Radiance were popular? Do you feel the kitchen sink approach has really stretched content and variety today?

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I think that CRPGs are now defined heavily by how they allow the player to express the personality of their character(s) in meaningful ways throughout the game. In that sense, I don't think the genre will ever move back to the Wizardry/Might and Magic era. However, I do think that games with top-down/isometric combat (like the gold box games) can still be viable in some markets.

Thief: The Dark Project came out in 1998 (!). Why d'you reckon that in the 12 years since, no RPG developer has been able to incorporate stealth mechanics to the same degree of success? Is this issue really as simple as player skill v. character skill?

Thief was a dedicated stealth game. Unfortunately, I believe most RPG developers either don't consider stealth to be worth implementing at all or only worth implementing in a minimalist fashion. It's a shame, because I don't believe that the fundamental mechanics of Thief are tremendously difficult to implement in a lot of engines.

The lead designer of Deus Ex 3, Jean-Francois Dugas, stated "There weren't enough exciting, memorable moments [in the original]. It was aimed more towards a simulation rather than a game experience." What do you think of this as a game developer?

I think the original Deus Ex was made in an era when "big moments" (sorry if I'm simplifying too much here) were hard to portray in-game. Big moments can be nice rewards for players, and they are nice press/talking points, but they aren't game play. If a game has great game play and not a lot of big moments, to me that's a lot more acceptable than a game with bad game play and a bunch of big moments.

What kind of budget are you aiming for, though? An ISO-TB RPG with the budget of Alpha Protocol probably isn't going to happen, but could you make a smaller game with a small budget, and build on its possible success? Indies manage with no money at all.

What do you think of Alastair MacIntyre's famous claim that postmodernism claims ownership over the objective perspective in order to deny that the objective perspective exists? (After Virtue, Whose Justice Whose Rationality_?

I don't think postmodernism explicitly denies that the objective perspective exists, but it implicitly neuters that perspective or effectively dismisses it as being beyond understanding or beyond usefulness to individuals. I believe postmodernism poses the following challenges to the legitimacy and value of defining an objective perspective:

Postmodernism was not a philosophical movement that started out with the goal of denying the existence of an objective perspective, but it was, like many historical philosophical movements, a reaction to the perceived failures of the philosophies that preceded it. MacIntyre appears to be heavily influenced by Hegel and Kuhn, and clearly Nietzsche's work is extremely reactionary, so I hope he would not dispute my comments.

I think that if a term already exists to describe something within the realm of game development and is understood by the public, that term should be used over developer-manufactured terms. I sometimes get the impression that developers want to create vocabulary that is unique to game development because it "legitimizes" game development and sets it apart from other forms of entertainment media. I just want that process to be organic. Vocabulary develops out of necessity. The more we rely on common terms (when appropriate, of course), the more transparent the game development process can be when discussed with non-developers.

How much do you get into an RPG's world when you design it? For example, do you like thinking as the characters would so as to make them more believable? Carefully consider their actions, relations, inventory, residences, etc.? What about its economy? 1EK

I try to consider all of the above when designing individuals and organizations. Even if the thought processes behind the decisions are not obvious to most players, putting in the time required can help establish consistent patterns in the world that, over time, have an impact on the majority of players.
I think a world's economy is important to consider because the actions of many people and groups are often driven by very practical matters: they want jobs, they want resources, they want finished products. And while many people and groups espouse an ideology, the clash between ideological goals and economic realities can often produce interesting plot elements.

It may be because I studied history in the postmodern tradition, but I'm not particularly interested in promoting anything other than, "Understanding things from different viewpoints is cool," or "People are complicated and do things for a lot of different reasons." I guess an extension of that is the idea that the player is the person who determines "validity", not the author.

I think IWD2 was "pretty good", but it has a lot of significant flaws. I think I have the most satisfaction in IWD2 because it was made under duress and the developers really put a lot of cool things into it, but the experience was uneven or frustrating in a lot of places.

The math is usually pretty simple. I use Excel and Excel formulae to see how RPG statistics scale over a given spectrum of levels, difficulty, etc. For example, if I'm creating an armor system, I might input different damage values against different armor values to see how high level damage vs. low level armor fares. I use the Excel formulae so I can change one number (variable) in one cell and see every other cell update based off of the variable.
In general, I don't believe that RPG mathematics should be overly "fiddly" or complex. I believe that the mathematics should be exposed or, if not exposed, the user should be able to deconstruct their basic operation through observation.

Picking up on your comment re. the Aliens RPG: Why do you suppose that fantasy is such a dominant setting for RPGs (both PnP and CRPG)? What other settings (be it genres or even IP's) do you think would benefit from RPG "treatment," and why?

Fantasy was the style of most early tabletop RPGs, and early CRPGs mostly just followed suit. Ultima, Bard's Tale, Phantasie, Wizardry, and Might & Magic, were the big CRPGs that defined the genre in the early- to mid-80s and they were all high fantasy. In the late 80s and early 90s, there was more high-profile experimentation with different RPG genres (Wasteland, Buck Rogers: Countdown to Doomsday), but even today non-fantasy CRPGs are still the exception rather than the rule.
Personally, I think that almost any type of setting could work for a CRPG. Western, transhuman future, whatever. As long as there are characters with whom the player can interact, meaningful choices to be made, and character development, it could work as a CRPG.

I think games can have auteurs if the individual has enough control over development processes for a long enough period of time. The first person who pops to mind is Koji Igarashi (IGA, Castlevania series), though probably the most obvious would be Hideo Kojima (Metal Gear).

Could you expand a little on why JRPGs don't appeal to you? Can you give an example of a specific mechanic from a FF game that you thought was interesting enough to warrant you playing the game?

Generally speaking, the character personalities and designs do not appeal to me, there is an extreme emphasis on cinematic sequences, and the game play is often very linear and lacks meaningful player choice.
I thought Final Fantasy X's Sphere Grid was an interesting mechanic because it presented character advancement in an unconventional way. Plotting a course across the Sphere Grid became a game play element on its own.

I'm not a lawyer, but as far as I know, mechanics are not protected outright, though design specifications done for a company (like any documentation) are covered. That is, if you can re-create/reverse-engineer a mechanic in another game, I don't think there's any precedent for a company claiming that their rights have been infringed.

I doubt anyone's actually done a study on gaming perspectives and perceived levels of immersion. I think it's just that: a common belief.
For me, it depends on what you/the designer is trying to accomplish with the camera perspective. For a lot of games with tactical combat, an "iso" perspective makes the most sense because you want the player to be able to see and process a lot of information about the environment and combatants. The same applies to strategy games that span large areas (or don't really focus on a single character).
Close third-person cameras can work when you want the player character (often alone) to navigate the environment with climbing/platforming elements or when real-time melee combat is central to game play. I think it can also work well for some horror games (e.g. Resident Evil 4, 5, Dead Space) because it combines a limited view of the world (anxiety-inducing) with a close-up picture of the player character's vulnerability.
First person is probably the easiest to work with, but it's not useful for all types of game play. If a designer wants to effectively remove the player character as an entity and focus more heavily on the environment, first person is the way to go. Personally, I lose all sense of character in most first person games and that's usually a big negative for me.

That's a very thorough explanation of _how_ fantasy is the dominant setting in RPGs, but you didn't really touch on why. Is it just creative inertia? In your experience, have you found that fantasy lends itself better to the CRPG features you mentioned?

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