Like many developers of his generation, Josh Sawyer stumbled into a career in videogames. “I went to school originally for vocal performance in a conservatory of music,” he tells us. “I switched over pretty quickly to history – that’s what I got my degree in. I wasn’t a good student, but I had taught myself web design and learned Flash animation to design a tattooing website. A friend of mine told me there was a job for a webmaster at Interplay. I didn’t know what I was going to do career-wise, so I applied for the job. There were only three applicants out of 62 that had [Flash experience], and they really wanted Flash, so I got hired.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/-AOBVqpqx1730457017878.jpg]
Sawyer had grown up playing Dungeons & Dragons, and started making his own tabletop RPGs in high school and college. He also remembers playing their computer counterparts: “When I was ten or so, maybe a little later, I saw The Bard’s Tale on a Commodore 64. I had only ever seen games on an Apple IIe – the audio was not very good, and it was black and white – so Commodore 64 was like I was seeing D&D. I played all the Gold Box games from Strategic Simulations Inc, and I really got into cRPGs.”
Ending up at the company responsible for The Bard’s Tale, that formative game, and getting to make cRPGs with the D&D licence, then, seemed nothing short of providence – even if Sawyer’s initial role was only tangentially related to actually making games. “My first job was to design the website for Planescape: Torment,” he explains, confessing that “I didn’t really have any conception of how videogames were made. But I was working pretty closely with the dev team, and immediately I was like, ‘Oh, this is what I want to do’.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/3713537911.jpg]
That began with the studio’s very next game, Icewind Dale, which uses the same Forgotten Realms setting as Baldur’s Gate, a world Sawyer says he knew “too well – I had wasted a lot of my college years playing a ton of Forgotten Realms D&D.” In what would become something of a theme in his career, he talked round division head Feargus Urquhart, and was given the green light to split his time between working on Icewind Dale’s website and designing the game itself.
So began a career that has spanned some of the biggest, most acclaimed and influential cRPGs of all time. Sawyer was there to help close out the genre’s first golden age, in the late ’90s, and again to literally kickstart its renaissance in the mid-2010s. His input has varied from project to project, spanning system and story design, weapon implementation, musical arrangement – and, of course, the occasional bit of web design.
On 2022’s Pentiment, which drew on his background as a history student, Sawyer led a team of 13 – unusually small for a studio now owned by Microsoft – in the roles of game and narrative director. And, as we sit down with him, it’s the question of what he can offer his collaborators as a leader that seems most on his mind. “I still have visions for things,” he says when we ask where he might be headed next. “But there needs to be room and space for people to contribute their own ideas within that. And when everyone is crying out, ‘We can’t do this, we can’t get this done’, I have to fight for them and make sure that they don’t get trampled in the process.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/9179705779.jpg]
ICEWIND DALE
Developer/publisher Interplay Entertainment (Black Isle Studios)
Format PC
Release 2000
We knew it was Forgotten Realms; we knew we were using the Infinity Engine from BioWare. The Planescape: Torment team had been working with that engine, so I already knew what it could and couldn’t do. I was one designer amongst several. There was, I believe, one senior designer – John Deiley – and the rest of us were all pretty junior. We were all in our early-20s, maybe mid-20s, and some of the people there had some experience on Torment. There were no leads. Chris Parker was our producer, but Parker was kind of there to hold the reins and keep us from going off doing crazy stuff. He wasn’t really driving the creative vision of the game and, to be honest, none of us individually were. But somehow we just collaborated well enough to make the game together.
We did crunch a lot. That was in the era where I realise I must have gone into work for an entire year straight. Even when I didn’t have work to do, it felt very weird to not be at work. That was the only game I can remember working on where I did actually spend nights at the studio. I had been in a fraternity in college; it was the music students, the physics students, we were all into gaming – it was a very nerdy fraternity. And so it felt just like a continuation of that. We all just kind of hung out and made the game.
Icewind Dale launched on the same day as Diablo II, which sounds like it would be catastrophically bad, but it actually did pretty well. There were lines and lines of people to get Diablo II, but a lot of them were into fantasy and isometric games, so they were like, “Icewind Dale – what’s this? Yeah, we’ll pick that up too.” Obviously people always looked at it as not quite part of the family of Baldur’s Gate, but I didn’t care, really, at the time. I was just happy to be making roleplaying games.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/0309703391.jpg]
ICEWIND DALE II
Developer/publisher Interplay Entertainment (Black Isle Studios)
Format PC
Release 2002
Most of the first half of my career was really marked by working with other people’s tech and trying to make the most of it. But at that time we were like, “We are making another game with [the Infinity Engine]?” Because we were already trying to move on. We had our own internal technology that we had been working on, which was far from mature but it was really cool in a lot of ways. BioWare was already moving on to their fully 3D engine for Neverwinter Nights. We had a project called Torn that was using LithTech, which wasn’t quite ready, and actually was cancelled so we could make Icewind Dale II.
In general, our development cycles were a lot shorter back then, but Icewind Dale II was made under more pressure, because Interplay was starting to get into real financial trouble. The initial time pressures were crazy. It was very much like, Feargus said, “Hey guys, in two days we need you to get a story and a list of areas, and a basic idea of what happens in each of those areas, and then we have to get it done.” Initially, they said four months – I said, “We can’t make areas that quickly” – and then that very quickly changed to nine months, and then eventually it was ten months.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/9739101770.jpg]
Steve Bokkes – a designer on the original Icewind Dale – and I worked together on the story, but then Steve left the studio. My big push was to switch it to third-edition [D&D] as well as we could. There were some things that we just couldn’t reasonably do, but I think we got a lot of really good stuff in there, where you could do true third-edition style multi-classing, you could play Dark Elves, you could play all these different races, species, that you couldn’t normally play in Infinity Engine.
NEVERWINTER NIGHTS 2
Developer Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher Atari Interactive
Format PC
Release 2006
[After Icewind Dale II] I went to Midway, and the problem was that Midway was kind of where Interplay had been a year earlier. So it was like I’d jumped from one sinking ship to another. I’d already worked on a game called [Baldur’s Gate III:] The Black Hound, using our tech at Black Isle, that got cancelled. I had then worked on Fallout 3, codenamed Van Buren, at Black Isle – that had gotten cancelled. I was like, ‘Man, I do not want to go down with the ship’.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/0717370315.jpg]
I had actually been chatting with Darren Monahan, who was one of the founders [of Obsidian]. He had been a programmer at Black Isle, and he was like, “Why don’t you come to Obsidian? We’re working on some D&D stuff you might like.” And then I think I talked to Feargus, because I will say that the Icewind Dale II days put a lot of pressure on both Feargus and me, and so there was some stuff that we needed to talk about before we worked together again. And we were like, ‘OK, it’s a few years later, let’s take another try at this’.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/3773533107.jpg]
They were right in the middle of working on Neverwinter Nights 2. I had been promoted into a lead designer position at Midway and I was pretty burned out. Like, ‘Can I just do some work? I don’t want to lead people; I just want to do content’. I started off initially as an area designer for Act II and I worked on that for a while. Then I got promoted up into the Act II lead, and eventually – after [Eric] ‘Ferret’ Baudoin left – I got promoted into lead designer position. But that was really late in development. There was only six months left and the game was in real rough shape, and so it was less about me making refined design decisions and more like, ‘I am sorry, guys, I know you are really attached to this stuff, but everyone is exhausted and we are going to kill ourselves if we try to do all this, so I’ve just got to try to find a way through for us’.
ALPHA PROTOCOL
Developer Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher Sega
Format 360, PC, PS3
Release 2010
I helped wrangle the close-quarters combat system. I think High Moon [Studios] was doing a Bourne game at the time and they had a pretty in-depth kravmaga-based close-quarters thing. We were looking at that and I’m like, “Guys, we have one programmer and one animator assigned to this system. It’s going to be really complicated.” So ultimately I said, “What do you want this to do? Why do you use this instead of guns?” Well, we want to use it from stealth and, if someone comes up from the side and it’s difficult to turn and shoot at them, we want closequarters combat to be a really quick way to resolve the problem.
We said, OK, we are going to keep the camera pulled back – what do we want to do that’s flashy? So Mike Cuevas, who was the animator working on it, and I talked about it, and we were like, “How about shotokan karate?” Which is really flashy and explosive. A friend of Mike or Nicholas Pakidko, who was the programmer for the combat, came in and we did mocap with him. The flying knee was everyone’s favourite, where you just do this big Tony Jaa jump up and smack a guy with your knee in the face. So it wasn’t the most elegant system but it did what it needed to do. I am happy to have contributed in my own small way to that project.
FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS
Developer Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher Bethesda Softworks
Format 360, PC, PS3
Release 2010
I believe Chris Avellone and Feargus had pitched the idea of this game, Fallout 3: New Vegas, to Bethesda. Avellone had written a setup, which was that you were shot in the head in the desert and dropped into a shallow grave. It’s a really strong opening. I’d been the lead systems designer on Van Buren and, after Avellone left, briefly the lead designer. So I was like, you know what? This is a blessing. I never thought I’d get a chance to work on Fallout [again].
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/0501777713.jpg]
I knew from the beginning we had 18 months. We had just come off of the cancellation of an Aliens RPG. I had been the lead designer on that and then promoted to director in the last three months, because it was having a lot of problems. We had put a lot of time and effort into the [Aliens] tech, but it took forever to make areas and basically we didn’t have a game. Then we got Bethesda’s tech, [which] is extremely powerful for rapidly making content, more than any engine and toolset I’ve ever used. [In contrast to what we had on Aliens], you can make content so quickly with their tools. So I said, “Hey, everybody, we do not want to disrupt our pipelines at all. We basically want to use what’s there – add to it, don’t change it, just add to it – and make great content.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/3173337003.jpg]
I do think that was the right call and I had more oversight of the designers on that project, but I still think most of the work you should just attribute to them; they are responsible for conceiving it and executing on it. The only [worldbuilding] thing I was really responsible for was the concept and the visualisation, with Brian Menze, of Caesar’s Legion and the NCR military. A lot of what I do when I look at worldbuilding is, I think about things from a historical materialist perspective. How do people live and die? How do they survive? How do they try to thrive? One of the main things I thought about was when [the real] Las Vegas was started, and people were like, “This is stupid. This is in the middle of the desert. This is one of the most dire places in North America.” So access to water and access to power are really vital to the survival of communities in that area.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/3510075035.jpg]
I did think about the idea of them fighting over New Vegas, but really they are also fighting over the [Hoover] dam, because control of the dam means control of the water and the power generated by it. Power is a little tricky, because you are ...
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/-AOBVqpqx1730457017878.jpg]
Sawyer had grown up playing Dungeons & Dragons, and started making his own tabletop RPGs in high school and college. He also remembers playing their computer counterparts: “When I was ten or so, maybe a little later, I saw The Bard’s Tale on a Commodore 64. I had only ever seen games on an Apple IIe – the audio was not very good, and it was black and white – so Commodore 64 was like I was seeing D&D. I played all the Gold Box games from Strategic Simulations Inc, and I really got into cRPGs.”
Ending up at the company responsible for The Bard’s Tale, that formative game, and getting to make cRPGs with the D&D licence, then, seemed nothing short of providence – even if Sawyer’s initial role was only tangentially related to actually making games. “My first job was to design the website for Planescape: Torment,” he explains, confessing that “I didn’t really have any conception of how videogames were made. But I was working pretty closely with the dev team, and immediately I was like, ‘Oh, this is what I want to do’.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/3713537911.jpg]
That began with the studio’s very next game, Icewind Dale, which uses the same Forgotten Realms setting as Baldur’s Gate, a world Sawyer says he knew “too well – I had wasted a lot of my college years playing a ton of Forgotten Realms D&D.” In what would become something of a theme in his career, he talked round division head Feargus Urquhart, and was given the green light to split his time between working on Icewind Dale’s website and designing the game itself.
So began a career that has spanned some of the biggest, most acclaimed and influential cRPGs of all time. Sawyer was there to help close out the genre’s first golden age, in the late ’90s, and again to literally kickstart its renaissance in the mid-2010s. His input has varied from project to project, spanning system and story design, weapon implementation, musical arrangement – and, of course, the occasional bit of web design.
On 2022’s Pentiment, which drew on his background as a history student, Sawyer led a team of 13 – unusually small for a studio now owned by Microsoft – in the roles of game and narrative director. And, as we sit down with him, it’s the question of what he can offer his collaborators as a leader that seems most on his mind. “I still have visions for things,” he says when we ask where he might be headed next. “But there needs to be room and space for people to contribute their own ideas within that. And when everyone is crying out, ‘We can’t do this, we can’t get this done’, I have to fight for them and make sure that they don’t get trampled in the process.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/9179705779.jpg]
ICEWIND DALE
Developer/publisher Interplay Entertainment (Black Isle Studios)
Format PC
Release 2000
We knew it was Forgotten Realms; we knew we were using the Infinity Engine from BioWare. The Planescape: Torment team had been working with that engine, so I already knew what it could and couldn’t do. I was one designer amongst several. There was, I believe, one senior designer – John Deiley – and the rest of us were all pretty junior. We were all in our early-20s, maybe mid-20s, and some of the people there had some experience on Torment. There were no leads. Chris Parker was our producer, but Parker was kind of there to hold the reins and keep us from going off doing crazy stuff. He wasn’t really driving the creative vision of the game and, to be honest, none of us individually were. But somehow we just collaborated well enough to make the game together.
We did crunch a lot. That was in the era where I realise I must have gone into work for an entire year straight. Even when I didn’t have work to do, it felt very weird to not be at work. That was the only game I can remember working on where I did actually spend nights at the studio. I had been in a fraternity in college; it was the music students, the physics students, we were all into gaming – it was a very nerdy fraternity. And so it felt just like a continuation of that. We all just kind of hung out and made the game.
Icewind Dale launched on the same day as Diablo II, which sounds like it would be catastrophically bad, but it actually did pretty well. There were lines and lines of people to get Diablo II, but a lot of them were into fantasy and isometric games, so they were like, “Icewind Dale – what’s this? Yeah, we’ll pick that up too.” Obviously people always looked at it as not quite part of the family of Baldur’s Gate, but I didn’t care, really, at the time. I was just happy to be making roleplaying games.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/0309703391.jpg]
ICEWIND DALE II
Developer/publisher Interplay Entertainment (Black Isle Studios)
Format PC
Release 2002
Most of the first half of my career was really marked by working with other people’s tech and trying to make the most of it. But at that time we were like, “We are making another game with [the Infinity Engine]?” Because we were already trying to move on. We had our own internal technology that we had been working on, which was far from mature but it was really cool in a lot of ways. BioWare was already moving on to their fully 3D engine for Neverwinter Nights. We had a project called Torn that was using LithTech, which wasn’t quite ready, and actually was cancelled so we could make Icewind Dale II.
In general, our development cycles were a lot shorter back then, but Icewind Dale II was made under more pressure, because Interplay was starting to get into real financial trouble. The initial time pressures were crazy. It was very much like, Feargus said, “Hey guys, in two days we need you to get a story and a list of areas, and a basic idea of what happens in each of those areas, and then we have to get it done.” Initially, they said four months – I said, “We can’t make areas that quickly” – and then that very quickly changed to nine months, and then eventually it was ten months.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/9739101770.jpg]
Steve Bokkes – a designer on the original Icewind Dale – and I worked together on the story, but then Steve left the studio. My big push was to switch it to third-edition [D&D] as well as we could. There were some things that we just couldn’t reasonably do, but I think we got a lot of really good stuff in there, where you could do true third-edition style multi-classing, you could play Dark Elves, you could play all these different races, species, that you couldn’t normally play in Infinity Engine.
NEVERWINTER NIGHTS 2
Developer Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher Atari Interactive
Format PC
Release 2006
[After Icewind Dale II] I went to Midway, and the problem was that Midway was kind of where Interplay had been a year earlier. So it was like I’d jumped from one sinking ship to another. I’d already worked on a game called [Baldur’s Gate III:] The Black Hound, using our tech at Black Isle, that got cancelled. I had then worked on Fallout 3, codenamed Van Buren, at Black Isle – that had gotten cancelled. I was like, ‘Man, I do not want to go down with the ship’.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/0717370315.jpg]
I had actually been chatting with Darren Monahan, who was one of the founders [of Obsidian]. He had been a programmer at Black Isle, and he was like, “Why don’t you come to Obsidian? We’re working on some D&D stuff you might like.” And then I think I talked to Feargus, because I will say that the Icewind Dale II days put a lot of pressure on both Feargus and me, and so there was some stuff that we needed to talk about before we worked together again. And we were like, ‘OK, it’s a few years later, let’s take another try at this’.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/3773533107.jpg]
They were right in the middle of working on Neverwinter Nights 2. I had been promoted into a lead designer position at Midway and I was pretty burned out. Like, ‘Can I just do some work? I don’t want to lead people; I just want to do content’. I started off initially as an area designer for Act II and I worked on that for a while. Then I got promoted up into the Act II lead, and eventually – after [Eric] ‘Ferret’ Baudoin left – I got promoted into lead designer position. But that was really late in development. There was only six months left and the game was in real rough shape, and so it was less about me making refined design decisions and more like, ‘I am sorry, guys, I know you are really attached to this stuff, but everyone is exhausted and we are going to kill ourselves if we try to do all this, so I’ve just got to try to find a way through for us’.
ALPHA PROTOCOL
Developer Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher Sega
Format 360, PC, PS3
Release 2010
I helped wrangle the close-quarters combat system. I think High Moon [Studios] was doing a Bourne game at the time and they had a pretty in-depth kravmaga-based close-quarters thing. We were looking at that and I’m like, “Guys, we have one programmer and one animator assigned to this system. It’s going to be really complicated.” So ultimately I said, “What do you want this to do? Why do you use this instead of guns?” Well, we want to use it from stealth and, if someone comes up from the side and it’s difficult to turn and shoot at them, we want closequarters combat to be a really quick way to resolve the problem.
We said, OK, we are going to keep the camera pulled back – what do we want to do that’s flashy? So Mike Cuevas, who was the animator working on it, and I talked about it, and we were like, “How about shotokan karate?” Which is really flashy and explosive. A friend of Mike or Nicholas Pakidko, who was the programmer for the combat, came in and we did mocap with him. The flying knee was everyone’s favourite, where you just do this big Tony Jaa jump up and smack a guy with your knee in the face. So it wasn’t the most elegant system but it did what it needed to do. I am happy to have contributed in my own small way to that project.
FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS
Developer Obsidian Entertainment
Publisher Bethesda Softworks
Format 360, PC, PS3
Release 2010
I believe Chris Avellone and Feargus had pitched the idea of this game, Fallout 3: New Vegas, to Bethesda. Avellone had written a setup, which was that you were shot in the head in the desert and dropped into a shallow grave. It’s a really strong opening. I’d been the lead systems designer on Van Buren and, after Avellone left, briefly the lead designer. So I was like, you know what? This is a blessing. I never thought I’d get a chance to work on Fallout [again].
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/0501777713.jpg]
I knew from the beginning we had 18 months. We had just come off of the cancellation of an Aliens RPG. I had been the lead designer on that and then promoted to director in the last three months, because it was having a lot of problems. We had put a lot of time and effort into the [Aliens] tech, but it took forever to make areas and basically we didn’t have a game. Then we got Bethesda’s tech, [which] is extremely powerful for rapidly making content, more than any engine and toolset I’ve ever used. [In contrast to what we had on Aliens], you can make content so quickly with their tools. So I said, “Hey, everybody, we do not want to disrupt our pipelines at all. We basically want to use what’s there – add to it, don’t change it, just add to it – and make great content.”
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/3173337003.jpg]
I do think that was the right call and I had more oversight of the designers on that project, but I still think most of the work you should just attribute to them; they are responsible for conceiving it and executing on it. The only [worldbuilding] thing I was really responsible for was the concept and the visualisation, with Brian Menze, of Caesar’s Legion and the NCR military. A lot of what I do when I look at worldbuilding is, I think about things from a historical materialist perspective. How do people live and die? How do they survive? How do they try to thrive? One of the main things I thought about was when [the real] Las Vegas was started, and people were like, “This is stupid. This is in the middle of the desert. This is one of the most dire places in North America.” So access to water and access to power are really vital to the survival of communities in that area.
image [https://cdn.magzter.com/1387349800/1730374449/articles/iDL8iZ-Yu1730456873627/3510075035.jpg]
I did think about the idea of them fighting over New Vegas, but really they are also fighting over the [Hoover] dam, because control of the dam means control of the water and the power generated by it. Power is a little tricky, because you are ...
You're reading a preview of
Edge Uk (Digital) - 1 Issue, Christmas 2024