Josh Sawyer interview at RPS

[Yossarrion]

everyone in the valley is both a victim and a killer, because that's the world that has been thrust upon them by the past. The survivalist, the White Legs, the Horses are all damned into this cycle of violence. Daniel may be an exception, but he's ineffective in the face of what's going on around him.

The exception should be the Sorrows. The reason Joshua and the Dead Horses are there is to help them out because they don't know how to fight other humans. The Survivalist did a great job setting them up for success but the unfortunate issue is they are too naive for the fallout world. Joshua I believe also feels some additional weight to be there because the White Legs are looking for him because they want to join the Legion.

I don't personally think that more effective player choice is necessary to Honest Hearts. Yes, you can't be a pacifist savior who makes everyone play nice. But that's just the way it is. What's happening in the valley began long before you arrive, and continues long after you leave, you're just a witness to it. I don't think making the player complicit is necessarily asking them to support what's happening. It's just telling them that they can't control it. They can let it drive them like Joshua, or they can watch in disapproval like Daniel. But that's a bit of roleplaying that happens in the player's head, I guess.

I actually find the HH choices to be some of the best in the series. You can side with Daniel for the "good" ending but it leaves the Sorrows displaced, innocence intact maybe but future looking dubious. Additionally it destabilizes trade in the region. You can side with Joshua and through your choices either make him whole hog ready to kill or temper him and teach him a basic virtue in mercy which is something actively practiced in the mormon faith. Depending on your actions the Sorrows may become no better than the White Legs as well.

 

[Jabberwok]

The exception should be the Sorrows. The reason Joshua and the Dead Horses are there is to help them out because they don't know how to fight other humans. The Survivalist did a great job setting them up for success but the unfortunate issue is they are too naive for the fallout world. Joshua I believe also feels some additional weight to be there because the White Legs are looking for him because they want to join the Legion.

I actually find the HH choices to be some of the best in the series. You can side with Daniel for the "good" ending but it leaves the Sorrows displaced, innocence intact maybe but future looking dubious. Additionally it destabilizes trade in the region. You can side with Joshua and through your choices either make him whole hog ready to kill or temper him and teach him a basic virtue in mercy which is something actively practiced in the mormon faith. Depending on your actions the Sorrows may become no better than the White Legs as well.

Yeah, I mean ultimately the most meaningful choice is whether to condemn the Sorrows to this cycle of violence, but arguably give them power, or to 'save' them while displacing them. If their peacefulness is naivete, what will preserving it do for them in the future (considering they will still be living in the same world, even if they escape the White Legs)? I agree that it's a good choice, and that's partly because it's disempowering. To be clear, Honest Hearts was my favorite of the DLCs. I think it does a lot with a little, and its limitations can play to its thematic strengths, from a certain perspective.

 

[khain]

I miss the "what the fuck is this for a shit" reaction option

(Edit: due to the deletion of some messages I feel obliged to say that this was not written as a reaction to the above post which I deem completely reasonable)

 

[Nodder]

What you're saying is true and there were more "grassroots" and hobbyist type of developers even if they weren't actually, they were just allowed more freedom at least. Games were popular, sure, but they also weren't everywhere until the console era really was in full swing (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube, Xbox 360, PS3, Wii time periods or about 2000-2014). I think the PS2 was monumental in getting people to have something that was capable of running games for many reasons. Sony's Playstation was a hit, Playstation 2 was its first time getting a new console. On top of that, Playstation 2s were not super expensive and could play DVDs so apparently some people found it was pretty affordable to just buy a PS2 to get their DVD player and also stop their kid from begging for a gaming console all in one go. If that's as true as people claim it is, that's a super smart move on Sony to get their console into your house.

There is a reason publishers were saying "[c]RPGs are dead." Because they saw how much of a market grew quickly in the console space and they didn't really have players who were used to something like BG and Fallout and Might and Magic and so on. They were used to what games were coming out on consoles. Things that were easy to implement controller based control schemes and were fluid in real time. Platformers, FPS/TPS, Action adventure, racing, etc. It doesn't shock me one bit that Fallout 3 got cancelled and Fallout Brotherhood of Steel got the green light. Why make RPGs that might or might not sell super well when we see that Halo Combat Evolved is outselling everything?

Apologies that this is mostly a tangential response to your really great encapsulated history post. This convo probably deserves a thread of its own, maybe even a different forum, but I feel like the fate of Fallout is just so common in beloved '90s hits. So many franchises get one big game, maybe a good sequel, maybe maybe a competent next-gen consolized threequel, and the creator usually leaves at some point for greener fields. X-COM. Total Annihilation. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. System Shock. Deus Ex. Thief. Homeworld. Descent: FreeSpace. Baldur's Gate. It just keeps happening. I think underlying all of these success stories is a lot of burnout, publisher in-fighting, unseen drama, and mistakes made along the way. Fallout was never going to make it into a long-running series. Not saying what happened in reality is good at all (though funny to imagine what if say BioWare was the one to get the IP), but all of these franchise tended to burn out sooner and later, sadly.

 

[Millim]

Apologies that this is mostly a tangential response to your really great encapsulated history post. This convo probably deserves a thread of its own, maybe even a different forum, but I feel like the fate of Fallout is just so common in beloved '90s hits. So many franchises get one big game, maybe a good sequel, maybe maybe a competent next-gen consolized threequel, and the creator usually leaves at some point for greener fields. X-COM. Total Annihilation. Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri. System Shock. Deus Ex. Thief. Homeworld. Descent: FreeSpace. Baldur's Gate. It just keeps happening. I think underlying all of these success stories is a lot of burnout, publisher in-fighting, unseen drama, and mistakes made along the way. Fallout was never going to make it into a long-running series. Not saying what happened in reality is good at all (though funny to imagine what if say BioWare was the one to get the IP), but all of these franchise tended to burn out sooner and later, sadly.

The thinh with a lot of these franchises are they are older games with a lot of older sensibilities.
Baldur’s Gate were built around an old RPG system that has seen numerous updates since.
Deus Ex was about how the future would look from the viewpoint of the year 2000, before 9/11, a global finacial crisis and the rise of the internet.
Fallout, at least the first two, were made in a very different political and gaming landscape.
Fallout 3 itself was made at a very different time, just look at how the reception of it has changed over time.
It’s gone from being one of the biggest games of the console generation to just being “That Fallout game that’s not as good as New Vegas”.

Now we live in the era where picking up a game from the 90’s is probably easier than picking up a game in the 90’s.
The price is a lot cheaper, most computers can run the older games through steam or gog, they are there to download.
And we are in the midst of the Nostalgic trend, so those retro games will have not only refound the old audience, but a new audience who can easily play it.

CRPGs died for a long time just due to there not really being an audience for them for a while.
It’s not untip recently that the audience has been growing.

 

[SquidWard]

CRPGs died for a long time just due to there not really being an audience for them for a while.

I've seen developers say that during the era of cRPGs dying, one factor was that stores were insisting that they were dead and therefore wouldn't put out the copies of the game to sell and then would use that as a measured proof that the genre was dead/dying since they weren't selling well. I do believe the major shift to consoles in general were a major factor in the decline of cRPG releases but I don't think they'd be as "dead" then as everyone claimed either. But it was pretty apparent that PC games were not a focus for awhile and as Steam grew in popularity, physical stores had less and less incentive to even try to sell a game you could buy cheaper without leaving your house. I remember the last time I bought a PC game in a store was around 2011-2012. Bought Witcher 1 and Rage. Witcher 1 worked right out of the box, Rage required me to use Steam like many PC games did by that point even if you bought a disc. I think that was when I realized that I wasn't really going to find many more discs that were like what I grew up being accustom to.

 

[Jabberwok]

I've seen developers say that during the era of cRPGs dying, one factor was that stores were insisting that they were dead and therefore wouldn't put out the copies of the game to sell and then would use that as a measured proof that the genre was dead/dying since they weren't selling well. I do believe the major shift to consoles in general were a major factor in the decline of cRPG releases but I don't think they'd be as "dead" then as everyone claimed either. But it was pretty apparent that PC games were not a focus for awhile and as Steam grew in popularity, physical stores had less and less incentive to even try to sell a game you could buy cheaper without leaving your house. I remember the last time I bought a PC game in a store was around 2011-2012. Bought Witcher 1 and Rage. Witcher 1 worked right out of the box, Rage required me to use Steam like many PC games did by that point even if you bought a disc. I think that was when I realized that I wasn't really going to find many more discs that were like what I grew up being accustom to.

Yeah, it's pretty much the shift to consoles that did it. The audience didn't disappear, the total market grew and publishers all gravitated towards the largest part of it. Even the PC games started to resemble console games because everyone wants to put money into whatever they think will make the most money. People blame the passage of time for 90s games being less accessible, but it seems to me that many of those people would not have been interested in those games even in the 90s.