Obsidian Entertainment - Josh Sawyer Interview
The RPG Codex has interviewed Josh Sawyer at the GDC Europe 2016:
RPG Codex Interview: Josh Sawyer at GDC Europe 2016
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Do you have the personal ambition to ever make a game with a modern engine as powerful as the one in Neverwinter Nights 2 again?
A personal ambition? No, but I do think that is very cool. I would say it's interesting because I actually met Ray Muzyka sometime in 2007, and we were briefly talking about the tools, and he said "Oh, you guys did so much cool stuff with the tools" and I was like "I kinda wished we had left a lot of it alone." Not entirely, but it is true that the Neverwinter Nights 2 toolset allows people to do a lot more specific and detailed things than the Neverwinter Nights 1 toolset did, and the Neverwinter Nights 1 toolset was so much easier for people to use. It was so much easier, for example, to make an exterior. It was just like a tiled interior, and yes, it didn't look as visually interesting, but it meant that it was very easy for someone to say "I want to make a level" and just jump in and do it.
That's one of the things Bethesda's toolset makes very easy. It's super easy to make areas, super easy to modify, super easy to track assets, and it's pretty darn powerful. Look at this way: there's no way in hell that our team could have made Fallout New Vegas without that tool. It was just impossible. And if you look at the mods, it's astounding what people can do with it. I personally think that is very cool. I hope we get to the point where we can actually develop tools like that. I wouldn't say it's a personally driving ambition, it's something that I hope we do.
And as for our file formats, that's something that whenever I see an opportunity, just make those files more open and easier to modify. Because, for example, things like Near Infinity and all those third party tools, we didn't use those when we made the Infinity Engine games, I had to make all my .2das in Notepad. I was a web designer so I was used to editing things in Notepad or maybe Excel if you're feeling fancy, but usually it was just opening it in Notepad. So if the data formats are accessible and easy to modify, usually even if you don't release tools, people will make tools, which is cool, but if they're human-readable then you can just open them in Notepad and edit them. If you're ambitious, you can do that. I love it when people mod the games, but I also know that with Neverwinter 2, it was an extremely huge undertaking to have that toolset. I don't want to promise anything like that because I just know it's expensive.
So if you compare the Neverwinter Nights 1, 2, and New Vegas toolsets, you'd think New Vegas was the best?
Well, here's the thing. I think our dialogue tools were probably better in Neverwinter 2 just due to the way we write conversations. But the ease in which you can put stuff together, and I also think it's a bit different because of the camera views, so it's not entirely fair to look at them the same way, I do really appreciate how easy it was in New Vegas to make stuff and modify stuff. And honestly, the scripting systems in Neverwinter Nights 1 and 2 are insane. You could do really crazy stuff, usually create a lot of bugs with that scripting system. The scripting system in the Bethesda engine is also very powerful and you can also do crazy stuff as well. But I do appreciate the ease-of-use stuff they had in Bethesda's editors.
I've worked with a lot of different toolsets and engines and stuff that we've developed internally, and making an engine, making a toolset is so incredibly time-consuming and so frustrating for so long. Keep in mind that when we released Neverwinter Nights 2, there were people that said "Give us the real toolset." "Like, what do you mean?" "You didn't make the game with this toolset, give us the real toolset." "No, dude, you're right. We didn't make the game with this toolset, we made the game with a toolset that was worse than this for two years, and you got the best version of it." And that blew people's minds, because it takes so much time and it's so hard and frustrating. So being able to go into Unity and kind of like drop things is nice. There's some things with the workflow that don't quite work for us, which is why we externalize things like conversation and stuff like that.
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