Highlights
- Josh Sawyer would return to Pillars of Eternity with a budget the size of Baldur’s Gate 3, but he feels he’s lost touch with the modern cRPG audience.
- The big difference is that he is not a fan of love stories in video games, as he believes they “can devalue some characters.”
The cRPG genre has been enjoying huge popularity ever since Baldur’s Gate 3 came out last year and swept the board with awards, leading some fans to wonder if Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment will ever return to its own cRPG series, Pillars of Eternity, with a third game.
Avowed, the upcoming Elder Scrolls-like role-playing game, is set in the world of Pillars of Eternity.
As PC Gamer reports, studio design director Josh Sawyer would make it with a budget on the order of BG3, but he feels it would be “out of touch” with the modern cRPG audience, so he’s not sure it would be a success.
“If you give me a bunch of money to make a game, I’ll do it,” Sawyer said. “I don’t necessarily think it’s going to appeal to the same audience (as Baldur’s Gate 3) and make the money back.”
Sawyer feels that the biggest disconnect between him and today’s cRPG player base is romantic relationships. In Baldur’s Gate 3, you can build incredibly deep relationships with each of your party members, leading to intimate escapades around camp and quieter, more vulnerable conversations as you become more comfortable with one another.
But Sawyer hasn’t been familiar with that side of role-playing for a long time. “I’m not up to date with it and it’s hard for me to understand it in any way,” Sawyer explained. “And the things that I do understand, I think to myself: I understand them – I don’t like them.”
Josh Sawyer has never been a big fan of RPG romances
PC Gamer also found a post from 2006 in which Sawyer expressed a similar opinion, saying that while he doesn’t hate romance in video games, he does hate “reducing love to superficial, masturbatory fantasy pleasures.”
“I appreciate that people have wanted more opportunities for romantic relationships (in Neverwinter Nights 2), but sometimes I think people want romantic ‘win’ conditions for all companions. I think that can devalue some characters… It annoys me. I don’t like the idea that you can ‘win’ everything or get everyone on your side.”
Sawyer was the lead designer of Neverwinter Nights 2 in 2006.
Admittedly, Baldur’s Gate 3 moves away from that feeling, offering more flexible characters that react to your choices in the story—Karlach and Wyll even leave camp if you attack the Druid Grove—but there are still romance points and checks throughout the game that calculate a “score” for how well you do.
