Fallout: New Vegas RPG veteran Josh Sawyer says he "didn't recognize myself" during Pillars of Eternity 2 development: "I was this huge, awful a**hole"
Apr. 23, 2024“It was that feeling of accelerating towards a brick wall”
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RPG veteran Josh Sawyer says that scheduling issues ahead of the “demoralising” launch of Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire meant that he ended up mistreating his staff until he could force studio execs to push the project back.
In an interview withRock, Paper, Shotgun, Sawyer outlined the difficulties he faced in the run up to the CRPG sequel. “Even though some studios have very strict no-crunch policies, people are still being asked to do either impossible things.” For Sawyer, it was clear long before the launch of Pillars of Eternity 2 that “we were in a position where we knew that we did not have enough time, nine months before we hit that wall.”
Sawyer says concerns were raised with management, with the team stating that “the options were either to invest more time in it, or to cut scope and staff.” Obsidian execs declined to do either of those things, and things got worse when Sawyer’s team was forced to keep a major feature in the game against their will, and then again once a commitment to voicing every character in the game was made.
“It was that feeling of accelerating towards a brick wall,” Sawyer says, admitting that “I and a lot of other people on the team became really harsh, and were snapping at people. I didn’t really recognise myself at a certain point because I had very little tolerance for time being wasted and questions and things like that. I was pushing people in a way I had never done on a game before.”
As a CRPG series, Pillars of Eternity seems to be on ice, butSawyer has says he’d make a third game if he could get a Baldur’s Gate 3-sized budget. For now, the series lives on asAvowed, while Sawyer worked on Pentiment, a project he recently described as one of the most relaxed of his career. In the past few weeks, he’s alsodescribed burnout as a bigger potential issue for the games industry than crunch, which seems particularly telling in the context of his time on Deadfire.
For a moment, Fallout: New Vegas fans thought they’d found evidence of sequel plans, only to find Josh Sawyer’s burrito order instead.
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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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