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733 - Open Worlds feat. Josh Sawyer (5/19/23) (Patreon)

Published:
2023-05-19 15:34:25
Imported:
2026-06

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We’re joined by video game designer Josh Sawyer (Pentiment, Fallout: New Vegas) to talk the wide world of gaming. We discuss Josh’s new game, Pentiment, a murder mystery set in 16th century Germany, then get into labor in the games industry, developments and limitations in video game art and style, trends in game play as a matter of business, and how to make quality builds in real life.

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Comments

gill

felix and will can argue "tv vs movies" all they want...we know that gamers are the true inheritors of the earth

Alez

Think I fucked up my real life build…

Erik Ruiz

Interactive media? On my chapo??

Pedro Lippe

This rules. Pentiment is amazing.

Rogus

This is amazing I'm so excited

Osborne MOCs

Finally an episode about hotel room shower assemblies

vermouth

holy shit no way

Brady

One of the goats, really cool idea for a guest

saintbeau

LETS FUCKING GOOOOOOOO

saintbeau

i would kill to see Matt play Pentiment

Bobalo

Loved hearing the maker of my favorite game talk with y'all, and will def pick up the new game

Willm

Don't sell yourself short guest I love Icewind Dale

LeZero

Andreas Muller for Killer Instinct 2

Simon

yes, finally some pillars of eternity chat

danny

im an outerworlds fanboy👍 very cool

JMB

Have they talked about what happened with Disco Elysium? How the makers of the game got fucked out of their own company.

Jonathan Conklin

The only solace is every fan not letting them ignore what they did to the creators. The studio is dead essentially

Rohan Williams

They didn't talk to him about cocktails or custom bikes? :(

Nolan

3. Fallout 4 2. NBA2k15 1.Skyrim.

Nolan

Assassins Creed Unity combat >

CJ

Bideo games

PJA

what a get, almost makes it worth the 12 hour late upload 🙄🙄🙄

Saya Clarke

in felix’s comment of AAA games being released unfinished: so funny because there is absolutely no fucking excuses for this. when nintendo can release tears of the kingdom. a game so incredibly gigantic that it is dizzying. with features that are so well defined and original that would absolutely break any other game of this size and in the week ive been playing have encountered exactly zero bugs or crashes.

chronye

🤓 <—— u

will michel

matt went on leonard nimoy vanishing mode: “didn’t i??”

Colin S

Who doesn’t enjoy haunted fishing?

Danika Lagorio and JDawg ConLorde

For whaling sim you should be able to play as the youngest deckhand and be forced to climb into the skull, scoop out the ambergris and then be forced to be isolated on the ship because of how bad you would stink

the lord commander

Feeling bad for Matt. Wondering if he just logged off

J.P. McD.

My second podcast (Retronauts is the other) to cover FO: NV this week. Might have to finally play the copy I bought from a used game store in Portland in 2017.

nick

NOOOO FUCKIN WAY I HAD A fonv CRAVING THIS MORNING

Doug Cartel

I think the biggest culprit in those cases is management. Sure, games are more complex and expensive and all that but in the case of games like Cyberpunk 2077 or Destiny, it's either the managers or shareholders that want bigger games to fit in the same time slots as older games. So Destiny should have had an extra year or two before it was released, but the contract they signed demanded 3 games in 10 years, so that option was out. And CDPR is pretty famous at this point for how the upper tiers of the company fuck around with their properties.

lake

I will not tolerate gaming discussions

Doug Cartel

shout-out to Io for making that game about doing guerrilla war in NYC against the Soviets, that game was wild and I think the alt history scenario involved the soviets nuking berlin with an H-bomb in 1945 even though people had barely figured out fission, never mind fusion, bombs back then and the protagonist and his brother were both plumbers living in NYC

Robert Karnick

GoW Ragnarok feels like a walking and opening doors simulator with some small combats sections for variety

Brian

Splinter Cell fuckin’ rules.

Hernan Melzi

My understanding is that the core dev team of the Zelda games have been around for decades which is extremely unique, and has huge obvious benefits.

Saya Clarke

oh yes i didn’t mean to imply it had anything to do with the team itself, obviously there is rampant abuse and crunch and that comes from the top no question

Saya Clarke

also i believe they are intimitely in tune with the hardware in a way that some third party companies are not. this allows them to achieve things that seem impossible on such a low spec system

Jenn

Nerrrrrrrrrrrrrdddddddddsssssss

calvin kilby

Yeah that shit was boring, also can I say I genuinely was put to sleep by cyberpunk 2077 and I refuse to play any more of it.

Mae

Night in the Woods mentioned! Based

Paul Steiner

Thank you for interviewing a guy at obsidian! Please send him thanks for making so many games that I've enjoyed! Very cool

Whucko Jaang

Today's Josh Sawyer he gets high on GLUE

Andrew Drake

Great Interview! Lot of laughs too. Thanks for this one 🤘

Chris T

When’s the Ian MacKaye interview?

Doktor Buzzo

Dead by Daylight, you must do this

K H

Felix almost needs his own show where he just talks about Elden Ring, or is that just what his twitch is? I think the resistance to "friction" fails to realize that is what makes many games fun and captures an audience. They are trying to apply the movie model to video games with big opening weekends. The friction is supposed to be fun and that has been replaced by continuous meaningless progression which is what grind is. There is bad friction and fun friction and weird friction(which I would classify Morrowind as). Most good games have some combination of those friction types. Game companies don't really want good games though, they want to sell another game to replace it every year so that each one flows through your mind like water, but the result is that people get bored after 2-3 iterations and go back to what they actually remember and talk about. Even when that is just earlier versions of the game. Fast fashion. Fast gaming. All the same.

叔叔六十四 (Uncle64)

Good game and good episode. I'm a little sad they didn't talk about Outer Worlds much, seems like a good intersection of topics as well.

K H

Omigosh I love Icewindale.

Declan Kennedy

we didn't get a weird article about Pentiment from Rod but we still got a Josh Sawyer episode, what a time to be alive (still hope we get the weird Rod article tho)

Cindy Carrot

Maybe there's something to these video games after all

Clammy_Damp

And sucking is a good time.

grant brown

Microsoft products make me sad

DM

Should have roped Matt into talking about Overwatch and how Bobby Kotick is running activision/blizz into the ground, folks he is the irl bad guy from ready player one

T.A. Martin

I love the idea of an HBO game, but how would you keep Kenny Powers from being too OP?

Dustin

So, we had a Matt miniseries, we are currently in a Will miniseries, Felix video game miniseries when!!!??

Mokomuku

I’m dumb, was Felix dunking on cyberpunk there?

realm lich

video games ruined my life for over a decade, this is some weird shit to listen to. interesting guest regardless.

DM

cyberpunk is exhibit a in the no nothing corporate bosses pushing the devs to release buggy, unpolished work. thank god for edgerunners sparking interest back into the one of the GOAT titles.

Westerday

This dude’s top 10 sucks. BOTW topping the list isn’t recency bias, it’s just better than the other games on the list and has only been beat out by TOTK.

Mokomuku

Is edge runners worth checking out?

Zarathushtra

Because fragments of your soul are contained in seven different Xbox 360 discs?

Dan

Even AoE 2 ?

Ethan

So good it made me buy the game lmao

Mokomuku

Making him the non playable end boss is the only option.

Poppy Chulo

I can understand this opinion if you're a woman but if you have a penis and made this claim you're an absolute dullard.

Poppy Chulo

Eight days without a politics episode. Bummer.

Ryan Kerr

Felix mostly plays FromSoft games and competitive shooters right. Listening to him describing the state of AAA games with josh sawyer on the call had me clasping my head with both hands

Torgosaves

42:25 Dishonored mention! I want to go back to that world.

Daffy

That was my last console game. The last good PvP console shooter they made before everything was halo.

Daffy

This notion used to piss me off, but honestly I've grown to understand that VGs used to be good if you had the free time for it. If you were ever poor or tried getting into it now, just like everything else they really really suck. Video Games are nice things for a lucky few who played on the original consoles and took those formative memories on with them. Now the bar for entry is pretty high and then once in, everybody sucks. Gamers are trash. That community exists to harass people with better lives and support those with no life. Barely redeemable, just toxic.

KIDBOOYA420

Yeah the golden age of gaming is over for now. Today games are so big budget they have to play it safe and have mass appeal in order to make their money back . This leads to games taking less risks . I also hate video game stories. Games should be fun and carry engaging lore and atmosphere, but games are meant to be played . If I want a story I’ll watch a movie . In short , games suck because of a bloated budget and a pretentious idea that game should be art and not entertainment.

Daffy

I always found this comment wierd. Like your existence during that time would have been any different if Blizzard or Bungie never happened? There wouldn't have been stray cats, baseball cards, meth, or gambling to put your anxiety into? Kids don't ruin their life with WOW anymore. They ruin it the good old fashioned way, with fuckin gambling, bro. All the twitch gambling and loot crates now makes spending your whole twenties on a server like I did rather virtuous. But I feel ya. Games have not had any majesty for a while. Like what happened to the makers if disco Elysium?

Joseph

Josh's criticism of Hitman is a little unfair, the game definitely punishes you for going guns blazing, it'll give you severe XP penalties and especially on higher difficulties the guards will brain you. Felix is definitely correct that they just released them wrong, H3 went out of its way to make sure all the maps were included in purchase or free, and they finally released an all-in-one version of the trilogy a few months ago

JD Nonce

Whaling simulator is a fucking awesome idea

The Pissler

I didn’t know he worked on Icewind Dale. I adored that game as a kid.

Wilko

What I find frustrating about the obsession with graphics is that while environments look more and more realistic (characters less so, esp. faces still look off) the way the player character interacts with this world still FEELS artificial. And I'm not just talking about the fact that mostly your interactions consist of shooting and punching, but also things like physics, that are in many ways still as unconvincing as they were ten years ago. I have yet to see a game where characters climb stairs in a convincing way or touch a wall in a way that seems realistic. This is where I wish game studios would attempt a leap forward.

Wilko

Also: no mention of Disco Elysium? For me, one of the best games of the past decade and it has nothing to do with the chapo involvement.

realm lich

I mean, at the end of the day, video games were something that I used to delay dealing with my misery. I guarantee I would have found something else to fill that void, but that's just revisionism and doesn't take away my experience really. If the kids have it bad nowadays, they have my sympathy. I don't often see people my age (mid thirties) talking about how poisonous video games are. I know it's a conservative and crankish take, but I think more people should.

Nasai

Matt just start in 1444 wtf. Nobody starts partway in. Hit up Sean and play with us

Sean Brocklehurst

I absolutely loved pentiment. Can't wait for Matt to just play EU4 and become a map game nerd.

Gabriel Bowater

Great ep. Felix vidya games miniseries plox

Will Wade

When I read Josh Sawyer I was thinking Josh Halway and was super confused before listening.

Drew McGill

I’d watch Matt play that Moby Dick sequel game for real lol

Claire Casey

Chris if you somehow see this, next ep please play some Smiths as an outro in honor of Andy Rourke, any of their songs with sick bass which is most of them, he's so under appreciated and might be the best Smith even beyond Marr

Arjun Jayaraman

I got into some video games to help with my ms-related right hand weakness. Did they talk about rdr2? Loved that game. I'm playing totk right now. It's almost too big.

Brian J. Lancaster

I was at a dark place in my life and about to rob a bank but the Icewind Dale 1 soundtrack changed my perspective and stopped me from throwing my life away.

Dick Van Sexel

Valient hearts: the great war was another amazing historical indy game. I 100 percent did not cry. Not once!

Ian Michael

BOTW and TOTK should have gotten way more love. Elden ring and TOTK truly redefine open world video games.

skrrt vonnegut

HBO All Stars is a tight idea. I wanna see Cyril OReily face off against Bodie

Michael

Can anyone link Josh's list of favorite games? I couldn't find it online.

Nick Muscatiello

Hasn’t Pentiment been out for like a year? Also psyched for Outer Worlds 2, didn’t know that was in the works

Matt Boi

Microtransactions are another big thing associated with AAA games

J. A.

Yeah man.... how do you think they support the bigger dev team?

Houthi & the Blowfish

Subnautica is a lot like this when it comes to just vibing. And of course gwent from The Witcher series became its own thing.

Houthi & the Blowfish

Card collecting game from Final Fantasy 8 also comes to mind. If you got the good cards you could use them in battle

CM

Top 10 episode holy shit

foxy

And I don't care who knows

Chris T

Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is the best game I’ve played since Elden Ring. 10/10

Scott Miller

Another game Matt should play is Return of the Obra Dinn. It's a murder mystery game about identifying sailors by race.

Harry

Sick ep, more game content please

Will

Bring back tabletop game theory

Dan

Please no. Certainly not as a Patreon Episode.

AKorgar

Realized while listening to this that we must be entering a period of time where more and more game designers are too young to be familiar with guys like John Carmack or John Romero, or the old 3D Realms stuff. And that's fine, but it just makes me feel old lol

Daniel Dermont

Got home from work bought the game. It’s great. Thank u for the heads up podboyz.

JV

fondly remembering that episode from ages ago now that randomly ended with the whole gang riffing in great detail for like ~20mins on what tweaks they'd make to mario kart

THEKILLERWHALE

My own experience with video games pretty much culminated with PS1 and playing RPGs with my brother. So I remember them rather fondly. But I talk to people who got into WoW and essentially poured 1/4 of their life into that game for a full half-decade. And what do they have to show for it? I am throwing myself in front of this for my own kids. They cannot melt their brains with this stuff.

Ol-Dirty-BAStart

Felix's game pitch at the end just went on and on

Nolan

3. Wizard 101 2. Club Penguin 1. Webkinz beat that.

Alec

Pl

laserwilliams

Kinda savage that they made Matt sit through this

Jonathan G

just so little nintendo love from the group here

Reece Coren

felix i’ll stop dming u if u give me the soup boy’s number

lolwuthappend

Agree. Dissociative waste of time

Chris T

Meanwhile Nintendo is and has always been the coolest

Jonathan G

*checks day and time*

chimpsuh

WHERES MY SLOP??

J

Listen i gotta walk my dog after work and I'm counting on you guys to come through for me with an ep by then. Please report back to the podcast factory asap

J.P. McD.

Well they should be “art” maybe, but they should not be “art in the exact way that movies are art”. They should use play mechanics and things unique to games to create artistic experiences, rather than “lots of cinematic cut scenes” and long-winded voice acting. Unfortunately since gamers are the equivalent of YA readers they think that like Portal 2 (“it has so much STORY and TALKING!!”) and The Last of Us should be the gold standard.

catsjvk

Dishonored mentioned W Disco Elysium snubbed L

Eamon O'Connor

nintendo is the mark twain of video games. not elaborating.

KatrinaJadeHelm

Does anyone know the ep? I don’t remember this one

Alberticus

I was playing 1985 bards tale on my steam deck while listening to this... I remember

Sardonic

A whaling game set in the Dishonored universe would be pretty sick