A Disco Elysium writer once told Josh Sawyer that 'we can do better than this now,' and Sawyer agrees
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"We just keep inspiring each other. It's not an animosity thing. It's just, do the best you can, [and] get inspired by other people."
Great news: if you were gearing up to deliver a searing oration against something Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and Pentiment director Josh Sawyer said a decade ago, he'd like to hear it too. In a recent chat with the Human Can Opener Podcast, the RPG vet discussed the ways that game developers all draw inspiration from one another, and how he's downright certain he doesn't have all the right answers when it comes to RPG design.
"We learn from each other," said Sawyer. "One of the writers on Disco [Elysium] wrote to me a little while after Disco came out and they were proposing a talk that was, in a way, a sort of updated response to a talk [I gave] in 2012 about narrative choice. From what I recall he was somewhat apologetic about, like, 'Hey, I'm gonna suggest this talk that's sort of—hey, we can do better than this now'."
Sawyer, of course, did not mind. "I'm like, 'I certainly hope, fuckin', 10 years we can do better!' I wrote that a long time ago and also I don't think I have all the answers on this stuff. I'm doing the best I can. If this is useful, hopefully it inspires other people."
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After all, Sawyer does the same kind of critical appraisal to other devs' work. "I look at stuff and I go, 'Hey that's cool, but I have an idea how to make it better,' and then I do something and someone sees that and says 'Hey that's cool—or it's not cool—I have a way to make it better.' This is just gonna keep going on."
Sawyer points at branching dialogue as an example of an RPG tradition that feels very "locked" in terms of how RPG devs approach and structure it, but notes that, even there, "We still find new ways to do it, and other people after I'm gone are going to figure out other new ways to do it.
"We just keep inspiring each other. It's not an animosity thing. It's just, do the best you can, [and] get inspired by other people."
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