At this year's GDC, PC Gamer hosted a roundtable that brought together veteran RPG designers to discuss a variety of topics, including whether the cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead and the impact of Elden Ring's success. When the topic of how much their games are based on what RPG fans want or their own personal preferences came up, Obsidian's design director, Josh Sawyer, said that the company's games are based on what RPG fans want or what their own personal preferences are, and that they are based on what they want, such as "Fallout: New Vegas," "The Pentiment," "Alpha Protocol," and numerous other design works, he went back to the beginning of his career.

"I've been playing D&D since 1985, and when I started in the industry in 1999, the first game I worked on was Icewind Dale. I was very excited."

"Icewind Dale" and its sequel are the official D&D games made with the Infinity Engine, just as "Baldur's Gate" was.

A few years later, he returned to such top-down, party-based, real-time, posed CRPGs with Pillars of Eternity, which raised a record $3,986,929 on Kickstarter in 2012. But he returned to a different man, with different ideas about how to design an RPG.

"I have to be honest and say that the most compromised games I worked on were Pillars of Eternity 1 and Pillars of Eternity 2. Because when I went back to that format, I said, 'Oh, I worked on those two games ("Icewind Dale") and then "Neverwinter Nights 2". But they were crowd-funded games, and the audience was like, 'No, we want D&D, we want the exact same experience as the Infinity Engine game.'"

The first game was "The Infinity Engine," which was a game that was a crowd-funded game, and the audience was like, "Oh, we want D&D, we want the exact same experience as the Infinity Engine game.

The fact that backers had already paid for an RPG that was, in the words of the first Kickstarter (opens in new tab), "an homage to the great Infinity Engine games of the past," meant that Sawyer felt "Pillars of Eternity" had to remain retro It means that he had to." There was a sense of obligation," he says." But I also felt like we were ultimately making a bad design decision, making the game worse to appeal to the sensibilities of an audience that wants something ultra-nostalgic."

Nevertheless, Sawyer does not consider Pillars of Eternity a failure. "It was a very strange experience, but I'm still proud of the game.

Our RPG roundtable also included Mike Laidlaw, Strix Beltran, Lis Moberly, and Paweł Sasko. You can read more about what they talked about here, or listen to the entire 80-minute conversation here.