Fallout: New Vegas director: RPGs should force players into hard, messy choices

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Fallout: New Vegas and Pentiment director, Josh Sawyer, has spoken about how he doesn't find it interesting when RPG protagonists can save everyone and fix everything. Instead, his design philosophy surrounds restricting players and forcing them to sit with uncomfortable choices.

Speaking on The Examined Game (thanks Kotaku ), Sawyer, who is reportedly working on a new Fallout game , explains that even if RPG players have been "conditioned" to be all powerful, he finds it more interesting when they are forced to make difficult choices.

"I save everyone, I kill everyone. I don't think that's particularly interesting," says Sawyer. "I don't think that makes players interrogate their values, either their own or the character that they're playing. And so I always prefer to kind of create scenarios where it says 'you're going to do your best, and your best is worth trying to do, but it's not going to fix everything, because you just can't. No person can fix everything."

He goes on to describe scenarios where he has incorporated this philosophy "to different levels of success. To favorable or unfavorable reception by the audience." Speaking of Pentiment, a game where you have to 'solve' a murder with no confirmation as to the culprit, Sawyer says that he didn't want to give a concrete answer, so players have to "sit" with their choices.

"With a role-playing game, so much of what we excel at is making the player sort of sit and deal with their choices, which often feel very imperfect," Sawyer says. "That sense of agony, where you're like, 'I have two things to do that are good and bad and I gotta decide which is most important."

Sawyer pulled a similar trick with Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, where players are unable to stop the god Eothas. "We also try to telegraph that he's way beyond the ability to physically do anything to," he says. "But players are very conditioned by a lot of RPGs to expect like, 'Yeah, but I'm built different. Like I'm going to be able to take this guy out.' And then you can't."

Another one of Sawyer's controversial decisions was in Fallout: New Vegas where an objective that allowed you to help Mr House while making peace with the Brotherhood of Steel was removed from the game. By forcing players to destroy the Brotherhood in order to help the billionaire, it made them question whether doing House's bidding was the right choice.

"So many problems are just human problems," he says. "They're like part of the reality of life, and being a human being, and living on this planet with other people right now. And even in a fantastic world, there are going to be powers that are beyond you and things that you can't overwhelm."

Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer says it was "pure luck" he directed the RPG at Obsidian: "Almost literally fell in my lap."