Josh Sawyer: ‘The most compromised games I worked on were Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2’

At GDC this year, PC Gamer hosted a roundtable in which a group of veteran RPG designers came together to discuss topics ranging from whether the cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead to the impact of Elden Ring’s success. When the conversation came around to the subject of how much their games were based on what the RPG audience was looking for, versus their own personal taste, Obsidian’s design director Josh Sawyer—whose design credits include Fallout: New Vegas, Pentiment, Alpha Protocol, and plenty more—went all the way back to the beginning of his career.

“I’ve been playing D&D since 1985,” Sawyer said, “and other tabletop roleplaying games along the way. When I got into the industry in 1999 the first game that I got to work on was Icewind Dale, and so I was like, ‘Yeah!’ I was so stoked.” He describes working on Icewind Dale and its sequel, official D&D adaptations made in the Infinity Engine just like Baldur’s Gate had been before them, as an opportunity to “dump” into videogames every idea he had about D&D while playing it around a table.