According to Josh Sawyer, he had to make the most compromises in these two games.

Sawyer attended one of the GDC roundtable discussions, where several veteran RPG designers were represented. The talk was hosted by PC Gamer and featured Josh Sawyer. There were many topics (is BioWare’s cinematic RPG style dead because of the success of Elden Ring?), but in this case, the question was how close the designers’ palates were getting their games to the needs of fans of the genre.

Sawyer is no new kid on the block, as Fallout: New Vegas, Pentinente, Alpha Protocol, and maybe even the two Pillars of Eternity (all of which were made at Obsidian Entertainment).

“I’ve been playing D&D since 1985 and other tabletop roleplaying games along the way. When I got into the industry in 1999, the first game I got to work on was Icewind Dale, and so I was like, ‘Yeah!’ I was so stoked. Honestly, I have to say it felt like the most compromised games I worked on were Pillars of Eternity 1 and 2 because when I came back to that format, I was like, ‘Oh, I worked on these two [Icewind Dale] games, and then I worked on Neverwinter Nights 2, and now I have a bunch of new ideas for how differently I would do it if I were doing it on my own.’ But they were crowdfunded games, and the audience said, ‘No, we want D&D, we want the same experience as the Infinity Engine games,'” Sawyer said.

Icewind Dale and its sequel on the Infinity Engine allowed him to tilt his D&D ideas into games. He later returned to top-viewing, team-based, real-time-but-stoppable CRPGs with Pillars of Eternity, which raised almost $4 million (a record-breaking amount at the time!) in 2012 and was a tribute to the Infinity Engine past. Sawyer said he felt obligated to do so with Pillars of Eternity.

He says the format holds back the games he’s still proud of today.

Source: PCGamer