A Disco Elysium writer once told Josh Sawyer that 'we can do better than this now,' and Sawyer agrees

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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