Под беззвёздными небесами. Глава восемнадцатая: Больше, чем ностальгия

“He fixates on particular restaurants and binges on them for a few years at a time, then he switches them up,” Brennecke said of Urquhart. “He'd probably eat there two to three times a week. Most of our lunch meetings were at the Cheesecake Factory during Pillars I.”

“At that point we had to make our case,” he explained. “It would be foolish to launch Pillars of Eternity early and rushed.”

“This game could technically be shipped now, but it should not be shipped,” he recalled saying. “It's way too buggy. We really need more time to iterate.”

“If Feargus and the other owners figure out how to make the money work for another six months, we could make a really, really great game,” Brennecke added.

“I think when Josh and Adam came and talked to me was, I was frustrated, because my job is to get the money and make sure everybody gets paid,” Urquhart admitted. “Selfishly, I turn into a twelve-year-old for a bit and go, ‘Why me?!’”

“In game development, there are delays. I know this is not a big revelation, and it's tough,” Urquhart said. “But then my job is to take a breath and say, ‘What's best for the game? What can we do? We can't spend ourselves into the poor house, but how can I give the teams as much as we can without putting the company out of business?’”

“Obviously, when you go over budget on anything, the people writing the checks don't like that,” he said. “So, when you say, ‘We're going to burn extra months on this project,’ you're talking about paying to employ those people, which is a lot of money in Southern California. It's totally justified that, anytime you ask for more time, the people writing the checks and looking at bank accounts go, ‘Hey, dude, that is a huge pain in the ass, and dangerous, and potentially catastrophic.”

That was the big discussion: If we didn't hit March [2015], our heads would be on the table. He made that very clear to us,” Brennecke said.

“Fearg wasn't happy about it, I can say that. I think Adam recalls it as being more dire than I do. I remember him being upset. I said, ‘Look, man, I get it. I didn't want us to be in this state either, but the fact of the matter is we have to make sure that this game is solid, or at least more solid than it is now, when it comes out. That's not going to happen without more time.’ And we got it. We got more time.”

“We were having a lot of difficulty with our save-point system not being that reliable, which can cause a lot of problems with QA,” Brennecke explained. “If you can't save and load through a forty- to fifty-hour a game, it's hard to get good progression. Or if things are breaking left and right after you reload, it's a challenge to get a good test case on things.”

“When we made Pillars of Eternity, I tried to be much more diligent about cutting back on systems, sub systems, class features, and areas that I didn't think were necessary.”

“It's a challenge because player expectation states that the game should be very big,” Sawyer continued. “Ultimately, we were on the hook for a game, so what we did on both Pillars I and II was we took extra time.”

“I’d have wanted to keep doing rewrites until the script was clean, top-to-bottom, but that’s just not how things work,” Fenstermaker stated. “When you’re on a budget, there are also the inevitable days when a producer walks into your office and says, in the middle of production, ‘We’ve determined that at our current rate, we can’t build the entire story. Please cut it down by twenty-five percent, and make the cut as fast as humanly possible because there isn’t time in the schedule to make that edit, either.’”

“Moments like that, your heart just sinks, because after you go through all the stages of grief with the producer, you know there’s only so much you’ll be able to repair,” Fenstermaker said. “You polish what you can but you always run out of time. I hated that: Shooting blind. Films and games with bigger budgets, they get focus testing, they get opportunities to make edits or cuts or additions or reshoots to shore up problems no one foresaw. For us, there wasn’t time. The burn rate doesn’t pause for focus testing.”

“It was hard as hell, getting it all to come together, but we felt good about what we had made. We just knew that, to us, it felt right, it looked right. We were delivering on the things we said we would deliver on. You just can never tell what the public would do with it.”

“I was nervous during the launch of Pillars 1 because I had no idea how we were going to be reviewed. I thought the game was pretty good, but I knew there were some real problems with it.”

“We worked really, really hard, but we weren't sure--and I think I speak for other people, too--if people would respond to this style of game,” said Dimitri Berman, echoing Sawyer’s edginess. “It had been a while since this kind of game had come out. Everybody was playing Call of Duty and games like that. Were they going to say, ‘What is this game? What is all this story stuff? Why do I have to pick all these races and play through this game of weird concepts and Watchers?’”

“I just make what I like, what I think is cool,” he continued. “I think a lot of times it works out. If you're just being honest, you'll find people who get it and who will respond favorably to it. I think that's how everybody on the team approaches these games and everything they're doing. We're not trying to do what this or that game did, or follow what's marketable. We're just doing what we know to do. That feels good to me, and I know it works.”

I remember on release day, everyone gets into the office and we're looking at reviews and commentary. I said, ‘I'm going to fix bugs. I'm not going to get drawn into this,’” Patel recalled. “And I totally got drawn into it. It's just so exciting and addictive. As a team, you're all stepping back and looking at this thing you've made, waiting very anxiously to see how it's received. By the end of it, we felt good about the product we'd created, but I think it was even better received than we expected. That was immensely rewarding for us.”

“When I got into the industry, I didn't think I'd be able to work on games like that, because they were in the past. Being able to do that was awesome. Working with the people I'd worked with in a scrappy, against the world, ‘We can do it!’ mentality, and being backed by so many people--it'll be hard to top that, I think. It's weird because we were making kind of a retro game, but it also felt like we were pioneering at the same time because we were using crowdfunding, and setting the bar, at least at the time, for what crowdfunding could do.”

“I was proud of the whole package: Just the fact that we had such an ambitious scope for this game and that we pulled it off with a [smaller] team. I was proud of just how close I think we came to replicating the Infinity Engine games. I remember being very pleased with that.”

“Because it's the first game, everything was made from scratch. The only sequel for a game I worked on was the beginning of Fallout 2. There's so much heavy lifting involved in the first of any game series, and I went into Pillars wide-eyed, knowing what we were getting into. A lot of people didn't discover it until later. It was too late for them! There was so much work, and people started to feel overwhelmed, but I was like, ‘No, we can get this done.’ That's what I was really impressed with: For the first IP made on an engine platform we'd never used before, with a funding system we'd never used, we got all that done and made such a great game. It was just absolutely amazing.”

“Most of the reason I think they're fun is because they're our games,” he said of Pillars of Eternity and its 2018 sequel, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. “After Stormlands, where the publisher oversaw everything we were doing, and everything has to be a discussion with the publisher to make sure they're happy, and you're happy, and everybody's happy with what's happening. Pillars was a whole different thing.”

“The truth is, in spite of its many warts, I like the game. I’m proud of it, and I had fun playing it. I like the ideas and turns in the main story even if the execution floundered at times. I like the companions. People rightly criticized that they didn’t all have a great justification to journey with the player, and I know people wanted there to be more to some of their quests. But their thematic ties were really good and I think for many players that made them emotionally impactful, and helped the overall narrative land. I like the antagonist even if he was a little too enigmatic for too long. I like the atmosphere for the setting that the team pulled off. That took area designers, narrative designers, concept artists, effects artists, level artists, all operating together at a high level. As a player it made me feel the pain of the place and want to set things right. With all the challenges and constraints we faced, I’m amazed things turned out as well as they did.”

“I was somewhat optimistic about it, but as a programmer, I always get frustrated with how buggy our games are. We had a reputation for buggy games, and I knew how many open bugs we still had, so I was fairly disappointed with the state of the game when we launched. It reflects poorly on the programming team. It's not our fault, per se, it's just something you have to deal with as a developer: Having a game go out, and still having open bugs.”

“There are always things fans will be let down by, but I am happiest that we made something for our community, for the people who backed the game,” he said. “I think it's very important, especially with crowdfunded projects, not to try to make everyone happy, but to fulfill the passions of that group of people.”