Pentiment: In Talks with Obsidian Entertainment – Special

To get you started on what game we spoke to Josh about, we recommend our news story to accompany the Pentiment announcement. As noted there, the charming adventure with a woodcut and book illumination look is about the life of a Bavarian journeyman artist in the 16th century. That sounds weird and it also looks like this: How in the trailer can be seen, the player travels to the fictional Upper Bavarian village of Tassing – at the time of the transition from the late Middle Ages to modern times. The main character Andreas Maler roams around the busy market square, sits in the office or decides in a dialogue where he spent his years of travel. In the course of the game he witnesses a murder and has to solve riddles to solve the crime.

4Players: I read that you studied German. Should we perhaps do the interview in German right away?

Josh Sawyer: No, English is better. (Josh laughs and answers in good German)

4Players: You’ve been working at Obsidian for quite a long time. Could you please give our readers a brief overview of your career as a gamemaker?

Josh Sawyer: I attended Lawrence University in Wisconsin in the Midwest, where I received my degree in history, with a focus on the Holy Roman Empire and the late medieval to modern transition; as well as on the topics of witch hunts and hagiography (editor’s note: This is the scientific research into the depiction of the lives of saints). So things that our game is also about. After that I taught myself web design and in 1999 found a job in Southern California at Interplay. After half a year there I convinced my boss Feargus Urqhart to promote me to game designer – and then I worked on Icewind Dale 1 & 2. After the collapse of Black Isle Studios, I went to Midway for a few years and then sort of returned in 2005 – to Obsidian Entertainment. That’s where I first worked on Neverwinter Nights 2 and then I was game director for Fallout: New Vegas and both Pillars of Eternity parts.

4Players: Let’s jump straight to your game Pentiment: It’s about a Bible illustrator named Andreas Maler, who works in a Benedictine monastery in the fictional Upper Bavarian town of Tassing. How did you come up with this scenario? You could have made a farmer from the Allgäu the protagonist…

Josh Sawyer: My father was an artist, many people in my family worked in this field. For a while I wanted to be an illustrator myself, so I find art and design, but also art history, very interesting. I’m also fascinated by how important art is for documenting historical events – be it paintings, woodcuts or illuminated manuscripts in old books. So I chose an artist for our game who works in the monastery but lives in the city. So he commutes between the office and village life, experiencing directly what life is like for both groups. Also, I like the idea of ​​an artisan who has a higher education – he’s sort of a college dropout of the time. He studied in Erfurt, the same place as Martin Luther. So, on the one hand, he’s a journeyman artist who wants to do his master’s, on the other hand, he has an academic background that might help him solve the game’s crime.

4Players: Be honest: Pentiment sounds super cool, but it might not be a top seller. So completely without creaking and Unreal Engine 5 graphics in 4K. How did you convince your bosses to develop the game?

Josh Sawyer: It was very important to make it clear to my boss that I really only need a few people for the project. We started with two people, an art director and I, meanwhile we are thirteen people – so that’s still pretty small. The release in Game Pass was at least as important: on a platform where people can easily try out a wide range of titles, such a game can be really niche. The combination of manageable budget and Game Pass ultimately made it quite easy for me to convince the executive floor – probably also because after all these years there is enough trust that I won’t overrev or take the wrong turn.

4Players: How can we imagine the research: Was Art Director Hannah Kennedy or you yourself on site in Bavaria and did you rummage through mountains of old tomes in libraries? Or is it really easy to do online these days?

Josh Sawyer: I’d be happy to tell you a little joke if you have time. I visited Ettal Abbey in Bavaria, which – like the abbey in our game – was a double monastery; so monks and nuns lived there. Unfortunately, like many monasteries in Europe, Ettal burned down almost completely and had to be rebuilt. That’s why the impression you get there is of course not comparable to that time. But no matter – I was there and of course I also visited the souvenir shop. I approached the brother who works there and asked if I could look at something more related to the history of the monastery – and he pointed out the books on display. I then asked if there wasn’t anything else – after all, I could also order the books from the USA via the Internet – whereupon he actually referred me to the State Library in Munich. Unfortunately, we didn’t have the time to visit them as well, but fortunately there are also digital collections such as those in the Morgan Library & Museum or the Bavarian State Library, where you can see an enormous amount of scanned original material. Also, Hannah got hold of a Nuremberg Chronicle facsimile, and we have the Huntington Library here in Los Angeles, which has a lot of early printed matter, or the Getty Museum, which has a wonderful collection of illuminated manuscripts. So we really had a lot of visuals.