Obsidian Entertainment have been on something of a tear for quite a while now. From The Outer Worlds to Grounded, and now, only a few short months after Grounded reached its 1.0 status, and now their next game, Pentiment is ready to roll out onto virtual shelves as well. As of the time of writing, reviews are just hours away from dropping, but in the meantime, the team at Obsidian are keen to share some insights into how the sausage was made, and, as we learn from a developer video we’ve learned how the lack of voice acting in the game, has not led to a lack of expression in the game, with clever use of fonts doing all of the heavy lifting in this space.
Josh Sawyer, the Obsidian genius behind some of the studios’ most acclaimed works, Fallout: New Vegas, and Pillars Of Eternity, spoke in the developer video, about how the font style and its book-like art help drive the 25 year in-game tale forward, saying,
The idea to have the game take place over 25 years largely came from my interest in showing how the changes and the choices that the player makes impact the community over longer than the typical amount of time that a game takes place in,
Obsidian’s Alec Fray, Producer of Pentiment, looks at the development of printed press though the duration of the game as being a key point that leads to the changes in font you’ll see in the game, continuing on to say,
More people are becoming educated. That literally changes who we are as people. Text plays a fundamental role in Pentiment‘s narrative, too – with no voice acting, Andreas’ interpretation of the people he meets is depicted in the fonts used for their dialogue.
Next, Obsidian’s Art Director, Hannah Kennedy, touched on how the fonts themselves help to represent the different voices being projected as well, saying
The fonts that we ended up developing I think played a big role into giving characters different flavours of voices
Finally, Sawyer spoke of how the heads of characters were actually animated in 3D to help convey expression further
We really tried to emphasise a lot of head movement, especially when it came to the faces, being able to communicate expressions was very important.
Pentiment is available on Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S and PC today.