Obsidian director Josh Sawyer says it's a 'mistake' for RPGs to sacrifice crunchy 'sweaty boy' systems in favour of a 'one size fits all' game, since easier difficulties aren't too hard to make

Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire.

Dear reader, I need to confess something to you. I have never done a proper playthrough of Skyrim. I've booted the game up countless times, gotten a few hours deep, and felt a kind of malaise drag me away. It's nothing personal—I just need more crunch out of my RPGs. Josh Sawyer, studio design director at Obsidian (who gave us New Vegas and Pillars of Eternity) hears my call.

Speaking to PCG's own Ted Litchfield at GDC this year, Sawyer got deep into the paint on the issue of difficulty and complexity in RPGs—and the back-and-forth pendulum of the CRPG genre as a whole.