Random characters kept swearing in Obsidian’s font-obsessed murder-mystery when its procedural error system ran amok: ‘Naughtiness abounded’

Pentiment is a very, very good videogame, and one of the most interesting things Obsidian’s put out this decade (though I liked Avowed quite a lot). Now, we’re sufficiently far enough past its release that people like director Josh Sawyer—a name you’ll recognise from Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and an all-timer Dolly Parton cover—are out and about giving GDC talks about what it was like making it. Sweary, it turns out.

It wasn’t the devs cursing, mind you, it was the characters, and it was 100% unintentional.

If you’ve not played Pentiment, the game has no voice acting. Instead, everyone communicates via text which is rendered in lusciously detailed fonts: priests might talk in a pretty gothic script, peasants in a scribble, and the town printer in stamped block capitals. They even make errors using what Sawyer called a “procedural effect”, sometimes writing in the wrong letter that then has to be scratched out and filled in correctly.

“Letter replacements became the thing that we did,” said Sawyer on stage at GDC. “We did this fairly early, and even though we didn’t need to do it fairly early, I’m glad we did, because naughtiness abounded.”

Naughtiness means the village monks might inadvertently start swearing like sailors, if you’re uncertain. It’s not hard to see how that could happen. For instance, if Obsidian’s error-generation system decided to insert a slip-up into words like ‘shut,’ or ‘can’t’, or ‘feckless’. Ahem.

“When you start just replacing letters in words, sometimes you get words that you don’t really want to be seen by a player,” said Sawyer. “So the longer we played, the more we saw those.” This led to Obsidian compiling a no-no list for its error-maker: “We [had] this growing list of like, ‘don’t do that’,” said Sawyer, though overall the system “worked pretty well.”

Alas, Sawyer kept schtum about just what was on that list, but like I said, I reckon we can hazard at least a few guesses. If nothing else, Sawyer gets to use it as a parable for other devs on the sometimes unforeseen benefits of doing things early: “It probably should have come later… But the benefit of doing it too early is that we caught a lot more of the naughty words. So it had a side effect that was positive.”