Feargus Urquhart and Josh Sawyer talk about upcoming Obsidian games at Gamepressure
Feargus Urquhart and Josh Sawyer talk about upcoming Obsidian games at Gamepressure
Interview - posted by Infinitron on Thu 26 November 2015, 17:00:59
Tags: Feargus Urquhart; Josh Sawyer; Obsidian Entertainment; Pillars of Eternity; Pillars of Eternity: The White MarchThe latest interview to come out of Obsidian's recent little publicity tour is at Polish gaming site Gamepressure.com. It's a dual interview with both Feargus Urquhart and Josh Sawyer, and interesting in that it manages to pry some information out of Feargus about Obsidian's upcoming projects, as well as a clarification about that second Obsidian Kickstarter that never happened. I quote:
The first upcoming game that Feargus mentions is clearly the recently revealed Project North Carolina reincarnation, but judging by his choice of words ("looking at crowdfunding one of our next titles as well") there must be something else coming up from Obsidian in addition to that. I wonder which one of them Tim Cain is involved with.
Congratulations for selling half a million copies of Pillars of Eternity! Do you consider it to be a lot or not really, keeping in mind that you are a rather large studio based in the US where it’s not cheap to develop games?
Feargus Urquhart: While we are a big studio, success is all relative to the size of the team and the budget. If Call of Duty sold 10 000 000 units it would be considered a failure. For us having sold over 600 000 units now, we are ecstatic.
What are you the most proud of when it comes to Pillars of Eternity and what would you do differently from today’s perspective?
Josh Sawyer: I don’t think there’s one specific thing, but the game as a whole. Our goal was to make a spiritual successor to the Infinity Engine games and I feel that, for the most part, we accomplished that. In retrospect, we should have had more stronghold content and the mega-dungeon (Od Nua) wore thin after a while. Would have preferred to have more content in the stronghold and to spread those dungeon levels around to make existing dungeons feel more substantial.
How is your work on The White March - Part II going? Will the game be comparable to the first part in terms of size?
Josh Sawyer: It’s going well and it should be comparable in overall size and gameplay length. We learned a lot from working on the base game and Part I, so we’re trying to apply all of that to Part II. The scale of things kicks up after you relight the White Forge and we hope people will enjoy the progression from the relatively modest problems of Stalwart to the wild ‘n crazy ending.
I assume that you won’t be able to tell me anything about what you’re currently working on, but there are lots of possibilities on the horizon. Pillars of Eternity 2, full-fledged RPG in Pathfinder universe that you were considering. Paradox acquired rights to the universe of the World of Darkness, I’m sure a lot of gamers would be really excited to hear that you’re making an RPG in this rich world. When can we expect any official announcements?
Feargus Urquhart: Not to tease, but we will have news in the next two or three months. We absolutely are looking at crowdfunding one of our next titles as well, so we’ll have news on that soon. I can say it’s been fun to sit around and talk with Tim Cain, Game Director of the original Fallout, about ideas for our next thing. I wish I could talk about it more.
What’s happening regarding the mysterious Kickstarter campaign that was supposed to launch by the end of 2014 (according to the interview you had with CVG)? I asked you about this in April and you said that it’s only a matter of weeks.
Feargus Urquhart: We thought about that a lot and decided that we should completely finish Pillars of Eternity before we went back to crowdfunding. Part of that was just because of how busy we were, and part of it was that it felt a bit strange to ask everyone for more money before we had delivered on our first crowdfunded game.
Feargus Urquhart: While we are a big studio, success is all relative to the size of the team and the budget. If Call of Duty sold 10 000 000 units it would be considered a failure. For us having sold over 600 000 units now, we are ecstatic.
What are you the most proud of when it comes to Pillars of Eternity and what would you do differently from today’s perspective?
Josh Sawyer: I don’t think there’s one specific thing, but the game as a whole. Our goal was to make a spiritual successor to the Infinity Engine games and I feel that, for the most part, we accomplished that. In retrospect, we should have had more stronghold content and the mega-dungeon (Od Nua) wore thin after a while. Would have preferred to have more content in the stronghold and to spread those dungeon levels around to make existing dungeons feel more substantial.
How is your work on The White March - Part II going? Will the game be comparable to the first part in terms of size?
Josh Sawyer: It’s going well and it should be comparable in overall size and gameplay length. We learned a lot from working on the base game and Part I, so we’re trying to apply all of that to Part II. The scale of things kicks up after you relight the White Forge and we hope people will enjoy the progression from the relatively modest problems of Stalwart to the wild ‘n crazy ending.
I assume that you won’t be able to tell me anything about what you’re currently working on, but there are lots of possibilities on the horizon. Pillars of Eternity 2, full-fledged RPG in Pathfinder universe that you were considering. Paradox acquired rights to the universe of the World of Darkness, I’m sure a lot of gamers would be really excited to hear that you’re making an RPG in this rich world. When can we expect any official announcements?
Feargus Urquhart: Not to tease, but we will have news in the next two or three months. We absolutely are looking at crowdfunding one of our next titles as well, so we’ll have news on that soon. I can say it’s been fun to sit around and talk with Tim Cain, Game Director of the original Fallout, about ideas for our next thing. I wish I could talk about it more.
What’s happening regarding the mysterious Kickstarter campaign that was supposed to launch by the end of 2014 (according to the interview you had with CVG)? I asked you about this in April and you said that it’s only a matter of weeks.
Feargus Urquhart: We thought about that a lot and decided that we should completely finish Pillars of Eternity before we went back to crowdfunding. Part of that was just because of how busy we were, and part of it was that it felt a bit strange to ask everyone for more money before we had delivered on our first crowdfunded game.
The first upcoming game that Feargus mentions is clearly the recently revealed Project North Carolina reincarnation, but judging by his choice of words ("looking at crowdfunding one of our next titles as well") there must be something else coming up from Obsidian in addition to that. I wonder which one of them Tim Cain is involved with.
