The Digital Dragons organizers have uploaded a video of the talk Chris Avellone gave at the conference last month. The topic is "Design Hierarchies", and it's basically a description of what he considers to be the ideal game development team structure. Chris favors a clear, organized hierarchy, with systems designers at the top, level designers in the middle, and narrative designers at the bottom. He emphasizes that it's very important for project leads to clarify their expectations from those beneath them, and that it's a bad thing when the same lead holds many different roles on the team. I'll let you decide for yourselves how relevant all of this is to Chris' experiences at Obsidian during his final years there.


As Jedi Master Radek posted on our forums on the day of the talk, Chris does indeed state that the unannounced games he's working on will "hopefully" be revealed to the public this year. We know by now that none of them are really his project, though.