Obsidian General Discussion Thread

[Sentinel]

Would Feargus actually sell Obsidian and all his pals tho?

 

[Fry]

Damn rumors travel fast. What other people built on my precious theory from 3 mins ago?

Might just be voices in my head.

 

[Rev]

This is where Paradox came in. “They’ve really learned how to manage the digital marketplace,” Urquhart says. “I can throw out ten things that I know about managing things on Steam, but they know a hundred,” Urquhart also feels Paradox understand the kinds of game Obsidian want to make. “They just get crunchy, you know, enthusiast hardcore games like Pillars, and that just makes any relationship easier.

Kinda seems like they'll be publishing Deadfire, then.

Maybe Feargus will let them publish Deadfire in exchange for a new Tyranny, despite the sales not being great (but maybe still profitable).
Btw, we should expect Paradox's genius marketing and overpriced DLCs with PoE2 too in case they do return to publish the game.

 

[Sentinel]

Paradox doesn't own the IP so I doubt they have any say in what gets made and what doesn't. But that all depends heavily on the deal they made of course. You can expect DLC if the game sells well regardless of Paradox's involvement.

 

[Abu Antar]

There's at least one expansion that we know of.

 

[Fry]

Obsidian already sold an xpac during the Fig campaign. So far they've been pretty good about sticking to their promises.

 

[Sentinel]

They funded an expansion during the Fig campaign? I don't recall that. If so it's pretty weird for Sawyer to say he's jumping ship as soon as the main game's development is done and someone else will most likely be in charge of DLC.

 

[Rev]

Obsidian already sold an xpac during the Fig campaign. So far they've been pretty good about sticking to their promises.

I don't think it was an expansion, not in the usual meaning of the term, at least. Feargus said the expansion model didn't work for PoE and in the sequel he would go for New Vegas-style DLCs.

 

[Quillon]

They didn't fund it, just sold it for additional $20 therefore more than a promise.

If so it's pretty weird for Sawyer to say he's jumping ship as soon as the main game's development is done and someone else will most likely be in charge of DLC.

Sawyer said exactly that in one of the interviews, prolly in the podcast.

 

[Sannom]

Sawyer being in charge of The White March was kind of weird actually if you look at the way DLCs were/are managed in FNV and Tyranny. Avellone directed most of the DLCs on the former and Matt McLean is in charge on the later. The fact that Obsidian wanted to introduce lots of non-insignificant system changes in TWM (and prepare the way for Deadfire) is probably why Sawyer sticked with them.

 

[Roguey]

Sometimes when we would play through games, he would make a character with an odd build that would seem kind of unusual and he would say, "Why can't I use these things," which is a good point.

Avellone's directly responsible for chew on that.

 

[Iznaliu]

Would Feargus actually sell Obsidian and all his pals tho?

Probably not unless shit hits the fan.

 

[Prime Junta]

Would Feargus actually sell Obsidian and all his pals tho?

Probably not unless shit hits the fan.

Certainly would if the price is right.

 

[Infinitron]

If so it's pretty weird for Sawyer to say he's jumping ship as soon as the main game's development is done and someone else will most likely be in charge of DLC.

Sawyer said exactly that in one of the interviews, prolly in the podcast.

Citation needed, I don't recall this. In the podcast, he spoke in generality about leaving the series to other people in the future but I don't think he said it would happen before PoE2's DLC.

 

[Quillon]

Now RPS interview with Feargus, on publishers: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/09/06/obsidian-publisher-interview/

Isn't this mostly irrelevant for publishers nowadays? Since all of them moved 95%-%100 of their development to their owned studios?

If so it's pretty weird for Sawyer to say he's jumping ship as soon as the main game's development is done and someone else will most likely be in charge of DLC.

Sawyer said exactly that in one of the interviews, prolly in the podcast.

Citation needed, I don't recall this. In the podcast, he spoke in generality about leaving the series to other people in the future but I don't think he said it would happen before PoE2's DLC.

58:50 in the podcast, last question:

- Do you have any DLC planned for Deadfire or are you talking about that yet?
- We've talked about it. I'm probably not gonna be heavily involved in doing that. I'm like, reviewing ideas from other folks in the team but right now I'm just focusing on Deadfire core game.

 

[Iznaliu]

58:50 in the podcast, last question:

Heavily involved doesn't mean not involved.

 

[Quillon]

58:50 in the podcast, last question:

Heavily involved doesn't mean not involved.

He prolly won't be directing it at the least, he'll do web design work for it

 

[Iznaliu]

he'll do web design work for it

I wonder if Sawyer can still do decent web design.

 

[Infinitron]

Very loong USGamer interview with Sawyer on his personal history: http://www.usgamer.net/articles/hes...-on-nearly-20-years-spent-making-rpg-classics

Fairfax-y bit about NWN2 and the subsequent death of isometric RPGs with full party control:

JS: Yeah, relatively new. It was 2005, so it was almost two years into their development. They had already shipped Knights of the Old Republic II and they were working on Neverwinter Nights 2. They were at full speed on Neverwinter Nights 2. I was really burned out from Midway, really disappointed, and I said, "You know what? Can I just be a senior designer? I don't want to be a lead, I don't want to be in charge of anything. I want to be in charge of some areas. Just let me go back to designing areas and working on systems and I'll be totally fine," and they were cool with that. That's what I started doing.

You must have felt like, "I'm a hardened veteran at this point."

JS: It's not so much of a hardened veteran as much as like I saw a bunch of really young, very ambitious people and I was like, "Okay, everyone's kind of just doing stuff." I mean six years is really not that much time, but it was enough that it didn't feel like it was very organized. That was my first impression, where I was like, "There's a lot of cool stuff going on, I don't know what everything going into this game is," but I'm like, "Okay, this is my chunk of it and I'm going to try to just take charge of it and make sure that this is really solid and good."

The thing with Neverwinter Nights is it had a lot of bugs when it came out and that kind of thing. I think that happened a fair amount at Obsidian. It was kind of a case of ambition meets limited resources?

JS: Very much so. I'm not always responsible about resources, but I'm fairly responsible. One of my main concerns coming onto Neverwinter 2 was, "I don't think all this stuff is going to get done. I don't think all these areas are going to get done, I don't think these quests are going to get done, I don't these prestige classes or these abilities are going to get done. I think we've got to start getting real serious about cutting this stuff."

I will say, I had set a really bad example at Black Isle.

Because you liked to write 1,600 page design documents?

JS: [laughs] I mean seriously, that's what I had designed. I guess the thing is the rubber never really had to meet the road on that because I was in documentation land for a really long time. Then I looked back at it and I was like, "Oh, that was a bad way to do that. Of course we shouldn't have done that." Midway was much more production oriented and so I started going like, "Oh crap, I really have to think more carefully about this."

Again, it wasn't like I was innocent in all this stuff but I was very concerned when I came over. One of the main things that I had said to the owners at the time after I did a more long term analysis of Neverwinter 2 is, "Hey, KOTOR 2 came out and it was really buggy and a lot of people were mad but they were like, 'Okay, this was their first game.'" I said, "Neverwinter 2 can only be so buggy or else we're going to become the studio that makes buggy games," which is exactly what happened. That was really my concern, which was, "Hey, if you want to make the number of bugs go down, don't put as much stuff in the game and be more responsible about how you put it in the game." It really took a long time for the project to get to the point where that was the reality check.

I actually moved off of the project for several months because I was concerned and I didn't really feel like, "I don't know, I don't feel like I'm able to contribute to this team because I have these concerns that don't really seem to be shared. There's a console game or some, you know, pitches and things that are going on. Maybe it would be better if I contributed to those because I don't want to be the guy who's just saying, 'Hey everybody, listen to me! There's trouble!'"

I went over and I worked on another project for a while and then they brought me back over to Neverwinter 2 to just clean it up and get it in order. Because it was rough. It was rough for a very long time.

It was maybe around this time that publishers moved away from isometric RPGs. I know that you've told me in the past that this was kind of frustrating on you. In that moment, what was that like?

JS: It was kind of annoying. To be honest, that whole intermediary phase was a little frustrating because I remember when we were working on Van Buren, it was a 3D game but it still had... I wouldn't say isometric, but it was narrow field of view, top down camera or three-quarter view camera. I remember some people saying, "Why is it even 3D if you're not going to get in close?" I'm like, "What do you mean? There's a bunch of cool stuff that we're doing with the 3D. We don't have to be first person or close third person. Plus if we want to have a party, we want to do all these things.

On Neverwinter 1, BioWare made certain choices. This is about design and choices and accepting the consequences. BioWare made playing Neverwinter about your character. Like you make a character and you control that character and you have companions but they're more satellites. They're not controlled like they are in Baldur's Gate. The camera is fairly close to you, you're fairly close to the action. It's a very different feeling from Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale or Fallout.

In Neverwinter 2, we had three camera modes and none of them felt that good. There was a tradition iso camera, there was a follow camera, there was one other one that I can't remember, which goes to show how important it was. It was this weird thing where we were like, "Well, you have a party but we want to also support this 3D follow cam, but you don't really want to fight in that mode because you can't see your party." It was a struggle to try to get into that space and figure out how we want to set up cameras.

The camera is the way that you view the whole game and so the decisions that you make with that are ultimately going to have a big effect on can you have party members, how do you control party members? Even thinking about something like Mass Effect when BioWare started going into close third-person, and I'm thinking about you have other characters around you, how you command them and understand where they are relative to you is a tricky thing to solve.I was disappointed to no longer have the sort of high top-down camera to play with, but more than that, it was frustrating trying to find a middle ground. We didn't really do a good job of finding a place where it's like, "Ah, this feels like the game that you know and love but it looks fresh and modern." Those were things that weren't really that compatible.

What's kind of a defining war story for you here at Obsidian, a moment when the rubber hit the road?

JS: The end of Neverwinter Nights 2, I guess. I would say that even on Fallout: New Vegas, we had a little bit of mandatory overtime on that, but it was actually not too bad. We were stressed on that. Neverwinter Nights 2, I mean I was like the butcher of Neverwinter. I came in and I was like, "Get rid of this, get rid of that, cut these classes, we're not doing this feature, get rid of all this stuff." It was really rough. It was also really rough, there were a lot of people here who were busting ass to make that game be awesome, but it was enormous and there were so many things left to do.

At the time I was living in downtown San Diego or like Hillcrest, and I was taking the train up and down every night and it was an hour and 50 minutes each way. I would get up at 6ish or whatever and I would get home at sometimes 11:30 or midnight. I would take the last train back. That was not easy.

It was all just... it was really just triage. It was me being like, "How many quests do we have in this area? How far along are they? Okay, these three are barely started? Cut them. Just get rid of them. Figure out how to clean up the loose ends and get rid of them." Because we were already way behind schedule and over-budget. That was really rough. We got through it but it was stressful.

 

[Fairfax]

Fairfax-y bit about NWN2 and the subsequent death of isometric RPGs with full party control:

Interesting, but why is it Fairfax-y?

In Neverwinter 2, we had three camera modes and none of them felt that good. There was a tradition iso camera, there was a follow camera, there was one other one that I can't remember, which goes to show how important it was.

I believe the three modes were character mode, strategy mode and exploration mode. IIRC I found the exploration mode with some tweaks the least shitty.

 

[Infinitron]

Interesting, but why is it Fairfax-y?

Because it tells a story about how people from Obsidian were incompetent, obviously.

 

[torpid]

Again, it wasn't like I was innocent in all this stuff but I was very concerned when I came over. One of the main things that I had said to the owners at the time after I did a more long term analysis of Neverwinter 2 is, "Hey, KOTOR 2 came out and it was really buggy and a lot of people were mad but they were like, 'Okay, this was their first game.'" I said, "Neverwinter 2 can only be so buggy or else we're going to become the studio that makes buggy games," which is exactly what happened. That was really my concern, which was, "Hey, if you want to make the number of bugs go down, don't put as much stuff in the game and be more responsible about how you put it in the game." It really took a long time for the project to get to the point where that was the reality check.

Sawyer's really branding himself as the one practical, forward-thinking guy at Obsidian. I knew he had "fixed" NWN2 but here he's going one step further and saying that he had figured it out in advance. If only "the owners" had listened. You hear that, MCA?

 

[Infinitron]

Again, it wasn't like I was innocent in all this stuff but I was very concerned when I came over. One of the main things that I had said to the owners at the time after I did a more long term analysis of Neverwinter 2 is, "Hey, KOTOR 2 came out and it was really buggy and a lot of people were mad but they were like, 'Okay, this was their first game.'" I said, "Neverwinter 2 can only be so buggy or else we're going to become the studio that makes buggy games," which is exactly what happened. That was really my concern, which was, "Hey, if you want to make the number of bugs go down, don't put as much stuff in the game and be more responsible about how you put it in the game." It really took a long time for the project to get to the point where that was the reality check.

Sawyer's really branding himself as the one practical, forward-thinking guy at Obsidian. I knew he had "fixed" NWN2 but here he's going one step further and saying that he had figured it out in advance. If only "the owners" had listened. You hear that, MCA?

I guess he is, but let's try to find somebody who disagrees. Anthony Davis?

 

[Fry]

Oh boy, let's try to stir up some controversy.

 

[Roguey]

Again, it wasn't like I was innocent in all this stuff but I was very concerned when I came over. One of the main things that I had said to the owners at the time after I did a more long term analysis of Neverwinter 2 is, "Hey, KOTOR 2 came out and it was really buggy and a lot of people were mad but they were like, 'Okay, this was their first game.'" I said, "Neverwinter 2 can only be so buggy or else we're going to become the studio that makes buggy games," which is exactly what happened. That was really my concern, which was, "Hey, if you want to make the number of bugs go down, don't put as much stuff in the game and be more responsible about how you put it in the game." It really took a long time for the project to get to the point where that was the reality check.

Sawyer's really branding himself as the one practical, forward-thinking guy at Obsidian. I knew he had "fixed" NWN2 but here he's going one step further and saying that he had figured it out in advance. If only "the owners" had listened. You hear that, MCA?

I guess he is, but let's try to find somebody who disagrees.

He's said his piece years ago.

NWN2 OC had several problems, many of which were solved when Josh Sawyer Chris Avellone took over the project - which is the nicest and most professional way I can phrase it.

Additionally

IWD2 I know for sure was Sawyer's game, as well as the upcoming Aliens RPG, and trust me when I say that what he did to save NWN2 and get it out the door was nothing short of amazing (I have mad respect for Josh, and I think he's underappreciated as a designer. In my time working with the man every chat with him has been a reminder that the dude is badass and knows his shit).