Beneath a Starless Sky - free book about the history of the Infinity Engine and Pillars of Eternity

[Infinitron]

Roguey Summary: https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...illars-of-eternity.124242/page-3#post-5946980

Huh, looks like it's documentary week:

Hello,

I am the Long Reads Editor at Shacknews. My next feature, "Beneath a Starless Sky," is a book on the making of the Pillars of Eternity franchise and Infinity Engine RPGs. I've written the book based on over 40 hours of interviews with developers from Black Isle, BioWare, and Obsidian Entertainment, with the full support of Obsidian.

"Beneath a Starless Sky" will be published FOR FREE on Shacknews this Friday, October 5, at 5pm Eastern / 2pm Pacific. It will be accompanied by a 75-minute panel video featuring discussion of RPG design and history, and a 35-minute documentary on the making and launch of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire this May.

I'd be happy to send RPG Codex a press release when the book goes live, and arrange an interview or other content about it.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,

David L. Craddock - Long Reads Editor, Shacknews.com

LESS T_T

 

[AwesomeButton]

...And zero hours of interviews with Owlcat games.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.shacknews.com/article/1...-documentary-video-series-premiering-tomorrow

Check out a teaser from 24 'Til Launch, Shacknews' new documentary video series, premiering tomorrow
Tune in at 12:00pm Eastern / 9:00am Pacific to check out our 35-minute documentary-style video on the launch of Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire.

I aim bigger with every Long Read I publish at Shacknews. Last April, Stairway to Badass was the largest and most comprehensive feature in the history of the site--so large and comprehensive I broke our content management system, and had to send out an SOS to our engineers to create more space. Last December, Rocket Jump: Quake and the Golden Age of First-Person Shooters towered over Stairway to Badass.

And, yes, I broke the content management system again.

Tomorrow, Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs goes live at 5:00pm Eastern / 2:00pm Pacific. It's nearly 500 pages of behind-the-scenes details that recount the making of Obsidian's contemporary RPGs and classic titles such as Baldur's Gate. (I didn't break CMS this time. To be honest, I kinda feel like I failed. I'll try harder next time.)

But wait, there's more! Ahead of that at noon Eastern, you'll be able to watch the inaugural installment of 24 'Til Launch, a recurring series of documentary-style videos exclusive to Shacknews.

Obsidian was gracious enough to open their doors Greg Burke, Asif Khan, and me on May 7, just 24 hours before Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire set sail for Steam and GOG.com. We interviewed several developers over the next day and ended up with a 35-minute documentary on Obsidian's history in RPGs, and Deadfire's development.

We've prepared a teaser for what you can expect from 24 'Til Launch - Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire tomorrow. Check it out at 12pm Eastern / 9am Pacific, and come back a few hours later to read Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs.

https://www.shacknews.com/article/1...y-ii-and-rpg-design-at-obsidian-entertainment

Shacknews Long Table: Pillars of Eternity II and RPG Design at Obsidian Entertainment
A new recurring feature and a sneak peek at the next Shacknews Long Read, Shacknews Long Tables feature panel-style discussions with developers. For the inaugural edition, host David L. Craddock sat down with developers from Obsidian Entertainment to discuss RPG design and the launch of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire.

Welcome to the inaugural Shacknews Long Table, a recurring video series where Shacknews editors host panel-type discussions with developers. Our inaugural Long Table was recorded on May 8, and can be viewed here as well as within the next Shacknews Long Read, Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs, to be published this Friday, October 5, on Shacknews.

Written from extensive research and over 40 hours of interviews with developers from Black Isle Studios, BioWare, and Obsidian Entertainment, Beneath a Starless Sky is a 480-page book that recounts the making of both Pillars of Eternity titles as well as the foundational Infinity Engine roleplaying games: Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale II.

On the afternoon that Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire went live to the delight of CRPG fans around the world, I hosted a long-table discussion—because in the games industry, with its abundance of conference rooms and rectangular tables, round tables are in short supply—with seven developers from Obsidian Entertainment.

For nearly an hour and a half, we talked the ingredients that define a roleplaying game made by the studio regardless of sub-genre or theme, the status of Infinity Engine-style RPGs such as Pillars of Eternity, settings the developers would love to tackle in future projects, and perhaps most importantly, who made bets to shave heads or eat obscene amounts of fattening foods on the condition that Deadfire holds at or above a certain aggregate score on Metacritic.

Enjoy the discussion, and remember to check back on the afternoon of Friday, October 5, to read Beneath a Starless Sky and check out more exclusive video features.

 

[Safav Hamon]

Here we go again...

 

[AwesomeButton]

Wow, Josh praising Disco Elysium!

Adam made me want to facepalm a few times. I guess he is still feeling weird about being on camera. An RPG where you have to find your dog?

 

[FreeKaner]

When is pillars tabletop adaptation video game?

 

[AwesomeButton]

When is pillars tabletop adaptation video game?

They are in negotiations with Owlcat games about it. Better expertise.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.shacknews.com/article/107682/24-til-launch-pillars-of-eternity-ii-deadfire

24 'Til Launch - Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire
Twenty-four hours before Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire launched on May 8, 2018, Shacknews visited Obsidian Entertainment to interview developers about the game's development and its roots in classic RPGs.

24 'Til Launch is a new, recurring series of documentary-style videos created, scripted, and edited by the Shacknews staff. Each video goes behind the scenes to follow developers in the hours before a game’s launch. In each episode, you’ll meet the faces behind the credits—how they’re feeling, what tasks they absolutely must finish over that final day, and how they come together in the moments before zero hour to celebrate doing the impossible: Seeing a game come to fruition.

The inaugural 24 'Til Launch was shot over May 7 and 8 at this year at Obsidian Entertainment in Irvine, CA, ahead of the release of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire. Each entry in 24 'Til Launch will be a standalone feature at Shacknews. I conceived the series as a part of my next Shacknews Long Read, Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs, which you'll be able to read in its entirety later this afternoon. In the meantime, I'm extremely proud to present the inaugural entry in 24 'Til Launch. Let the Shack staff know what you think in the Chatty comments below.

Written from extensive research and over 40 hours of interviews with developers from Black Isle Studios, BioWare, and Obsidian Entertainment, Beneath a Starless Sky is a 480-page book that recounts the making of both Pillars of Eternity titles as well as the foundational Infinity Engine roleplaying games: Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate II, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale II.

Be sure to check out Beneath a Starless Sky's second exclusive video feature, the inaugural Shacknews Long Table, in which I host seven developers from Obsidian in a panel-style discussion about the history of RPGs and Obsidian's catalog of award-winning titles.

 

[Infinitron]

Extras:

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.shacknews.com/article/1...-eternity-and-the-infinity-engine-era-of-rpgs

Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs
From the Sword Coast to the Deadfire archipelago, Beneath a Starless Sky explores the making of the Infinity Engine RPGs, the history of Black Isle Studios, and the development of Obsidian Entertainment's Pillars of Eternity franchise.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Leave or Die
3. The Roleplaying Company
4. Penny Bets
5. Selling the Dream
6. Pause Screen: World on Fire - The Oral History of Fallout and Fallout 2
7. Pause Screen: Green Team - How a Ragtag Band of Upstarts Created Baldur's Gate
8. Pause Screen: Where Winter Never Ends - The Freewheeling Development of Icewind Dale
9. Pause Screen: Realmsplay - Writing, Adapting, and Playing in the Forgotten Realms
10. Soul Ex Machina
11. Building a Diorama
12. Practicality First
13. Musical Programming
14. Pause Screen: Romancing the Throne - David Gaider on Intimacy in Baldur's Gate II and BioWare RPGs
15. Pause Screen: Long Table - Pillars of Eternity II and RPG Design at Obsidian
16. Pause Screen: Tim Donley's Toy Story
17. Pause Screen: Stone by Stone - How Planescape: Torment Raised the Bar for CRPGs
18. More Than Nostalgia
19. Wizards Behind Curtains
20. Setting Sail
21. Pause Screen: Chopped Up - John Romero on the Sorrows of Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows
22. Pause Screen: 24 'Til Launch - Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire
23. Pause Screen: In the Guts of Game Design with Josh Sawyer
24. Pause Screen: Fighting Randomness - Feargus Urquhart on Fig and Obsidian's Future
25. Pipeline Dreams
26. World of Mystery
27. Epilogue
28. Notes and Citations

Fairfax Roguey I'm sure there are things for you to gawk at in there.

 

[Safav Hamon]

I've been thinking a lot about that, but a lot of my time has also been spent on, Okay, Eternity II stuff will eventually come to a conclusion. What is everybody going to move on to? Is Eternity III the right answer? Is something else the right answer? Josh has wanted to work on a more tactics-based game. We've talked about that. We've talked about doing a big RPG: What would that be, if we were to do another big RPG right now? And of course, my job is, "Where would the money come from?"

Eternity II is a big game that has lots of hours of gameplay, but it's not a game that needs eighty to a hundred people to make. So, it's kind of hard to define. Probably when I say "big game," it's, if we're going to go off and make a fifty-, sixty-, one-hundred-hour console RPG with triple-A expectations—that's a big game.

It sounds like Obsidian is considering doing another triple-A game in addition to Outer Worlds.

 

[Infinitron]

Nah, I think he's just pretending that The Outer Worlds is a big secret there.

Also in the context of this book he's probably thinking specifically about a Pillars of Eternity sequel that's a "big game".

 

[Safav Hamon]

I edited it. The implication seems to be that Outer Worlds is triple-A and Feargus is considering transitioning Deadfire's team to another triple-A project.

 

[111111111]

I honestly wouldn't mind an ARPG like Skyrim based in Black italy (old valia)

 

[Lacrymas]

Console RPG.

 

[Jenkem]

PILLARS OF ETERNITY 3

 

[Fairfax]

PS:T chapter is very weak.

Although Chris Avellone spent hours answering many of my questions for this book, the writing obligations that pay his living compelled him to bow out of answering the final slate—which, wouldn’t you know, concerned arguably his most famous title.

What's the point of writing a whole chapter on PS:T and not interviewing MCA? He should've waited, as I did, or asked the PS:T questions first.

Urquhart: There were three Planescape games going on when I took over the division. I ultimately killed all of them and then created a new Planescape game around Chris Avellone and Tim Donley, and Dan Spitzley, and a couple of other people. And when I say created, I don't mean I created that game. I gave them a box. I said, “Use the Infinity Engine. Planescape's about going to planes. Go to planes.”

Feargus exaggerating his contribution as usual.

It was an interesting thing in that two of them were internal, one was external. The third, the external one, wasn't so much that I killed it; it just sort of died. One of the internal projects was called Planescape PC, and the other was called Planescape PSX. What was weird was that when I took over the division, there were two or three people working on each of them, and it was unknown how any of them would get done. Then it was like, “Why are we trying to have a bunch of PS games that don't have the number of people on them it would take to complete them?”

It's strange how Feargus never mentions what happened to Planescape PC/Stonekeep 2, and I'm sure he remembers. I don't believe it's ever been confirmed that it was under BIS, but if it was, that would explain it. If nobody knows about that failure, I imagine he sees no reason to bring it up.

Craddock: Guido, how would you define your role on Planescape: Torment relative to leads such as Chris Avellone?

Henkel: I was a shepherd. My job was to keep things rolling and to keep distractions away from the team. I was the grease, essentially, enabling them with what they needed, providing feedback and ideas while making sure the project stayed true to the vision.

Craddock: Planescape: Torment was initially pitched under the title Last Rites. What was that project, and how did it differ from what it became as Planescape: Torment?

Henkel: It was only a title change, nothing more. We felt [the original title] did not represent the game properly and the religious connotations were, perhaps, too strong.

They changed it because there was a game called Last Rites already.

Craddock: Unlike in most RPGs and MMOs, rats in Planescape: Torment put up a fight. Were rats intentionally designed this way to challenge the convention of tediously grinding rats for XP in many RPGs?

Henkel: Yes. This was actually in direct response to Fallout, as a kind of in-joke.

MCA once said that he was just tired of the trope. I don't believe he ever claimed it was an in-joke in response to Fallout, but I guess it's possible.

Urquhart: We were always talking about doing Torment 2. This is no one's fault, but there are these things that happen in your life, and somehow they become urban legend. This all spawned out of a conversation I had in the office with Chris. I think the conversation was going around, and we got on to the subject of [commercial success], and I think what I said was something to the effect of, “Yeah, I mean, Torment's not done as well as Baldur’s Gate II will probably do, but it's doing fine.”

That's what I said, and I think the implication of that was that it didn't do well commercially. It did fine.

Yet people will keep saying it didn't.

Craddock: How did Chris and the team at large communicate that vision?

Spitzley: We had a modeler on the game named Aaron Brown, who also worked at Obsidian for a time. He was just a machine. He could crank out incredible art in what seemed a very short period of time. If I recall correctly, I think he put together a teaser reel to give the feel of the universe we were trying to build to sell it to people in the company.

The stuff that he did--3D models of these big, moving pieces of equipment, and these character silhouettes--I don't know if he did it on his own, but either way, it turned out incredibly. That gave us all a vision of, ‘Okay, here's what we're making.’ That's opposed to the Fallout games, especially Fallout 2, where there was a lot of panicking: ‘How are we going to get this done in time?’ It felt like there was an opportunity to do something different with Torment, and I think that helped us a lot to understand what we were trying to do.

It seems Spitzley has a bad memory. According to Tim Donley, Eric Campanella was the one responsible for making those great models really fast:

And in terms of taking his character ideas and bringing them to life in the game, was that what you were doing?

Tim: Well, we had this guy, Eric Camponella, who had come over as a concept artist to help us decide what the characters were going to look like. We had a couple people on the project who were initial modellers and animators, and the thing is… now, Eric is probably one of the best character modellers and animators I’ve ever met, but when I first saw his concepts I was like, “these aren’t that good”. His concepts were squiggly and some of the concept modellers were saying how it was really difficult to model them, and then Eric saw the finished product, he said “these haven’t been translated that well”, so I had to laugh and say “well Eric those concepts have been translated about as well as it’s gonna get, so I don’t know what to tell you buddy!”. So he said “give me a shot, I am gonna do this and I’ll show you what’s up” and he dove into it. He’d never modelled a character before, and it was like somebody had just said ‘hey, why don’t we let Michelangelo try make a sculpture!’ because he was just producing these masterpieces that looked nothing like what he’d drawn (laughs). Who cares what it looked like on paper, because the actual, final thing that he made was incredible. It was so good – we would spend so long opening his models and couldn’t understand how he’d built them so well!

So he modelled characters, animated them in 3D and then we made sprites out of them. And he was fast, like he could knock out like 3-5 a week. They weren’t low res either - they were hi-res – I mean, the character portraits you see in the game all come from those models. When you see a poster or something, those were the characters he modelled, and basically we’d just use them in the game as a tiny sprite! I think when he started doing the character models it all just came together because he, in one fell swoop, unified the look of the game.

He did the Nameless One and then everything from that point forwards was an exercise in genius. He just did these incredible models where you’d see Fall From Grace or Nordrom and you’re just blown away by how he figured it all out. It was one of those risks that you take sometimes – someone comes to you with a passionate idea that they’ve never been able to do before, and it sounds very cliché’d to say it because there’s a million movies out there where they go ‘oh he can’t do it, he’s crazy, he’s insane, you can’t make a time machine!’ and then he goes and creates the time machine and everything’s great! (laughs) And Eric was one of those stories where no one thought he could do it. But Eric believed in himself and he was willing to put in the time to prove it, and he did. It really helped us and really motivated the team while we were working through and trying to figure things out. So Eric just nuked it and it raised everyone else’s game.

Henkel: The key is empathy. You need to create something that players can relate to. It doesn’t matter whether it’s happening among humans in real life, robots or orcs, some themes are simply universal and when applied properly will elicit an emotional response from people. This was, I think, one of the greatest strokes of genius that Chris Avellone and Colin McComb managed to inject into the game. The ability for players to relate and empathize with situations and force the player to make decisions that are not easy, not black-and-white. I witnessed that on a daily basis as I was reading the design and dialogues as it progressed.

Henkel praising MCA and Colin? Nice change from "they were extremely disorganized and slow".

Spitzley: We were in the same office for a long time: Chris Avellone, myself, [lead artist] Tim Donley, and [artist] Aaron Meyers. We had a big corner office with a bunch of us, and probably an enormous amount of radiation from all the computers and monitors we had running. Tim was a constant source of humor. His attitude was really great, and he was really fun to work with. There was a lot of joking about things like, ‘Oh, this development is going horribly. Cancel Christmas.’ Just all these in-jokes.

Tim Donley said the opposite about the office's size:

It was myself, Aaron Myers, Dan Spitzley and Chris Avellone, we all shared a room and the room was the smallest office – I kid you not, they would not even put prisoners in a room that size! It was probably 2 metres by 4 metres, if that! But it was the most fun I’d ever had! It was just pure adrenalin – we’d get in there at 10 in the morning and wouldn’t leave until 10 at night, and we were just laughing and making the game all day.

Lots of Feargus and Guido, no MCA or any of the game's designers, bad info. It doesn't tell the story of how the game was made either.

I guess I'll have write the definitive piece myself at some point.

 

[Fairfax]

MCA relevant chapters are 2 (BIS), 3 (Obsidian), 6 (FO1 and 2), 10 (PoE), 17 (PS:T, but no MCA quotes).

Some thoughts on the PS:T chapter:

Spoiler

PS:T chapter is very weak.

Although Chris Avellone spent hours answering many of my questions for this book, the writing obligations that pay his living compelled him to bow out of answering the final slate—which, wouldn’t you know, concerned arguably his most famous title.

What's the point of writing a whole chapter on PS:T and not interviewing MCA? He should've waited, as I did, or asked the PS:T questions first.

Urquhart: There were three Planescape games going on when I took over the division. I ultimately killed all of them and then created a new Planescape game around Chris Avellone and Tim Donley, and Dan Spitzley, and a couple of other people. And when I say created, I don't mean I created that game. I gave them a box. I said, “Use the Infinity Engine. Planescape's about going to planes. Go to planes.”

Feargus exaggerating his contribution as usual.

It was an interesting thing in that two of them were internal, one was external. The third, the external one, wasn't so much that I killed it; it just sort of died. One of the internal projects was called Planescape PC, and the other was called Planescape PSX. What was weird was that when I took over the division, there were two or three people working on each of them, and it was unknown how any of them would get done. Then it was like, “Why are we trying to have a bunch of PS games that don't have the number of people on them it would take to complete them?”

It's strange how Feargus never mentions what happened to Planescape PC/Stonekeep 2, and I'm sure he remembers. I don't believe it's ever been confirmed that it was under BIS, but if it was, that would explain it. If nobody knows about that failure, I imagine he sees no reason to bring it up.

Craddock: Guido, how would you define your role on Planescape: Torment relative to leads such as Chris Avellone?

Henkel: I was a shepherd. My job was to keep things rolling and to keep distractions away from the team. I was the grease, essentially, enabling them with what they needed, providing feedback and ideas while making sure the project stayed true to the vision.

Craddock: Planescape: Torment was initially pitched under the title Last Rites. What was that project, and how did it differ from what it became as Planescape: Torment?

Henkel: It was only a title change, nothing more. We felt [the original title] did not represent the game properly and the religious connotations were, perhaps, too strong.

They changed it because there was a game called Last Rites already.

Craddock: Unlike in most RPGs and MMOs, rats in Planescape: Torment put up a fight. Were rats intentionally designed this way to challenge the convention of tediously grinding rats for XP in many RPGs?

Henkel: Yes. This was actually in direct response to Fallout, as a kind of in-joke.

MCA once said that he was just tired of the trope. I don't believe he ever claimed it was an in-joke in response to Fallout, but I guess it's possible.

Urquhart: We were always talking about doing Torment 2. This is no one's fault, but there are these things that happen in your life, and somehow they become urban legend. This all spawned out of a conversation I had in the office with Chris. I think the conversation was going around, and we got on to the subject of [commercial success], and I think what I said was something to the effect of, “Yeah, I mean, Torment's not done as well as Baldur’s Gate II will probably do, but it's doing fine.”

That's what I said, and I think the implication of that was that it didn't do well commercially. It did fine.

Yet people will keep saying it didn't.

Craddock: How did Chris and the team at large communicate that vision?

Spitzley: We had a modeler on the game named Aaron Brown, who also worked at Obsidian for a time. He was just a machine. He could crank out incredible art in what seemed a very short period of time. If I recall correctly, I think he put together a teaser reel to give the feel of the universe we were trying to build to sell it to people in the company.

The stuff that he did--3D models of these big, moving pieces of equipment, and these character silhouettes--I don't know if he did it on his own, but either way, it turned out incredibly. That gave us all a vision of, ‘Okay, here's what we're making.’ That's opposed to the Fallout games, especially Fallout 2, where there was a lot of panicking: ‘How are we going to get this done in time?’ It felt like there was an opportunity to do something different with Torment, and I think that helped us a lot to understand what we were trying to do.

It seems Spitzley has a bad memory. According to Tim Donley, Eric Campanella was the one responsible for making those great models really fast:

And in terms of taking his character ideas and bringing them to life in the game, was that what you were doing?

Tim: Well, we had this guy, Eric Camponella, who had come over as a concept artist to help us decide what the characters were going to look like. We had a couple people on the project who were initial modellers and animators, and the thing is… now, Eric is probably one of the best character modellers and animators I’ve ever met, but when I first saw his concepts I was like, “these aren’t that good”. His concepts were squiggly and some of the concept modellers were saying how it was really difficult to model them, and then Eric saw the finished product, he said “these haven’t been translated that well”, so I had to laugh and say “well Eric those concepts have been translated about as well as it’s gonna get, so I don’t know what to tell you buddy!”. So he said “give me a shot, I am gonna do this and I’ll show you what’s up” and he dove into it. He’d never modelled a character before, and it was like somebody had just said ‘hey, why don’t we let Michelangelo try make a sculpture!’ because he was just producing these masterpieces that looked nothing like what he’d drawn (laughs). Who cares what it looked like on paper, because the actual, final thing that he made was incredible. It was so good – we would spend so long opening his models and couldn’t understand how he’d built them so well!

So he modelled characters, animated them in 3D and then we made sprites out of them. And he was fast, like he could knock out like 3-5 a week. They weren’t low res either - they were hi-res – I mean, the character portraits you see in the game all come from those models. When you see a poster or something, those were the characters he modelled, and basically we’d just use them in the game as a tiny sprite! I think when he started doing the character models it all just came together because he, in one fell swoop, unified the look of the game.

He did the Nameless One and then everything from that point forwards was an exercise in genius. He just did these incredible models where you’d see Fall From Grace or Nordrom and you’re just blown away by how he figured it all out. It was one of those risks that you take sometimes – someone comes to you with a passionate idea that they’ve never been able to do before, and it sounds very cliché’d to say it because there’s a million movies out there where they go ‘oh he can’t do it, he’s crazy, he’s insane, you can’t make a time machine!’ and then he goes and creates the time machine and everything’s great! (laughs) And Eric was one of those stories where no one thought he could do it. But Eric believed in himself and he was willing to put in the time to prove it, and he did. It really helped us and really motivated the team while we were working through and trying to figure things out. So Eric just nuked it and it raised everyone else’s game.

Henkel: The key is empathy. You need to create something that players can relate to. It doesn’t matter whether it’s happening among humans in real life, robots or orcs, some themes are simply universal and when applied properly will elicit an emotional response from people. This was, I think, one of the greatest strokes of genius that Chris Avellone and Colin McComb managed to inject into the game. The ability for players to relate and empathize with situations and force the player to make decisions that are not easy, not black-and-white. I witnessed that on a daily basis as I was reading the design and dialogues as it progressed.

Henkel praising MCA and Colin? Nice change from "they were extremely disorganized and slow".

Spitzley: We were in the same office for a long time: Chris Avellone, myself, [lead artist] Tim Donley, and [artist] Aaron Meyers. We had a big corner office with a bunch of us, and probably an enormous amount of radiation from all the computers and monitors we had running. Tim was a constant source of humor. His attitude was really great, and he was really fun to work with. There was a lot of joking about things like, ‘Oh, this development is going horribly. Cancel Christmas.’ Just all these in-jokes.

Tim Donley said the opposite about the office's size:

It was myself, Aaron Myers, Dan Spitzley and Chris Avellone, we all shared a room and the room was the smallest office – I kid you not, they would not even put prisoners in a room that size! It was probably 2 metres by 4 metres, if that! But it was the most fun I’d ever had! It was just pure adrenalin – we’d get in there at 10 in the morning and wouldn’t leave until 10 at night, and we were just laughing and making the game all day.

Lots of Feargus and Guido, no MCA or any of the game's designers, bad info. It doesn't tell the story of how the game was made either.

I guess I'll have write the definitive piece myself at some point.

Also, it seems Feargus/Obsidian and MCA are going to court:

(Author’s note: One situation Urquhart opts to remain tight-lipped about is the circumstances surrounding the departure of Obsidian co-founder and creative director Chris Avellone, who announced that he would be moving on to new ventures in June 2015. Both parties preferred that I focus on the history of Infinity Engine games and the development of the Pillars of Eternity franchise for Beneath a Starless Sky. After investigating the allegations made by Avellone and discussing them with both parties, I agreed for two reasons: the matter between Avellone and Obsidian has been turned over to legal representatives, and neither party is able to disclose information to the public; and because both parties and I agreed that the issues had little bearing on the story I set out to tell. I informed all parties that I would mention the issue so as to avoid giving the impression that I purposely ignored or negligently overlooked it in my research.)

 

[Chris Avellone]

(Author’s note: One situation Urquhart opts to remain tight-lipped about is the circumstances surrounding the departure of Obsidian co-founder and creative director Chris Avellone, who announced that he would be moving on to new ventures in June 2015. Both parties preferred that I focus on the history of Infinity Engine games and the development of the Pillars of Eternity franchise for Beneath a Starless Sky. After investigating the allegations made by Avellone and discussing them with both parties, I agreed for two reasons: the matter between Avellone and Obsidian has been turned over to legal representatives, and neither party is able to disclose information to the public; and because both parties and I agreed that the issues had little bearing on the story I set out to tell. I informed all parties that I would mention the issue so as to avoid giving the impression that I purposely ignored or negligently overlooked it in my research.)

That's odd and not true. There is no legal battle, and I haven't heard from anyone from Obsidian. If he was told that, though, that's not on me.

Skimming the article, there's some inaccuracies (for example, I never started out as a lead designer on NWN2), but I haven't read it all - it's an impressive read, though.

Also, on the PST subject - to be fair, David did send questions, but there were about 130+ questions in the entire interview and I couldn't get to them all, it was just too much (my answers were already at 23 pages on just Black Isle and Fallout 2 alone, and doing just the Planescape section would have been longer than that). I also had to do some back and forth to ask for clarification and citations in some quotes for some of the questions I was getting, correct some of the questions on the owners, when we left BIS, etc. and that kind of wore me out as well (again, not his fault, as I think unless you were there, some info is hard to know).

In short, I wouldn't put any blame on the interviewer - I answered what I could in the time provided. To put it in perspective, most interviews I get keep it to 10-12 questions, and that's why I can find time to do them - once they go beyond that, they become increasingly difficult to find time to do.

EDIT: What Spitzley means in his modeler answer was Aaron Brown was largely an environment modeler (and an amazing one), and he did help Tim put together a teaser trailer to help sell the game's vision with structures, areas, etc. - the character modeler was mostly (if not all) Eric Campanella, though, but I'm not sure how much he was involved with the internal teaser trailer (he started later on the project than Tim and Aaron did).

EDIT 2: My recollection was SK2 was under BIS, DeMilt was Lead Producer on it, and I think it would make for a good story, yes. We lost a lot of faith in getting things done at BIS because of SK2 - it just seemed to burn money with little or nothing to show for it, and maintaining that team was very, very expensive (the team had the most highly-paid devs at the company).

 

[Fairfax]

Also, on the PST subject - to be fair, David did send questions, but there were about 130+ questions in the entire interview and I couldn't get to them all, it was just too much (my answers were already at 23 pages on just Black Isle and Fallout 2 alone, and doing just the Planescape section would have been longer than that).

It's a shame most of it was cut, then. You only got a dozen quotes or so about FO2 and BIS.

In short, I wouldn't put any blame on the interviewer - I answered what I could in the time provided. To put it in perspective, most interviews I get keep it to 10-12 questions, and that's why I can find time to do them - once they go beyond that, they become increasingly difficult to find time to do.

Yeah, I don't want to be too harsh on him. It's still a really nice effort and a good read from what I've read. I just felt like the PS:T chapter was a waste, and overall it's a bit light on research, taking a lot of claims at face value.

EDIT: What Spitzley means in his modeler answer was Aaron Brown was largely an environment modeler (and an amazing one), and he did help Tim put together a teaser trailer to help sell the game's vision with structures, areas, etc. - the character modeler was mostly (if not all) Eric Campanella, though, but I'm not sure how much he was involved with the internal teaser trailer (he started later on the project than Tim and Aaron did).

Oh, I see. Do you mean this teaser trailer?

 

[Chris Avellone]

Oh, I see. Do you mean this teaser trailer?

Yeah - if I remember correctly, a chunk of those environments in the teaser were Aaron Brown's (and others), the character models were likely Eric's (sorry, it's been a while).

Dan Spitzley was (and is) right, though, Aaron Brown was a machine (and did quality work, too) and so did Eric Campanella.

 

[AwesomeButton]

The "book" seems like largely a PR piece, rather than a reliable source of information.

This may be my personal reading, but I felt sad to observe an air of fatigue. These guys speak in past tense with a feeling of nostalgia, as if they acknowledge that indeed they used to do inventive and innovative things, but that period is behind them now. Today they would rather be directors of interactive first-person 3D presentations where gameplay is substituted by dialogue at best.

Didn't the company that was doing this kind of things recently go bankrupt?

The question I would have asked, if I was making an interview, right after the one about their favorite IE game, and grognard to grognard, would have been - how much of the same passion did you feel while making your Renaissance Infinity Engine games in the 2010s? And I would try to gauge how honest they would be with the answer to that.

 

[Safav Hamon]

These guys speak in past tense with a feeling of nostalgia, as if they acknowledge that indeed they used to do inventive and innovative things

Being unoriginal is the last thing I would criticize them for. Love or hate them, Deadfire and Tyranny have some unique and inventive gameplay systems.

The question I would have asked, if I was making an interview, right after the one about their favorite IE game, and grognard to grognard, would have been - how much of the same passion did you feel while making your Renaissance Infinity Engine games in the 2010s?

It's no secret that Josh Sawyer would rather be working on anything else. I don't blame him honestly. Even though I like Obsidian's infinity engine clones, I've never been an infinity engine fanboy.

 

[Grunker]

Deadfire sales must’ve been a gutpunch. A shame.

 

[Safav Hamon]

They probably care more about good reviews than sales.

Obsidian has a triple-A game in development funded by Private Division. If they need funding for a smaller project, they can always crowdfund or find a publisher to work under contract for.