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

ushas

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Heh, reading comprehension :oops:
I suppose it doesn't have any relation to adventure Beneath a Steel Sky?
 
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It's a shame most of it was cut, then. You only got a dozen quotes or so about FO2 and BIS.

Anyone who constructs a text from interview questions should leave the raw, unedited interview as a supplement to the text. Maybe we can still get those if we ask nicely?
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Cain's main issue always seemed to be with Feargus, though. He still had bad blood with BIS after Fargo left Interplay, and was clearly talking about Feargus here:

Calis: Say, Fargo accidentally left the FO license in his pants when he quit IPlay and his wife sent it to you with a note "Here you go, love, [insert name]"

Tim Cain: Ah...ok, here's my multiline response (Tim Cain story hour time)...When I finished FO, I was exhausted and tired of FO. After all, I worked on it for 3.5 years! So I gave the whole thing over to my assistant producer and started thinking of a new RPG. Well, things weren't working out. Fargo wanted me to take over. I said no. He said I owed him, for the opportunity he gave me to do the first one. So I started FO2. But things were still bad. People secondguessed what was good for the game, and they wanted in on it, since it looked like a "big thing" now, not some grade B product, which was what FO was viewed as. So I got tired of this whole thing. I felt like I was in a dark hole. So I left. But that was 4 years ago. I have done another game, and designs on 3 other games. I wouldnt mind returning to FO, but not with those people running it. There, I'm done. Whew!

Calis: any chance we can trick you into being more specific than "those people"?

Tim Cain: Nah. They threaten to sue.

The book's account of this:

TIM CAIN

It boiled down to, there was really no way to make Fallout 2's development like Fallout's. We tried. We tried to Fargo, we talked to Feargus. We had lots of meeting about how we could try to put that lightning back in a bottle, but there was really no way to do it.

It turned into a franchise. It had gone from being a fun project that no one paid attention to, to a franchise. That wasn't what we'd wanted to do. We didn't sign up to make a franchise. We did a design for Fallout 2, because the original one got thrown out, and stayed for about three or four months while it got started.

BRIAN FARGO

The irony was that we made money every year we were in business, up until we went public. Then everything hit the fan. I was scrambling. I was spending very little of my time in development. I was constantly trying to save the company. It was putting a lot of pressure on people. But despite the fact that we had lots of guns at our heads, we had Sacrifice, Giants [Citizen Kabuto], Baldur’s Gate II. There were great things coming out of Interplay all the way to the end, despite the fact we were under pressure, and that we had been capitalized.

FEARGUS URQUHART

I do understand what Tim and Leonard are saying, but on the other side, I think they had gotten a taste of doing something their way, and they wanted more of it. That's not bad at all. I think it's admirable. It's awesome, actually, for them to identify that they wanted to do more and be in charge more, and the best way they could do that was to do their own thing. I think that's awesome.

There was a conversation with Brian in his office. You realize some things at junctures in your life and career where you're like, this is a juncture, and I don't think Tim and Leonard understood at the time that they'd come to a juncture. Maybe they did, and maybe they didn't.

Tim Cain, Leonard Boyarsky, and Jason Anderson held several meetings with Brian Fargo to express their unhappiness with Interplay’s direction. The trio pointed to specific grievances. When Boyarsky and the artists drew up artwork for the game’s box, marketers ignored it and drafted their own. Executives in the U.K. branch of Interplay dictated that children could not be harmed in Fallout 2. Cain, Boyarsky, and Anderson weren’t looking to torture any virtual kids, but children had existed in their post-apocalyptic setting, and life for them should be depicted as unpleasant for them as it was for adults.

Meetings continued through July 1997, when Fallout was just three months away from its projected release date . That month, Cain recommended to Feargus Urquhart that Fred Hatch, one of his producers, should be promoted to associate producer on the game. Cain claimed that Urquhart did not process his request, but admitted that Urquhart did test Hatch to evaluate whether or not he was fit to helm Fallout 2. According to Cain, Hatch’s designs came up short of the lofty expectations of a Fallout sequel. Urquhart informed Cain that he would not force him to make the game, but Hatch would not be promoted, nor would he lead the project.

Cain kept working and taking meetings with Fargo. Sometimes Urquhart, who Cain wanted present at the meetings, joined in. Other times he did not, either because he did not know about them, or because he chose not to attend.

FEARGUS URQUHART

We had this conversation about compensation. It was about how they could be better compensated for making products that made a lot of money and things like that. Brian's an awesome salesman. He presented something, and Tim and Leonard tacitly agreed. They said, "Yeah, that sounds pretty good," and everybody was about to get up and leave.

I said, "Everybody, stop."

BRIAN FARGO

At first, they were going to go, and then they decided to stay, and then they decided to go. They just wanted to do their own thing.

FEARGUS URQUHART

I said, "Tim and Leonard, just so you know, what Brian is going to take from what you just said is that while some tweaking could be done to the topics we just talked about, this is the [outcome], and you have said 'yes' to that. If you leave, because you guys feel this is just a conversation, know that that is not how Brian is taking it."

I said, "Brian, sorry I'm talking for you, but is that correct?" He said, "Oh, yeah, absolutely." And they said, "Oh. Well, yeah, I mean...”

We had that conversation, and I think at that point, Tim and Leonard were already looking at different opportunities and wanted to do different things, and they wanted to get out from under Interplay. I think that's when that road really started in my brain: We were looking at a possibility of them leaving. The next thing I knew about that situation was them quitting.

TIM CAIN

I remember thinking, Okay, you guys love this game? You make something. I want to go do something else.

Fallout 2’s launch date slipped. That Thanksgiving, Cain let Urquhart know he was thinking of leaving Interplay. A month later, he went to Fargo and announced that he would be leaving the company. Boyarsky and Anderson had confided in Cain that they had no interest in making Fallout 2 without him and, unbeknownst to Fargo, planned to leave with him. Fargo talked Cain into staying a while longer. Cain’s issues persisted until in January 1998, when he followed through on his gut instinct to leave. Boyarsky and Anderson followed him out the door, and the three went out to co-found Troika Games.

Fargo and Urquhart recognized the significance of Cain, Boyarsky, and Anderson leaving Interplay and Black Isle. The trio had created one of Interplay’s most successful games, and could make or break the sequel.

BRIAN FARGO

I was very concerned. I tried very hard to get them to stay. Very, very, very hard.

FEARGUS URQUHART

I didn't talk to them about staying because, maybe I have a weird philosophy, but when people come and quit—and we still do this at Obsidian—I always explain, "Look, maybe you're finding it weird that I'm not asking you to stay, but you must have spent days, weeks, whatever, thinking about this and deciding that it's the best decision for you, so it's not my place to get you to stay."

I do say, "If there's something very specific about why you're leaving, I wish we could talk about it, but in general, if you've made a decision, I support you in that decision." It was the same with them.

BRIAN FARGO

We were fortunate that Fallout 2 was well-entrenched for what kind of game it was. Coming up with the first [entry in a franchise] is the hardest, in my opinion. Fortunately, the team that was still there, they picked up the slack and they did a wonderful job.

Interplay management did not make a fuss over the Fallout creators’ departure. One day they were at the office, and the next they were gone. Many of the game’s developers had no clue their managers had even been thinking of leaving and were blindsided by the news.

ERIC DeMILT

I heard the same way ninety percent of Interplay probably found out, an oh-my-god-rumor-mill sort of thing. Everybody was sitting around talking to each other, like, "Oh my god, what happened?"

CHRIS AVELLONE [designer, Black Isle Studios; co-founder, Obsidian Entertainment]

I wasn’t aware of the CEO, division director, and team’s issues regarding Fallout 2. In fact, all we heard were a number of stories about what had happened that later turned out to be untrue.

ERIC DeMILT

You had the official company line, and Fargo was pissed, and Ferg was dealing with it. Then you had a couple of different rumor mills going about how it went down and why, stuff like that. Because Tim and I were friends, I don't think it hit me as a surprise. Like, "How are you not happy here at Shangri-La?"

SCOTT EVERTS

I was surprised. I didn't see it coming. It was a little depressing, but Feargus was really good. He said, "Okay, guys, let's get through this and move forward."

I've known those guys for a long time. I hung out with them after they moved on from Interplay. A bunch of them are here [at Obsidian] now. But at the time, it was surprising. It felt like the people who had created Fallout were just gone.

CHRIS AVELLONE

Their departures changed the nature of Fallout 2. This happens whenever someone else pours a foundation for a game and then it gets transferred: You miss all the reasons for why the foundation and certain set-ups were placed the way they were.
 
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When Brian first saw it, he said, "Oh, just take my name off that." I was like, "Brian, you gave us three years and three million dollars. I think your name can be on it."

It's a new piece of information or I just haven't read it before?
 

Fairfax

Arcane
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Messages
3,518
It's a shame most of it was cut, then. You only got a dozen quotes or so about FO2 and BIS.

Anyone who constructs a text from interview questions should leave the raw, unedited interview as a supplement to the text. Maybe we can still get those if we ask nicely?
Perhaps. I've already talked shit about it, though, so someone else should ask. +M

The book's account of this:
I expected a self-censored version, but that's just misleading.

This is a more honest version from the book Gamers At Work, back when Cain still had a grudge and didn't work for Feargus:

Ramsay: Tell me about the day you left Interplay. Why did you leave? What were you thinking?

Cain: While Fallout was in production, I was unhappy at how development worked at Interplay. People who didn’t play games, or didn’t even seem to like games, were making decisions about how to market the game, what features it should have, and when it should ship.

Worse, decisions were being made that changed the game and required us to do substantial changes, and these decisions could and should have been made months earlier. For example, the UK office said no children could be harmed in the game, but children had been in the design for years. Another example: Interplay spent a lot of money for an external marketing agency to develop treatments for the box and ad, and they were terrible.

My artists produced better work on their own time, but marketing did not want to use them. However, when Interplay’s president, Brian Fargo, saw their work, he liked what he saw, so the art was used. My role as producer appeared to consist of arguing with people and trying to defend the game from devolving into a lesser product.

In July 1997—Fallout would ship three months later in October—I had decided that I did not want to work on Fallout 2. I submitted to my boss, Feargus Urquhart, a review for my line producer Fred Hatch that recommended he should be promoted to associate producer and assigned Fallout 2. Although the review was not processed, Feargus gave Fred the game to see how he would perform. When the first designs were submitted, I really didn’t like them. Neither did Feargus, nor did Brian Fargo.

Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, who were the two artists and designers on Fallout with whom I would later start Troika, didn’t feel any different either. So, Leonard and Jason wrote a different storyline for the game, which Brian liked more, but he told me he’d like to see what I could do. When I asked Feargus about Fred’s promotion—his review was now long overdue—he told me that while he wouldn’t make me do Fallout 2, the promotion wasn’t going to happen, and Fred wouldn’t get the sequel.

Feargus planned to give Fallout 2 to the producer of Descent to Undermountain if I didn’t take it. While I personally liked that producer, I hated Descent. I thought the sequel would suffer under similar direction. I told Feargus that I would do the sequel and began working on a design.

Before leaving for Thanksgiving, I informed Feargus that I was thinking of quitting. I wanted him to know how I was feeling about development and how deeply I had been affected. I was worried that the same problems I had experienced during the development of Fallout would persist during the making of Fallout 2. Feargus said he understood.

When I returned, he asked if I had made a decision. I had not, and so I began work on Fallout 2. I worked out a new design and made an aggressive schedule to get the game out by the end of October 1998. I then started working on the game as lead designer and producer.

But the same problems resurfaced. For example, to save time and money, I had decided to have the same internal artists make the box for Fallout 2. Feargus was upset that I had made such a decision without consulting him, but when I talked to Marketing, they were fine with the idea. But then Sales decided to change the box size and style, which would create problems for making the second box look similar to the first. In a meeting with Sales where Feargus was present, I was told that the decision was made and “there will be no further discussion on it.”

I decided I had enough. Leonard and Jason, who could tell I was unhappy, had told me weeks earlier that they were unwilling to work on the sequel without me. Rather than simply quit, I remembered that Brian had told me years ago, after a programmer had quit under bad circumstances, that he wished people would come and talk to him rather than quit.

I went to Brian in December and told him that I was unhappy and wanted to quit. I decided to be frank and honest, and told him that other people also weren’t happy and might resign with me. He wanted names. I told him about Leonard and Jason. Other people declined to be mentioned.

Throughout December and January, the three of us met with Brian to discuss the problems and see what solutions might be found. We wanted to meet with Brian as a group to prevent any misunderstandings that might arise from separate meetings. In fact, I wanted Feargus there, too, but Brian only included him once toward the end. Brian seemed surprised that I was getting resistance to doing Fallout 2 my way. His attitude was, “You did well on the first game, so just do it again on the second.”

Unfortunately, this meant running to Brian whenever anyone tried to force their own ideas into the game, which didn’t seem like a good working environment. We discussed this problem and raised other issues at these meetings, such as converting our bonus plan to a royalty-based plan. Brian did not like the idea of royalties. As for how to handle creative control, Brian said I could divide the responsibilities with Feargus, so I could handle Marketing and other departments directly, and they would have to effectively treat me as a division director. This seemed unsatisfactory to me, but Feargus seemed very unhappy that his own authority and responsibilities concerning Fallout 2 would be greatly reduced in this plan.

It was unclear how some issues would get resolved, such as budgeting for equipment and maintenance, since I didn’t have a division director’s budget. Brian handwaved these issues, saying that we’d work them out.

At that point, I regretted not abiding my original instinct to walk out and trying to work things out with Brian. In mid-January, I decided to leave the com-pany. I told Feargus, who accepted my resignation and asked me to work until the end of the month. We went to talk to Trish Wright, the executive producer, who was unhappy to see me leave but accepted it. She warned me that Brian might be very upset, but I wanted to tell him that day. I returned to my office and told Leonard and Jason that I had quit, effective at the end of the month. Then I went and told Brian.

As expected, he was not happy. We talked for an hour, but the meeting was cut short because I had a dental appointment. While I was at the dentist, Leonard and Jason also decided to tender their resignations. I didn’t speak to Brian after that day, and I finished out the month with my team.

My team was surprised and unhappy, having heard nothing of my months of meetings with Brian. I met with them to make sure the design for Fallout 2 was up-to-date. And I met with Feargus; my replacement, Eric Demilt, who would produce Fallout 2; and other designers, such as Chris Avellone and Zeb Cook, who would assume my design responsibilities.

I made sure that everyone understood the new design and where all of my documents were located on the local network. Phil Adam, the head of human resources, met with me once, to get my view on why I was leaving, but I otherwise did not interact with Brian or the administration.

On my last day, I packed my personal effects and went to Human Resources to process out. I was redirected to Legal, where I was asked to sign a letter that reminded me of my confidentiality agreement. I learned later that Leonard and Jason were not asked to sign such a letter. And then I went home, wondering what to do, now that I had a good title under my belt but had effectively cut ties with my last company.

When Brian first saw it, he said, "Oh, just take my name off that." I was like, "Brian, you gave us three years and three million dollars. I think your name can be on it."

It's a new piece of information or I just haven't read it before?
No, it's not new.
 

Infinitron

I post news
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Messages
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Reddit AMA is live: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/9ndh6v/we_are_obsidian_entertainment_and_david_l/

We are Obsidian Entertainment and David L. Craddock, creators of fine RPGs and author of “Beneath a Starless Sky,” a FREE online book that recounts the making of Pillars of Eternity 1-2 and the Infinity Engine RPGs. Ask us anything!
renderTimingPixel.png

Hey, Reddit! I am David L. Craddock, author of Beneath a Starless Sky: Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine Era of RPGs, an online book that chronicles the making of Obsidian Entertainment’s Pillars of Eternity franchise and the classic roleplaying games that influenced it. You can read the entire book FOR FREE on Shacknews.com right now!

Beneath a Starless Sky is the culmination of eight months of research and over 40 hours of interviews with developers from Obsidian Entertainment, BioWare, Black Isle Studios, and Interplay. Several Obsidian developers are joining me today: Adam Brennecke, Executive Producer and Lead Programmer Justin Bell, Audio Director Mikey Dowling, PR ManagerKaz Aruga, Lead Artist Kate Dollarhyde, Narrative Designer Paul Kirsch, Narrative Designer

Here’s Obsidian’s proof, and here’s my proof.

Here are some stats about Beneath a Starless Sky: over 480 pages and 200,000 words, all available to read for free on Shacknews; games covered include Fallout 1 and 2, Pillars of Eternity 1 and II, Baldur’s Gate 1 and II, Icewind Dale 1 and II, Planescape: Torment, and even more Obsidian RPGs; chapters span a mix of narrative-style accounts, Q-and-A interviews, oral histories, and video features such as a 35-minute documentary and a 75-minute panel.

We’ll begin answering questions at 5pm Eastern / 2pm Pacific. Ask us about Obsidian’s history, specific games such as Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire and the recently released DLC expansions, the process of writing and/or being interviewed for Beneath a Starless Sky—anything at all!
 

Roguey

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Back in October, David Craddock put out a novel-length book about Pillars of Eternity and the Infinity Engine era of RPGs. I've now finished it, and I've compiled a ton of quotes of mostly-never-discussed info, since an hour's worth of reading is far more accessible than an hours-long book. I'm totally doing you all a favor.

Feargus and Brian confirm that Interplay would have died sooner if not for Baldur's Gate II:

"We were definitely making money, and then Baldur’s Gate II was just the hockey stick up,” Urquhart said, using a business metaphor that refers to the hockey stick-like shape of sales that steadily dip only to spike upward. “Baldur’s Gate II pretty much saved Interplay. If it had not shipped in the fall of 2000—and I've never talked to Brian [Fargo] about this—I have a feeling that things could have gotten pretty dire. It had shipped in two million units by our Christmas party in December, which was amazing."

"I would say the Baldur’s Gate franchise was that impactful," Fargo confirmed. "That product absolutely helped extend the life of Interplay, no question, but we had a heavy royalty load. We had to pay BioWare a hefty royalty, and TSR on top of that. If that wasn't an internally developed title with no royalties, boy, it would have been a way different outcome.”

Feargus intimidated upper management into letting his employees play their precious MMOs on company time:

Feargus Urquhart’s primary job was making sure Black Isle’s wants and needs were met. If his developers needed new software or equipment to make more or better games, they got it. If they wanted to play games to unwind from the rigors of making their own, Urquhart made it happen. Once, Interplay’s IT department blocked all online RPGs after management—not Brian Fargo—decreed that Anarchy Online, Ultima Online, and EverQuest were crimping productivity. Urquhart could have gone above IT’s head and complained to Fargo, but he didn’t. There was no need. Reason, and the reminder of the power Black Isle wielded, were his weapons.

“This is generally how the conversation went with IT,” Urquhart said, launching into a summary: “‘Look, this is what I want. It is not unreasonable, and you know that if you just say no, I’m going to see Brian, and Brian's going to call you into his office, and you're going to have to explain to Brian why you don't want to give me this very reasonable thing.’ I think that's what I tried to do with my people: To empower them to do what they needed to do,” he said.

Urquhart's Betrayal:

“He was my only manager, and certainly seemed to have had my back at key points in my life,” Chris Avellone said. “That was significant enough that I felt loyal to him more than [to] Interplay.”

Josh claims he's not what Fairfax thinks he is:

Josh Sawyer doesn’t allow himself to develop an inflated sense of self-importance when he lands a big project. Any enthusiasm he displays stem from his desire to deliver a great product for its core audience. He started as a tabletop player and designer, fell in love with The Bard’s Tale the first time he played it, and was floored by the open-ended design of Fallout.

Baldur's Gate III: The Black Hound wasn't even going to be in the Forgotten Realms until Interplay told them how utterly ridiculous that would be:

Internally, Baldur’s Gate III became known as Project Jefferson. Chris Parker looked past the presidential veneer and squirmed at the idea of creating another Baldur’s Gate title. He understood why keeping the title of a best-selling franchise made sense financially, but he and a few others on the team expressed interest in changing up the setting. Sawyer agreed, going so far as to label the name “misleading.” He wanted to change the game’s setting.

Interplay’s higher-ups shot down the suggestion for a change in setting. The Baldur’s Gate III team kept working.

:slamdunk:

Around 9:30 one evening in July 2001, Scott Everts and Torn’s lead character artist were poring over six pages of instructions for integrating a character model into the engine when Urquhart walked up. “Feargus says, ‘What are you guys doing?’” Everts recalled. “We said, ‘We're trying to get this goddamn character to appear in the engine.’ He said, ‘Just go home.’ I said, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because I'm going to cancel this game tomorrow.’ We looked at each other and said, ‘Awesome.’”

The downside to no longer having to wrestle with uncooperative technology soon became apparent. Black Isle was hit with its first round of layoffs the very next day, sending five people home without jobs. That afternoon, Urquhart called Josh Sawyer into his office and told him they needed a slam dunk to make up for lost time and resources spent on Torn. That slam dunk would be Icewind Dale II.

More like Absurdian:

“We listed all these names, and we had Scorched Earth, Three Clown Games or Three Clown Entertainment,” Urquhart remembered.

“I remember the bad ones because we used to joke about naming it things like 'Three Clowns Studio,' stuff like that, which we refer to every now and then when we think we've done something amazingly stupid,” Parker added.

Feargus was all about those consoles (out of alleged necessity):

Urquhart had been a student of the industry. One of the chief reasons for Interplay’s worsening finances had been Fargo’s insistence on sticking with PC games when consumers were adopting consoles such as Sony’s PlayStation 2 and Microsoft’s Xbox in greater numbers. He was determined not to make the same mistake.

“By the time we started Obsidian in 2003, we really understood that the future was console [driven]. I'm not saying I personally thought consoles were the future of gaming,” Urquhart clarified. “It was just the reality of the industry. There was the much lauded, over 2001 and 2003, death of the PC as a gaming platform. If we wanted to make RPGs, we were going to do that on consoles.”

Feargus was technically-not-poaching:

Chris Avellone had been ready to resign the moment he’d caught wind of Urquhart’s resignation. Urquhart had been the only manager he’d had in the industry, and he was fiercely loyal. Urquhart cautioned him to stay put. He didn’t even have a company for Avellone to join just yet. Avellone waited, working on Project Van Buren—also known as Fallout 3—until he got the all-clear.

“During the Interplay resignation interview, I brought up the Baldur’s Gate III cancelation and the other troubles the studio was having as my reasons for leaving,” Avellone said. “The HR department didn’t seem to be aware of these issues enough to understand my concerns or why it would matter to me, which was further proof it was the right time to leave. No one likes seeing their work flushed for careless reasons, especially years of work. I know they questioned me quite a bit about my resignation and if Feargus had approached me for work. They were less interested in why I was leaving versus if Feargus was poaching people.”

One of Obsidian's first pitches was Resident Evil: The RPG

Firing off pitches gave way to yet more ideas for pitches. One was an outline for a roleplaying game that crossed zombies with biohazards, a concept inspired by Capcom’s Resident Evil series. Publishers didn’t bite.

Josh and Feargus were mad at each other for years because of the arguments they had during Icewind Dale II which is why Josh didn't join up straight away even while he was posting away on the Obsidian forums:

Monahan stepped up to produce Neverwinter Nights 2 with a team of ten, including Chris Avellone as creative director and Ferret Baudoin as lead designer. Near the end of the project, another Black Isle alum joined in. “I think Josh was either talking with Feargus about getting a job at Obsidian as a senior designer, but he'd been posting on our forums for a while,” Brennecke recalled of his first online brush with Josh Sawyer. “I was like, 'Who is this guy? He's posting all this stuff about Neverwinter Nights, and Dungeons & Dragons, and all this weird stuff.’ That's weird, having another game developer posting on your forums. He'd post a lot and was very opinionated about things.”

Brennecke was impressed by Sawyer. Based on the arguments, structure, and flow of his forum posts, he was either an expert in Dungeons & Dragons, or a very opinionated fan. His suggestions spoke to an understanding of game design that only an insider could have.
...
Sawyer nearly went down with the ship. Citing loses of over $20 million in 2003 alone, Interplay closed Black Isle Studios that December. Unlike many of his peers, he did not seek out Urquhart, Monahan, and Parker right away. He and Urquhart had butted heads over design during development of Icewind Dale II. After Sawyer left, both he and Urquhart agreed that Sawyer should look for work somewhere besides Obsidian, at least for a time. Sawyer applied to a design position at Ensemble Studios where he hoped to work on the Age of Mythology strategy game. When he landed an interview, the manager who spoke with him insinuated that Sawyer’s resume made him better suited to roleplaying games. Sawyer thanked him for his time.

His next interview, at Midway Games, went much better for both parties. He would lead design efforts on Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows, an action-RPG, alongside Doom and Quake co-creator John Romero, the project director at Midway’s San Diego studio. Romero’s vision was to create a new type of Gauntlet that injected roleplaying and story elements into the traditional arcade, hack-and-slash formula. Sawyer liked the game’s direction. When he wasn’t working on design, he hopped on Obsidian’s forums to talk D&D with other users.

“I kept participating in those threads in part because I wanted to give my perspective of a developer who had worked on Dungeons & Dragons games,” Sawyer explained. “I did it without really asking anyone at Obsidian if they were okay with me doing it. There were certain times where I said, 'Look, guys, these things are pretty hard to implement regardless of what engine you're talking about. These things are hard; these concepts don't come across from tabletop into CRPGs.' Just debating interface things and stuff like that, mostly because I was into roleplaying games and I just wanted to talk with people about them.”

In the spring of 2005, Darren Monahan reached out to Sawyer and invited him to help guide development of Neverwinter Nights 2 as a senior designer. Sawyer hesitated. His team at Midway was in the trenches on Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows. He wouldn’t feel right leaving at such a crucial time—until managers released John Romero and commanded Sawyer and the rest of the team to sew up the game in time for a Christmas release a few months later.

His vision for Gauntlet compromised, Sawyer met with Urquhart. A few days later, Midway announced his departure.

If Josh could do it over again, he'd cut disguises from New vegas (a mistake imo):

The Caravan didn't get done in a good state, the card game that we made up. I would have cut that. There were a few other features, like the disguise system, which was very cool but we didn't have code support for it so we did it all through scripting—that became very buggy; I probably would have rolled that back. I think that with New Vegas, it was a miracle that it got done, but, yeah, it was really buggy.”

Tim Cain made South Park turn based to make it more casual:

At Cain’s first meeting, one of the designers suggested he play Stick of Truth so the team could get feedback from someone who had never tried it before. “He put a controller in my hand, and I was terrible,” Cain admitted. “Part of the reason I was terrible was because there was an awful lot you could do. You could pick different spells, you could block, you could re-position where you're standing.”

Cain asked to take a crack at converting the game from real-time gameplay to turn-based. If combat unfolded over turns, players could take their time thinking through attacks. He produced a turn-based demo in seventy-two hours.

“We really liked it turn-based, and that's how we shipped it. It's designed for casual players, and I think getting rid of the time pressure in combat made the game more casual friendly,” Cain said. When his six months were up, Cain was having so much fun that he asked the co-founders to make his position permanent. They consented.

When Tim Cain was a teenage boy, a group of Navy men introduced him to D&D and the gay lifestyle:

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons when I was fourteen. My mom actually got me into it. She worked at an office in D.C. with a bunch of Navy admirals and stuff. A few of the "boys" played Dungeons & Dragons, so we went over to their house one weekend and played it, and I really got into it.

Fargo tried to make Star Trek's 3D chess game but was dismayed to find out it was all a bunch of nonsense:

We were also going to do a Star Trek chess game with a 3D chess board, but we didn't do it because no one could figure out how to play it. There were no rules for it. It was just a visual thing for TV shows. Some fans made rules, and we found out it was impossible to play. I know there are real rules now, but at the time we decided [to table it].

Cain got his job at Interplay thanks to his familiarity with D&D:

I sent my resume out, and Interplay was literally three or four miles away. They were making the Bard's Tale Construction Set. I found out later that [the job was between] me and someone else, and I got the job because I had worked on a game before, and because I knew the Dungeons & Dragons rules. The questions came down to, they asked us both what THAC0 was, and the other programmer didn't know.

Almost no one at Interplay wanted to make a game from scratch:

TIM CAIN

Since everybody could technically go home at six, I sent out an email saying, "I'm going to be in Conference Room 3 with a couple pepperonis and a cheese pizza at six. If you want to talk about developing a new game, I've got the engine partially written. I can show you what the features are. I can kind of show you how the scripting is going to work. Come by and we can talk about what genres you like."

I hadn't even picked that out. There was no art, no genre.

LEONARD BOYARSKY

Only five or six people showed up. Which, to me, was shocking. Even if you didn't want to design a game from scratch—and I couldn't believe people didn't want to be involved in that—there was free pizza! If you don't care about one, I'd think you'd care about the other.

TIM CAIN

I remember what was surprising at the time was how few people showed up. I expected there to be twenty or thirty people packed into that conference room because, hey, we can make whatever game we want! Instead there were maybe eight, ten.

Leonard Boyarsky disagrees with the Fenstermaker approach to storytelling:
If you give people every bit of information about a setting, that takes something away from the setting. It makes it feel more clinical or sterile. There are a lot of games that do it really well, so I think it's more of a style thing.

SPECIAL came together so quickly because it was homebrew system Chris Taylor created in middle school (Tim Cain convinced him to add Luck as a stat):

CHRIS TAYLOR

We had a meeting about what we wanted to do. Now, all game designers fall out of love with D&D at one point or another, and they make their own roleplaying game. I had done this in middle school. I had made an RPG on paper called Medieval—which is a terrible name, and I'm embarrassed to say it out loud after all these years—and it had all the stats that are in S.P.E.C.I.A.L., even though we weren't calling it S.P.E.C.I.A.L. at the time; it had all of S.P.E.C.I.A.L.'s core mechanics; it had a lot of those elements.

It wasn't complete. It wasn't an exact copy. But all the stats were there, and how it fundamentally worked was pretty solid. I had run games with this. I was very used to it. It was my system, so I had an answer for any question about it.

Early sales figures for Fallout:

On October 9, 1997, Fallout hit store shelves like a nuclear bomb. The game rocketed up sales charts, selling over 53,000 units in just two months. Interplay more than doubled that number over the next year.

Feargus broke the chain of command to make Baldur's Gate happen when his boss scoffed at the idea:

Urquhart went to his boss at the time and showed him Battleground Infinity. The manager gave him a get-outta-town look. Roleplaying games had been Interplay’s bread and butter at one point, back in the heyday of The Bard’s Tale, which had put Brian Fargo and his company on the map. Now the genre was dead or at least on life support. Compared to cutting-edge genres like first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, RPGs were slow and too complex for mainstream consumers. They were ugly to boot, the polar opposite of fast, gorgeous games like Doom, Myst, and StarCraft, which topped sales charts.

The manager ended his meeting with Urquhart with the ultimate dismissal: Battleground Infinity was stupid.

Urquhart dug his feet in. "It was one of those times when I said, ‘That's not good enough. No. It's not stupid.’"

While Urquhart had pull within his division, Black Isle was ultimately one piece of Interplay. He went up the next rung on the corporate ladder to Trish Wright, his boss’s boss and the vice president of product development and marketing. He told Wright he believed in his gut that BioWare’s game had the potential to be a huge success, and that Interplay would be foolish to pass on it. Wright told him to show her the demo.

Urquhart paused. His computer was old and hadn’t been capable of running the demo in all its glory. He went to Michael Bernstein, one of the company’s programmers, and asked him to load it on his machine. Wright and Urquhart watched over Bernstein’s shoulder. When the demo finished, she turned to Urquhart and asked if Brian Fargo had seen it. Urquhart said he hadn’t.

Wright picked up the phone in Bernstein's office. A few minutes later, Fargo watched the demo play out on Bernstein’s screen while Urquhart gave his elevator pitch: a cutting-edge, party-based RPG based on the D&D license.

At the end of the demonstration, Fargo told Urquhart to sign it.

Dr. Muzyka wanted Baldur's Gate to be turn-based but the lead designer James Ohlen insisted on real time because that's where the sales were:

Ohlen and Ray Muzyka butted heads over combat in Baldur’s Gate. Muzyka loved the Gold Box games because they had been predicated on turn-based combat, just like Dungeons & Dragons tabletop games. Turn-based systems allowed players to think through their moves before taking action. Ohlen appreciated the classics, but insisted that turn-based play was outmoded. Real-time strategy titles such as WarCraft II and Diablo proved that the future of gaming lay in fast, think-on-your-feet tactics.

They reached a compromise. Baldur’s Gate would play out in real-time, but players could pause the action during fights to take stock of their situation and queue up orders for their party to carry out when the action resumed. "You got the finer control of turn-based, but at the same time, you got the kind of exciting action of a real-time [strategy game]," Ohlen said.

Bioware was adding new content to BG almost up until they went gold because a lot of maps still felt empty:

The Infinity Engine’s flexibility came in handy. Four months out from launching Baldur’s Gate, Interplay’s QA testers opined that many areas in the world felt empty. The game was solid in terms of bugs and glitches, but was lacking in things to see, do, talk with, and kill. For the last two months, BioWare’s team made a big push, churning out more characters, items, and quests for players to undertake using the tools Greig had crafted.

"That created a big headache for everybody because it added testing to the game, but I think it was really remarkable that they were able to go through and put that much stuff into the game that quickly," Parker said.

Baldur's Gate originally had PoE-style descriptive text but it had to be cut due to localization concerns:

Occasionally, Ohlen would have to ask writers to trim word counts. Baldur’s Gate emulated Dungeons & Dragons in several ways, one of which was its use of prose. Although the game boasted beautiful visual and sound direction, character dialogue and action was accompanied by descriptive text of the sort a dungeon master might read aloud to paint a picture for his or her players.

"What you write on a page takes ten seconds, but all the resources that have to go into that—modeling, texturing, voiceover, music, all the rest—suddenly that ten seconds of writing becomes tens of thousands of dollars of assets. There were different reasons for why we would do the cuts,” Ohlen explained.

Early BG sales figures:

The game sold 175,000 units over its first two weeks, and was crowned the number-one-selling title according to several retailers in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and France—more than recouping its development costs and proving Black Isle’s faith in BioWare.

Ohlen wanted to add a time travel plot to BG2 because he felt it wasn't long enough:

"I had my designers revolt at the end, because I said, ‘The game’s not big enough,’ and they said, ‘It is big enough,’” he said of work on Baldur’s Gate II. “If you've played it, you know it's big enough, but I said, ‘No, we're going to do this plot where you go back in time and change the timeline, and then there will be this alternate timeline version where the Sword Coast is under oppression and you have to free it to save the timeline.’ Everyone said, ‘You've lost your mind.’"

Josh was a lousy student who got a job at Interplay because he knew Flash:

Josh Sawyer, another eager recruit, wasn’t looking to be a rock star. He just wanted to make games. Sawyer had limped out of college with a low grade-point average and concentrations in history and theater. Between classes, he taught himself web design. His do-it-yourself attitude and burgeoning skill set fit a job that opened up at Interplay.

"A friend of mine said, 'Hey, Black Isle Studios in California is hiring a webmaster for some secret, D&D-related project that they're doing.' I applied for it, and I got the job, in part because I knew Flash animation, which at the time was still pretty new," said Sawyer.

Sawyer's contributions to Icewind Dale:

“I wound up designing all the magic items just because I was super passionate about it,” Sawyer said. “I wrote all the dialogues for my dungeons, and then I wrote a few other NPCs that existed in Easthaven and Kuldahar. We would all give each other feedback on stuff, and Chris Avellone would give us feedback on writing.”

Sales figures for Icewind Dale (note: it outsold Fallout at full price):

Icewind Dale went on to sell nearly 150,000 units by the end of 2001 and earned $6.8 million for Interplay, proving that Black Isle’s tactical dungeon crawler appealed to players in search of a deeper yet still visceral experience than Diablo II faster and more frantic loot fest.

Brian Fargo didn't finish BG2 because he was overwhelmed by chapter 2, but he was able to complete the more linear IWD:

The cherry on top came when Feargus Urquhart forwarded Sawyer a glowing email he had received from Brian Fargo. “Brian congratulated Feargus on what a good game it had turned out to be, and said it was the first roleplaying game he had finished in quite a while. That really meant a lot to me,” Sawyer said.

“Sometimes games become a little overwhelming,” Fargo added. “I remember when I turned on Baldur’s Gate II, I went, ‘Oh my gosh.’ There was so much to choose from right out of the chute. Perhaps because I'm involved in so many different things, my attention span was and is shorter, so I like when I can get into titles a little easier. You can layer the complexity on all you want, but up front, I like to reduce friction as much as possible. I played Icewind Dale all the way to the end and just loved every second of it.”

Sawyer wanted Heart of Winter to be longer, but the money wasn't there:

Feargus Urquhart ground his teeth. Josh Sawyer was in his office again, pushing for something Urquhart could not give him.

“Feargus just wanted games to be good,” Sawyer said. “He always gave opinions on things. In that era, Feargus and I butted heads a lot. Thankfully we butt heads less often now, but I think everyone, including him, just wanted to make great roleplaying games.”

The latest in their long-running series of debates concerned the scope Sawyer had in mind for Heart of Winter. “I was concerned it was going to be too small, but in his defense, we didn't really have the resources to make a huge [expansion set],” Sawyer explained.

Urquhart held firm. When Heart of Winter arrived in stores in February 2001—four months ahead of Diablo II’s own add-on pack—the game sold well, but critics did call out its story for being too short.

Sawyer's ambition:

Over the past two years, Sawyer had grown into a tenacious designer yearning for greater challenges. He went to Urquhart and asked to be made head designer of Icewind Dale II. Urquhart hesitated, pointing out Sawyer’s inexperience. Sawyer countered by observing that all but a few designers at Black Isle were still feeling their way through development. Sawyer only had one game under his belt, but was willing to pit his knowledge of the Forgotten Realms and greater Dungeons & Dragons universe against anyone’s.

The inspiration for IWD2's plot:

For Sawyer, the problem was that each thought-provoking diary entry was followed by pages and pages of bloodshed and whiz-bang spells against the same list of suspects. “The Ten Towns, that area of the Icewind Dale setting, has all these problems with goblins over and over again, where they end up rising up, and then [heroes] wipe them out.”

Salvatore wasn’t the only author at fault. Forgotten Realms novels were sword-and-sorcery yarns at heart. Sawyer understood that, but wanted to flip the script on previously evil races like goblins and orcs. “I'm like, ‘Where are these guys coming from? What's the deal? Are the Ten Towns committing genocide against all of these creatures?’”

Feargus Urquhart tried to protect the programmers from Sawyer's ambition:

Then Sawyer decided to press his luck. The Infinity Engine had been written to employ a modified version of Dungeons & Dragons’ 2nd Edition rules. Sawyer wanted to update those rules. “I said, 'I can take charge of this. I can come up with areas, I can come up with characters. I can figure out how to convert this to 3rd Edition D&D,' which was a big arguing point between Feargus and me for a long time.”

At first, Urquhart said no. There simply was no time. Sawyer dug in by offering sound reasoning. BioWare was developing a new engine for a new roleplaying game that would compete with Icewind Dale II. Since Black Isle’s game would be built on older technology, they needed to keep up by making the jump to newer rules. “That was the thing,” Sawyer explained. “Neverwinter Nights was fully 3D with dynamic lighting, it had a DM mode, it used 3rd Edition rules,” Sawyer explained. “It was like, 'Holy crap, dude. Can we really come out with a game made on an engine that has looked almost identical for its entire history, and still be 2nd Edition?”

Pillars of Eternity originally had halflings, half-orcs, and gnomes as playable races:

Other stock fantasy races such as halflings, orcs, and gnomes went under the knife as well. “I included those,” Sawyer explained, “but then thought, You know what? I don't think that many people are into halflings and gnomes, and I really don't want to have orcs, and I don't think that many people are into orcs and half-orcs as player-characters. I knew some would, but it wouldn’t be a big percentage of people. So I decided to not to do those, but I did say, ‘Let's have a small race and a big race.’”

The towering aumaua were born out of Sawyer’s distaste for stereotypes such as all orcs being bloodthirsty savages, a preconception dated all the way back to J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Their gigantic physiques and colored skin make them the subject of racism by the folk, the most prolific of Eora’s races.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from the aumaua are the diminutive orlan. While the orlan are partially inspired by halflings, they crave more than languid summer days spent celebrating one-hundred-and-eleventh birthdays and shying away from adventures. They’re small, they’re frequently oppressed, and they’re tired of it. “That's where a lot of the orlan background, especially in the first game, came from,” Sawyer said. “They're physically small, so most cultures that come into contact with them wind up at least trying to push them around. Their history as a people, at least in the Eastern Reach, is defined by various forms of enslavement or resistance to the intence of other people.”

Avellone criticized Sawyer for making the classes too much like D&D:

Early on, Chris Avellone mentioned that many of the classes Sawyer had devised hewed too closely to D&D. Fighters and clerics were a given, he said, but maybe a few classes should be as different from the norm as possible.

Fenstermaker's first pass at PoE's plot (that they ended up repurposing for Deadfire):

Fenstermaker’s first stab at a treatment picked up after the Saint’s War, a piece of lore Sawyer had written before Fenstermaker got involved. In the Saint’s War, a farmer named Waidwen became the host for the god Eothas, organized a revolt, installed a theocratic government, and invaded the Dyrwood. Fenstermaker’s treatment saw Waidwen reincarnated and pick up where he left off at the end of the Saint’s War. He ran the idea by Sawyer and others, but was met with concern over the scale of the climax, a battle at a stronghold central to the game’s plot.

“We’d done something similar in the third act of Neverwinter Nights 2 and it was a notorious resource hog both development-wise and engine-wise,” he recalled. “Neverwinter Nights 2 had inflicted a kind of trauma on the people who’d worked on it, and even almost a decade later the hard lessons of that project were so fresh in our minds that we were all maybe a little prone to overcorrection. It’s funny,” he added, “looking back at this treatment now, part of me thinks maybe we should’ve done it, if only because it was cleaner than the later pitches, and would’ve been ready to go a lot quicker.”

The second pass, with fewer details:

Working alongside George Ziets, Fenstermaker wrote a second treatment by mashing together ideas from other developers. It had promise, but plot ideas from other treatments were gumming up his creative works. Fenstermaker discarded the treatment and started over. By that time, Ziets’ contract had expired and he had moved on to other work. Fenstermaker wrote another story pitch, one in which religion played a key role. “I focused on trying to streamline what we had, and to make the story more personal,” he said. “I was also just looking for some kind of unknown ingredient that would give the story a kind of reason for being.”

Fenstermaker wanted to tell a story that couldn't happen in the Forgotten Realms:

I think I was still at that point searching pretty actively for something that would make our setting stand apart from the sort of boilerplate fantasy setting that everyone defaults to. I had some concern that the soul mechanics of the world, while an interesting focal point, weren't distinguishing enough on their own. Like, if the whole adventure could've just happened in the Forgotten Realms, then why should this IP even exist? I think I zeroed in on the concept of manmade gods because I liked the existential implications of it. Fantasy doesn't usually get to deal with those.”

Carrie Patel had never played an IE-style game in her life when she applied to Obsidian. She eventually played Torment, but not the others:

When they asked about her history with roleplaying games, Patel admitted she lacked experience in the types of RPGs that were influencing Pillars of Eternity, but made up for it with her knowledge of writing other types of stories as well as playing other types of story-driven games. She got up to speed on the classics before starting at Obsidian a couple of weeks later. “I did play Planescape: Torment once I got to Obsidian, in part because I knew that was such a big touchstone for us as a company and as the Pillars team, and because it was such a groundbreaking game in terms of narrative design and storytelling in games, but I had not played Baldur’s Gate or Icewind Dale. We've always been looking for a balance in the Pillars games between hearkening back to that flavor and style, and updating it and creating our own world and story.”

Grieving Mother was an antagonist in a P&P game of Avellone's:

“For example, the Grieving Mother in Pillars of Eternity transitioned off of a supervillain I had once created for Champions’ Underworld Enemies, a villain who was so unremarkable, she was mentally invisible to people around her, including her own family, so she did dangerous stunts and crimes to force people to notice her and help her. I’d never been able to do more work with the character, so I decided to expand on the concept in a video game.”


~Balance~:

As much as Sawyer and Brennecke loved D&D, they removed their rose-tinted glasses. Some aspects of Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale, such as their real-time-with-pause combat, held up. “It seemed like the game had to be real-time with pause, just because it would be very strange for people if they played a game purporting to be an Icewind Dale-style successor that was fundamentally a different combat system,” Sawyer said of Pillars of Eternity’s gameplay.

Other aspects of Infinity Engine RPGs had existed due to technical or resource limitations rather than because their designers believed them to exhibit good design. “I wanted anyone who played a character, who made a character of a certain class, to feel that that character was a good character,” Sawyer said.

Sawyer was intimately familiar with D&D’s history. He had played the game since early editions when the community at large had concurred, like a hive mind, that certain classes were awful and not worth playing. Infinity Engine games had been afflicted with that curse. Despite pushing player freedom, players could choose any class only to quickly intuit that their choice had been ill-informed.

Sawyer pointed to Imoen, a mage-thief hybrid character whom players meet early in Baldur’s Gate. Soon after, they run into Montaron, a fighter-thief. If the player chose to play a thief character, they find themselves saddled with a party of three thieves. Ideally, parties should feature a range of classes so players have diverse abilities to deploy in encounters. “It's kind of a crappy feeling because it's basically a sub-standard combat class that can open locks and remove traps which, while important, you don't three people to do that. Or the bard, who was even less useful in a lot of ways,” Sawyer continued.

Brennecke also sought to do away with the user-unfriendliness of party configuration, which had plagued him in Icewind Dale as well as Baldur’s Gate. “I still can't make a good party in those games. I'd show my party to Josh, and he'd say, 'Why are you doing this?' And I was like, 'I don't know, man.' He'd say, 'Don't ever pick that combination of options.'”

An indirect shout out to Sensuki's love of rounds:

“I think the pace of combat was not that good in Pillars I, but I think rounds are a [mechanic] that make sense first and foremost if you come from a tabletop background. If you're not coming from that background, it feels weird in a real-time-with-pause setup. I said, ‘I think we should go [with a model] where there are action times and there are recovery times, and those are all independent from each other. It's time, it's seconds, and you can see that.’ I know people who think that's awful, and really bad and dumb.”

Sawyer felt they mostly achieved their goals with PoE's combat:

Setting aside what he perceived as missteps on Pillars of Eternity’s combat, Sawyer acknowledged that the game had done a more than admirable job of picking up the tactical-combat torch that the Infinity Engine had carried.

“There are always things fans will be let down by, but I am happiest that we made something for our community, for the people who backed the game,” he said. “We fulfilled their dreams. I think it's very important, especially with crowdfunded projects, not to try to make everyone happy, but to fulfill the passions of that group of people.”

Fenstermaker is a huge fan of Justin Bell's music part 1 :what::

“I'm a big fan of doing character themes, so we talked a bit about that,” Fenstermaker said of his conversations with Bell. “We were limited in our resources that we could apply there, but Justin did one for Thaos that I thought was just a fantastic encapsulation of the character. There's a version of it that's this very raw violin solo and I think it's my favorite bit of music in the game. I ended up doing a lot of critical path gameplay scripting myself, and I made damn sure to bust out that Thaos theme in its various forms as often as I could to help some of those big moments sink in emotionally and make them all feel tied together.”

Bell worked for years to achieve results like Fenstermaker’s reaction to the Thaos track.

Fenstermaker is a huge fan of Justin Bell's music part 2 :what::

Fenstermaker, however, genuinely appreciated one combat track in particular. “Combat Music D. Holy hell, Combat Music D. Goddamn,” Fenstermaker gushed, saying that the track competed with Thaos for his favorite.

David Gaider on the narrative freedom he had in BG2:

There was a dungeon or a town where James would design the crit [main] path, and he'd say, "Just fill it up with some side quests." I had one dungeon where I came up with the idea to have [creatures] that were stuck, and had been stuck long after the owner had died, guarding a chest. The owner's two imps were hanging around haranguing him and I just wrote that on the fly.

My first job was filling out the Copper Coronet in Athkatla. I knew that Anomen was there, and there was a vague plot James gave me, which was that there was some pick-fighting that was going on, but he just said, "Fill it up with extra things." I would write extra characters. It's kind of weird: I think back and wonder, Did I even have a narrative [direction]? And I don't think so. I don't remember them like that. There were a lot of little plots we just sort of wrote. If there were any notes, they were directions to where the files were, and "You need to spawn in this character," and [directions like that]. There wasn't much pre-planning, per se.

If you go around Athkatla, a lot of the little side quests you get that aren't part of the crit path were just created on the fly. Sometimes they got pretty big, too. I remember that when you get to the Underdark, the drow city, I wrote that entire [area]. I didn't really talk to anyone about it. I knew that along the crit path, you were supposed to go there, and there was one stop on the crit path that involved the drow. At that point James trusted me pretty well, and he just said, "Make it interesting."

I sat there and wrote this plot that was a triple-cross: You could work sides against the other [factions], and I was pretty happy with it. But for the life of me I can't remember the process. I just sat down and wrote dialogue until it became evident that I'd need to have another dialogue, so I'd go start that one. I had a whole bunch of dialogues that were sort of interconnected, and I'd have to sit down with a tech designer and explain to them, "This is what these files are, and here's what needs to happen."

Gaider on Bioware's late-90s company culture:

It was very... I don't want to say a frat house, because I never went to university so I'm not sure what a frat house is really like, but it was the way I imagine a frat house would be. I was twenty-seven, and I was one of the older guys there. Even my boss, James Ohlen, was younger than I was, so it was a little odd for me.

Everybody was very casual. If somebody was in their office, and they decided they didn't want to wear pants, well... that would happen. There was an artist there who would play porn on his computer. He'd just have it playing. Didn't worry about it, didn't care what anyone else thought.

David Gaider was the Josh Sawyer of Bioware when it came to working with his boss:

Everyone on the writing team sort of became jealous of me because, really, my entire role at BioWare was that I was the James Whisperer for the longest time. I kind of knew what he wanted even if he didn't. He would tell other writers, "Do this," and they would do exactly that, and then he wouldn't like it, and they would get frustrated, and it would go back and forth. For me, often he would give me his document that says, "This is what I want." And as I was working on it, I'd think, I don't think he really wants this, and I would just do something else.

Nobody else would get away with that. I would tell them, "Look, if I changed it and he didn't like it, I would get doubly dinged." I would get dinged for not doing it right, and not doing what he told me to do. But I knew what he really wanted. I could read between the lines and write that instead, and he liked it. That was sort of how the team was run: Everything was written to his satisfaction.


The Aerie and Viconia romances were supposed to be written by Kristjanson, but he got bogged down with Jaheira, so Gaider took 'em, resulting in not enough time for the Valygar and Haer'Dalis romances he was supposed to do. Additionally, Gaider hated Anomen too! (he inherited the character concept):

We discussed, "Let's give them arcs," and then the idea of romances came up. We initially were supposed to have six: three female, three male. We were interested in that, but what the romances would be? I don't think we [knew]. It wasn't like we had direction such as, "Make it emotionally resonate." We were just trying to write a good story. As I recall, that's all we were trying to do. It was a little weird, because romance in a video game seemed like a weird thing. We weren't sure how we would do this.

I remember when I was sitting down and trying to write romances, I was just trying to make it an interesting story. I was trying to figure out what to do with Anomen. That was actually my first romance, and I didn't know what to do with him. I didn't create his character. The first part of his character writing had been done by, I think, Rob Bartel, one of the other writers. And [the character] was kind of an asshole. I had followed up on that, here's this arrogant paladin guy, based on what Rob had started. Then at some point I remember James saying, "Okay, he's the first male romance." And I was like, "Really? Really? Anomen? You think...? Okay. Sure. I'll figure it out."

I was trying to take Anomen and figure out, okay, how would you romance this guy? I didn't give any thought, really to who the audience was or if it would be an emotional thing. I just thought, If this were a story I were writing, like a book, how would it play out? Drama is just a thing that has to happen. I didn't feel pressured to make it engaging for the player. I just thought, Well, what do I feel like? What do I think is cool?

Same thing when I wrote Aerie and Viconia [DeVir] romances. They were kind of dropped in my lap because I wasn't supposed to do the female romances at all, but Luke was falling way behind, so they said, "Why don't you do these?" So I was like, okay, they're very different from each other, so I took two different [approaches]: Aerie being the damsel in distress, Viconia being a femme fatale. When I did tabletop, I would sometimes give my players romances. If they were romancing a player in my game, how would I write that story? That's all.

Chapter 6 of BG2 was originally about as long as chapter 2:

The end parts of the game ended up getting a lot smaller, and that was a good thing. If they were as large as chapter two ended up being, they would have ended up being a nightmare.

Bioware doesn't want to make games for homophobes:

For every guy who's like, "I don't like that my characters can be gay!" For everyone who did that, perhaps we'd draw in someone else who said, "There are no games like this [for me]." If we could get them to play, does that not make up for it? We had no data to test that out, but the feeling at BioWare was, the more [frequent] those comments occurred, the more we said, "I don't know that I want to make a game for those people [who would be disgusted]."

Gaider doesn't like entitled SJWs either:

When I talk about blowback, I'm not just talking about the Gamergate crap either. We probably got as much, if not more, from the social justice crowd. We got it from both sides. Even after Dragon Age Inquisition came out, saying that characters had sexuality and that you might not be able to romance them? Well, of a sudden it was, "I'm a lesbian player and I can't romance Cassandra? How dare you! How dare you, BioWare, not make her available [to me]?" There's a certain amount of entitlement on both sides.

I tend to think that on the social justice side, they're coming at it from a different direction in terms of, they don't get this kind of content very much, so they're coming at it maybe from a position of need. But there's still entitlement. As far as how the writers felt about it, we liked the agency of characters who decided for themselves. The player-sexuality left a bad taste in our mouths. So, yeah, you're right, that's why we eventually moved away from that. But at the time, during Dragon Age 2, it seemed like a good idea.


Josh Sawyer's favorite IE game (Fairfax is unsurprised):

For me, it's probably the original Icewind Dale, just because that's the first game I worked on in the industry.

Carrie Patel's favorite IE game isn't even an IE game (guess she didn't like Torment):

If I can maybe interpret "IE-style game" a little more broadly...

I'd say my favorite is Shadowrun: Hong Kong. I had a lot of fun with it. I loved the style of combat. I loved the world. Fantasy/cyberpunk was a breath of fresh air to me, and a lot of fun to play in. But it was also a really focused game. We've talked a bit about the appeal of shorter games that are still engaging: [Hong Kong is] not super long; the roleplaying opportunities are present, but they are a little more focused; and I still had a great experience with it. I left wanting just a little bit more because I was having a good time, but at no point did I feel bogged down in the experience, like, "Ugh, I've got to finish this game so I can get on with stuff."

Feargus Urquhart's favorite IE game:

Baldur's Gate II is my favorite.

Dan Spitzley has probably enjoyed Grimoire:

I think every roleplaying game should be forced to be a first-person, grid-based, dungeon crawler. There are not anywhere near enough of them now, and I just love them. We have to get on that.


Four million dollars covers two years of Obsidian development. If only they had raised $6-8 million:

Urquhart reminded them of Obsidian’s situation. The four million dollars raised through Kickstarter and PayPal was gone. It had paid for two years of salaries, equipment, software licenses, and other development costs. Urquhart and the other co-owners would have to dip into other coffers—money earned from working on South Park, the steady stream of revenue from discounted titles on digital platforms such as Steam—to extend Pillars of Eternity’s runway.

He granted the request for more time, on one condition. “That was the big discussion: If we didn't hit March [2015], our heads would be on the table. He made that very clear to us,” Brennecke said.

Sawyer tells half-truths:

Unlike his time working on the Icewind Dale titles at Black Isle, Sawyer had not fought to add more content. Quite the opposite. “When we made Pillars of Eternity, I tried to be much more diligent about cutting back on systems, sub systems, class features, and areas that I didn't think were necessary.”

That, he knew, was a big risk. Sequels—and spiritual successors—came with expectations. Fans expected more: More characters, more quests, more dialogue, more weapons, more monsters, more areas. If it had existed in the Infinity Engine games, fans would expect it to exist in Pillars of Eternity in some form.

Sawyer was aiming for quality over quantity. Where Baldur’s Gate II had featured 200 maps, Pillars of Eternity would feature 150. “It's a challenge because player expectation states that the game should be very big,” Sawyer continued. “Ultimately, we were on the hook for a game, so what we did on both Pillars I and II was we took extra time.”

PoE's final act was originally longer:

The narrative designers made concessions where deemed concessions feasible, excising a large chunk of the final act and doing their best to sew up the gap so players would not notice anything amiss.

Fenstermaker wanted to do a director's cut pass on the writing, but Josh and Feargus wouldn't let it happen. He's still mostly satisfied:

Fenstermaker kept waiting for the phone to ring, and for Feargus Urquhart or Josh Sawyer to be on the other end with good news: They would be making a director’s cut of Pillars of Eternity, and he would have all the time and money he needed to heal all the game’s warts. “A lot of those fixes wouldn’t be all that difficult and that sort of kills me a bit,” he admitted.

Still, Fenstermaker continued, he got to do what he had wanted to do since the beginning of his career: Write a grounded fantasy tale. “The truth is, in spite of its many warts, I like the game. I’m proud of it, and I had fun playing it. I like the ideas and turns in the main story even if the execution floundered at times. I like the companions. People rightly criticized that they didn’t all have a great justification to journey with the player, and I know people wanted there to be more to some of their quests. But their thematic ties were really good and I think for many players that made them emotionally impactful, and helped the overall narrative land. I like the antagonist even if he was a little too enigmatic for too long. I like the atmosphere for the setting that the team pulled off. That took area designers, narrative designers, concept artists, effects artists, level artists, all operating together at a high level. As a player it made me feel the pain of the place and want to set things right. With all the challenges and constraints we faced, I’m amazed things turned out as well as they did.”


The origin of Deadfire's plot revealed: Fenstermaker's Folly part 2: Patel's Pratfall (Sawyer's Gone Senile)!

Fenstermaker and Carrie Patel developed several treatments of the game’s story. In one, a magical apocalypse laid waste to a society. That germ of an idea morphed into the game’s inciting event.

“Eric and I worked over the months of preproduction to flesh out specific story beats,” Patel said, “how the player encounters factions, how the player encounters Eothas, how we keep this off-screen antagonist—or is he not an antagonist?—present in the player's story, but also tie in things the player is doing to the factions of Deadfire and things that are happening locally.”

By late 2016, Fenstermaker and Patel—with plenty of input from Sawyer—had outlined Deadfire’s major story beats. Then Fenstermaker, a new father, resigned. His parting was amicable. He had realized dreams by working at Obsidian for so many years. Now, he wanted to raise his child.

“White March benefited from many such lessons about writing style, lore distribution, design and writing process, collaboration, et cetera. I was excited to see what we could do with a full-sized game after all that. And then of course I totally bailed on my team. Sorry, dudes,” Fenstermaker said. “By the time I handed off my duties to Josh, I think we'd laid out the places you'd visit, the basic sequence of events, and the role the major factions would play. Call it a first draft. It had holes in it, and a lot of the details had yet to be added or continued to evolve afterward.”

John Romero heaps praise on Sawyer:

Romero: He was brilliant. He was super articulate. I can't even imagine a better RPG designer. He's just the best. The amount of knowledge he has about D&D and RPGs, and his own ideas--he knows what should be in an RPG. He has a wealth of experience to draw on, much like Sandy Petersen had when we hired him for Doom: Sandy was this encyclopedia of design, and so was Josh. He was easy to work with. He stands up for stuff he cares about.

Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows's plot and characters were all Josh's before Midway put it all through the grinder:

Craddock: According to Wikipedia, two characters created by you and Josh, Lancer and Tragedian, were removed. There's no source for that, so I thought I'd ask about it. Were they part of the game that got chopped out?

Romero: Definitely. I didn't come up with any of the characters, though. Josh came up with everything. Tragedian was a character in a play, I think. It's almost like in Final Fantasy 6 where you're on the airship, and your character's attacks are playing cards. Tragedian was a character who was an actor in tragedies, so he had his own way of fighting. Josh came up with a lot of really cool characters, and he was one of them.

It was totally a case of, "There's too much shit, and fewer things to balance means we ship faster, so chop them out." I wasn't there for any of that, but I heard about it. I believe they hacked the game to one-third the size we were going to make it, which meant that all or almost all of those cinematics were gone. Half a million dollars of cinematics just thrown away.

The humble beginnings of Josh Sawyer, Balance Man:

I think it was in high school when I started modifying games, modifying the rules. I was playing D&D so much that I was running into what I felt were friction points: "Well, these rules are kind of obnoxious and none of us seem to enjoy using them, so I'm going to start changing them." Once I started changing them, I realized I could do whatever I wanted to do. I felt liberated. I would look at a rule, and whenever I thought there was something that I, or more importantly, the groups I played with, thought would be enjoyable, I'd just modify it. In college, I started designing my own tabletop roleplaying systems. Luckily I had a pretty big group of people to play with and get feedback from.

PoE's lackluster loot was the result of Sawyer getting reprimanded for trying to get too crazy with magic loot when he was a brand new designer on IWD:

David Craddock: In your experience, what are some elements of tabletop games that have not, or cannot, carry over to computer and video games?

Josh Sawyer: My imagination. It seems so naive, but one of the first things I did was start designing unique items. I've always loved unique, magic items, and there's tons of cool Forgotten Realms modules and source books that had these really neat items with these long histories. If you look in The Magister's Element in the Forgotten Realms, it's full of all these really crazy, unique items that have these page-long histories with all these weird powers. [During development of Icewind Dale] I was like, "I want to do this, and I want to do this!" And the programmers were like, "Uh... how about none of that? Or how about a quarter of that?"

It took me a while to realize, oh, there are things the engine does, and there are things the engine doesn't do, and then there are things the engine sort of does, and maybe those could be extended. I had to very quickly understand that an engine contains a set of rules and capabilities, and you have to work within those as much as you can. Or, if you want to extend them, that's a cost. That's a burden on other people that you have to consider.

Sawyer schooling a tester on probablity:

Probability is very difficult to communicate. There have been so many instances of that. I remember one while making Icewind Dale II. Third-Edition D&D switched over Rogue characters: They no longer have backstab damage, they have sneak attack. Every few levels, a Rogue got another die. So, you'd start with 2d6, and then three [d6], four, and five, all the way up to fifteen d6. That's fifteen, six-sided dice. The actual maximum you could get is ninety points of damage, and I got a bug from QA at Black Isle saying, "Why do I never see ninety points of damage?" I was like, "Well, it's fifteen, six-sided dice being rolled." And they said, "Yeah, so I should see it sometimes." I'm like, "No, dude, that's not how probability works. There's a really, really steep bell curve in operation, here."

They wouldn't believe me. They refused to believe me. I showed them a chart of distribution, and they still wouldn't believe me until I took fifteen dice into a room with them, and I rolled, in front of them, fifteen d6 twenty times, and I added them up and charted them on a piece of graph paper. I said, "Do you see how this falls inside the bell curve?" Finally they kind of grumbled and accept it.

Fuck You Suck My Dick Josh Sawyer's Dream Pen and Paper RPG:

When Feargus pitched me on the idea of doing the pen-and-paper game, I said, "I will do that if I can tell everyone up front that I'm going to do whatever I want; that it is not going to be class based; that it is not going to have a d20 base; that it is not going to be compatible with D&D; and that I will listen to people, but I am absolutely not going to bend over backward to make it fit their vision of what the game should be. He said, "That's fine."

So, I told people that, and then I started showing people the pen-and-paper rules, and some of them started getting really bent out of shape. I said, "Sorry you don't like it. I'm not changing it." Because that was the expectation: I said from the beginning that I was going to do whatever the hell I wanted.

Sawyer is still unsatisfied with resting in Deadfire:

One thing that's an ongoing struggle that we have to deal with is inns and camping. They're things that feel very appropriate for D&D, but it's difficult to incorporate those mechanics into a CRPG that doesn't resort to save scumming, or necessitate things like repopulating enemies after you rest; otherwise resting can feel pointless. We've tried two different revisions: Pillars 1, and Pillars II. I still don't think we're all the way there in terms of making a tight cycle out of [resting in camps and inns].

If you look at a game like the tabletop RPG Torchbearer, they have an extremely, extremely tight time economy where resting is precious and dangerous, to the point of really being anxiety inducing. Also, Darkest Dungeon: These are games where the whole game cycle is built on this downward grind that you have to close yourself out of by retreating and resting. But the thing is, that kind of feels like it's in conflict with the nature of the Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Pillars games, where they're open-world, you're exploring and can come and go as you please. It's not the same as delving into a dungeon where you're on this tether.

Feargus hinting at Microsoft's plans for a big RPG:

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?"

So, when I say "big RPG," it really has to do with staff, staff budget, and development time. I don't know where the industry would put that number of staff, but as soon as you get above fifty or sixty people working on a game, you're now making a big game. If you're below fifty or sixty people, you're probably not making as big of a game.

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.


Not Discussed: The Avellone Exception:

As an example, the first thing we edited out of our employment agreement when we started our company was the non-compete and non-solicitation agreement. That's the word I was trying to remember. Most employment agreements have non-competes and non-solicitation [clauses] in them. Ours don't. We want people to work here, but we don't want you to feel like you're trapped. When people leave, we shake their hands and thank them for working here. I think most people have appreciated that.


A lot of Obsidian employees consider PoE Josh's vision despite his protests:

Many developers at Obsidian referred to the development of Pillars of Eternity and Deadfire as a studio-wide effort to bring Josh Sawyer’s vision to life. Sawyer doesn’t see it quite the same way. Yes, he’s the game director, and yes, most decisions are filtered through him. But game development is a collaborative effort, and Sawyer has always been willing to defer to peers if he finds merit in their input.

Sawyer followed Carrie Patel’s work on both Pillars of Eternity titles, saw that the tasks she performed and the quality of her work were of leadership quality, and extended his leadership on the narrative team to her. He trusted Adam Brennecke to make technical decisions that would facilitate faster development and more creativity. And, because he comprehended how much of his time writing would take, he asked lead area designer Bobby Null to step into the role of lead designer after Dave Williams, another systems designer, was needed on another project.

“Josh called me in one day and said he wanted to make me the lead designer,” Null remembered. The meeting took place almost one year into work on Deadfire. “At one point, Josh was doing lead narrative work because Eric Fenstermaker had left the company, and I was still the lead area designer. Between those jobs and the project director, there are five full-time jobs that Josh and I just figured out ways to do ourselves.”

Sawyer didn't design any of Deadfire's character systems himself, Infinitron:

“On Deadfire, we actually had systems designers, so I gave high-level direction on that stuff, but I didn't do tuning, and didn't build out the character-advancement trees,” Sawyer said. “It was a sequel to a game that already had fairly strong systems, so I knew I did not need to micromanage all of that stuff.”

Carrie Patel doesn't like the military so she tried to make them more sympathetic:

The VTC isn’t the only burgeoning trade operation eyeing the archipelago. Ancestors of the Royal Deadfire Company inhabited the region as well. They’re interested in turning a profit, but they’re also trying to survive: Their stormy homeland made seeking out land where crops could be safely grown and harvested essential. “They were tricky at first because they were the pseudo-military faction, which as an aesthetic, was not what I would have chosen first,” said Carrie Patel. “So I thought, Okay, how do I make these guys interesting even to a player like me? How do I make them feel flavorful and unique without making them the grunt military faction, and there's nothing else to them? Giving them a survival-level interest in Deadfire was actually one of the changes I suggested when taking them on to make them a bit more sympathetic and to give them stakes that were distinct and on par with those of other factions.”

2012 Sawyer: "The game is being designed for relatively high difficulty at first and later tuned down for lower levels of difficulty. It's easier to lower difficulty from a high bar than to raise it from a shallow baseline."
2018 Senile Sawyer:

“When Deadfire came out, we erred a little—or a lot, depending on what your play style is—it being too easy,” said Sawyer. By the time Deadfire launched on May 8 of 2018, wheels were already in motion on rolling out patches that would increase difficulty for players. “I said, ‘Well, between too easy and too hard, I'd rather err on the side of too easy, and tune up from there,’” Sawyer continued.

Carrie's mysterious lack of immediate promotion, Sawyer's narrative responsibilities:

When Eric Fenstermaker and Chris Avellone left Obsidian, Carrie Patel became the only narrative designer who had worked on every installment of Pillars of Eternity: the base game, the two-part White March expansion set, and Deadfire.

“I had a lot of institutional knowledge and a greater awareness of how our pipelines worked, of the Pillars tone and flavor, and what our vast lore included,” she said. “Also, because all of the other leads were incredibly busy, I was often a much easier person to approach about a lot of those questions. Writers and people from other disciplines who wanted to know something about Pillars lore or how we did things, like using our tools, would oftentimes come to me with those questions.”

Already spinning several plates as Deadfire’s game director, Sawyer took on the role of lead narrative designer. Someone had needed to fill the void left by Fenstermaker. He also wanted an opportunity to take a hand in the game’s story and characters.

Patel quickly fell into step with Sawyer, collaborating with him as she had with Fenstermaker. “I find that Josh is very reasonable and willing to hear things out, and then take those things into consideration,” she said. “For Pillars II, whenever there was a question about a big creative direction or decision that needed to be made, I'd pass it to him and say, ‘Where do you want to head on this?’ When it was something that was kind of established or understood, or if it needed more definition or something we already had an internal answer on, I'd usually follow up on it on my own.”

Sawyer gave Patel and the other narrative designers the credit for carrying the heaviest loads. He had to be more concerned with the ten-thousand-feet view out of necessity: story structure, making sure the story gave players freedom to confront moral dilemmas and respond to them in their own way, and providing opportunities for players to flex their tactical-combat muscles. “I wrote Pallegina, which is the companion I wrote in Pillars I,” said Sawyer. “I wrote Eothas, who is the main, driving force behind the plot in Deadfire. And I wrote a handful of side characters.”

Josh told Carrie to make a character less evil:

Dereo the Lean was a new character, written by Patel, and one of the most creative challenges she faced while writing Pillars of Eternity II. He belongs to the Principi, a faction of pirates who, through a ruling body of seven captains, attempt to control the activities of pirate fleets in and around the Deadfire. “I remember doing a first pass, and it was kind of what you'd expect: ‘Oh, yeah, he's a nasty, sneaky guy, living down there with all the criminals.’ That was the feedback I got,” Patel recalled.

Sawyer read her first take on Dereo and recommended that she inject more of the nobility that flows through the blood of the Principi’s ancestors. That feedback empowered her to bring out more of the character’s innate flair. Dark-skinned, somber, and methodical, he bears a striking resemblance to drug kingpin Gustavo Fring from AMC’s Breaking Bad TV drama, a comparison that perhaps influenced Patel as she worked and reworked Dereo’s interactions. “He was still someone who fit the role, but I found ways to make him an individual. I think he's fun because you can tell he's someone who's having fun doing what he's doing. I think that's fun to write and fun to encounter as well.”

Carrie's descriptive text:

One of Sawyer’s favorite uses of prose over dialogue was Orron, a dwarf written by Carrie Patel. When players meet Orron, he’s sitting at a table pouring equal amounts of wine into glasses. Quiet and intent, he tops off each glass until the bottle is empty and each cup holds the same amount of wine. “It's something we can't see something happening on the screen. It evokes your imagination. It lets you understand, Holy shit, this guy is super-obsessive compulsive, which informs some choices you can make in the conversation later to really throw him off. When I saw people using prose like that, I tried to reinforce, ‘Yeah, that's great. That really builds the character. That gives you insight you couldn't get from the scene.’”

Sawyer finally gave Patel the title of what she had been doing all along in 2018:

In January 2018, a few months before Deadfire was due to launch, Sawyer asked Patel to meet with him in his office. He had been impressed with the creative work and responsibilities she had undertaken since joining Obsidian, especially on Deadfire. He asked if he could formally recognize her as co-lead narrative designer, a promotion that would lead to other opportunities following the completion of Pillars of Eternity II. Patel accepted.

“Carrie is fantastic,” Sawyer added. “She did great work on Pillars 1, and on Pillars II. I can't wait for her to be a lead on a project where I'm not hovering over her, because I think she's going to do great stuff.”

Patel thinks Deadfire improved on PoE in every way and she didn't care about it anymore on release because she had already been moved to The Outer Worlds:

Patel’s stomach was calm, a sharp contrast from how she had felt nearly three years ago on the day Pillars of Eternity became available for purchase. “Pillars 1 is a great game, but I honestly feel we've improved on it in every way with Deadfire. That's not to say anything negative at all about the work we did on the first game, but we'd learned a lot about making this type of game, so it was exciting to have a chance to go back and say, ‘Okay, how can we do this thing, but better?’ When you have a team as strong as ours, and the support we've had from management and from our fans, the passion we've all brought to this, and the experience from the first game especially, I think that really gives you an opportunity to try some new things, improve the things you did well, and polish the things that didn't work as well as you'd hope.”

She had another good reason for feeling more excited than anxious. “I've been moved to another project,” Patel explained, “so there was already work lining up that was more urgent than, ‘Fix these Deadfire bugs right now!’ I guess that gave me a little more balance to check in, see how everyone's enjoying the game, think, Wow, that's really exciting, and then go back to working and say, ‘Okay, let me try to knock this thing out.’ It was a good day.”

Tim Cain believes The Outer Worlds will evolve the RPG genre:

“It's killing me not to talk about what we're doing because, after spending five years supporting the visions of others, it's been fun to go back and make a brand-new IP from scratch using all the lessons I've learned over the past several decades. It's fun,” Cain said. “I'm all prepared to talk about the things this game does that you haven't seen yet, and ways I think it evolves the RPG genre. But for the most part, I think our team reached full size about a year ago. We've had quite a lot of people working on this for the last year.”

Josh created Pillars of Eternity for the company and he's glad he'll never have to work on it again:

“I didn't create Pillars as a dream project for myself. I created it because I felt it was important for the company as a whole to have something that we owned, and that other people could do things with. I really do believe the best part of this is I don't have to work on more Pillars games. Other people at the studio can do that. Actually, I'm excited to work on the tabletop version of Pillars because I'm going crazy with that.”

Feargus tells half-truths about Deadfire's "success." No mention at all in the book about how it was a financial failure:

Feargus Urquhart has never stopped stargazing. “With the success of Eternity 1 and Eternity II, I think a lot about, Are we a different studio than we were ten years ago? Absolutely,” he answered.

Finally, more hints about Microsft and their upcoming Skyrim competitor:

Only one thing has remained immutable: Obsidian Entertainment was and is independently owned.

That could change, provided the circumstances were right. “I'm always very up front: If someone showed up with a dump truck full of gold bricks—not bitcoins, but gold bricks—of course we would sell the company. It would be silly not to, depending on the number. But I do enjoy us being independent,” Urquhart said.

Despite his preference for independence, Urquhart acknowledged the difficulties of being in charge of making sure hundreds of people had money to eat and pay their bills every month. Another immutable fact of life at Obsidian: Projects always needed funding, and there was no surefire source. “Kickstarter and Fig are great, but there's a limit to the amount of money you can get. Depending on how well you do, you're looking at two-and-a-half, three million to five or six million. That's kind of the range now. If we wanted to make an epic game, that's a thirty, four, fifty, seventy-million-dollar game. That's not coming from Fig. Where's it going to come from?”

Urquhart believes Obsidian has another epic RPG—one as massive as Stormlands, if not bigger—in its future. When, not if, the time is right, he will be approaching publishers rather than crowdfunding platforms.

No matter how the stars align, Obsidian’s identity will remain intact.

“I'm not saying that's what we're doing right now,” Urquhart said of creating an epic RPG, “but the thing about being independent is you're always looking at: We want to make these games, we want to be successful, we want to stay who we are.”
 

Nano

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 6, 2016
Messages
4,648
Grab the Codex by the pussy Strap Yourselves In
Holy fuck, I can't believe I just read all of that.

Interesting stuff, I guess.
 

Bah

Arcane
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Oct 6, 2006
Messages
2,946
Location
Northwest American Republic
Ohlen wanted to add a time travel plot to BG2 because he felt it wasn't long enough:

Brian Fargo didn't finish BG2 because he was overwhelmed by chapter 2, but he was able to complete the more linear IWD:

I'll come clean. I never finished BG2 when it was new. I got to the underdark, and frankly just lost interest at that point because I felt the game was way too long. This problem has only gotten worse as I've gotten older. When SOD was released, I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be awesome to start over and take a character from BG1->SOD->BG2".

So I started over, and finishing BG1 was no issue. Finishing SOD was no issue. I got back to the underdark with BG2, and frankly I just lost interest again. I'm not sure I'll ever finish BG2.
 

Fairfax

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Joined
Jun 17, 2015
Messages
3,518
Feargus and Brian confirm that Interplay would have died sooner if not for Baldur's Gate II:
We had to pay BioWare a hefty royalty, and TSR on top of that.
TSR didn't exist anymore, Fargo had to pay WotC (which was acquired by Hasbro before BG2). Interplay also didn't pay them until they were sued, and they lost the NWN contract for it (along with the whole licence later on).

If that wasn't an internally developed title with no royalties, boy, it would have been a way different outcome.
What a silly thought. What would BIS (and IPLY) have been without the D&D licence and the IE?

Josh claims he's not what Fairfax thinks he is:
:lol:

Baldur's Gate III: The Black Hound wasn't even going to be in the Forgotten Realms until Interplay told them how utterly ridiculous that would be:
That's the whitewashed version. As a result of the legal dispute with Hasbro, they could only name it Baldur's Gate or Icewind Dale. It's possible Interplay's management tried to hide it with that excuse, just like they pretended the unpaid royalties were "an accounting error".

Josh and Feargus were mad at each other for years because of the arguments they had during Icewind Dale II which is why Josh didn't join up straight away even while he was posting away on the Obsidian forums:
It's a shame they didn't disclose the reasons. The weird part is that the IWD chapter suggests the opposite, that the problems made them get along:
Icewind Dale II’s deadline extension ended up being a good thing for the game, which benefitted from more time to create and polish content, and for Sawyer and Urquhart, who came to to better understand the other’s point of view.

“He trusts me more,” Sawyer said. “When I say that I've looked into the difficulty of implementing something, or talked to everyone involved in something to give him a breakdown of what it's going to involve, I think he trusts me more when I give him the lowdown on that stuff. I also have a greater appreciation for risk scenarios. That's a common difficulty: When you're running a company, there's more going on than just me pushing for an individual feature on an individual project.”

Cain got his job at Interplay thanks to his familiarity with D&D:
I wonder how many Obsidian devs would know what THAC0 is.

SPECIAL came together so quickly because it was homebrew system Chris Taylor created in middle school (Tim Cain convinced him to add Luck as a stat):
This and the "fluke" interview vindicate some old Fallout fanboys who often complained that Taylor didn't get enough credit. Some were also upset when it was announced that he wouldn't direct the original FO3.

Sales figures for Icewind Dale (note: it outsold Fallout at full price):
Not necessarily. These games often had discounts even before launch (IWD did), and in a few months they were already down to $30 or so (not including international prices). It seems it did sell more copies in the first year, though.

Sawyer's ambition:
The reverse Project Eternity pitch: "I'm the only one who can do it right".

Feargus Urquhart tried to protect the programmers from Sawyer's ambition:
More like he just wanted the game to be released as soon as possible. Also, the "sound reasoning" turned out to be a joke.

Fenstermaker's first pass at PoE's plot (that they ended up repurposing for Deadfire):
“looking back at this treatment now, part of me thinks maybe we should’ve done it, if only because it was cleaner than the later pitches, and would’ve been ready to go a lot quicker.”
"this one was dumber and harder to make, but at least I would've had more time to fix my writing along the way".

Fenstermaker wanted to tell a story that couldn't happen in the Forgotten Realms:
The aspects that aren't compatible with the FR don't add anything and/or could easily be replaced, so this was a silly concern.

Grieving Mother was an antagonist in a P&P game of Avellone's:
Interesting. I believe it's this one:

“There are always things fans will be let down by, but I am happiest that we made something for our community, for the people who backed the game,” he said. “We fulfilled their dreams. I think it's very important, especially with crowdfunded projects, not to try to make everyone happy, but to fulfill the passions of that group of people.”
:hmmm:

Josh Sawyer's favorite IE game (Fairfax is unsurprised):
+M

Sawyer tells half-truths:
Context for those who don't know why it's a lie:

Early in preproduction, Sawyer stood his ground on big decisions; most significantly, the size of the game. The old Infinity Engine games, which the team had been playing during spare afternoons for inspiration, had worlds that were divided into individual map screens, each full of objects and encounters. The largest of these games, Baldur’s Gate 2, had nearly two hundred unique maps. To plan Project Eternity’s scope, Sawyer and Brennecke would need to figure out how many maps the game would have. Brennecke had settled on 120, but Sawyer disagreed. He wanted 150. And Sawyer wouldn’t relent, even though they all knew it would cost more money. “The way I view the relationship between production and direction is there intentionally should be a little bit of antagonism,” Sawyer said. “Not hostility—but the director at some level is saying, ‘I want to do this, I’m writing this check.’ Production holds the checkbook.”

Fenstermaker wanted to do a director's cut pass on the writing, but Josh and Feargus wouldn't let it happen. He's still mostly satisfied:
Fenstermaker sounding like Colin here. At least he understood that players value companion quests. Too bad his PoE2 replacement didn't agree.

Not Discussed: The Avellone Exception:
He could only do these things to another owner.
Nothing new, Feargus bragging about things that are out of his control. :M

Non-compete agreements are automatically void as a matter of law in California, except for a small set of specific situations expressly authorized by statute.[11] They were outlawed by the original California Civil Code in 1872 (Civ. Code, former § 1673).
Because of their potential for abuse, the courts and/or legislatures of most states impose limits on restrictive covenants. The most common approach is that restrictive covenants won’t be enforced unless they’re reasonable in terms of how long they last and what activities they prohibit. California law, however, goes much further. This is because Section 16600 of California’s Business and Professions Code consists of the following single stark sentence:

“Except as provided in this chapter, every contract by which anyone is restrained from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business of any kind is to that extent void.”

Any ambiguity about how strictly this passage should be interpreted was removed in 2008 when the California Supreme Court ruled in Edwards v. Arthur Andersen LLP that 16600 does not allow even the sorts of reasonable or narrow restrictive covenants permitted in other jurisdictions. Non-compete and non-solicitation clauses really are presumptively invalid in California.

Josh created Pillars of Eternity for the company and he's glad he'll never have to work on it again:
It just happened to be great for his career, with a big promotion and royalty checks. :M


As expected after reading the PS:T chapter, the book is filled with puffery and poor research. Thanks for the quotes. :salute:
 

Zed Duke of Banville

Dungeon Master
Patron
Joined
Oct 3, 2015
Messages
11,760
Some of those quotes man... there is no hope for western RPGs.
There already has been renewed Incline of Western RPGs, following the Era of Decline and the Wasteland Era; an Incline including but not limited to:

Legend of Grimrock (2012)
Paper Sorceror (2013)
Legend of Grimrock II (2014)
Underrail (2015)
Age of Decadence (2015)
Salt & Sanctuary (2016)
The Warlock of Firetop Mountain (2016)
Grimoire: Heralds of the Winged Exemplar (2017)
Kingdom Come: Deliverance (2018)
Kenshi (2018)

Of course, none of these owe anything to the Decline wrought by Bioware, the most pernicious RPG developer ever to disgrace the industry.
 

Infinitron

I post news
Staff Member
Joined
Jan 28, 2011
Messages
97,236
Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Hell yeah Roguey, I knew you wouldn't let us down.

But tell me:

Finally, more hints about Microsft and their upcoming Skyrim competitor:

Only one thing has remained immutable: Obsidian Entertainment was and is independently owned.

That could change, provided the circumstances were right. “I'm always very up front: If someone showed up with a dump truck full of gold bricks—not bitcoins, but gold bricks—of course we would sell the company. It would be silly not to, depending on the number. But I do enjoy us being independent,” Urquhart said.

Despite his preference for independence, Urquhart acknowledged the difficulties of being in charge of making sure hundreds of people had money to eat and pay their bills every month. Another immutable fact of life at Obsidian: Projects always needed funding, and there was no surefire source. “Kickstarter and Fig are great, but there's a limit to the amount of money you can get. Depending on how well you do, you're looking at two-and-a-half, three million to five or six million. That's kind of the range now. If we wanted to make an epic game, that's a thirty, four, fifty, seventy-million-dollar game. That's not coming from Fig. Where's it going to come from?”

Urquhart believes Obsidian has another epic RPG—one as massive as Stormlands, if not bigger—in its future. When, not if, the time is right, he will be approaching publishers rather than crowdfunding platforms.

No matter how the stars align, Obsidian’s identity will remain intact.

“I'm not saying that's what we're doing right now,” Urquhart said of creating an epic RPG, “but the thing about being independent is you're always looking at: We want to make these games, we want to be successful, we want to stay who we are.”

Don't you think he could actually have been talking about The Outer Worlds here (and in the other places where you've determined he was referring to a Skyrim competitor) - still pretending it was a secret?
 

Roguey

Codex Staff
Staff Member
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Joined
May 29, 2010
Messages
35,660
Don't you think he could actually have been talking about The Outer Worlds here (and in the other places where you've determined he was referring to a Skyrim competitor) - still pretending it was a secret?
Outer Worlds is pretty big but it doesn't come across as Stormlands-big. Book was out in October, Obsidian acquired in November, so talks were happening as he was telling the guy this stuff.
 

Quillon

Arcane
Joined
Dec 15, 2016
Messages
5,214
As much as Sawyer and Brennecke loved D&D, they removed their rose-tinted glasses. Some aspects of Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale, such as their real-time-with-pause combat, held up. “It seemed like the game had to be real-time with pause, just because it would be very strange for people if they played a game purporting to be an Icewind Dale-style successor that was fundamentally a different combat system,” Sawyer said of Pillars of Eternity’s gameplay.

Other aspects of Infinity Engine RPGs had existed due to technical or resource limitations rather than because their designers believed them to exhibit good design. “I wanted anyone who played a character, who made a character of a certain class, to feel that that character was a good character,” Sawyer said.

They were dreaming of making 3D games, even first person games while making the Fallouts and BGs and today the nostalgic player base treat those aspects as artistic decisions that should be preserved when in fact they had been made that way out of necessity.

It was a mistake to make PoEs technically like IE games, they shoulda followed up on DAO.
 

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