Eternity Avowed - Obsidian's first person action-RPG in the Pillars of Eternity setting - coming February 18th

[AwesomeButton]

"OH NOO THE PLUCKY UNDERDOG OBSIDIAN PLS UNDERSTAND NO RESOURCES"

Getting really really tired of this narrative.

Making an RPG game with a 100 person team is hard yo!

 

[Infinitron]

To me, maybe that's a suggestion Avowed will be more linear than Obsidian's other RPGs, but I don't know that for sure. It does, however, build on a feeling from the presentation that Avowed is more of an action game with RPG elements, than an RPG with action elements. "Don't panic," Carrie Patel tells me. "Avowed is still jam-packed with characters and dialogue, and dialogue choices, and all of the things that people are used to from Obsidian branching story and branching narrative.

Carrie sure knows how to build confidence.

Obsidian seem to like doing this in interviews whenever they don't have a publisher controlling their PR. Happened with The Outer Worlds too in one of its first developer interviews: https://rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=11113 "We cut a ton of content and features tbh, we totally butchered this game"

 

[None]

Considering her "mavericks and martyrs" stance I expect this game to be incredibly mediocre. If it ends up feeling stale and lifeless (which it looks) it's probably because she's the one who stifled anyone who was even remotely passionate about the project. We can already see the excuses being formed preemptively.

 

[Roguey]

Making an RPG game with a 100 person team is hard yo!

Tim and Leonard put The Outer Worlds together with an 80-person team in a little over 3 years. Carrie got this project back in January 2021 and it's taking nearly four years to deliver (were they able to use anything from the previous iteration?). Ethically-sourced game development isn't looking all that efficient.

 

[Delterius]

one of the co-developers/outsourcing partners is George Ziets' Digimancy.

so glad to see ziets got some of that xbox money too

 

[AwesomeButton]

Obsidian seem to like doing this in interviews whenever they don't have a publisher controlling their PR. Happened with The Outer Worlds too in one of its first developer interviews: https://rpgcodex.net/article.php?id=11113 "We cut a ton of content and features tbh, we totally butchered this game"

Do you think it's some kind of a coded form of protest against the constraints on development, or they just don't realize they shouldn't talk like that?

Ethically-sourced game development isn't looking all that efficient.

I think that's more of an exacerbating factor, but yeah. The biggest letdown for me is the realization that we've moved from times when we were optimistic about Obsidian's upcoming game into having less and less confidence. We've downgraded to being content with butchered projects like TOW, to today where we are at the stage of "fingers crossed it's won't be too hollow, too directionless, too cliched".

 

[AwesomeButton]

Tim and Leonard put The Outer Worlds together with an 80-person team in a little over 3 years.

And it's terrible. I wish there was some senior developer to tell upper management that Obsidian is better off producing isometric games on this size of budget and teams, than producing cutdown versions of first-person RPGs.

 

[Quillon]

LMAO their ultimate excuse for this shit is already here:

she refers to Obsidian as a "medium-sized studio", and Avowed as a "medium-sized project".

With TOW "time & budget" was the excuse dictated by the publisher now its dictated by themselves if you can believe it; as if there wasn't a vision change mid development; realising they won't be able to make a Skyrim-like gaym and immediately falling back to what worked for them before.

With MS acquisition literally everyone's expectation was them to unleash their full potential(whatever that'd look like at this point) but they are too chicken shit to even attempt it, nobody's forcing them to divide the studio between 3-4 games.

 

[AwesomeButton]

LMAO their ultimate excuse for this shit is already here

Yeah. "We weren't really trying to make a good game, that would require more money. Now, if we were, you should have seen us then!"

 

[Cross]

Key to this are "loadouts", which was a word we heard multiple times throughout the presentation. The idea is you'll be able to quickly switch between sets of weapons in order to overcome the different enemy-based challenges. Need a sword and shield for these enemies? No problem. Need a two-hander to break this one's guard? You got it. Need a pair of wands to pelt these enemies with magical attacks? Fine. It's that kind of thing.

Their most hyped feature is being able to switch equipment, a feature every RPG has had since 1974.

I ask gameplay director Gabe Paramo and he gives me a slightly mystifying answer; he says spells are "on their own button". "There's a single button to use an ability, in terms of the ones that you have on your talent tree." This immediately makes me think of the one-button approach Fable 2 used, but I don't know if that's what's going on here. We didn't see a UI, he tells me, because one hasn't been definitively decided on.

Then there's more player-driven abilities that the player can access as well. And [they're] somewhat like an extension of the player in terms of how we wanted to present that - it's still tied to that singular ability button."

It's, again, a slightly unclear answer, and it's another mention of that intriguing singular ability button. Is it a context-sensitive thing? "Yeah, exactly," Paramo answers, but that's as much explanation as I get.

Oh and perhaps on that note: if you're wondering whether Pillars co-creator Josh Sawyer is involved with Avowed in any way, he is, albeit tangentially. "Josh is the studio design director so at some point he tends to have some involvement with most of the projects going on in the studio," Patel says, "to some degree or other. Since Pentiment released, he has been helping us out a little more directly on the gameplay side, and occasionally pinch-hitting in a few other areas as we all tend to do in medium-sized [projects/teams]."

It's over.

 

[Roguey]

Tim and Leonard put The Outer Worlds together with an 80-person team in a little over 3 years.

And it's terrible. I wish there was some senior developer to tell upper management that Obsidian is better off producing isometric games on this size of budget and teams, than producing cutdown versions of first-person RPGs.

Bloodlines was made by a team of roughly 50 (and that was in total; the core team was 32) and a lot of people here regard that as a classic.

 

[Viata]

50 is already too much, imo.

 

[AwesomeButton]

Bloodlines was made by a team of roughly 50 (and that was in total; the core team was 32) and a lot of people here regard that as a classic.

Of course there are counter examples. Talking about current times and current people, who can't and won't work like that, who don't really care about the game on the same level, I'm trying to be a realist. Maybe even this way I'm still overestimating them.

 

[Roguey]

Of course there are counter examples. Talking about current times and current people, who can't and won't work like that, who don't really care about the game on the same level, I'm trying to be a realist. Maybe even this way I'm still overestimating them.

Frankly Bloodlines's gameplay was terrible and it was carried heavily by the setting, the writing, and the art. Unfortunately for poor Obsidian, while TOW and probably-Avowed have less jank than Bloodlines, they are severely lacking in the setting, writing, and art departments.

 

[Delterius]

Do you think it's some kind of a coded form of protest against the constraints on development, or they just don't realize they shouldn't talk like that?

turns out most dorks in game development haven't been through media training

 

[Butter]

Of course there are counter examples. Talking about current times and current people, who can't and won't work like that, who don't really care about the game on the same level, I'm trying to be a realist. Maybe even this way I'm still overestimating them.

Frankly Bloodlines's gameplay was terrible and it was carried heavily by the setting, the writing, and the art. Unfortunately for poor Obsidian, while TOW and probably-Avowed have less jank than Bloodlines, they are severely lacking in the setting, writing, and art departments.

This is basically every soulless product game produced nowadays. "At least it's better polished than those other games" meanwhile everything about it is bland and uninteresting.

 

[Quillon]

Tim and Leonard put The Outer Worlds together with an 80-person team in a little over 3 years.

And it's terrible. I wish there was some senior developer to tell upper management that Obsidian is better off producing isometric games on this size of budget and teams, than producing cutdown versions of first-person RPGs.

Bloodlines was made by a team of roughly 50 (and that was in total; the core team was 32) and a lot of people here regard that as a classic.

And NV was 70 or so. Tho we can't really directly compare team sizes for a game made 20 years ago vs today, some aspects of gamedev got more complex, requires more people. There was quote from Boyarsky about how simple it was making a character in Bloodlines vs how more complex it was for TOW for instance.

So if 100 people isn't enough utilize the other 180 devs the studio got. Its not like everybody's dying for a TOW sequel or whatever else, people want the best game you can make not your self-inflicted comprimised shit.

 

[Roguey]

So if 100 people isn't enough utilize the other 180 devs the studio got. Its not like everybody's dying for a TOW sequel or whatever else, people want the best game you can make not your self-inflicted comprimised shit.

This sounds like an "Obsidian got punished for fucking up the first two years" deal to me. The money MS gives them for TOW 2 is supposed to be spent on TOW 2, not Avowed. That team actually delivered the first time around.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I kind of half watched some of the footage shown on the Mortismal video linked above and some of it looks slightly less dog shit than I would've figured. I'll wait and see.

I still expect it to be a dumpster fire, but if it looks janky because it actually has an RPG system running under the hood more like something like Morrowind or Mass Effect 1, it might be alright. If it looks like that but is a pure action driven thing with dialogues, then this is going to be the clusterfuck we've all expected.

This is probably the most favourable that I've viewed this thing in years, so that's something I guess.

 

[Tyranicon]

TBH, this is looking worse and worse as they release more information about it.

 

[Old Hans]

I kind of half watched some of the footage shown on the Mortismal video linked above and some of it looks slightly less dog shit than I would've figured. I'll wait and see.

I still expect it to be a dumpster fire, but if it looks janky because it actually has an RPG system running under the hood more like something like Morrowind or Mass Effect 1, it might be alright. If it looks like that but is a pure action driven thing with dialogues, then this is going to be the clusterfuck we've all expected.

This is probably the most favourable that I've viewed this thing in years, so that's something I guess.

putting graphics aside, It just looks like something that could have come out in 2010.

 

[mediocrepoet]

TBH, this is looking worse and worse as they release more information about it.

I haven't been following it all that closely because I expect it to be a complete trainwreck that may cause MS to blow up Obsidian or parts of it. Just saying, this is as positive as I've been since the first teaser because otherwise I completely agree with your assessment.

 

[Roguey]

putting graphics aside, It just looks like something that could have come out in 2010.

This is every game. 360/ps3 generation was the peak and everything since has been that with more ram and graphics.

 

[Peachcurl]

TBH, this is looking worse and worse as they release more information about it.

Indeed, it's promising to be a very entertaining release.

 

[mediocrepoet]

TBH, this is looking worse and worse as they release more information about it.

Indeed, it's promising to be a very entertaining release.

I just hope that if it's the dumpster fire we generally expect, they put a bunch of the studio to the sword like they started cleaning house in nuBlizz.