Incline Chris Avellone Appreciation Station

[Sensuki]

Rev From what I remember they actually created the story design by committee. Josh did the initial version and then they had a bunch of meetings that included Josh, Bobby Null, Jorge Salgado, Eric Fenstermaker, George Ziets (via Skype), Adam Brennecke and I think Chris attended a couple but in more of an advisory position (whatever that means).

Each person who attended the meeting then went away and did their own version of the story and they cut and paste the best bits and pieces together. Eric's version combined with some parts from George and Josh's were what was used, with minor elements from other people's (use of a character or two). Eric then went away and worked on it and I recall it being stated that over time he changed what it was about (themes and stuff).

He still pitched his take on the story and he was the only writer working full-time on the game for a while, so maybe he was still open to the idea?

I might be wrong here but my recall is that he didn't pitch his own take and was not present at all of the design meetings?

And yeah I understand what you're referring to now. There did seem to be some kind of rift between Chris and the project early on. It wasn't too long into 2013 when he started doing his "world tour" starting with Rezzed 2013, and from then on out talk after talk about Pillars of Eternity/Obsidian. In the Codex's interview of Carrie Patel, she was asked what it was like to work with people like Chris and Eric, she only talked about Eric and didn't mention Chris at all.

 

[Roguey]

"What's it like working with Chris Avellone?"

"Who?" says Carrie as she swings her axe at Grieving Mother's dialogue trees.

 

[Epsilon]

Hey Chris, where are your damn balls? We're living in Trump's America now. Don't apologize when you've done nothing wrong.



I had to look at this in a private window to understand what was going on because this misandrous moron uses a block list.

Gross. Those people fucking disgust me. The most dull, one-track minds on the planet, and they think they are genius level philosophers, sent here to guide our evil minds.

It's interesting, but I can't even name a single influential female developer. I'm sure there has got to be some out there. I just can't think of any who's game or design contribution influenced the rest of gaming in a positive way.
If it turns out that I can't think of any, because there aren't any. Then that is not the fault of men.
And no, trannies don't count. You have to have been born with double X chromosomes to qualify.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

It's interesting, but I can't even name a single influential female developer. I'm sure there has got to be some out there. I just can't think of any whose game or design contribution influenced the rest of gaming in a positive way.

Roberta Williams, co-founder with her husband Ken of Sierra, pioneer of graphical adventure games, creator of the King's Quest series.

Think she's only the really influential female game developer, though.

 

[Kev Inkline]

Don't you guys ever tire of gossipping?

 

[Sensuki]

It's interesting, but I can't even name a single influential female developer. I'm sure there has got to be some out there. I just can't think of any who's game or design contribution influenced the rest of gaming in a positive way.
If it turns out that I can't think of any, because there aren't any. Then that is not the fault of men

The same goes for most inventions / creativity in world history, not like it's an anomaly.

 

[laclongquan]

Marie fucking Curie, you fucking ignorant savages! And that's a double Nobel laureate for ya.
Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya which you should know if you did some math back in the day.
Get your head out of US a bit.
Oh, and to be clear, game making aspect is consider artsy, not hard science.

 

[Fairfax]

He still pitched his take on the story and he was the only writer working full-time on the game for a while, so maybe he was still open to the idea?

I might be wrong here but my recall is that he didn't pitch his own take and was not present at all of the design meetings?

MCA said this back then:

Speaking of the story, how does the process work when you've got so much writing to fill in all the little cracks of this big, open world?

Eternity has been different from our other projects. With our other projects, we haven't had quite the luxury to have this sort of process. So generally, on our previous projects, a project director would sort of set up the overall vision for the game. In terms of, here's the overall mechanics I'm looking for. Here's the overall feel that I want the player to have. And then what we call a creative lead kind of holds the torch for the storyline. What he'll do is do a few takes on the storyline, let everyone in the studio offer feedback on that particular storyline, and then we iterate on that until we feel solid about it.

And then we divide that story up into chunks amongst the designers. "Hey, you develop this area and these characters. You develop this companion, you develop that companion." On Eternity, it's been a little different because Josh Sawyer set up the vision, the feel he's looking for, and then every designer had a chance to sort of do their own take on what the storyline was like, and we picked and chose from there. Even Josh did a take on the storyline, as well. So it's been a lot different, and we're really enjoying the process.

Since he was one of the designers, I assumed he gave his own take as well, but maybe he just gave his feedback and voted, I don't know.

And yeah I understand what you're referring to now. There did seem to be some kind of rift between Chris and the project early on. It wasn't too long into 2013 when he started doing his "world tour" starting with Rezzed 2013, and from then on out talk after talk about Pillars of Eternity/Obsidian. In the Codex's interview of Carrie Patel, she was asked what it was like to work with people like Chris and Eric, she only talked about Eric and didn't mention Chris at all.

Not just Chris, Tim Cain was a huge part of the Kickstarter updates, initial discussions, AMAs, etc. Tim Cain was the one who said the game would have low INT dialogue and mod support. Something happened along the way and both of their roles were to a fraction of their initial involvement.

 

[Sensuki]

They were used for their celebrity effect. Josh ended up re-designing everything Tim worked on, or took over the design himself, and Tim is now working on a different project. Go figure I suppose?

Wasteland 2 also did the same thing - Fargo talked about all these original designers, I think some of them maybe came to one paper design session (easy paycheck) and contributed no further. In the end we got Chris Keenan, Nathan Long, Brother None and sea.

 

[Fairfax]

Found some interesting stuff in his late 2012-early 2013 interviews.
One of the few (maybe only?) "no comment" I've seen from him:

Back in March, Brian Fargo mentioned a pretty depressing example of Obsidian’s treatment by Bethesda, the publisher of Fallout: New Vegas. In your experience working with publishers, do you find that sort of behavior unusual?

No comment.

He was less apologetic back then:

Third and fourth: I remember reading through the Planescape Vision Statement after it was made public. It was interesting, since it presented the game as much less thoughtful than it actually turned out to be. In particularly, I was deeply surprised to see these two bullet points in there: (1) “‘Babes,’ as in ‘Truckloads Of'” and (2) “And More Babes”. Was this something you felt you needed to have to motivate the design team? Or was this actually part of the original vision?

There was a lot of marketing hype and speak in it, and that worked for the audience at the time, which wasn’t solely the team. The goal was to get the project into production, and there were elements about it that were part of the vision, yes – as an example, Morte’s outlook didn’t change from the vision doc, and yes, it was important to me that both Annah and Fall-From-Grace be extremely good-looking in their own way even if the player character wasn’t. Sue me.

You recently mentioned that you were tempted to crowd-fund a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment. It wasn’t long thereafter that Obsidian launched Project Eternity on Kickstarter. Is this the aforementioned spiritual successor?

No, Project: Eternity is something different. We had considered doing a Planescape: Torment successor, and that seemed like a waste considering the powerhouses we already had in the studio – why not have them come together and collaborate on something? In my opinion, that would actually be more interesting to the public than a Planescape title, and that seems to have proved itself out.

It's interesting because Feargus' version was different. He said Chris didn't want to make it because it'd be "another death march". I don't see why he'd lie about it, so maybe it was one of the reasons? Or maybe MCA was offered the project again later on? Guess I'll ask him in the interview when/if it happens.

I think a true PS:T successor would be inherently tied to his vision about CRPGs from back then, so I understand the idea of combining the strength of every big name at Obsidian at the time. In hindsight, that's the opposite of what happened, but it was a good idea in theory. Although there's always the chance it could've been a case of too many chiefs and not enough indians.

He said something similar in another interview:

Could you highlight one game/series (Baldurs Gate, PS: Torment or IWD ) as the primal predecessor of Project Eternity („PE”), or all of them have the same importance/impact as predecessors. Chris Avellone mentioned in an interview that he would like to make a kind of “unofficial sequel” for Torment.

Tim Cain, Adam Brennecke, Josh Sawyer, Feargus Urquhart, and I sat down in a room and broke down elements from all the Infinity Engine games we felt had strengths that appealed to players and to us – Baldur’s Gate had the incredible companions, storyline, and world, Icewind Dale took the idea of creating amazing dungeon locales for the player to explore (the fortress of the Severed Hand and the Jungles of Chult are still two of my favorite locales), and we wanted to have dialogues and the depth of interactions that hearkened back to Planescape: Torment.

Project: Eternity is not a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment – with the team we have at Obsidian, we’re creating something greater than that.

On PoE's reactivity:

Do moral decisions affect the plotline and how?

Decisions, moral or otherwise, have an impact on the plotline, factions, and companions. Without giving anything too specific away, we want the breadth of reactivity (personal and world-wise) to be along the lines of Fallout 2, Torment, and Fallout: New Vegas, all of which we felt were great examples of being able to make an impact on the environment.

More details on the process behind choosing PoE's story:

There’s directives we try and operate from in terms of design of the game which hopefully should shed some light on the process. In terms of development of the narrative, we have a first draft of a story that we’re iterating on after feedback from the team – the draft we chose as the spine was a collaboration of two stories, one from George Ziets and the other from Eric Fenstermaker. There were elements from every story pitch that we liked a lot, and other elements that we felt could be developed more, or made more impactful for the player.

 

[Grotesque]

how I read the last 2 pages: scroll scroll walls of text read a few words scroll scroll walls of text some words scroll scroll done

 

[Goral]

Marie fucking Curie

Yeah, she was fucking (Peter) Curie but her last name was Skłodowska.

 

[Sceptic]

Roberta Williams, co-founder with her husband Ken of Sierra, pioneer of graphical adventure games, creator of the King's Quest series.

Think she's only the really influential female game developer, though.

Jane Jensen. Lori Cole. Christy Marx.

There were a few more here and there back in the day. There's Carol Shaw obviously, and Anne Westfall (Archon, and I think she had a hand in some Epyx Dunjonquest stuff? not sure about that one). Infocom had Amy Briggs. Origin had one whose name I always forget. IIRC NWC had one too. You could argue some were more or less influential than others, but all the Sierra ones, Shaw and Westfall did some brilliantly innovative stuff.

 

[Roguey]

Given that he went full-on lead with System Shock it seems unlikely to me that he was ever fully excited over making a rehash of a game he made nearly 20 years ago. Ever since Dead Money, he's been on an environmental storytelling/storytelling-through-gameplay kick. Chris "the new Ken Levine" Avellone.

 

[HansGruber]

It's interesting, but I can't even name a single influential female developer.

In addition to the ones named, there is a developer called "Jade Raymond" who is credited as one of the creators of a faintly successful game series called "Assassin's Creed".

 

[ERYFKRAD]

Amy Hennig, people.

 

[Chateaubryan]

No mention of Annie Vandermeer Mitsoda ?

That's cold of you, Codex. Real cold.

Also, Brenda Romero for Wizardry.

 

[Barbarian]

Roberta Williams, co-founder with her husband Ken of Sierra, pioneer of graphical adventure games, creator of the King's Quest series.

Think she's only the really influential female game developer, though.

Jane Jensen. Lori Cole. Christy Marx.

And the games were good too. Very good. But those were different days. Jansen had a chance to develop two games in recent years and we got a shitty adventure with tons of gay homossex and a decent adventure with a strong liberated wymmin protagonist. Mind you, Gabriel Knight was a shitlord. After the failure of both she abandoned gaming for goood and now dedicates her life to writing gay softporn fiction(I shit you not).

I tell you this: It is 2016. Keep wymmin away from game development or they do just that. This isn't 1992 anymore.

 

[agris]

Do moral decisions affect the plotline and how?

Decisions, moral or otherwise, have an impact on the plotline, factions, and companions. Without giving anything too specific away, we want the breadth of reactivity (personal and world-wise) to be along the lines of Fallout 2, Torment, and Fallout: New Vegas, all of which we felt were great examples of being able to make an impact on the environment.

Yeah. The expectations were set high, and the results left me and others very disappointed. Regardless of what you think of PoE now, the release version did not live up to this. The studio, including Chris, did themselves no favor by saying such things.

 

[Fairfax]

Do moral decisions affect the plotline and how?

Decisions, moral or otherwise, have an impact on the plotline, factions, and companions. Without giving anything too specific away, we want the breadth of reactivity (personal and world-wise) to be along the lines of Fallout 2, Torment, and Fallout: New Vegas, all of which we felt were great examples of being able to make an impact on the environment.

Yeah. The expectations were set high, and the results left me and others very disappointed. Regardless of what you think of PoE now, the release version did not live up to this. The studio, including Chris, did themselves no favor by saying such things.

Agreed, but then again, with the people they had available, I can't blame them. MCA himself worked on the 3 games he mentioned, Tim Cain created Fallout, Sawyer led IWD2, FNV, etc. They had what they needed, at least at first.
I think Tim and Chris becoming less involved (for whatever reason) changed the project's direction for good. People seem to have forgotten, but it was Tim Cain himself who promised mod support and low intelligence dialogue back in the KS updates. Maybe not having them to push for these things is why we never got them.

 

[agris]

Fairfax

This discussion seems ripe with material for future interview questions.

 

[Fairfax]

Fairfax

This discussion seems ripe with material for future interview questions.

Yeah, I want to ask him about this stuff. I didn't send him a list of questions for the interview, by the way. Since it's not an audio interivew, I'm doing it as a back and forth via email so I can ask follow-up questions. The interview will take much longer because of it, but I think it'll be better as a result.

 

[Infinitron]

I don't think they ever really became less involved. IMO PoE was always going to be the Sawyer & Brennecke show and Obsidian just had Chris and Tim put on a show with some Kickstarter updates. My interpretation of MCA acting like he was deeply involved at the beginning is that he was bending the truth, just like how he went from saying he had an important role on the game to disavowing any involvement after he left Obsidian.

 

[agris]

I don't think they ever really became less involved. IMO PoE was always going to be the Sawyer & Brennecke show and Obsidian just had Chris and Tim put on a show with some Kickstarter updates. My interpretation of MCA acting like he was deeply involved at the beginning is that he was bending the truth, just like when he went from saying he had an important role on the game to disavowing it after he left Obsidian.

Why though? That's a more convoluted rational than: he initially was involved, something happened and then Tim and him weren't.

 

[Infinitron]

I don't think they ever really became less involved. IMO PoE was always going to be the Sawyer & Brennecke show and Obsidian just had Chris and Tim put on a show with some Kickstarter updates. My interpretation of MCA acting like he was deeply involved at the beginning is that he was bending the truth, just like when he went from saying he had an important role on the game to disavowing it after he left Obsidian.

Why though? That's a more convoluted rational than: he initially was involved, something happened and then Tim and him weren't.

It just wasn't their project. Until his recent project with Leonard Boyarsky, Tim Cain was just slumming it as a code monkey, and god knows what really took up Avellone's time for all those years.