Incline Chris Avellone Appreciation Station

[StaticSpine]

I'd never considered the idea that Fallout became more of a popular phenomenon than Baldur's Gate in Russia and other Eastern European countries because it was on a single CD and thus easier to pirate. That's amusing.

I can't remember what the prices were for pirated games per CD back then

80 RUB (~$4) when FO2 came out. I bought a lot of this stuff back in 98-99.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I'd never considered the idea that Fallout became more of a popular phenomenon than Baldur's Gate in Russia and other Eastern European countries because it was on a single CD and thus easier to pirate. That's amusing.

And false. Look at the Russian fanbase of Stalker or Metro. It's massive. And yes, they were both based on hugely popular books by Russian writers, but then those books also became popular there for a reason.

 

[Infinitron]

I'd never considered the idea that Fallout became more of a popular phenomenon than Baldur's Gate in Russia and other Eastern European countries because it was on a single CD and thus easier to pirate. That's amusing.

And false. Look at the Russian fanbase of Stalker or Metro. It's massive. And yes, they were both based on hugely popular books by Russian writers, but then those books also became popular there for a reason.

Yes, of course. Maybe still a contributing factor, though?

OTOH, Poland liked Baldur's Gate a lot. Somebody ought to draw a graph in Excel that correlates late 1990s GDP per capita with RPG popularity. :D

 

[Flou]

80 RUB (~$4) when FO2 came out. I bought a lot of this stuff back in 98-99.

Sounds about right. I paid for mine in Finnish markka, both in Russia and Estonia and now that you said it I believe it was about 20-40 markkas for one CD pirate game from Estonia/Russia. From a legit store in Finland the games were 300mk which was a lot of money for most kids back then.

 

[Flou]

Yes, of course. Maybe still a contributing factor, though?

OTOH, Poland liked Baldur's Gate a lot. Somebody ought to draw a graph in Excel that correlates late 1990s GDP per capita with RPG popularity. :D

Didn't the Polish get a translated version of the game which made the series a massive hit in Poland?

 

[Jarmaro]

This is going to sound so unCodexian, DU will ban my ass if he ever reads it. But I don't believe for a second that 99% of gamers are dumb lazy fratboys who only want to be spoonfed cheap entertainment. If Christopher Nolan can consistently print money making 4 hour movies with barely any action in them, the gaming market also has a place for quality intelligent games with high budget and production values.

I wouldn't go that far, players can appreciate good games, but they do the same with bad or mediocre ones. They just don't distinguish.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I'd never considered the idea that Fallout became more of a popular phenomenon than Baldur's Gate in Russia and other Eastern European countries because it was on a single CD and thus easier to pirate. That's amusing.

And false. Look at the Russian fanbase of Stalker or Metro. It's massive. And yes, they were both based on hugely popular books by Russian writers, but then those books also became popular there for a reason.

Yes, of course. Maybe still a contributing factor, though?

OTOH, Poland liked Baldur's Gate a lot. Somebody ought to draw a graph in Excel that correlates late 1990s GDP per capita with RPG popularity. :D

Probably more to do with the fact that potato edition of BG had a blockbuster localization with top actors doing the dubbing. CDPR used it to start their publishing business.

Edit: beaten to it.

 

[Fairfax]

Black Isle have created properties that went on to make billions for Zenimax

Fallout was not made by BIS.

IHaveHugeNick and Fairfax I guess it just seems like people's expectations are a little utopian here. "Underperformed for their potential" / "wasted so many great opportunities" just seems like a weird way to describe a company that made the games Obsidian made, and has lasted as long.

I guess they could've done even better, but what RPG studio do you think did better along the metrics the Codex cares about? Black Isle certainly made great games, but (a) it was a division of a larger company and (b) it only lasted 7 years, and only released games the Codex cares about over a four-year span ('98 to '02). Troika made even fewer games over an even shorter span -- I certainly think they made good stuff, but they didn't last. Bioware made some games that I like a lot, but it hypertrophied and was consumed by EA.

Obsidian has been operating for 14 years -- twice as long as Black Isle -- without the wealth of Interplay propping it up. While its games might not be quite as great as the best of Interplay (Fallout), Black Isle (PS:T), Troika (Bloodlines, IMO, but I know it's debatable), they have put out three all-time classics, which puts them in the same class as BI and Troika, and they've survived. To me, the assumption that they should've done even better is just naively optimistic.

For instance, if The New World is amazing, I will be ecstatic. But if Iron Tower runs into an iceberg, you can't cry, "Shame!" at them for doing something remarkable. Same think with Obsidian in my opinion. They hit a few out of the park, they've gone the distance, they remain close with the community, they've been quite nimble, and they've both created tools and nurtured developers that have yielded additional RPGs.

Black Isle had to cancel or delay projects and make lesser games just to make Interplay money. Troika had about a dozen people and much less favourable conditions. Obsidian had no excuse to fail so many times. They had creative freedom, more resources, more people, and more time to make their games than any of these studios. And at some points, such as the period the 2009-2011 period, they arguably had better talent (at least in terms of writers and designers) than any RPG studio ever had.

But if Obsidian had succeeded in the way you want, in all likelihood they'd be a Biowarean cinematic RPG maker subsumed by a larger company. How is that better?

BioWare didn't have to keep dumbing their games down, and they didn't have to be purchased by EA either. If Obsidian had made games with about as much depth as KOTOR/ME1/DA:O and old Obsidian's qualities, I'm sure all sides would've been satisfied. Most here like KOTOR2, MOTB and FNV, after all.

FNV metacritic fiasco was started by MCA. Something I bet didn't go well in the company with the other partners.

I'm sure they wish it hadn't been revealed, but they clearly don't resent MCA for it. He is the one who recently worked on a Bethesda project and keeps a good relationship with them.

Certainly you don't expect them to be able to hang onto every Lead Writer quality writer they had back then or will have in the future? Both Gonzalez and Stout got a Lead Writer position after working at Obsidian. There was a huge demand for quality writers in the gaming industry when more AAA games started to have a proper narrative design. Naturally the competition will poach writers from a company widely known to nurture a lot of talented writers. Who in their right mind would want to poach Bethesda's "Have you seen my dad, he's a middle-aged man" -level of "talent" to work for them.

You misunderstood my comment. I wasn't attacking them for losing all that talent. Although it was Obsidian's fault, there's no way to know if they would've stayed much longer, and they were certainly good enough to be poached. I was just pointing out their best period.

Paradox didn't gamble much, the game was cheap and marketing was as cheap if not even cheaper and they made profit with it. Not just those PoE numbers they were expecting which of course had way bigger/broader marketing thanks to Kickstarter frenzy.

It was definitely a gamble. Paradox didn't just fund part of the game's development, they bought the Tyranny IP as well. It turned out to be a failure, and there was no excuse there either.

 

[Infinitron]

Fallout was not made by BIS.

oh puhleez

http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/fallout

Division Director:
Feargus Urquhart

They just hadn't named it that yet.

 

[Fairfax]

Fallout was not made by BIS.

oh puhleez

http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/fallout

Division Director:
Feargus Urquhart

They just hadn't named it that yet.

The division didn't exist when Fallout's development started.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Fallout was not made by BIS.

oh puhleez

http://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/fallout

Division Director:
Feargus Urquhart

They just hadn't named it that yet.

The division didn't exist when Fallout's development started.

Sweet Jesus dude, just what is wrong with you. We all know you're a storyteller on a holy mission to protect the Great Chris Avellone from all possible harm, and that for some reason you deluded yourself that it somehow requires taking wild swings at anyone he's ever worked with, but this is some Soviet propaganda level of absurdity.

This is literally your logic: Stephen King didn't write The Running Man. Richard Bachman did. The fact that Stephen King and Richard Bachman are actually the same person clearly shouldn't mislead us into thinking Stephen King had anything to do with the book.

I'd love to see your MRI scan just to see the level of mental gymnasticks required to conjure this level of idiocy. Get the fuck over yourself you weirdo.

 

[Fairfax]

Someone's off his meds.

Fallout's development started in 1994. The division was created (without the Black Isle name) in 1996.

 

[MRY]

Black Isle had to cancel or delay projects and make lesser games just to make Interplay money. Troika had about a dozen people and much less favourable conditions. Obsidian had no excuse to fail so many times. They had creative freedom, more resources, more people, and more time to make their games than any of these studios. And at some points, such as the period the 2009-2011 period, they arguably had better talent (at least in terms of writers and designers) than any RPG studio ever had.

***
BioWare didn't have to keep dumbing their games down, and they didn't have to be purchased by EA either.

I don't have your brains, knowledge, or energy. My only asset in this conversation is a few years' more weariness. But I think you're engaging in the common mistake of treating all the good qualities that someone (or, in this case, some organization) has as baseline, happenstantial, or irrelevant, rather than as achievements themselves.

For instance, you are treating Obsidian's ability to employ a larger staff than Troika as if staff size were just a random dice roll for the builds they were assigned, and "[t]hey had creative freedom, more resources, more people, [arguably better talent], and more time to make their games" as if dumb luck or free inheritance gave them those things, such that only the most dissolute wastrel could squander them making only (only!) KOTOR2, MOTB, FNV, and PoE -- not to mention Tyranny, Alpha Protocol, and South Park.

Likewise, you are treating Obsidian's overall resistance -- imperfect, maybe, but still real -- to making ultra-streamlined or cinematical RPGs as if that didn't require integrity and judgment; it was just a blue Paragon choice to make, obviously the right one if you want to stay true to your values. Thus, Bioware knowingly, maliciously, unnecessarily chose -- "didn't have" -- "to keep dumbing their games down," whereas Obsidian just muddled along automatically on the default path of not doing so.

This seems to me a little like the way I felt in high school: that the kids who worked really hard and got good grades, while I slouched about getting middling grades, didn't really deserve them because "they only got them by working hard" -- as was proven by standardized test scores -- "and if I wanted to waste my time doing stupid worksheets and reading the assigned books, I could get As easily too." The feeling was absurd, and I think your sentiments, though not absurd, suffer from the same flaw.

The fact that Obsidian gathered, nurtured, and largely retained the raw ingredients for making good RPGs (existence, manpower, enough autonomy to make RPGs, access to engines to create them, the desire to create them) is extraordinary, as is demonstrated by the fact that so few other developers have created, gathered, or retained them. The fact that they used those ingredients to make a series of great RPGs is actually less extraordinary but surely praiseworthy as well.

Obviously something went grievously wrong between Avellone and Obsidian -- he was one great asset that Obsidian wasn't able to nurture and retain and utilize. There's no real story in which losing him isn't a failing of Obsidian. It doesn't matter what sins they could lay at his feet; as long she can sing, the leading lady is entitled, after all, to be a prima donna, and it's the impressario's job to grovel before her.

 

[MRY]

No, I didn't wise up until my 30s. Until then, I continued to think that lazy smarts were more praiseworthy than the fruits of honest labor.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

No, I didn't wise up until my 30s. Until then, I continued to think that lazy smarts were more praiseworthy than the fruits of honest labor.

Doesn't everybody? Growing up you don't notice the level of effort that goes through something as simple as a grocery store. Milk just appears to grow on shelves. You don't see the tremendous logistics and organization required for you to be able to pour that milk on your Cheetos. That someone has to put that milk on the shelve, someone else has to unload the truck, that truck has to keep precise timing to keep product from going sour. And that before milk even goes into bottle that goes into the truck that goes into the shop, it gets pre-produced in a factory with some high-tech equipment that full-team of educated people have to keep operating. And that before preproduce milk gets to the factory, it has to come from a cow, and that cow has another group of trained specialist around her to keep her smiling and healthy while she's being milked.

Then you start working some entry level jobs, and you're still not in a position to see the whole picture, and people in higher position seems like they are simply lucky because they got there before you. You haven't seen shit so you don't know shit, that goes for everybody.

And yes, I do have an unhealthy obsessions with cows. Cows are good people, unlike some people.

 

[Fairfax]

I don't have your brains, knowledge, or energy. My only asset in this conversation is a few years' more weariness. But I think you're engaging in the common mistake of treating all the good qualities that someone (or, in this case, some organization) has as baseline, happenstantial, or irrelevant, rather than as achievements themselves.

For instance, you are treating Obsidian's ability to employ a larger staff than Troika as if staff size were just a random dice roll for the builds they were assigned, and "[t]hey had creative freedom, more resources, more people, [arguably better talent], and more time to make their games" as if dumb luck or free inheritance gave them those things, such that only the most dissolute wastrel could squander them making only (only!) KOTOR2, MOTB, FNV, and PoE -- not to mention Tyranny, Alpha Protocol, and South Park.

You're right, assembling that kind of talent is an achievement by itself, and I didn't want to undermine that. My point was that Obsidian had (for many years) everything they needed to consistently make great, successful AAA RPGs that still pleased a BIS/Codexian fanbase.

Likewise, you are treating Obsidian's overall resistance -- imperfect, maybe, but still real -- to making ultra-streamlined or cinematical RPGs as if that didn't require integrity and judgment; it was just a blue Paragon choice to make, obviously the right one if you want to stay true to your values. Thus, Bioware knowingly, maliciously, unnecessarily chose -- "didn't have" -- "to keep dumbing their games down," whereas Obsidian just muddled along automatically on the default path of not doing so.

They didn't really resist that path. Many of their games make heavy use of cinematics, and all of them have streamlined mechanics (some more than others, of course). They didn't have to go down the EA BioWare path in order to be successful, as BioWare itself was extremely successful making games with the same amount of depth as Obsidian games.

This seems to me a little like the way I felt in high school: that the kids who worked really hard and got good grades, while I slouched about getting middling grades, didn't really deserve them because "they only got them by working hard" -- as was proven by standardized test scores -- "and if I wanted to waste my time doing stupid worksheets and reading the assigned books, I could get As easily too." The feeling was absurd, and I think your sentiments, though not absurd, suffer from the same flaw.

I don't think that's a fair analogy, since none of what I said involved merit, hard work, etc. And if I was to include Obsidian in that scenario, I don't think either type applies to them. I see it more like a student who had the smarts, the work and the resources to get good grades, but failed most exams regardless. Why that happened is up for the debate, but I didn't even discuss it. My issue is with how its fans (and Feargus to a lesser extent) blame it all on publishers and/or external factors. In that scenario, it's like always blaming bad grades on poorly worded questions, biased teachers, bad books, lack of time, and so on. It might be true in one or two cases, but at some point the excuses become rather silly.

The fact that Obsidian gathered, nurtured, and largely retained the raw ingredients for making good RPGs (existence, manpower, enough autonomy to make RPGs, access to engines to create them, the desire to create them) is extraordinary, as is demonstrated by the fact that so few other developers have created, gathered, or retained them. The fact that they used those ingredients to make a series of great RPGs is actually less extraordinary but surely praiseworthy as well.

That's fair, but again, it seems like you took my arguments as a hateful attack on Obsidian and their creations. I find their trajectory tragic, not despicable.

 

[Drax]

Cows are good people

Also, really tasty when burnt for a while.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Now you want Obsidian to add not just better business acumen but also unwavering artistic integrity in the face of publisher/mega-developer enticements? Utopian, indeed.

Anyway, getting back to this. I don't think it's Utopian at all. Rome just isn't built in a day. You have to do a Memento and Insomnia before you can move on to $200 million blockbusters. Who the fuck knows what's to come. Larian were the edge of bankruptcy just a few years ago, a broken developer who specialized in making games in a dead genre. Look at them now. Sven could probably sell a million copies with a VR game that has player follow a microcamera into his own anus. 20 years from now you may be producing Primordia 7 HoloDeck Edition and signing autographs at Comic-Con to a 50,000 crowd of awed teenagers while snorting cocaine from a hand of your pet monkey.

 

[MRY]

(1) I prefer Memento to any of Nolan's other work, and certainly I think his filmography from 2000 to 2008 (Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, Prestige, Dark Knight) outshines 2008 to 2017 (Inception, DKR, Interstellar, Quay, Dunkirk). So I'm not really sure why Nolan should be deemed an aspiration rather than a Biowarean cautionary tale.

(2) The aspiration to build Rome rather than tend your garden is pretty utopian. The desire to hector others into building Rome (though I suppose Hector never harassed Aeneas on this score) rather than tending their garden seems misplaced. While perhaps the overall arc of history is improved by trackless ambition and radical striving, on a more quotidian level it is misery -- misery for the striver who never achieves his goal and never is satisfied when he does because even Romans weren't satisfied with building Rome and usually misery for others around him because he crashes and burns and lives in his dreams rather than taking care of everyday cares like, say, paying your employees, patching your games, seeing your kids, whatever.

(3) The Rome-building-rags-to-blockbusters story you talk about is the Bioware story. It's not just the Bioware story looking from the outside in; it was the Bioware story the doctors themselves told me when I met them. They wanted money to make better engines, and better engines to make more emotive character animations; and more emotive character animations to make RPGs where you had both better characters from a story-telling standpoint (e.g., because you could show stuff that otherwise needed expository dialogue) and better opportunities for roleplaying because of your ability to paperdoll your character. And now the whole universe is made of paperclips that look like this:

It turns out that all roads lead to hell, not Rome.

(4) Along those lines, I have no desire to make an adventure game with cutting edge cinematical powers. I know you're being somewhat facetious, but I gather the basic thought ("If you work hard, one day you could own your own company, son!") is sincere: bit by bit I could go from a 320x200 retro adventure with voice acting from Dave's drinking buddies to ... what? A Tell Tale game? Forget being tied to the mast, I'm so scared of sirens I won't even go to sea.

 

[Alienman]

You could become the next David Cage.

 

[Jarmaro]

(3) The Rome-building-rags-to-blockbusters story you talk about is the Bioware story. It's not just the Bioware story looking from the outside in; it was the Bioware story the doctors themselves told me when I met them. They wanted money to make better engines, and better engines to make more emotive character animations; and more emotive character animations to make RPGs where you had both better characters from a story-telling standpoint (e.g., because you could show stuff that otherwise needed expository dialogue) and better opportunities for roleplaying because of your ability to paperdoll your character. And now the whole universe is made of paperclips that look like this:

Only thing you proved is that modern companies care more about making games' development cost as low as possible, which leads to bad games. There isn't some godlike power that forbids making good games, it's all about money and its proper managment. Your words scream 'despair'.

 

[Roguey]

We all know you're a storyteller on a holy mission to protect the Great Chris Avellone from all possible harm, and that for some reason you deluded yourself that it somehow requires taking wild swings at anyone he's ever worked with, but this is some Soviet propaganda level of absurdity.

Well, regardless of whether it falls under the Black Isle umbrella or not, Chris still has to take some of the blame for Descent to Undermountain, the game he had to work on instead of Fallout.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

(1) I prefer Memento to any of Nolan's other work, and certainly I think his filmography from 2000 to 2008 (Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, Prestige, Dark Knight) outshines 2008 to 2017 (Inception, DKR, Interstellar, Quay, Dunkirk). So I'm not really sure why Nolan should be deemed an aspiration rather than a Biowarean cautionary tale.

He certainly had to dumb it down for the mass audience, but this dichotomy that you either have to be a starving artist or a Bioware is false one. There's a place in the market for things that have high production values and don't compromise too much, and more are popping up every year.

(2) The aspiration to build Rome rather than tend your garden is pretty utopian. The desire to hector others into building Rome (though I suppose Hector never harassed Aeneas on this score) rather than tending their garden seems misplaced. While perhaps the overall arc of history is improved by trackless ambition and radical striving, on a more quotidian level it is misery -- misery for the striver who never achieves his goal and never is satisfied when he does because even Romans weren't satisfied with building Rome and usually misery for others around him because he crashes and burns and lives in his dreams rather than taking care of everyday cares like, say, paying your employees, patching your games, seeing your kids, whatever.

Come on now, that's just isn't how people set their goals. That's just how pop-culture trivializes it, rags to riches overnight, cutting out everything in between. Nobody just sets a goal to climb K12 and tries to achieve it. They set a goal to climb the nearest rock, then the nearest hill, then its the Alps, and then you aim even higher. And misery and struggling are part of human condition no matter what you do. I'm sure Bill Gates sometimes wakes up in the night and feels despair that he didn't party like a rockstar and spend his entire youth typing on a computer.

(4) Along those lines, I have no desire to make an adventure game with cutting edge cinematical powers. I know you're being somewhat facetious, but I gather the basic thought ("If you work hard, one day you could own your own company, son!") is sincere: bit by bit I could go from a 320x200 retro adventure with voice acting from Dave's drinking buddies to ... what? A Tell Tale game? Forget being tied to the mast, I'm so scared of sirens I won't even go to sea.

TellTale make visual novels posing as a game. I was thinking more in line of one of those walking simulators that are popping up lately. Some of them capture the spirit of what I expect from an adventure game far better than anything TellTale ever did. Goal-oriented exploration that has you look for clues and interact with environment rather than walk around aimlessly, with a slowly unwinding plot told through indirect means, rather then fed through cut-scenes or dialogue. Ethan Carter comes to mind.

 

[Latro]

by the way, has MCA's wife thrown away his street fighter cammy figurines?


asking in case he wants to give them to a friend









to me...

 

[laclongquan]

That would be good stuffs. Shame if she ebay it~