Interview Chris Avellone is still pretty mad about Obsidian

[Deleted member 7219]

He does sound incredibly bitter about Fallout: New Vegas. I can understand his attitude towards the other Obsidian owners - it is weird that the creative director of a company never had much involvement with the games made at said company - but what he said about New Vegas doesn't make sense. He just outright trashes it.

Fuck his opinions about FO2 and FNV.

Unfortunately, Chris Avellone did such a superb job on KOTOR 2, did good stuff with Torment, and wrote good companions for Obsidian's other games, so I have to take his opinions seriously.

 

[Endemic]

He's always trashed his own work, that's just MCA modesty. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-07-31-fear-is-the-path-to-the-dark-side (KOTOR 2, for example).

 

[Infinitron]

I wouldn't say he "trashes" FO:NV in this interview. It's more like he's trying too hard not to say anything good about it.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

He's always trashed his own work, that's just MCA modesty. http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-07-31-fear-is-the-path-to-the-dark-side (KOTOR 2, for example).

Ok, but he was the boss on KOTOR 2 so it can legitimately be called his game (although a lot of the writing was done by other people, he was responsible for how the game turned out creatively).

He had no such position on Fallout: New Vegas, so any kind of dismissive criticism he makes where he makes out Bethesda's games to be better is really just an insult to the other Obsidian devs who worked on it, most of whom have since left the company. Trashing it isn't some kind of modesty on his part and it isn't a shot at the Obsidian owners either. Not sure what he hopes to accomplish other than ingratiate himself with Bethesda.

 

[Excidium II]

Saying FO2 had a better main quest than FNV is beyond dumb, he should try less hard.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Saying FO2 had a better main quest than FNV is beyond dumb, he should try less hard.

Completely agree with this.

Fallout 2's main story was, "Gonna nuke the world again!". It had factions, but they didn't have much bearing on the main story choices as I recall.

Fallout: New Vegas' was a factional conflict with the ultimate question being around who controls the Mojave, and what kind of society do you want to create. It was full of player agency while also presenting real, interesting choices, with some excellent characters (Mr. House, Caesar etc) there to help you make educated decisions.

 

[an Administrator]

He does sound incredibly bitter about Fallout: New Vegas. I can understand his attitude towards the other Obsidian owners - it is weird that the creative director of a company never had much involvement with the games made at said company - but what he said about New Vegas doesn't make sense. He just outright trashes it.

Fuck his opinions about FO2 and FNV.

Unfortunately, Chris Avellone did such a superb job on KOTOR 2, did good stuff with Torment, and wrote good companions for Obsidian's other games, so I have to take his opinions seriously.

A Persian proverb says : "A potter drinks from a broken bowl"
Devs can sometimes have shit taste in games.

Just becomes he is experienced in something it doesn't mean that his opinion is 100% correct on everything in that field.

 

[Sannom]

How is MCA a "SJW"?!?

He was interviewed once by a Gamergate site (One Angry Gamer I believe) who tried to have him diss SJWs, the same way the guy in this interview tries to have him say bad things about Bethesda, but he never took the bait. You could sense the frustration of the interviewer.

 

[Crooked Bee]

He does sound incredibly bitter about Fallout: New Vegas. I can understand his attitude towards the other Obsidian owners - it is weird that the creative director of a company never had much involvement with the games made at said company (other than KOTOR 2 of course) but what he said about New Vegas doesn't make sense. He just outright trashes it.

Maybe the fan theory that he hates Josh Sawyer is true after all.

 

[Excidium II]

Sawyer = the ant
MCA = the cicada

 

[Lurker King]

Maybe the fan theory that he hates Josh Sawyer is true after all.

That was a given from past interviews. This new interview suggests that this fan theory need to be revised to include his hate against Tim Cain and Feargus Urquhart.

 

[MRY]

It's fun to try and divine someone's intentions from an interview like this, but I guess I'd say it's not the most valuable way to approach the text. To me, the takeaway is a strong hostility to broad assertions that "Game X is better than Game Y" and a preference for more particularized evaluations.

For example, he's not saying that FO2 had a better story overall than FO:NV. He says that, "story-wise, I can definitely say Fallout 2 did a worse job on many fronts than Fallout 1, for example, and New Vegas did a lot of things even worse than Fallout 2." He gives some examples here of what he's talking about: "talking deathclaws in F2, talking animals, ghosts, Wannamingoes that look like HR Giger knock-off monsters, etc, etc.), even stuff I've done that I realized later was the wrong decision for the sake of a cheap joke (esp. 4th wall-breaking jokes)." I'm not sure what particular items in FO:NV he'd object to (I couldn't get into the game at all), but I take his point to be more that there are things in FO:NV that deserve criticism even in comparison to FO2.

It is a valuable skill in a creator (and probably in a person, period) to be able to see what is good in the things you dislike and what is bad in the things you like, so that you can emulate that good and avoid that bad, even if generally speaking you'd rather utterly condemn what you dislike and emphatically praise what you like. I think Chris has pretty consistently done this. All his talk about environmental storytelling is typically done via criticizing PS:T (a game universally lauded for its storytelling) and praising railroad shooters (which RPG players would probably generally criticize from a story standpoint).

That said, I think this particular virtue can become a vice if you don't pursue some kind of golden mean. It's an important corrective against bias and blinders, but always criticizing what you ought to love and always praising what you ought to hate can lead to a crisis of confidence, a loss of values, and a lack of action. When you're basically the one revered writer of dialogue-choice-based RPGs, to run around praising a ubiquitous form of visual storytelling can be counterproductive. When there is no limit to Bethesda's critical and financial success, and Obsidian is struggling to get by, praising the good in the former while highlighting the bad in the latter doesn't seem likely to cause the good to get better so much as to cause the good to go away and the bad to preen more.

Still, I think it's silly to take his statements as implying that he thinks poorly overall of FO:NV's storytelling or of his former colleagues.

 

[an Administrator]

A war between the gods

 

[CyberWhale]

Obsidian doesn't even follow him on Twitter. Bad blood in fucking gallons.

 

[Excidium II]

Maybe the fan theory that he hates Josh Sawyer is true after all.

That was a given from past interviews. This new interview suggests that this fan theory need to be revised to include his hate against Tim Cain and Feargus Urquhart.

Does he hate Guido Henkel? In other words is it mutual?

 

[Fenix]

However, if we are evaluating whether this will affect his capabilities as a lead designer, then the answer is a big yes.

It is a fucking BULLSHIT.
I won't explaine this, because if such obvious thing need explanation then there is no need to explan.

 

[Fenix]

trash combat such as PS:T

Another loadout of BULLSHIT.
I don't see in what place and moment I can see that TRASHCOMBAT when in reality it doen't differ much from BG combat, and while it isn;t that good, you need to drink a nice cup of exaggeration to call it TRASH COMBAT.
And also there is NO connection between casual games he prefer for relaxation and his quality of work.

 

[Mastermind]

He probably also likes Bethesda's exploration more because Bethesda, unlike Obshitian, gives you plenty of empty places to explore.

FTFY.

Nope, it's the other way around. Countless times I've wandered the NV map looking for points of interest only to find out they're a wrecked building (as in, just the corner standing or something) or abandoned shack with nothing interesting there.

 

[an Administrator]

Lack of random encounters in NV made the exploration even more banal.

 

[Lurker King]

It is a fucking BULLSHIT.
I on't explaine this, because if such obvious thig need explanation then no need to explan.

You think that it is fucking bullshit because you are so sure that you are right and think you are infallible that you forget that we all make mistakes. So a little bit of epistemic humility goes a long way. The reason why causal gamers can’t be decent lead designers for cRPGs is really simple: this task requires a deep knowledge of the intricacies of cRPGs. You can’t expect someone who can't kill wolves in Arcanum to implement a decent combat system, solid encounter design, interesting skill combos, etc. [Evidence to support this belief: PS:T, Kotor 2 and AP all have bad combat systems]. You can’t expect someone who doesn’t enjoy challenging games in his spare time to develop (or understand what is needed to make it work) a robust resource management and solid level progression [Evidence to support this belief: PS:T, Kotor 2 and AP all fail in this department].

 

[Excidium II]

You can’t expect someone who can't kill wolves in Arcanum to implement a decent combat system

To be fair nobody could kill wolves with that character. He made a character with no combat skills because people convinced him Arcanum is a game you can talky talk through.

 

[Fairfax]

Still, I think it's silly to take his statements as implying that he thinks poorly overall of FO:NV's storytelling or of his former colleagues.

Indeed. He praises the team all the time on twitter:






With countless similar tweets going back to the game's release.

He also does several Fallout related interviews and talks about FNV all the time, always praising the game and the team.
To say

he's trying too hard not to say anything good about it.

is simply disingenuous.

 

[Lurker King]

Nope, it's the other way around. Countless times I've wandered the NV map looking for points of interest only to find out they're a wrecked building (as in, just the corner standing or something) or abandoned shack with nothing interesting there.

The difference is that NV map looks like a real place, while FO3 world looks like a gamey egotistical theme park. You can say what you want about Sawyer, but he took photographs of real locations and studied the terrain of the place, etc. he made the same thing to KOTOR2 and made a big difference.

 

[Infinitron]

That's my opinion about how he sounds in this interview. It doesn't have anything to do with what he says on Twitter.

 

[Lurker King]

You can’t expect someone who can't kill wolves in Arcanum to implement a decent combat system

To be fair nobody could kill wolves with that character. He made a character with no combat skills because people convinced him Arcanum is a game you can talky talk through.

A grognard would never drop all the combat skills and lose half the fun.