People News Feargus Urquhart IGDA Montreal Talk

[Athelas]

You claimed "PoE's engine" offers a set of features. When you were called on those, you admitted they weren't good and they needed work.

I said no such thing. I said that even if you personally disliked those features, it's still better than not having them at all.

So who the fuck is going to work on "PoE's engine" instead of loading Unreal and benefit from a support 100 times more intensive, dedicated and actually expert in the arcane art of engine crafting?

You think a game running on Unreal guarantees it will be good? Do you enjoy the hundreds of popamole games that were produced with Unreal?

Does that mean Obsidian can make a living building engines? Do they have a business model?
No they don't, so shut the fuck up.

Have you ever heard of this little thing called the Onyx engine, an engine developed by Obsidian used to produce their two most bug-free games to date?

 

[Hegel]

Wait, you said those things

You think a game running on Unreal guarantees it will be good? Do you enjoy the hundreds of popamole games that were produced with Unreal?

No, I think you'd be irrational to pick Obsidian over Epic, ceteris paribus.

Have you ever heard of this little thing called the Onyx engine, an engine developed by Obsidian used to produce their two most bug-free games to date?

Yeah, an engine they opted to discontinue because the cost of licensing the middleware would have made future projects economically unfeasible. Choosing a technology stack (the engine) is a decision bound down by costs.
You seem unable to grasp the reality of budget constraints, which is the reason why it would make no sense to pick Obsidian over "big engine developer", unless Obsidian had a massive value proposition which would have skewed their customer's judgement in their favor, but they don't.
In short: they don't have an engine crafting business, and in fact they don't sell engines. It appears the market is correct.

 

[Infinitron]

Bioware did just that, the infinity engine was designed for a RTS after all.

Yeah, for a few months in 1995, before the man in the video in the OP told them to change it.

(BTW, did you know that Feargus Urquhart also came up with the title "Baldur's Gate" for the game? The Biodocs thought it was dumb.)

But it has nothing to do with this discussion.

It has everything to do with this discussion. You're suggesting that a codebase already prepared for developing point & click party-based 2D pre-rendered isometric RPGs with dialogue trees is a worse choice for RPG development than an off-the-shelf first person shooter engine. Dude, if Torment was made with Unreal it would have played and possibly even looked shittier right now. I guarantee it.

And while you may not believe that Obsidian will ever produce a PoE2 on par with BG2, you can be sure that they never COULD produce it without what they've already made for PoE.

 

[Abu Antar]

Black Isle, Troika and now Obsidian. Why the fuck does this keep happening?

 

[Hegel]

Infinitron stop being a retard by polluting the discussion with unrelated stuff. I'm stating that Obsidian can't monetize PoE's engine, and in fact they can't. Do they have a customer base? Would licensing their product be a rational choice (assuming they could even license their own version of unity) from a customer's point of view?
I make my living by valuing stuff; you can't value something which, as of now, didn't, doesn't and will not exist.
Sure they might become the next Epic, IdSoft or Crytek; just as I might become the first man on Mars.
As of now they aren't and it looks like they have no intention (or the skillset or the product) of being in that business.

 

[Athelas]

Infinitron stop being a retard by polluting the discussion with unrelated stuff. I'm stating that Obsidian can't monetize PoE's engine, and in fact they can't. Do they have a customer base? Would licensing their product be a rational choice (assuming they could even license their own version of unity) from a customer's point of view?
I make my living by valuing stuff, you can't value something which, as of now, didn't, doesn't and will not exist.
Sure they might become the next epic, idsofwtare or crytek just as I might become the first man on Mars. As of now they aren't and it looks like they have no intention to be.

Good thing then that nobody made this claim - we were dicussing reusing the engine for future isometric RPG's made by Obsidian and InXile.

On the upside, I think you might be that much closer to a dumbfuck tag.

 

[Infinitron]

Hey, if goalpost-moving is the price of ending this discussion, I pay gladly

 

[Hegel]

So, who in his right mind would license a by-product (from a third party) which admittedly is not great, needs a lot of rework and needs to be expanded upon?

Dumbfuck said:

Who in their right mind? Well, the company you like to describe as 'InCline', for starters.

Dumbfuck said:

Tell me again about the great stealth systems and day/night cycle in Shadowrun Returns and Wasteland 2.

Dumbfuck said:

Do you really think InXile would prefer building an RPG engine from scratc using Unreal, with all the effort and resources that would cost, rather than simply making use of what Obsidian already had produced? Even if Unreal had been free at the time, InXile would still have used the PoE engine.

Dumbfuck said:

Apparently the subtleties of everyday speech are lost on you. Everyone understands the PoE engine is just a set of features.You seem to think a company would rather dedicate resources and effort to building those features from scratch instead of just using the 'PoE engine'.

What is this birdie saying? I can't hear you? What, Athelas is a dumbfuck? Of course he is!

 

[Kz3r0]

Have you ever heard of this little thing called the Onyx engine, an engine developed by Obsidian used to produce their two most bug-free games to date?

I already mentioned it and you ignored that, tell me genius, why Obsidian wasted resources for making thir own engine and then switched to a third party product.
Oh yeah, the proprietary middleware I already mentioned, this show their business acumen.
On top of that Sawyer mentioned how much a pain in the ass was using 3D models on a 2d background using Unity, if you don't understand how Unreal will make the whole process less cumbersome stop talking about stuff you don't understand.

 

[Athelas]

I already mentioned it and you ignored that, tell me genius, why Obsidian wasted resources for making thir own engine and then switched to a third party product.

What, that an engine developed to produce AAA console games wasn't necessarily the best fit (in terms of cost-efficiency) for a retro 2d RPG? You mean the point I was making the entire time?

Anyway, Onyx was completely tangential to this discussion since nobody actually claimed the 'PoE engine' was a real engine until Hegel brought it up.

 

[tuluse]

Well, I never said it was great, just that it's a feature that could be expanded on. Try to read what I actually post.

Meanwhile, Harebrained is making their third game about shadowrunning without the ability to shadowrun (i.e. stealth).

There are scripted stealth sections

 

[Tigranes]

Onyx was a great success in terms of what it did to Obsidian's development process. But its future was basically fucked with Aliens, because Onyx was always meant to be an AAA game engine. After the Aliens debacle, Obsidian likely did not have the money to continue engine work, the engine itself was growing older without a flagship game on it coming out, and POE itself specifically could not use Onyx simply because the cost of the middleware made it prohibitive.

The Pathfinder game is being made by Zero Radius Games, so one might guess that Obsidian's 4 projects are POE Expansion + Tanks + Mystary 1 + Mystary 2. But it's hard to say what Feargus is and isn't counting there.

 

[Infinitron]

The Pathfinder game is being made by Zero Radius Games

Isn't that the PoE physical card game

We're talking about the tablet game: http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...finder-adventure-card-game-for-tablets.93565/

 

[Tigranes]

Oh, yes. I'm an idiot.

 

[Duraframe300]

Onyx was a great success in terms of what it did to Obsidian's development process. But its future was basically fucked with Aliens, because Onyx was always meant to be an AAA game engine. After the Aliens debacle, Obsidian likely did not have the money to continue engine work, the engine itself was growing older without a flagship game on it coming out, and POE itself specifically could not use Onyx simply because the cost of the middleware made it prohibitive.

The Pathfinder game is being made by Zero Radius Games, so one might guess that Obsidian's 4 projects are POE Expansion + Tanks + Mystary 1 + Mystary 2. But it's hard to say what Feargus is and isn't counting there.

Not...... exactly the timetable

Dungeon Siege III was on Onyx and the engine work was continued till after the cancellation of Sawyer's pre-POE project in 2012 (Including DX11 support). I can't remember EXACTLY the date where they gave up the engine development team though.

 

[Zeriel]

I am not sure that the D:OS engine is all that it's cracked up to be re: developing Black Isle-style RPGs, judging by the experience of modders. It's got stuff like item randomization built deep into its core. Not to mention the fact that it's 3D. I'm sure it's going to get a lot of work, but for now...

It's really not as bad as all that. All of the "these design restrictions are baked into the game" issues are from a modding perspective, an actual developer could easily change all of that, and even much of it from a modding perspective is just "oh yuck we have to dig into awkward files", not that its impossible.

It also looks better, as a 3D game, than some 2D games I've played.

The bigger hurdle is that licensing another company's proprietary engine just isn't done very much, what happened with InXile and Obsidian is very much the exception to the rule.

 

[Semper]

why Obsidian wasted resources for making thir own engine

at first this engine was developed solely for the upcoming aliens crucible. i bet the engine development team was payed with sierra's budget. later development of onyx was also financed through contractual work on dungeon siege 3 and south park. that's also why it was not used for poe. to keep onyx up to date and to adapt it to the needs of current projects another 1-2mio would be needed. money not easily accessible through cowdfunding.

Would licensing their product be a rational choice (assuming they could even license their own version of unity) from a customer's point of view?

of course there is no special fork of unity developed by obsidian. afaik with vers4 there even never was the option to access/license the source code needed for such a fork. obsidian is still able to license out the scripts/plugins/code/shaders they created to adapt unity to run a party based isometric crpg with pre-rendered backgrounds. plus they would license out their dialogue editor and bug tracking software which are wired to unity. that's how the asset store works and that's the tech inxile bought from obsidian.

 

[Tigranes]

Onyx was a great success in terms of what it did to Obsidian's development process. But its future was basically fucked with Aliens, because Onyx was always meant to be an AAA game engine. After the Aliens debacle, Obsidian likely did not have the money to continue engine work, the engine itself was growing older without a flagship game on it coming out, and POE itself specifically could not use Onyx simply because the cost of the middleware made it prohibitive.

The Pathfinder game is being made by Zero Radius Games, so one might guess that Obsidian's 4 projects are POE Expansion + Tanks + Mystary 1 + Mystary 2. But it's hard to say what Feargus is and isn't counting there.

Not...... exactly the timetable

Dungeon Siege III was on Onyx and the engine work was continued till after the cancellation of Sawyer's pre-POE project in 2012 (Including DX11 support). I can't remember EXACTLY the date where they gave up the engine development team though.

True, I didn't mean to say Onyx was killed when Aliens died. It's just always been my understanding that Aliens was a massive blow, and that knocked their plans out of whack. But yes, after the 2012 event I have never heard of them doing anything substantial on/with Onyx.

 

[tuluse]

DS3 and South Park are both Onyx.

Those are also their most bug free releases.

 

[Duraframe300]

DS3 and South Park are both Onyx.

Those are also their most bug free releases.

Yeah, somehow forgot South Park.

THAT said, engine development was actually halted late 2012/early 2013 before South Park's release.

 

[Ninjerk]

I don't know why people bag on the card game so much as a business decision. It's backed IIRC? And they get to reuse assets AND just about any and all design sensibilities of such a game are well-explored?

 

[Athelas]

I don't know why people bag on the card game so much as a business decision. It's backed IIRC? And they get to reuse assets AND just about any and all design sensibilities of such a game are well-explored?

People may be upset that they brought on one of the designers of the original Fallout to design a card game.

 

[Roguey]

Funny, all of them combined didn't sell as much as NWN 2 and expansions, even less as F:NV did.
In fact they barely outsell KOTOR 2, maybe.

Making money while delivering relatively polished products that get a good critical reception is the golden path. It's why Bioware Edmonton, post-xbox Bethesda, Eidos Montreal, and now Larian don't have to make tank MMOs, bits and pieces of other peoples' MMOs and card games.