Company News Obsidian Almost Got To Make Baldur's Gate 3

[Moribund]

Better to ask what obsidian lackey zahkad is the alt of.

Efficiency implies that they got more bang for the buck. It's just not true, and the only person you are fooling is yourself. Obsidian is not in AAA league, even bethesda is not even average for game studios in spite of its heavy budget, and they aren't even in that league.

CoD I chose because it's got a ton of VA and extras in it and it doesn't have the super greatest engine ever. For end product it's a good comparison to an RPG and I know in detail where the money went having once been an avid CoD fan before I grew up. And the bang for buck has to be ten times what Obsidian or Bioware delivers. These aren't some great artists and genius writers they are by and large the bottom of the barrel aside from some of the old school guys of obsidian like MCA, who from the credits is there only for for moral support and guidance these days.

Most people don't give a shit about RPGs, especially not the new definition of them. They don't get a jolly working at some place making romance simulators, they get a jolly making twice the money at a successful studio instead.

 

[Moribund]

Maybe a better comparison is Bloodlines versus AP.

I assume they had a similar budget. They had a lot of similarities, really, but AP fell on its face and Bloodlines was an instant classic. Why?

1. looks. Vampire looked much better, in spite of older engine. It was not that it had more tech, it was more competently done art. Art was by and large superb.

2. Sound. Most amazing soundtrack for a game ever. In AP, I don't remember any music and that says it all.

3. More importantly, setting/plot/ etc. I was intrigued by the idea of a spy RPG. Then I saw it would be more a war on terror kind of game. Still might be good, could be interesting to look inside crazy arab jihadist nonsense. Oh wait that's too PC the villain has to be some white guy, as much as that makes no sense at all. So just a white guy with no magic powers or death ray or anything, a guy in a suit? FFS. OTOH bloodlines is about clans of immortals fighting and intriguing each other from sundown to sunup and you are only a pawn in an actually cool event that you wouldn't expect to be what's really happening.

4. Waste. No waste in bloodlines. In AP they cut some content including a 500k QUICK TIME EVENT. Yes, that's what a shitty quick time event everyone on earth hates so much costs. And they were sorry to see it go. That QTE would have made the game, bro.

On the surface there's a lot of similarity. Bloodlines isn't good because of it, though, it's good in spite of the lack of XP for combat making the combat a lot more boring. But they were a lot more talented and did a lot better job for roughly the same money.

 

[Mangoose]

Didn't AP basically get scrapped and redone halfway though?

 

[Anthony Davis]

Actually I remember an Obsidian member, Feargus(?), saying that when they told how much DS3 cost to other industry guys they couldn't believe how cheap it was.

Anthony Davis said that here. He also said that the budget was so low that Square Enix likely made money from it even with its 820k sales. Its low budget status is definitely apparent when it comes to the cinematic dialogues and lack of good multiplayer (things Chapman said he would prioritize if they had more money, along with the camera).

I don't know the exact budget of Oblivion or Skyrim but they're more expensive than BioWare's Mass Effect titles, even though those are graphically probably superior games. Bethesda is too private about it for me to even guesstimate budgets, though.

I don't know where this site is pulling its numbers from but it claims Skyirm's total budget was $85 million which seems accurate-ish. I doubt they spent the full GTA4 $100 million.

If Skyrim cost 85 million (which doesn't surprise me) then you guys would be REALLY shocked by what DS3 cost.


You could say that you were less than 10% shocked...if you know what I mean.

 

[Infinitron]

You sly dog.

 

[Volourn]

85mil for Skyrim sounds like bullshitz to me.

 

[Brother None]

If Skyrim cost 85 million (which doesn't surprise me) then you guys would be REALLY shocked by what DS3 cost.

You could say that you were less than 10% shocked...if you know what I mean.

Well, including marketing! Could probably slice of like $20+ million considering how big Bethesda's marketing campaigns are.

But man, that really is very cheap. Very impressive. Square Enix should be very pleased about that co-operation, then.

 

[Anthony Davis]

Maybe a better comparison is Bloodlines versus AP.

I assume they had a similar budget. They had a lot of similarities, really, but AP fell on its face and Bloodlines was an instant classic. Why?

1. looks. Vampire looked much better, in spite of older engine. It was not that it had more tech, it was more competently done art. Art was by and large superb.

2. Sound. Most amazing soundtrack for a game ever. In AP, I don't remember any music and that says it all.

3. More importantly, setting/plot/ etc. I was intrigued by the idea of a spy RPG. Then I saw it would be more a war on terror kind of game. Still might be good, could be interesting to look inside crazy arab jihadist nonsense. Oh wait that's too PC the villain has to be some white guy, as much as that makes no sense at all. So just a white guy with no magic powers or death ray or anything, a guy in a suit? FFS. OTOH bloodlines is about clans of immortals fighting and intriguing each other from sundown to sunup and you are only a pawn in an actually cool event that you wouldn't expect to be what's really happening.

4. Waste. No waste in bloodlines. In AP they cut some content including a 500k QUICK TIME EVENT. Yes, that's what a shitty quick time event everyone on earth hates so much costs. And they were sorry to see it go. That QTE would have made the game, bro.

On the surface there's a lot of similarity. Bloodlines isn't good because of it, though, it's good in spite of the lack of XP for combat making the combat a lot more boring. But they were a lot more talented and did a lot better job for roughly the same money.

Man, you make a lot of assumptions out of thin air.

Similarities? One was Source, one was Unreal. Unreal for 3 SKU's costs over 1.5 million to license. I don't know what Source costs, but at that time it was PC only and it was not the same PC Source engine it is today so my educated guess would be that it was substantially less than Unreal.

1. Only true from a subjective point of view, and it is one I agree with. From a TECHNICAL point of view, this is wrong. AP was much more advanced graphically than Bloodlines.

2. Subjective. Again, though I agree with this OPINION since I too really like Bloodlines and I like Lacuna Coil. I also like the the sound in AP very much though.

3. Obviously subjective, to the point of apples and Buicks.

4. No waste in Bloodlines? There are tons of cut and half finished features in Bloodlines. Most of the cut stuff in AP was cut for a very good reason and for accurate reasons stated by Feargus in that Kotaku interview where we were struggling to figure out what kind of game AP was going to be.


Bloodlines did not initially review well, and they had to have a very quick patch to fix a lot of scripting issues. Most of the decent reviews of Bloodlines came MUCH later after the release. It did review better than AP though, that's true.

Both Bloodlines and AP still continue to sell, and sell quite well, which is a good thing for everyone except Obsidian and the dead-Troika.

 

[Volourn]

Codexian mum's asses sell and review better than AP.

This sillyiness of how they 'continue to sell' is menaingless. For allw e know it could mean it sells 1 copy per day. LMAO

Pretty much every game in existence 'continues to sell'.

Bottom line is AP was a disaster. The publisher told Obsidian to fuck off when it came to sequel talk. Same with BL and Troika even though I actually like BKL a lot personally but my perosnal opinion means shit to publishers.

People ehre talk about how popular AP is yet will trash talk BIO's 'big failure' DA2 which sold 2mil+, made the publisher money, had decent reviews overall, AND has a sequel coming out at the other side of the mouth.

Total. fukkin'. bullshit.

 

[Infinitron]

Hey Volourn.

How much do you want to bet AP is currently selling better than DA2?

 

[Anthony Davis]

85mil for Skyrim sounds like bullshitz to me.

It depends if that figure includes marketing or not. If it include marketing, it sounds low to me.

If it does NOT include marketing, it is a smidge higher than I would expect.


You gotta remember, 3D games take a LOT of people to make them. Remember, even NWN1, over 10 years ago, had 120+ people working on it at one time. They didn't have 120 people the entire project, but they did ramp up to it. If I had the physical copy of Skyrim, I would wager the credits page is quite extensive.

People cost a LOT of money. From QA making 10 to 15 an hour all the way up to the top making the serious money.
Lease for space for all those people costs a lot of money.
Devkits, Computers, Utilities, Food, Cleaning, furniture, etc.
3rd party software licensing fees (Scaleform, Havok, etc).
Software licensing fees, photoshop, visual studio, 3d max, softimage, whatever they are using can cost hundreds of dollars per license to THOUSANDS of dollars per license.

All of that times 2 to 5 years and it can equal a LOT of money.

That is ALL before you get into the marketing money where things get truly ridiculous. Most analysts who try to figure out how much games and movies cost to make use the standard 2x rule. If a game/movie costs 50 mil to make, they will usually spend at LEAST 50 mil to advertise it.

Again, just my guess.

 

[Volourn]

"You gotta remember, 3D games take a LOT of people to make them. Remember, even NWN1, over 10 years ago, had 120+ people working on it at one time. They didn't have 120 people the entire project, but they did ramp up to it. If I had the physical copy of Skyrim, I would wager the credits page is quite extensive."

Yeha, but companies like BIO and Beth work on multiple games at once. During NWN's dev time alone, it was in the works since BG (hence the in game hint about the city of NW), BG2, and KOTR, JE, and others wer emade during NWN's long development so a lot of those 120 employees weren't likely just focused on NWN their entire time working.

I'm sure Skyrim cost a lot but 85mil seems too high. Then again, if we listen to the net, KOTOR OL's cost ha ranged from as 'low' as 25mil to as high as 100mil+. Unless the game company themselves mention how much soemthing cost I wouldn't take stuff at face value. I don't trust unproveable sources.

 

[Anthony Davis]

Codexian mum's asses sell and review better than AP.

This sillyiness of how they 'continue to sell' is menaingless. For allw e know it could mean it sells 1 copy per day. LMAO

Pretty much every game in existence 'continues to sell'.

Bottom line is AP was a disaster. The publisher told Obsidian to fuck off when it came to sequel talk. Same with BL and Troika even though I actually like BKL a lot personally but my perosnal opinion means shit to publishers.

People ehre talk about how popular AP is yet will trash talk BIO's 'big failure' DA2 which sold 2mil+, made the publisher money, had decent reviews overall, AND has a sequel coming out at the other side of the mouth.

Total. fukkin'. bullshit.

Here is my educated guess about Bioware's problem.

TOTAL WILD SPECULATION ABOUT TO BEGIN!

They have an incredibly high burn rate with their money. Not as crazy as Blizzard but I bet they are close. The big difference here is they do not have a cash cow like WoW to subsidize YEARS of development on video games. I saw Dragon Age behind closed doors at E3 in 2003! That means they were working on it BEFORE 2003, probably for quite some time. The game was released in 2009, which means they spent more than 6 years working on it. They NEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEED to get their money back out of Dragon Age, thus the rushed DA2.

In normal conditions, where a game takes 2 years to develop, 2 million or even 1 million copies would be considered a great success, but when you have a huge burn rate and take YEARS to make a game, 1 or 2 million won't cut it.

Remember, 120 people for NWN1 at the highest, and you can find that figure in the NWN post mortem relased in Game Developer. DA staffing was probably close to that.

They also took a bath on SWTOR, which cost somewhere between 200,000,000 and 300,000,000 to develop, maybe more. They will never get this money back and the scuttlebutt from the grapevine was that lots of people have lost their jobs over this.

Mass Effect continues to perform VERY well and sell a TON of copies, but it isn't selling CoD, HALO, or GTA numbers, and it is also a very expensive game series to make.

END WILD SPECULATION

 

[grotsnik]

Dost thou argue with the Volourn, my son?
The madness that bites, the trollings that catch!
Beware the Bioware-social bird, and shun
The frumious RPGwatch!"

Fuck, I'm drunk.

 

[Volourn]

"Mass Effect continues to perform VERY well and sell a TON of copies, but it isn't selling CoD, HALO, or GTA numbers, and it is also a very expensive game series to make."

Nor should anyone with a brain (ie. not EA) should think it would. BIo has and enver will be at that level of popularity.


L0L Now KOTOR OL cost 300mil to develop. HAHAHAHA!


DA1 took a loot of time, cost a lot of money, sold 4mil, and made money. DA2 took less than half the time,w a slikely cheap to make inc omaprison, and sold 2mil. So, take that up with DA1 not DA2. This, of course, is quality arguments aside.

NWN - may have takena while and cost a lot to make - but it was obviously successful along with its 2 expansions, multiple PM before the rise of DLC, a sequel and its 3 expansions. And, a new game trying to piggyback off its name (and is gonna destroy the NWN brand).

I doubt BIO's games cost as much to make (sands KOTOR OL of course) as games like COD, Halo, or GTA.


"Dost thou argue with the Volourn, my son?
The madness that bites, the trollings that catch!
Beware the Bioware-social bird, and shun
The frumious RPGwatch!""

iIs this BIO you claim I'm a fanboy of who made KOTOR OL, S:RPG and othe rgames I din't bother to buy/oplay? Man, if I'm a BIO fnaboy I'm a huge failure of one. I have a higher % rate for Obsidian and Troika games. HAHAHA!

 

[Anthony Davis]

Yes, if Bio and Beth producers, tech leads, and art leads are communicating properly, they will share assets and tech across projects when they are LEGALLY allowed to do so.

There are legal occasions when a single developer has to keep development teams separate. For example, we had two Onyx engine games in development at the same time with two different publishers. We had to keep source code separated in different trees and make sure walls were in place to legally protect what one publisher was paying for from another publisher. I may no be explaining this well... Let me try again.

If you were a company working on a game, let's say for a shooter for a movie franchise using Unreal for publisher A.
You also had your OWN shooter game in development with your own IP, which also used Unreal that will be published by publisher B.

You legally are required to keep those separate from each other and most publishers would insist on it.

I won't lie to you and say that developers do that, I know developers who have several projects running concurrently and just throw all the money into one bucket and then fund whichever project they want to till the publishers catch on.

Obsidian does does this correctly, whereas other developers cut every corner they can - till they get caught that is.

 

[Anthony Davis]

L0L Now KOTOR OL cost 300mil to develop. HAHAHAHA!

I said between 200 and 300 million. The 200 million figure is on several analyst pages.

 

[Roguey]

Bioware Edmonton has around 350 fulltime employees so yeah that's a damn high burn-rate.

 

[Volourn]

"There are legal occasions when a single developer has to keep development teams separate. For example, we had two Onyx engine games in development at the same time with two different publishers. We had to keep source code separated in different trees and make sure walls were in place to legally protect what one publisher was paying for from another publisher. I may no be explaining this well... Let me try again."

I meant that not all the employees ar ejust focused on one game. If BIO developed BG, NWN, JE, KOTOR, and others along side eahc other the same employee might have ended up working on each of them so NWN might have 100+ employees who got credit for working on not all 100+ were working on for the 5 or so years it was ind evelopment.

I get what you mean above. Obviously, BIo can't be sharing art tech between NWN licensed by Atari with, say, KOTOR licensed by LA for legal rerasons (outside of the artificial shared Aurora tech).

 

[Anthony Davis]

Bioware Edmonton has around 350 fulltime employees so yeah that's a damn high burn-rate.

And I think Bioware Austin has been through at least 3 rounds of layoffs too. I don't keep in touch as much as I used to since I left the biz to wrangle donuts.

 

[Roguey]

Though it turns out not nearly as crazy as Blizzard: http://www.joystiq.com/2012/02/13/blizzard-has-4-700-employees-across-11-cities/
This says Bioware's worldwide total is 849 and I'm not sure how far back in 2012 it was updated. I imagine it may have counted Victory and Mythic at one point as well.

 

[Anthony Davis]

Though it turns out not nearly as crazy as Blizzard: http://www.joystiq.com/2012/02/13/blizzard-has-4-700-employees-across-11-cities/
This says Bioware's worldwide total is 849 and I'm not sure how far back in 2012 it was updated. I imagine it may have counted Victory and Mythic at one point as well.

Yeah, ~750 for game development, the rest is all support. There are thousands of "blues" employed by Blizzard just for WoW. I don't think they get paid much.

WoW makes crazy money. Or Cray Cray Money as the kids say. It needs to, Diablo 3 took ELEVEN years to make, at least. That's so crazy I can't believe it, even when I type it out.

 

[Infinitron]

Diablo 3 took ELEVEN years to make, at least. That's so crazy I can't believe it, even when I type it out.

 

[Anthony Davis]

Though it turns out not nearly as crazy as Blizzard: http://www.joystiq.com/2012/02/13/blizzard-has-4-700-employees-across-11-cities/
This says Bioware's worldwide total is 849 and I'm not sure how far back in 2012 it was updated. I imagine it may have counted Victory and Mythic at one point as well.

Yeah, ~750 for game development, the rest is all support. There are thousands of "blues" employed by Blizzard just for WoW. I don't think they get paid much.

WoW makes crazy money. Or Cray Cray Money as the kids say. It needs to, Diablo 3 took ELEVEN years to make, at least. That's so crazy I can't believe it, even when I type it out.

On a related note, this is why I know eventually Blizzard will have to "contract" and shrink.

WoW, and the WoW money, won't last forever.

I don't think Blizzard has the ability to make a game in a reasonable amount of time with a reasonable budget. Believe it or not, that is an actual skill that game developers have to work on. It is wonderful to have the luxury to say, "it will be done when it's done." But that's what it is, a luxury.

Once the golden goose dies, if they don't have a new golden goose by then, they will start to eat through their saved up war chest of funds. Releasing a poor selling game will actually hurt them at that point.

This is not a criticism of Blizzard necessarily, this is a normal business cycle. Grow, contract, grow, contract.

I guess it has already started a bit too:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/...yees_in_organizational_shift.php#.UNOkfndqx8E

 

[Anthony Davis]

Diablo 3 took ELEVEN years to make, at least. That's so crazy I can't believe it, even when I type it out.

Who dat?