Obsidian General Discussion Thread

[MRY]

Obsidian did not reveal how many people it laid off or if any of these employees were offered positions at My.com in Russia.

Words fail.

 

[hpstg]

How could they possibly think that the tanks crap would work? They can barely make the things they are supposedly "good at", good.

 

[Excidium II]

How could they possibly think that the tanks crap would work? They can barely make the things they are supposedly "good at", good.

The fuck are you talking about?

 

[hpstg]

The fuck are you talking about?

The folly of getting into new big projects while you can't even make the crap that made you "special" properly. And now people are laid off.

 

[Excidium II]

The fuck are you talking about?

The folly of getting into new big projects while you can't even make the crap that made you "special" properly. And now people are laid off.

You have a very retardo idea of game development.

Also

That synopsis is actually accurate - we always knew that we would ramp down AW to a support role while the MRG team in Moscow ramped up to live development - with the intention of shifting people over to our other projects - which we have done. For those we couldn't make room for, there was advance notice and severance. There was also a ramping down some of our QA as more and more QA responsibilities were taken on by Bytex.

 

[MRY]

The fuck are you talking about?

The folly of getting into new big projects while you can't even make the crap that made you "special" properly. And now people are laid off.

The made like a bajillion dollars off this, didn't they?

Also, whenever people muse about human folly, I'm reminded of this immensely depressing account from Adam Cadre (an interactive fiction writer):

In 1993 I went with my father to Virginia to visit my sister Abby's gravesite. I'd never been there before. It was mid-March and the ground was covered in a thin layer of snow. At this cemetery, the National Memorial Park in Falls Church, graves are marked not by headstones but by bronze plaques set into the ground. The snow had enough melted spots that I could see quite a few of them as we walked toward spot 1A, where I found... a blank patch of snow. "Dig away the snow," my father suggested. I had a cardboard box with me which I used to scrape away the snow — nothing. Eventually I reached the point where I was turning over dirt, and I felt a wave of nausea as I realized that technically this now counted as exhumation. So I stopped.

Now, let's think about this. You have to think that a person would remember buying a grave marker, especially given that there's more to it than just forking over some money — you have to create a design and so forth. (I know this because after my first advance check came in I designed and bought one.) So my father must have known perfectly well that we were going to visit a blank patch of ground. And yet he had me dig, just to put off for another thirty seconds the moment of having to explain that he had flaked for, at that point, sixteen years and change.

There's a lot that a lot of people will do for those 30 seconds.

 

[Prime Junta]

3 is a slightly different version of 2

From where I'm at, 2 and 3 are ... very different. W2 is a linear game with a branch in the middle, W3 is mildly structured open-world with embedded branching quests and mountains of filler.

 

[hpstg]

Or maybe I do and this is the only PR they can use to cover the fact that their publisher doesn't trust them to properly deliver, and have given the project to another team to finish it and cut loses.

They obviously need to keep them around to salvage whatever is made, and they'll call it something like an advisory role.

For such a crafty little fap monk you sure swallow your PR whole.

 

[LizardWizard]

QA in game development are treated worse than fast food workers. This isn't surprising at all.

 

[Excidium II]

Or maybe I do and this is the only PR they can use to cover the fact that their publisher doesn't trust them to properly deliver, and have given the project to another team to finish it and cut loses.

They obviously need to keep them around to salvage whatever is made, and they'll call it something like an advisory role.

For such a crafty little fap monk you sure swallow your PR whole.

They're moving development to Russia as the brunt of game development is concluded and russian workforce is immensily cheaper.

 

[Infinitron]

As far as I can tell, Armored Warfare has been pretty well-received.

Given the wage disparities, the real question is how Obsidian ever got to make it in the first place. Perhaps mail.ru had no local talent available initially (all sucked up by Wargaming.net?), or maybe there was a prestige factor involved in having an American studio develop the game.

 

[Haba]

Given the wage disparities, the real question is how Obsidian ever got to make it in the first place. Perhaps mail.ru had no local talent available initially (all sucked up by Wargaming.net?), or maybe there was a prestige factor involved in having an American studio develop the game.

WoT never managed to cut it in 'kwanzanian market (29k peak v.s. 200k in EU and 1m in RU). One of the main criticisms for WG has been the fact that they are Russian developers with a Russian bias.

So getting kwanzanian developer for the project was strictly strategic decision.

And how well received can this game be? Nobody plays it. NA can't even probably fill up the next PVP top 100, lel.

 

[Israfael]

If you think Russian programmers are much cheaper than the Kwan ones, it's not quite right for several reasons. There's huge demand for good PC coders in Russia and very low supply of such people, so poaching is rampant. Also, good people often try their luck abroad, lured by lucrative salaries at Google et al. in Ireland, Switzerland and other EU countries, while not knowing that taxes, living costs and everything else is higher there (one of my brother's former co-workers thinks about returning to Russia as he's not really making it out there as compared to what he had available here).

Still, the threat of their workers beelining to the greener European pastures makes many employers raise their salaries to a comparable level. For example, typical programmers receive around 300K roubles (5k dollars) in Moscow IT companies, which is an exorbitant sum of money even by Moscow standards. As far as i know, same people are offered around $60k monthly in Ireland/EU, so the difference is really negligible (considering that it's 2-3.5 times cheaper to live in Russia than there) from his point of view. Well, at least it's not as big as in other spheres of economy.

As for why they chose Obsidian, probably someone at Mail.ru is a BI/obsidian fanboy (old RPGs are rather popular in Russia), so they decided to support them.

 

[Roguey]

From where I'm at, 2 and 3 are ... very different. W2 is a linear game with a branch in the middle, W3 is mildly structured open-world with embedded branching quests and mountains of filler.

When it comes to things like combat and writing, they both feel very much alike. The way I played it, Witcher 3 was a slightly-better-feeling Witcher 2 with 100% more horseback riding.

 

[Zed]

Says who?

I ask because I gave him his copy of the game and we've talked about it on multiple occasions.

he said he barely played it on Another Internet Forum

 

[jaydee2k]

Says who?

I ask because I gave him his copy of the game and we've talked about it on multiple occasions.

he said he barely played it on Another Internet Forum

He said it in the last Dev Stream of POE from november 30th. It's on youtube now...

EDIT: He said he played a few hours of it and thinks it's great...

 

[badler]

Do you envision Obsidian parring down their teams / moving offices and going for more modest projects after Armored Warfare is wrapped up?

Why does Obsidian continue to push for a -big - but not too big - but still big enough, to need constant influx of contracts / SLA's to keep the lights on- middle ground?

Maybe I have poisoned the well too much to get a response but I have always maintained that it must suck to land a job at Obsidian - a company infamous for RPG's.. only to get stuck on writing tank engine physics for some Russian vape company.

P.S. am I fired too? This is bill from the AW team.

I can't speak to being hired for the AW team since I haven't had a large amount of interaction with that team. I sat in a few producer interviews for them, but not much else.

As for the devs on AW, I am not sure if they knew they were going onto AW or thought that they were going to be a part of a cRPG team. I assume that most of them had an idea where they were going before being hired, but I am not sure.

One thing to note is that not everyone joins up with Obsidian because they love RPGs. There are lots of different reasons that people choose to work here. To be honest, being an RPG fan it isn't really a requirement for most departments. Obviously designers and gameplay programmers are vetted for that kind of fit, but if a great environment artist has a background in FPS games, it might be perfectly fine. It more depends on what the team's goals are and what role the artist needs to fill.

As for what Obsidian will continue doing, I am not the right person to answer that question. I don't have much control over those specific decisions. I would guess that we will continue taking on games that we think would be cool to work on, but focus on more IP ownership.

Also, Bill, I have never liked you. I thought you should know.

 

[Anthony Davis]

Do you envision Obsidian parring down their teams / moving offices and going for more modest projects after Armored Warfare is wrapped up?

Why does Obsidian continue to push for a -big - but not too big - but still big enough, to need constant influx of contracts / SLA's to keep the lights on- middle ground?

Maybe I have poisoned the well too much to get a response but I have always maintained that it must suck to land a job at Obsidian - a company infamous for RPG's.. only to get stuck on writing tank engine physics for some Russian vape company.

P.S. am I fired too? This is bill from the AW team.

I can't speak to being hired for the AW team since I haven't had a large amount of interaction with that team. I sat in a few producer interviews for them, but not much else.

As for the devs on AW, I am not sure if they knew they were going onto AW or thought that they were going to be a part of a cRPG team. I assume that most of them had an idea where they were going before being hired, but I am not sure.

One thing to note is that not everyone joins up with Obsidian because they love RPGs. There are lots of different reasons that people choose to work here. To be honest, being an RPG fan it isn't really a requirement for most departments. Obviously designers and gameplay programmers are vetted for that kind of fit, but if a great environment artist has a background in FPS games, it might be perfectly fine. It more depends on what the team's goals are and what role the artist needs to fill.

As for what Obsidian will continue doing, I am not the right person to answer that question. I don't have much control over those specific decisions. I would guess that we will continue taking on games that we think would be cool to work on, but focus on more IP ownership.

Also, Bill, I have never liked you. I thought you should know.

Let me just chime in here and add a quick addendum, AW development isn't stopping.

I realize now re-reading my original post and some of the replies that "support" is really not the correct word for the situation. We still are the leads on AW; Felix Kupis is still the lead designer, Rich Taylor is still the Project Director, that hasn't changed - and we still have a big team working hard on the game. We are still the lead developers of features, including Global Operations and Balance 2.0.

I just don't want people to get the wrong idea that somehow we aren't doing anything anymore, I work my ass off on this game, and I love it.




More of you jokers should should try out Global Ops and let me know what you think.

 

[Haba]

More of you jokers should should try out Global Ops and let me know what you think.

Hook a brother up with creds and global rep, I can't grind anything anymore.

I've wasted about 62 days with WoT, most of that grinding shit tanks that I don't even want to play.

Spoiler

please send help

 

[Morgoth]

Can they finally wrap up this tank crap and make Alpha Protocol 2 or Kotor III please?

Thanks.

 

[Prime Junta]

Can they finally wrap up this tank crap and make Alpha Protocol 2 or Kotor III please?

Yeah more sequels, woo.

From where I'm at one of the biggest indicators of is the dearth of new IPs. Same thing with movies. It's just the same old crap recycled, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Even "new" IPs are usually recycled from some other genre -- CDPR's Cyberpunk from the PnP game, that upcoming Luc Besson Valerian movie from a comic, and so on and so forth.

I wouldn't be sad if Obsidian never made another sequel again. We need more studios willing to do new things.

 

[Abu Antar]

I want sequels and new IPs.

 

[Morgoth]

Can they finally wrap up this tank crap and make Alpha Protocol 2 or Kotor III please?

Yeah more sequels, woo.

Yeah, we definitely want more "exiting" fresh IPs like PoE or Tyranny. Lol.

 

[Urthor]

Obsidian still needs to find a formula to really cash in on. Atm they can keep snowballing Pillars of Eternity 2 and hopefully sell around the Pillars of Eternity mark of 600k+ undiscounted sales plus DLC and the tail, but the gap in quality between 1.0 and 3.whitemarch might mean consumers don't come back to the franchise a second time around, especially since V2 isn't kickstartered which gave PoE a nuclear marketing boost. It's probably my biggest single worry, say what you like about InEx but at least they did the smart thing by Kickstartering Wasteland 3 to build marketing hype cheap.


Obsidian need cash first before they can start an Alpha Protocol sized moonshot after being burnt so badly by the ole AP, and whilst they have a bit they don't have what devs referred to as the old THQ touch "they could keep doing stupid shit and making bad management decision because WWE sales kept baling them out time and time again."

So yeah, Obsidian still needs a console franchise to really make it as an independant studio and that's undoubtedly Feargus' long term castle building goal. Building any PC property to make that kind of dough is impossible, only The Creative Assembly and Firaxis can do that and they've got hella brand leverage to say the least. Decline is always going to conflict with that, and whether they roll over the Tyranny team to do Tyranny 2, if Feargus sets up another studio team as well as the PoE/Armored Warfare/Tyranny teams it will probably be console focused, and therefore certain decline no matter what happens.

 

[Morgoth]

Git gud Obsidian. You haven't made a really good game since 2010. Nobody wants your NOFUNALLOWED isometric borefests anymore.