"We might not tackle a game like this again"
Obsidian opens up after Armored Warfare contract terminated.
Obsidian Entertainment has assured Eurogamer it is "doing fine" following
the announcement it will no longer develop Armored Warfare, the free-to-play tank game. Those duties will move wholesale to Russian studio My.com, owned by the Russian company bankrolling the whole operation, Mail.ru.
In an official statement the two companies suggested the split was amicable but in a conversation with Eurogamer, Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart said it's unlikely the independent studio will ever tackle a game like Armored Warfare again.
But however unusual Armored Warfare might have seemed for role-playing specialist Obsidian, it was paying the bills. It was the bedrock of Obsidian operations for the past four years, the main project at
a studio of nearly 200 people. Productions like Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny were small by comparison.
There being no further Armored Warfare paychecks will inevitably have wider repercussions for
Obsidian, a company that came perilously close to closure in 2012.
Obsidian hasn't announced new layoffs - despite online reports of them (
a producer from Turtle Rock told Chris Avellone, former Obsidian creative director, the studio had hired some laid-off Obsidian staff) - and when I asked CEO Feargus Urquhart whether Obsidian would downsize his reply was, "We are doing fine."
It's worth noting that
Obsidian laid off an undisclosed number of Armored Warfare staff in December 2016, as development was partially moved to My.com in Russia.
Of Obsidian's in-development games, the
currently-in-crowdfunding Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire stands to be most affected. However, Feargus Urquhart assured me Pillars 2, which has raised a meaty $2.6m with 10 days to go - well over its $1.1m goal - was "totally fine".
"Everything is totally fine on Pillars 2," he said. "Between royalties from Pillars 1, and the Fig campaign, we will have all the funding we need to finish the game without changing anything about the team or our plans."
Monetary concerns aside, the move away from Armored Warfare sounds in some ways like a relief. Massively-multiplayer online games are complicated, ongoing services, and it sounds as though Obsidian has had its fill.
"It's funny you should ask about whether Armored Warfare was an unusual project for us," Urquhart told me. "It really was, but we are super proud of what we did with it. Going from nothing at the end of 2012 to launching out to the world for open beta by October of 2015: that was a pretty amazing feat for a non-MMO studio.
"What we did learn is we might not tackle a game like this again. Large MMOs are really beyond the ability of an independent developer to manage unless that developer gets huge and brings in all the other aspects of the business: operations, customer service, live operations, etc.
"Those things all sound interesting, but what is more interesting to us, and to me personally, is focusing on the making of a game. When a studio begins to focus on all those other things, you are all suddenly in a lot of meetings every day that aren't to do with game development.
"So, the answer here is we love making games," he added, "but the challenge with making a large MMO is you can't [help] but get dragged away from the game-making part."
It's tempting to look at this as Obsidian returning to the kind of games we want it to make - games like Fallout: New Vegas, Knights of the Old Republic 2, South Park: The Stick of Truth, Alpha Protocol and so on. Role-playing games with a proper budget. But those budgets come from publishers, and although Obsidian has worked with most of them, few appear to have asked Obsidian back.
Our best wishes to any Obsidian employees affected by layoffs.
