Obsidian General Discussion Thread

[Infinitron]

http://www.ign.com/articles/2018/06...-tabletop-style-storytelling-a-ign-unfiltered

HOW FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS GOT A DOSE OF TABLETOP-STYLE STORYTELLING – IGN UNFILTERED

Fans of Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas have been arguing over which role-playing adventure is the superior one ever since Obsidian Entertainment got its chance with the franchise, especially considering a portion of the development team worked on the original two Fallout titles. One often-cited strength of Fallout: New Vegas is its more open-ended quest structure, borrowing heavily from Obsidian’s and Interplay’s top-down role-playing games, which are in turn heavily inspired by tabletop games such as Dungeons & Dragons. In this month’s IGN Unfiltered (watch the full episode in the video below), Fallout: New Vegas director Josh Sawyer lays out how the game utilized classic tabletop game design to build a better, more open-ended apocalypse.

“One of the [design principles] in New Vegas that was really focused on player freedom, I said from the beginning that you have to be able to kill any character in this game who is not a child as soon as you have a clear line of fire on them,” Sawyer says. “If you want to open a door and have a character talk to them, that’s fine, but as soon as the conversation ends, you have to assume the player has killed that character.”

This policy of making sure the story flowed even with any character dead went all the way from the lowest raider to the leaders of each faction, and it all comes back to small-scale and long term reaction from the world. This reactivity is found in the moral dilemmas the game presents players with, where rather than having an objectively good or evil path, players would be faced with decisions that had no clear outcome. One of Sawyer’s favorite examples of this reactivity is the quest “The White Wash.” After learning that a former Follower of the Apocalypse faction member is siphoning off water from the New California Republic in order to help starving locals feed themselves, the player is forced to choose between the lives of the poor crop farmers or the NCR’s own farmers.

“We have a timer set so that way later, if you’re wandering around [the NCR sharecropper’s] farm, that farmer will come up to you and go, ‘Hey, asshole, thanks for not figuring out what the hell happened to the water. I lost my plot of land and have to go back to California. Thanks for nothing.’ It’s a small thing. It’s actually very easy to do, but it's something where the player goes, 'Oh my god, this is 10 hours later and here's this reactivity to something I did.’”

Another key example for Sawyer is the bounty hunter you meet on the outskirts of the Freeside community, who players can later find dead in an alley. Sawyer compares it to The Witcher 2’s narrative, where the player can experience an entirely different area of the world if they make one key decision over the other. Rather than planning for epic divergences that cause players to get less bang for their buck, Sawyer prefers stringing along smaller moments to help add up to a bigger sense of ownership over a story.

“Have a small payoff for these little choices and interactions the player has and it feels much more alive. It makes it feel like it grows and changes over time. It's not about planning for these epic things that diverge in massive ways,” Sawyer says.

Perhaps Fallout: New Vegas’ greatest sense of divergence is in how the plot weaves the player character through each different faction, including the New California Republic, Caesar’s Legion, and several others. The game purposefully never makes it clear who is the real villainous force of the Mojave Wasteland, again letting players choose on their own who to fight against in the end, including every faction.

“I think a lot of people saw the NCR and thought, 'Oh, this is America, the good guys,' but the more they interact with them, the more they realize this is pretty corrupt,” Sawyer says. “Interacting with Caesar's Legion, initially they appear completely psychotic, but then you learn there's this weird underlying philosophy for what Caesar is doing what he's doing. For most people, that doesn't forgive them for what they're doing, but it makes them more comprehensible. I wanted to put players in scenarios where they questioned their own morals and what they really wanted to see in the Mojave Wasteland.”

For more behind-the-scenes info on the development of Fallout: New Vegas, the future of Pillars of Eternity, and Obsidian’s canceled Aliens RPG, check out this month’s full episode of IGN Unfiltered featuring developer Josh Sawyer.

 

[Freddie]

“When it was announced that we were working on an Aliens role-playing game, I think a lot of people couldn’t even comprehend it, which seems crazy to me,” Sawyer says. “I can’t remember when we started working on it relative to Mass Effect, but sci-fi games as RPGs were not necessarily a super big thing outside of Mass Effect.”

“With the first Pillars, I admit that I was being very conservative. So much of the company’s fate depended on its success. I was so concerned about making something that was too far away that I cleaved very tightly to traditional Western European, Forgotten Realms fantasy.

Why is it that every time I read an interview with Saywer, he's always going on about how people are unabe to handle RPGs not set in a generic fantasy universe? Who are these people, and why does this supposed aversion not stop even the biggest publishers in the world from developing a variety of non-fantasy RPGs such as Mass Effect and the new Fallout and Deus Ex games?

Mass Effect falls under "exceptions that prove the rule".

It's true that post-apocalyptic settings are becoming about as normie-acceptable as fantasy, though.

Deus Ex, Cyberpunk is sci-fi, though it was classified mostly as pseudo-RPG back in the day and Shadowrun games with their mix of sci-fi and fantasy. For Deus Ex series, studio messed it up with Invisible War and for later games Human Revolution suffered from poor choices in marketing and DLC policy. What comes to Hare Brained, I think they did everything they could achieve with resources they had with those 3 games.

I don't recall there has been that many attempts.

Post. Apoc. is more acceptable than fantasy for a long while now. As I've claimed many times before, everybody got sick of fantasy except for nostalgic fucks who obviously haven't been agreeing with me on this

If Obs kickstarted a post apoc game instead of pillows back in dat day. it would have been a lot more successful than pillows fo-sure!

Realistic(not hardcore) > (high)Fantasy crap in this generation. See it.

I've seen a lot of people say this, but then you see stuff like Black Geyser fantasy shovelware blowing out Copper Dreams on Kickstarter. Fantasy just seems to get peoples' attention. It has a shallow but broad appeal.

Fantasy is much more familiar because of all that came before still has lot of influence. To make this short, Fantasy has Tolkien, what does sci-fi have? Obvious answers where PR people go are Star Wars and Trek and there's a but, they are... not Tolkien.

But just thinking out loud here. Alpha Protocol was game that many game journalists and I guess gamers wanted to like back in the day IIRC. It would have been valuable IP for Obsidian but quality of the product was unfortunately just almost there. Being that sci-fi or something closer to real world it's also creation of new brand with added tax to marketing. I think Sawyer may have thought thought that Pillars allow Obisidian to have their own brand, series they don't pay royalties out and it's safest route to go and then, whatever happened with Alpha Protocol, it may sting. Who knows.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

To make this short, Fantasy has Tolkien, what does sci-fi have? Obvious answers where PR people go are Star Wars and Trek and there's a but, they are... not Tolkien.

Worth remembering that science-fiction is a much newer genre than fantasy.
But if I had to pick one sci-fi series to rival Tolkien's middle-earth, it would probably be Dune.

 

[Quillon]

Fantasy is much more familiar because of all that came before still has lot of influence. To make this short, Fantasy has Tolkien, what does sci-fi have?

Dude everything else is much more familiar than fantasy because realistic = familiar lol. Fantasy's dominance is/was only on games and that's cos of DnD and all the devs who grew up playing it, some idiot devs even go indie after years of being part of a studio to make their dream fantasy game in this day and age without ever realizing they're doomed to failure with their tiny budgets.

Also about post apoc vs fantasy; post apoc is just an example that fantasy's influence on games have been fading, today's kids want to simulate life in a realistic game, they want to survive and shit, they don't want to cast fireballs.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Worth remembering that science-fiction is a much newer genre than fantasy.

Wut. No it isn’t (unless you’re reeeeeaaaallly stretching the definition of the genre to include shit like fairy tales and mythologies).

 

[Freddie]

Fantasy is much more familiar because of all that came before still has lot of influence. To make this short, Fantasy has Tolkien, what does sci-fi have?

Dude everything else is much more familiar than fantasy because realistic = familiar lol. Fantasy's dominance is/was only on games and that's cos of DnD and all the devs who grew up playing it, some idiot devs even go indie after years of being part of a studio to make their dream fantasy game in this day and age without ever realizing they're doomed to failure with their tiny budgets.

Also about post apoc vs fantasy; post apoc is just an example that fantasy's influence on games have been fading, today's kids want to simulate life in a realistic game, they want to survive and shit, they don't want to cast fireballs.

I find this difficult to buy. An RPG game is much about escapism (from real life) and I doubt many who buy say whatever it was that Betsheda does, have ever played PnP, though those who know about it are among core audience. There is this thing, for my understanding cRPG's are outselling the PnP games.

People even when they look for escapism, tend to look for something they know and gauge their experiences with that. Lord of the Rings (novel) is considered classic. Even people who didn't read it knew about it. Films made it something huge people actually know about something.

On sci-fi side there are few good novels but they are difficult to gamify because they are more about the ideas, things that are not that always that easy to visualise and they are not known that well. Popular franchises I mentioned earlier are shit for mainstream because, well, they are shit which both reduces the appeal and fractures audiences understanding what is sci-fi. Both Deus Ex and Mass Effect (the first one) IMO did something right and managed to use that to their advantage. Something that PnP guys creating Shadowrun and Cyberpunk 2020 realised way earlier.

 

[Abu Antar]

You wanna kill a studio? I know a few assassins. Microsofr, Activision and

 

[Quillon]

An RPG game is much about escapism (from real life)

And what makes fantasy more escapist? IMO escapism is much more powerful when the game is realistic/familiar and you do/achieve shit in it that you wouldn't/couldn't IRL; more people have dreams to be a charismatic spy, a superhero, being famous etc than being a hero in a fantasy land. Which is why we only saw 3 great LotR movies and some shit Hobbit ones and a hundred superhero movies in the last twenty years. Just take a look at genre dominance in movies/TV and games, it shouldn't be hard to see that fantasy has way more presence in games than it has right to. Tho it might be hard to see cos people got used to it being this way But its fading rapidly cos games started being made by people with more diverse backgrounds than mostly fantasy nerds.

 

[fantadomat]

Are you some kind of kid?! Wanting to be spy or a cape retard,the fuck ! You can become spy in the real world,it is nothing special. Also who the fuck dreams being a cliche fantasy hero?! It is all about being a manly warrior slashing faggots left or right,thieving bastard or a mighty wizard. Only faggots dream to be Zelda or something similar!

 

[DalekFlay]

Really earnin' your edge card there.

 

[unfairlight]

I made bomb threats and even I can't manage to be that edgy.

 

[fantadomat]

I made bomb threats and even I can't manage to be that edgy.

It comes from inside. Also it is not like i am wrong,what kind of faggot would dream to be Zelda. For kids to dream about is ok,but grown men....[insert vomit emoticon here]

PS: And you didn't even give the edgy rating,shame on you .

 

[frajaq]

what if I dream about being dominated by Zelda

 

[fantadomat]

what if I dream about being dominated by Zelda

Wanking is a whole different thing mate ,go play around in E-hentai. org .

 

[pomenitul]

Are we talking about Link or Zelda?

 

[fantadomat]

Are we talking about Link or Zelda?

There is a difference? I thought that all of them are called zelda.

 

[Quillon]

You can become spy in the real world,it is nothing special.

Oki, I'll go to spy agency tomorrow, thanks! Next time you see me, you won't but I'll see you cos I'll be a SPY! Ho-ho-ho I'll be a spy in santa clothes!

 

[fantadomat]

You can become spy in the real world,it is nothing special.

Oki, I'll go to spy agency tomorrow, thanks! Next time you see me, you won't but I'll see you cos I'll be a SPY! Ho-ho-ho I'll be a spy in santa clothes!

I would recommend you to go to a country that have not enough kebabs,say Iceland. Open a kebab shop and befriend the locals,after a year or two begin sending emails back home with privet information of the people.

 

[LubomiRTard]

Private info is now subject to gdpr regulation in EU and Iceland is EU

Just saying

 

[Quillon]

You can become spy in the real world,it is nothing special.

Oki, I'll go to spy agency tomorrow, thanks! Next time you see me, you won't but I'll see you cos I'll be a SPY! Ho-ho-ho I'll be a spy in santa clothes!

I would recommend you to go to a country that have not enough kebabs,say Iceland. Open a kebab shop and befriend the locals,after a year or two begin sending emails back home with privet information of the people.

Kebap shop would be anticlimactic there, I'd open an icecream shop instead:

 

[Rev]

Read the last few pages, why do everyone assumes that Sawyer is going to leave Obsidian. Did I miss something?

 

[HoboForEternity]

Read the last few pages, why do everyone assumes that Sawyer is going to leave Obsidian. Did I miss something?

Possibility from the avelleaks gate that mca said someone in high position is leaving obs

 

[Quillon]

Was that steam chat stuff fake?

 

[RNGsus]

Is Project Indiana confirmed singleplayer?

Because until a game's confirmed singleplayer, just assume its multiplayer.

 

[hello friend]

You can become spy in the real world,it is nothing special.

Oki, I'll go to spy agency tomorrow, thanks! Next time you see me, you won't but I'll see you cos I'll be a SPY! Ho-ho-ho I'll be a spy in santa clothes!

In the language of my people spy is how you write vomit.

:informative: