I officially handed in my Obsidian fan card in the TOW thread and feel the need to unburden myself.
I became an Obsidian fan because I felt that they were trying to do something that other comparable studios weren't. That their heart was in the right place, even if their execution often fell short of their ambition. It was perpetually the might-have-been studio, making games that just fell short of their potential to true greatness. The only exception to this is Fallout: New Vegas, where the chips really did fall right. It has the worldbuilding, the faction mechanics, the writing, the scope, all combined with gameplay that's not actively offputting at worst and actually fun at best. It's also not afraid to go where the logic of the setting or the characters take it, even if those places can be really dark, like Boone's companion quest for example.
KOTOR 2 has terrific writing. It's not quite peak Chris Avellone, but still up there. It takes the Star Wars tropes and inverts them, to surprise, delight, horrify, shock, and move. And it's tragically unfinished, with a truncated endgame, occasionally ugly levels, poor lighting, and padding, and it suffers from the silly gameplay it inherited from KOTOR1. But god damnit if it didn't try -- there was real passion here, real ideas, real creativity.
There was still a quite a bit of this left in Pillars of Eternity. It may not have been Josh's dream game, but he threw himself fully into making the best goddamned RTwP fantasy RPG system he could, and then kept hammering it until it actually became something good. Maybe you don't like his design approach (I do), but man did he ever give it all he got. Some of the same passion shows in other places too. The characters are for the most part well thought-out and well grounded in the world; they feel like real people with real agency, not just painted sticks. At this point though it was clear the Chris was deep into his death spiral -- his characters are cool and interesting but they feel like they're from some completely different game, the Grieving Mother in particular. And yes, the game is deeply flawed in many ways I won't go into here again. But damnit, they tried, and they revitalised a dying subgenre -- the isometric RTwP party-based cRPG. I don't think we would have PF:KM without Pillars of Eternity, and it helped clear the field for other mid-budget games as well.
This old fire had burned down to embers in Deadfire. Yes, it's big, it's competently built, it corrects many of the problems Pillars 1 had, but apart from a bit of Josh's colonial history and politics autism it feels like a potboiler. It's carefully calibrated to please the largest number of people, removing "problem" mechanics like per-rest abilities, and replacing the well-grounded characters with author self-inserts. Where Sagani and Kana Rua felt like actual characters, Xoti and Tekehu feel like Californian teenagers larping their characters. And it flopped.
And so we come to The Outer Worlds. Carefully anodyne, calibrated to offend nobody except people offended by the very existence of short-haired women, a one-note world with no depth or variety to it, populated entirely by the people of Pismo Beach in a larp. It's not even trying to do anything remotely interesting, it's just trying not to fail. And in the process it lost the very thing that made it worth attempting in the first place.
Fare thee well Obsidian, I loved you well. At least we will always have Vegas.
