Obsidian General Discussion Thread

[Quillon]

When was he a Game Director?

 

[Dishonoredbr]

The last two games Feargus was credited in a creative role for were MotB and Kotor2.

KOTOR2

 

[rusty_shackleford]

When was he a Game Director?

https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/baldurs-gate/credits

 

[Nano]

The last two games Feargus was credited in a creative role for were MotB and Kotor2.

You need a refresher on Feargus's role on Dungeon Siege 3. From MCA's May of Rage:

Stepping up was dangerous and demoralizing, especially with Feargus. For all the games that got released, there were others on the never-got-made pile.

But dispensing with the vague answer, here's the specifics of one case, and why I became hesitant to be a lead at Obsidian again (not just South Park, but elsewhere).

After DS3, I did get asked to take on a Project Director role (for a potential sequel) not by Feargus - but because of Feargus.

The reason I was asked, however, was because of how Feargus was treating the team – for all the control he tried in DS3, it had upped in DS4, and the team came to me and asked if I would come on to be a buffer between them and Feargus, since they were finding a hard time getting approvals and getting work done. It ended up being a lesson that made me very hesitant to report to Feargus (even though I did in the last year at Obsidian).

Feargus, it turned out, sometimes had a tactic where if he disapproves of someone or is angry at someone, he micromanages them to an excruciating degree, calls out everything he objects to (not something that’s necessarily wrong, just something he objects to), and makes it very difficult to move forward on anything. I had seen hints of this indirectly, but never experienced it – it sometimes was employed as a way to get someone to resign without actually firing them. It mostly seemed like an extended form of punishment with no positive goal except to punish the person for some perceived failing.

So I agreed to take on the role, because the ones asking me genuinely seemed to need help, and I also foolishly thought that surely this couldn’t be the case. The project also seemed like it might be fun.

Within 2 weeks of the role, I realized the team was absolutely right, and the problem wasn’t limited to what was brought up to me – it was worse.

While being a buffer helped (slightly), the issue started coming up that Feargus would do sudden pivots on elements he had approved and the team had spent a lot of time on. He would also forget he approved them and would assume he hadn't when he saw a decision he (now) didn't like had been made.

I’m not sure I even classify these events as lies when they occurred because it involves memory and the old classic managerial “gut instinct,” but what I discovered is that elements I would fight for and the team wanted (starting with the story, which was being savaged just like DS3) would be given approval by Feargus when I asked, then he would forget he gave approval, and within a few days of me relaying the good news to the team, he would backpedal and say, “Why this story and not mine? I never approved that.” When confronted on the fact he had approved the change, it would then become, “well, it’s not how I feel today.”

When this occurred, I felt as if I had lied to the team and let them down – and the situation had been out of my control despite my best intentions.

Realizing I couldn’t manage if I didn’t get reliable approvals (it undermined anything I said or did), I stepped down.

The pitch died not long after, which was probably for the best. The core idea was sound, but the process was going to strangle the life out of it. More time and money wasted.

The “I don’t care what I approved, that’s not how I feel today” management retractions would happen a lot. It happened with Parker, too. I don’t care so much about managers changing their mind, but it was rarely communicated to the people who needed to know when they did – and you felt like you were about to walk into a trap you can’t even see coming every time you had a meeting. It would also be easier to take if it the dismisiveness of the decision didn’t also come with anger at the person relaying what had been asked for – and the messenger had no idea their manager no longer wanted it, because their manager had never communicated they had changed their minds and when they had changed their minds. It was like watching days, even weeks of work, spiral down the toilet.

Again, part of this is a manager’s right, but between Feargus and Parker, their management style would often be to ask for something, you’d plan it out, work on it, and then when they got exposed to what they’d asked for, they’d claim they never approved it.

When you took a risky move and said they had (and could prove it), their response would be, “well, it’s not what I want today.”

And I do say “risky move” in bringing up the facts of what they asked for because of what would happen when you did.

So, in an effort to fix this (my next mistake), I started relying more on email to track requests and get confirmation vs. face-to-face meetings (which I thought might be the problem, since no notes were taken so decisions could get clouded).

This tracking mechanism worked, but ended up being a mistake, since the facts ended up not being the issue.

The reason it was “risky” was because presenting facts and their actual request never went over well – they’d lose their temper because their change of mind was exposed, so the facts ended up being useless. (Parker once lost it when I asked when we were getting a designer on KOTOR2 that he had promised and was using exclusively for UI work, since it was past the date for the designer to move over to content assistance – and then told me despite what he had promised, this was simply the way it was now, and the designer I had planned for would simply not be available and I had best deal with it – and this blaming was for a plan I hadn’t even proposed, so I didn’t understand the rage.)

Managers can change their mind, that’s fine, but it’s rough when you plan ahead and your manager has changed their mind and doesn’t tell you. It’s more disempowering and chilling when you realize they don’t even know what they asked for or approved of - compounded with the feeling when you have to tell the team the bad news.

My opinion is “That’s not how I feel today” makes it impossible to plan for tomorrow.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

From MCA's May of Rage:

I don't trust meth addicts

 

[BinaryForest]

https://www.usgamer.net/articles/obsidian-founder-feargus-urquhart-rpgs

Feargus Urquhart is gonna start directing games again, Obsidian is so fucking dead

 

[Flou]

With Brennecke leading the smaller project. Does that leave Perez as the Game Director on the biggest project? Or is Parker actually directing a game? Badler started on his project way later so his project is smaller as well.

 

[LESS T_T]

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...dian-post-acquisition-to-see-what-has-changed

In a separate interview, Sawyer's Pillars pal Adam Brennecke, who's directing Grounded, told me: "Just like with Outer Worlds we have big RPGs being worked on right now. We have a lot of stuff being worked on right now." So I thought I'd ask Feargus Urquhart "how many?" at the end of his guided office walkaround tour.

"More than one, less than forty," he told me with a smile. "We're working on a number."

Visiting post-acquisition Obsidian to see how much has changed
"After your 47th Mai Tai..."


I visited Obsidian Entertainment a couple of weeks ago for the reveal of the studio's first game for new owner Microsoft. If you remember, The Outer Worlds was published by Private Division, Take-Two's label for partnering with independent studios (Obsidian was independent when the deal was made). This was, then, a significant moment.

The game itself was a bit of an anti-climax - Grounded, a small-team survival game with a Honey I Shrunk the Kids hook - but I still got an opportunity to nose around the studio and see what changed post-acquisition and since I visited in August 2017.

The answer, in a nutshell, is "not a lot", which is encouraging. Obsidian still resides in the same office block in the eerily perfect city of Irvine, California, and still occupies the same amount of office space. It's still a bit tatty, which I like, and the only real sign there's now Microsoft money behind the studio is a pile of boxes with computers and monitors in them.

Where the PR and community team used to live is where the Grounded team now lives, in a corner of the office in a small room roughly the size of a living room. I mention this because it helps paint a picture of how small the Grounded operation is.

To picture the rest of Obsidian, imagine a square and in each corner you have a different team. There are lots of hallways and rooms - it's not open-planned - but in each corner there's an open area where the occupants of nearby rooms teams can convene.

One of these corners is devoted to The Outer Worlds and shoved into another is Grounded. But the other two? Pillars of Eternity is no longer an active thing so what were all the other people working on? I spied my best, by the way, but didn't see anything incriminating - unsurprising for an organised press tour. But on my way around I did see people like Tim Cain waving from his office (Outer Worlds co-director) and, I'm pleased to say, Josh Sawyer. I'm pleased because I genuinely thought he was going to leave.

Sawyer sounded fed up when he talked at Digital Dragons earlier this year. He said Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadire had been "the most stressful directing experience I've had so far" and that he was "burnt out" directing and making isometric RPGs. He also talked about being overridden a number of times by management during development, which sounded ominous.

But Sawyer is there at Obsidian, beloved bike in his office, headphones on, tapping away at something - as far as I know he's finished making the pen-and-paper Pillars of Eternity role-playing game.

In a separate interview, Sawyer's Pillars pal Adam Brennecke, who's directing Grounded, told me: "Just like with Outer Worlds we have big RPGs being worked on right now. We have a lot of stuff being worked on right now." So I thought I'd ask Feargus Urquhart "how many?" at the end of his guided office walkaround tour.

"More than one, less than forty," he told me with a smile. "We're working on a number."

The Outer Worlds is included in that. A post-release plan hasn't been announced yet but there's still a team in The Outer Worlds corner working on something. Obsidian isn't leaving it behind in a rush to work on Microsoft projects.

"Actually it's the opposite," Urquhart said. "What's always been interesting about the independent developer before was: who was going to pay for support? If I'm not being paid for support by the publisher then [...] we have this weird thing of how do we do it?

"In the Microsoft world, we get to run a studio based on what makes sense for the franchises and I'm not having to make these day-to-day decisions so much. People are obviously loving Outer Worlds and we made it because we love it, so now we get to keep on doing things to help support [it]."

It makes sense - not least because Obsidian, and presumably now Microsoft, owns The Outer Worlds IP. Tim Cain mentioned this in an interview with Game Informer a while back, saying, "we get to retain ownership of the IP". Supporting it works out well for everybody, and who knows? One day The Outer Worlds 2 might be an important next-Xbox game.

My tour of Obsidian was strikingly similar to the last time Feargus Urquhart led me (and Chris Bratt) around the studio. I filmed that walkaround and there's this brilliant bit where I film the carpet - it's not to be missed. But the difference this time is Urquhart is no longer Obsidian CEO.

"So I got demoted," he joked (he was as jocular as ever). "No, so, Obsidian is still a separate company and I am no longer an owner so I can't be on the board, in theory. I'm not the CEO any more.

Spoiler

"All of us are studio heads, whether that's Guillaume [Provost - Compulsion Games] or Brian [Fargo - Inxile Entertainment] or Rod Fergusson [The Coalition] - we're all just called studio heads."

Otherwise, structurally, nothing seems to have changed. "More structurally? No," Uruqhart said. More or less the same number of people work at Obsidian now - 185 people - and there are no plans to go above 200. "Assassin's Creed is awesome and all those big games are awesome," he told Kat Bailey from USG, who stood with me, "but maybe I'm old school [because] I don't think we need to compete with numbers. If that means more focused games: awesome. I don't want to do 1000-person games."

I've wanted to speak to Urquhart since the Microsoft acquisition but for one reason or another I haven't been able or allowed to. Part of that, I'm sure, has to do with my wanting to put the allegations made by former Obsidian design director Chris Avellone to him.

Avellone accused Obsidian management of, among other things, meddling in projects and causing more harm than good, usually resulting in more work for the team. When Microsoft was rumoured to be buying Obsidian, Avellone even went so far as to Tweet Xbox boss Phil Spencer to say, "Hire the devs, fire the chaff at the top." Avellone elaborated on his frustrations with Obsidian management in an interview with VG247 earlier this year.

I still haven't had the chance to really sit down with Urquhart to put Avellone's allegations to him, and all the questions I asked him on this visit were off the cuff, made while we were walking around. It wasn't the time or place. But I did unearth some related information.

Microsoft didn't, for instance, "fire the chaff at the top". The co-owners, "they're all still around", Urquhart told me. No one has taken the money and run. Chris Parker, for instance - director of Alpha Protocol - is now making a new game, presumably in charge of it.

"I want to make role-playing games," Urquhart went on, "my partners want to make role-playing games, so this is the best place to do that. We all laugh [about] going to sit on a beach in Fiji but that would be entertaining for about a month. After your 47th Mai Tai...

"I and my partners - and everybody - got in this to make games. That's what's interesting to me. The thing with Microsoft changes that equation and that's cool."

By changing the equation, he means he no longer has to relentlessly pitch Obsidian to publishers to keep the lights on. "Increasingly my job over the last five years has been business, more and more and more," he said. "But more of my job now gets to actually be working on games."

In what capacity? "Meddling," he told USG, with what had to be a knowing grin. "I would love to be a game director again," he said. "I got to do that back on Fallout 2, I've done it intermittently for short periods of time here, and it would be cool to be a game director again."

Whether or not that will be a good thing, we'll have to wait and see, but at the moment, the signs are encouraging for Obsidian. You're only as good as your last game, they say, and for Obsidian it was very recently The Outer Worlds, which has gone down well and is exceeding Take-Two/Private Division's expectations.

Gone is the anxious volatility of independence, replaced by a safety net of Microsoft ownership and support, plus a burgeoning family of Microsoft Studios to lean on. Adam Brennecke had just been visiting some of them - Rare (Sea of Thieves) and Playground Games (Forza Horizon). "Not only at Obsidian are there multiple teams," he said, "but multiple teams across the world we'll be able to communicate with and share ideas and bounce things off of."

Yet, there will be things lost as the transition matures - invisible things which are harder to quantify. Maybe the office will lose the air of informality it once enjoyed; maybe the freedom to work and create will be encroached upon by mandated procedures and company policies; maybe more people in suits will hang around the office (I saw people in suits this time I don't remember from before). Maybe lots of little things will add up to a big change. And then, as a wise friend once told me, all the muscle in the world won't help if the heart has left the body.

But we're not there yet.

 

[Duraframe300]

He also talked about being overridden a number of times by management during development, which sounded ominous.

Sawyer getting that Avellone experience.

How long before May of Rage 2: Balanced Edition?

 

[Infinitron]

He also talked about being overridden a number of times by management during development, which sounded ominous.

Sawyer getting that Avellone experience.

How long before May of Rage 2: Balanced Edition?

That sentence is referring to what Josh said at Digital Dragons back in June. He didn't say that to the Eurogamer guy.

 

[Duraframe300]

He also talked about being overridden a number of times by management during development, which sounded ominous.

Sawyer getting that Avellone experience.

How long before May of Rage 2: Balanced Edition?

That sentence is referring to what Josh said at Digital Dragons back in June. He didn't say that to the Eurogamer guy.

I was half-joking.

Anyway,

With Brennecke leading the smaller project. Does that leave Perez as the Game Director on the biggest project? Or is Parker actually directing a game? Badler started on his project way later so his project is smaller as well.

According to that last interview Parker seems to be directing a project.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Otherwise, structurally, nothing seems to have changed. "More structurally? No," Uruqhart said. More or less the same number of people work at Obsidian now - 185 people

wait
what

 

[Duraframe300]

Otherwise, structurally, nothing seems to have changed. "More structurally? No," Uruqhart said. More or less the same number of people work at Obsidian now - 185 people

wait
what

The 200 number is taken from LinkedIn which includes dead accounts or mistakes in profiles. That number was always an approximation.
Still a bit less than I suspected (around 190)

 

[jf8350143]

Asking 'cause I really don't know: Was co-op a big part of the game's success, i.e. did most people play it that way? I have basically ignored that entire aspect of the game.

I tried to play D:OS2 in coop and hated it. Felt like two people trying to read the same copy of a book at the same time. But apparently a lot of people like it for some reason.
I think it lets normies play RPGs without having to actually focus on the story or characters at all, which is an …interesting way to market RPGs to normies.

From my experiences, people play co-op don't treat the game as a RPG(at least when they are playing co-op), they treat it as a sandbox to do wacky shit, like using barrels to mess with each other.

 

[nikolokolus]

Obsidian now like that weird girl you dated for awhile that breaks up with you to move away and become an actor, and later you find out she's doing bukkake porn.

 

[Prime Junta]

Obsidian now like that weird girl you dated for awhile that breaks up with you to move away and become an actor, and later you find out she's doing bukkake porn.

 

[RepHope]

He also talked about being overridden a number of times by management during development, which sounded ominous.

Sawyer getting that Avellone experience.

How long before May of Rage 2: Balanced Edition?

That sentence is referring to what Josh said at Digital Dragons back in June. He didn't say that to the Eurogamer guy.

I was half-joking.

Anyway,

With Brennecke leading the smaller project. Does that leave Perez as the Game Director on the biggest project? Or is Parker actually directing a game? Badler started on his project way later so his project is smaller as well.

According to that last interview Parker seems to be directing a project.

Parker? The moron who fucked up Alpha Protocol and begged Avellone to bail him out? Oh I’m sure this won’t be a fucking disaster.

 

[Quillon]

I hope he is ambitious; I'd rather see ambitious over-scoped buggy games that'll eventually fixed by devs or community than uninspired, safe, practically bugfree games from Obs. Unpolished gems ftw!

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

He also talked about being overridden a number of times by management during development, which sounded ominous.

Sawyer getting that Avellone experience.

How long before May of Rage 2: Balanced Edition?

That sentence is referring to what Josh said at Digital Dragons back in June. He didn't say that to the Eurogamer guy.

If I recall correctly Feargus forced him to add ship combat, which was a correct decision and Sawyer needs to suck it up.

 

[vortex]

akshually

If I recall correctly Feargus forced him to add ship combat, which was an incorrect decision and Sawyer needs to learn to live with it.

 

[undecaf]

Obsidian should make an open world, open narrative ”Police Quest” RPG set in the 70’s.

Yeah, that’s what they should do.

 

[Junmarko]

If I recall correctly Feargus forced him to add ship combat, which was a correct decision and Sawyer needs to suck it up.

He should. Dude is a progamming savant when he needs to be, no point dwelling on drama.

Feargus also needs to make sure the old dogs remaining from Black Isle, stay content within the company. Otherwise Obsidian really is fkd.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

vortex , you can't have a pirate game with ship-traveling main character and not have ship to ship combat. If the system wasn't fun for players, that's on Sawyer for fucking it up. Perhaps next time he should focus on making the ship combat interesting instead of focusing on adding personalities to the sailors or making them do gay sex with the captain.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I doubt anyone would have cared if there was only the ship-boarding combat. There's a reason the mod was so popular and that they made it an ingame option.

 

[Junmarko]

Nigga, you can't have a pirate game with ship-traveling main character and not have ship to ship combat. If the system wasn't fun for players, that's on Sawyer for fucking it up. Perhaps next time he should focus on making the ship combat interesting instead of focusing on adding personalities to the sailors or making them do gay sex with the captain.

Nigga, maybe he could work on it in his own time like he did with the J.S Hardcore Mode 2.0 for FNV, then. Is that the implication? Cause I'm pretty sure he didn't "fuck it up" any more than he didn't magically "freeze time" for the game's release window here. Same can be said for FNV - dude is also a legend for continuing to mod that game 2 years post release. Wonder if Feargus is even aware he did that.