Obsidian General Discussion Thread

[Jedi Master Radek]

I was reading a book recently, where the unicorns are these ripped horses with a long sharp horn that they impale people with. And instead of "being pure", they're obsessed with virginal purity, so they grab little girls and drag them into the forest, where they can protect their virginity. And I thought "oh great,.. subversion *yawn*".

Subversion? Or a logical conclusion?

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

*Ooooh someone quoted me, maybe a conversation about Sawyer or subversion in fantasy is coming up...*

*Click*

Oh... another non-post. Thanks for wasting my time.

 

[PlanHex]

Old meme by now https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subverting-expectations

 

[NPC451]

itt people who don't recognize self-deprecatory irony

Literal autism.

 

[KVVRR]

obsidian, designing their new game: you have to choose between these two morally grey choices
me, a GAMER: ok but what if I just fucking kill everyone in the vicinity because I'm getting bored to tears with this writing

honestly though it's a good thing that they're still trying to make that option available even in their more recent games, always liked how I can just walk up to what the writer thought it would be the "big dick in campus" and shoot his legs off because he looked at me funny

 

[Ol' Willy]

I like subversive design. Planescape, Codex favourite, is the epitome of subversive design. Lawful Good characters are merciless killers, whore who is a virgin, literal skull who is the most lively character in the game, guy talking about freedom non-stop while being a slave, immortal MC who dies all the time, etc.

 

[fantadomat]

I am curious if there is an ending for killing everyone in outer farts.

 

[Daidre]

It's a comically exaggerated scene. Sawyer suggests that black be associated with good and the imaginary gamer is so SHOCKED by the originality of it that he shits his pants and his head explodes. He is, if anything, making fun of his own penchant for subversion.
The man said last year that he'd failed with POE and was out of touch with what gamers wanted, and now you think he's bragging about how awesome his ideas are? That makes no sense.

In the light of ongoing shitstorm in the game industry around The Last of Us 2 and sophisticated art of "subverting expectation" I'd rather take Sawyer's words at face value as a vapid attempt to express solidarity with his kinda colleagues in profession and actual critique toward toxic gamers with a growing tendency for the gross overreaction.

I'd take it as a joke from any other person, but Sawyer's psyche seems... californicated enough to be serious, under the thin veneer of his joke.

 

[Wunderbar]

Planescape, Codex favourite, is the epitome of subversive design. Lawful Good characters are merciless killers, whore who is a virgin, literal skull who is the most lively character in the game, guy talking about freedom non-stop while being a slave, immortal MC who dies all the time, etc.

there it is!
That wasn't some self-deprecating joke, Sawyer was passively aggressively poking at Avellone!

 

[Flou]

Oh, there are more of these articles. More from Feargus: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...-could-never-pitch-these-ideas-to-a-publisher

Echoing Schafer's comments about opening that folder of crazy ideas, Obsidian boss Feargus Urquhart feels that Game Pass will enable the RPG studio [which Microsoft acquired in 2018] to create things that wouldn't get approved otherwise. Such as its upcoming survival game, Grounded.

"This isn't anti-publisher, but try to sell a publisher on something strange, and they're like 'if we put money in this, how are we going to make that back?' Which is absolutely the right way to look at it. Game Pass emboldens us to go 'we think this could be super cool', and there's people who can just try it.

"I read this book [Free: The Future of a Radical Price], and they did some study where they offered chocolate on a campus. It was 11 cents for a nice piece of chocolate and one cent for an average piece. And they got a good smattering of people across both price ranges. They then lowered both by one cent, and everybody just took the free chocolate. Even though it was just a penny different. [Game Pass] gives us the opportunity to make things that are new, and people will try them because they're not making a judgement call. They're not spending that penny. That absolutely has changed how we look at different conceptual stuff, which are not 100-person teams working on things.

"That helps us internally as well, as we have this idea where people can rotate between the products. They can go and do something different, and then go back to a big RPG."

Sounds to me like Obsidian will have more of those smaller "passion projects" coming up. It's not just Grounded and Sawyer's game. Feargus wants to keeps his staff from burning out with big RPGs and have them do something else once in a while.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Planescape, Codex favourite, is the epitome of subversive design. Lawful Good characters are merciless killers, whore who is a virgin, literal skull who is the most lively character in the game, guy talking about freedom non-stop while being a slave, immortal MC who dies all the time, etc.

there it is!
That wasn't some self-deprecating joke, Sawyer was passively aggressively poking at Avellone!

Sawyer is the storebrand imitation version of Avellone.
Sad!

 

[Horvatii]

I just read The New Annotated HP Lovecraft FOREWORD by Leslie Klinger and it was more entertaining and interesting than EVERYTHING Sawyer has worked on combined.

Polidori's "Vampyre", 1819, has the first vamp horror """subversion""" - the vamp is a cutie, a gentleman vampire.

 

[KVVRR]

I am curious if there is an ending for killing everyone in outer farts.

as far as I recall besides the ship calling you a psycho after the first planet nobody reacts too much to it besides shooting you on sight after you've tried to kill them. There are endings describing what happens if you kill companions/leadership but afaik the game still treats it like there are people around when it should all be a ghost town. could be wrong though.

 

[2house2fly]

itt people who don't recognize self-deprecatory irony

 

[Yosharian]

Black isn't associated with evil for racial reasons, it's because as a species we've always been afraid of the dark since it contains dangers that we cannot see

If anything if you make the connection that 'Black moon' is related to 'Black person' you're kind of the racist

 

[HoboForEternity]

Pillars of Eternity 3: now skyrim clone!

bruh.

i am a fucking prophet

 

[Sailor Woedica]

Obsidian has a new writer!

 

[Duraframe300]

Obsidian has a new writer!

Wait Michael Chu is back at Obsidian? What? Or is that just contract work?

OG Obsidian Crew right there.

 

[KVVRR]

Michael fucking Chu. Let me tell you about him: he was the main writer for Overwatch for almost four years. In those four years he used all his time to... do absolutely nothing. He said he was "working on it" and that they were in "sort of a phase 1 of Marvel" (this was three years after release). The whole lore and ""plot"" Blizzard was pushing was that Overwatch stopped a WW3 against Skynet and now they're getting back again for... reasons. Up until OW's 2 reveal we had no idea what those reasons were, and now we know it's literally just "oh the robots went crazy again whoops" -and just now that it seems to somewhat be moving foward- Mr Chu here quit the company.

He expended YEARS doing nothing except going to conventions saying how "deep" the universe he was creating was, and answering banal trivia questions about the characters on twitter, like what was X's favorite food and so on. What little lore he released completely contradicted what was previously established and in some cases straight up retconned it for no reason, he just came out and said that wasn't the case anymore and that's it. He released a couple of short ""novels"", all of them astonishingly bland and outdone by the first one her new partner at the time wrote within her first months at the job.

Think about it this way: Overwatch's entire appeal is that its universe is filled to the brim with potential for fun storytelling. Crazy robots, mad max wasteland, cybercowboys and ninjas, global police, the Gi-joe badguys, etc - and the only thing this guy could think of was BARELY develop what the guy who came up with almost all of the pre-launch content did, retread the same content for literal years, and then just do as little as humanly possible. And even then he constantly got things wrong, there's a character in the game right now that because of a retcon he did is now supposed to have been the founding leader of a international criminal organization who was so successful that they single handedly merged all the other major US gangs into one and catch the attention of Overwatch itself, at AGE 15. AND HE COULD BE EVEN YOUNGER.

tl;dr Chu is an absolute hack fraud and the epitomy of decline. If he's truly working for obsidian then give up on any hope for decent writing.

 

[Duraframe300]

Michael fucking Chu. Let me tell you about him: he was the main writer for Overwatch for almost four years. In those four years he used all his time to... do absolutely nothing. He said he was "working on it" and that they were in "sort of a phase 1 of Marvel" (this was three years after release). The whole lore and ""plot"" Blizzard was pushing was that Overwatch stopped a WW3 against Skynet and now they're getting back again for... reasons. Up until OW's 2 reveal we had no idea what those reasons were, and now we know it's literally just "oh the robots went crazy again whoops" -and just now that it seems to somewhat be moving foward- Mr Chu here quit the company.

He expended YEARS doing nothing except going to conventions saying how "deep" the universe he was creating was, and answering banal trivia questions about the characters on twitter, like what was X's favorite food and so on. What little lore he released completely contradicted what was previously established and in some cases straight up retconned it for no reason, he just came out and said that wasn't the case anymore and that's it. He released a couple of short ""novels"", all of them astonishingly bland and outdone by the first one her new partner at the time wrote within her first months at the job.

Think about it this way: Overwatch's entire appeal is that its universe is filled to the brim with potential for fun storytelling. Crazy robots, mad max wasteland, cybercowboys and ninjas, global police, the Gi-joe badguys, etc - and the only thing this guy could think of was BARELY develop was what the guy who came up with almost all of the pre-launch content, and then just do as little as humanly possible. And even then he constantly got things wrong, there's a character in the game right now that because of a retcon he did is now supposed to have been the founding leader of a international criminal organization who was so successful that they single handedly merged all the other major US gangs into one and catch the attention of Overwatch itself, at AGE 15. AND HE COULD BE EVEN YOUNGER.

tl;dr Chu is an absolute hack fraud and the epitomy of decline. If he's truly working for obsidian then give up on any hope for decent writing.

Don't worry, I don't have high expectations. There had to be a reason he immediately went back to Blizzard after KOTOR2.
That said maybe a minimalist, straightforward story for a survival game will suit him.

 

[undecaf]

Hmm, I didn't know those sorts games even bothered with anything resembling writing.

 

[KVVRR]

His style isn't really minimalistic, it's more of a "the teacher said we need to have 500 words minimum so I recycled three phrases over and over again through the whole thing"

 

[KVVRR]

Hmm, I didn't know those sorts games even bothered with anything resembling writing.

There's an entire market dedicated to hook in lorefucks like me. Most often than not they barely develop it, leave it to rot just before its conclusion, or the game fucking dies

God I miss Evolve's lore

 

[NPC451]

Does anyone have any idea what Chu wrote in KOTOR2?
Going from that to Overwatch is a major decline.

Overwatch only excels in its art imo.

 

[sser]

Didn't even know Overwatch had a story.