Obsidian General Discussion Thread

[Dishonoredbr]

John Gonzalez is back at Obsidian as Creative director

 

[Quillon]

NV2 confirmed yaaa...y maybe, can't even get excited ffs

aaand not even that.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

NV2 confirmed yaaa...y maybe, can't even get excited ffs

 

[Quillon]

NV2 confirmed yaaa...y maybe, can't even get excited ffs

yep just saw it on reddit and ninja'd my post

bethesda's butthurt must immesurable to shelf the IP for another 10 years, but whatever.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

It's clearly for Avowed 2

 

[Quillon]

It's clearly for Avowed 2

nah Fergie clearly read my posts over the years about bringing in jonh gonzo to help sawya and formed a genius idea completely on his own but couldn't convince Godd Howard and it would look bad to take away GD role from a woman in commifornia so they are yet again making a new IP. true story.

that is if sawya won't double down on his hipster path of small team-small game that no one cares

 

[Takamori]

I will only feel a sliver of hope if Chris returns but thats almost 0 chance given that Turd Fergie fucked CA during his departure.

 

[Nano]

So Eric Fenstermaker is pretty much retired, huh?

 

[Takamori]

Doing a quick search his Linkedin and Twatter is dead, no updates since 2020.
It just shows he is working with Something Wicked Games that has no updates on their project since 2023. But Jeff Gardiner that is the founder of this game studio is pretty active on twatter but nothing solid regarding their first big project. Just some artwork throw around.

 

[Maldoror]

Gonzalez being back is cool. Won't do much to prevent the general decline of Obsidian, but should inject a bit of life into the parts of their games that are still good. Might get something cool out of a Josh / John duo.

 

[duskvile]

My hope is they make something new, not an RPG but a more linear immersive sim like Deus Ex and Dishonored.

 

[Quillon]

already have fantasy gaym and fallout-wannabe so if josh & gonzo are teaming up for new IP it'll be spiritual successor to alpha brotocol, they'll call it sigma protocol I don't think avowed 2 or TOW 3 is "exciting times" for either of them

 

[Quillon]

if they don't clean house, whatever Gonzalez could possibly positively bring to the table will be subsumed by what the standing workplace culture is
he will be sat in the cuck corner in short pants like Cain was

well he's used to it, he worked on horizon gaym

 

[Roguey]

Yeah, Gonzalez was all right under the direction of late-00s Josh Sawyer but the guy became such a loser of a male feminist.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/horizon-zero-dawn-wins-writers-guild-award-for-best-video-game-writing

"We want to dedicate this award to two women who did not live to see this tonight," said Gonzalez after accepting the award. "Our mother's, Ann Gonzalez and Susan McCaw.

"It is no coincidence that their sons went on to write an epic with a strong female protagonist in which human love in general, and maternal love in particular loomed so large. We learned that from them. This is for them. Thank you, they are not forgotten."

Wouldn't trust mid-20s Sawyer to right the ship unfortunately.

 

[BlackheartXIII]

Obsidian never had a studio creative director before, could be a sinecure for Gonzales.

 

[Quillon]

Wasn't MCA one? Also wasn't Boyarsky already the studio creative director? He left? Or was it always a per game basis role?

 

[Roguey]

Wasn't MCA one? Also wasn't Boyarsky already the studio creative director? He left? Or was it always a per game basis role?

Apparently Boyarsky's deal was a misunderstanding, he's specifically the creative director of The Outer Worlds 1/2.

Avellone claims he had a meaningless title with no power/influence, though he exaggerates, he did have a little influence. It's accurate to say Feargus was the shadow creative director, overruling his calls and making his own decrees.

 

[Morgoth]

Obsidian says it won't chase huge profits or grow aggressively, and that's how it's going to last 100 years in the RPG business: 'Are we serious? Yes'​

By Tyler Wilde
published 5 hours ago

The Avowed studio expects each game to be a "mild success" and budgets accordingly, say company leaders who want it to reach its 100th birthday.

In a talk at this week's D.I.C.E. Summit, an industry conference whose theme this year is sustainability, Obsidian Entertainment VP of operations Marcus Morgan and VP of development Justin Britch said they want the Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and most recently Avowed studio to make it to its 100th birthday. Obsidian is 22 years old now, so that's 78 to go, and the VPs think it can get there by staying lean, holding onto talent, setting realistic sales expectations, and not going all-in on delivering huge profits.

Obsidian's 100-year plan isn't—and I hope this isn't too disappointing—a decade-by-decade breakdown of future projects that ends somewhere around Fallout: Old Vegas (I'm assuming that pre-apocalyptic settings are popular in 2103). It's more of a thought exercise, but Morgan and Britch said that they genuinely want Obsidian to continue beyond their lifespans. "Are we serious? … Yes," said Morgan. And why not? Nintendo was founded in 1889.

One of the pillars of the plan is staying "lean and invested," meaning small enough that none of Obsidian's employees feel like a cog in a machine. Morgan and Britch said that in recent years they'd been considering opening multiple international offices, but in the end decided to partner with existing studios rather than risk weakening Obsidian's culture by getting too big.

Leanness can also refer to Obsidian's games: It doesn't aim for unprecedented scale or the most advanced graphics, and before it greenlights a game, Britch says the studio spends a lot of time determining how much to invest in the project with the assumption that it will be a "mild success," not a smash hit.

They didn't call out any examples themselves, but the duo was clearly setting themselves apart from companies that pour enormous budgets into long and turbulent development cycles and then announce that the resulting game underperformed because it didn't immediately sell tens of millions of copies. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the most recent high-profile example of an expensive RPG that didn't meet its owner's sales expectations, and EA cut jobs at BioWare after the miss.

(Big bets do sometimes pay off, though: Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind as a recent example, though I can't say exactly how its scale and budget compares to Avowed's, and Cyberpunk 2077's launch troubles notwithstanding, CD Projekt continues to make a case for RPGs that take a long time and a lot of money to make.)

Obsidian has also laid off staff at times in the past, and has been in a precarious position at least once, but has appeared stable since Microsoft acquired it in 2018. That hasn't been the case for Microsoft's more recent acquisitions, which have been hammered with layoffs and studio closures from their new Xbox bosses.

The difference there can't be attributed to some secret sauce of Obsidian's—it's a much smaller company than Activision Blizzard or Bethesda, which Microsoft clearly had different plans for—but the studio's strong showing at a time when much of the industry seems to be reenacting Homer's jump over Springfield Gorge does lend credibility to the idea that Obsidian has sustainability ideas worth listening to.

Obsidian has released three games in the 2020s so far: survival game Grounded (we reviewed it positively), narrative adventure game Pentiment (we reviewed it positively), and now Avowed (another good one). Some studios don't even announce a new game in that amount of time.

Among other things not mentioned here, Morgan and Britch's plan includes building institutional knowledge by aiming for "the lowest turnover rate in the industry" and continuing to release the kinds of games they're known for (player freedom, worldbuilding, all of that) at a consistent pace, "not rushed, but often."

Britch described his vision for Obsidian as a 1973 VW bus with a trunk full of tools and a manual that's being continuously annotated, and summed up the plan by saying that Obsidian is more or less going to keep doing what it's been doing, "not trying to grow aggressively, expand our team size, or make super profitable games." It's aiming for somewhat profitable games, then, made well and at a consistent pace.

Prudent, but it didn't save Arkane Austin, also a mid-sized studio, from getting shuttered.

 

[Nano]

This is their company culture: a complete and utter dearth of creativity and ambition. Imagine how much worse it is now vs. when Avellone left.

 

[Infinitron]

This is their company culture: a complete and utter dearth of creativity and ambition. Imagine how much worse it is now vs. when Avellone left.

If your creative leadership was Feargus Urquhart, you'd want to play it safe too.

 

[Quillon]

Obsidian says it won't chase huge profits or grow aggressively, and that's how it's going to last 100 years in the RPG business: 'Are we serious? Yes'​

By Tyler Wilde
published 5 hours ago

The Avowed studio expects each game to be a "mild success" and budgets accordingly, say company leaders who want it to reach its 100th birthday.

In a talk at this week's D.I.C.E. Summit, an industry conference whose theme this year is sustainability, Obsidian Entertainment VP of operations Marcus Morgan and VP of development Justin Britch said they want the Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and most recently Avowed studio to make it to its 100th birthday. Obsidian is 22 years old now, so that's 78 to go, and the VPs think it can get there by staying lean, holding onto talent, setting realistic sales expectations, and not going all-in on delivering huge profits.

Obsidian's 100-year plan isn't—and I hope this isn't too disappointing—a decade-by-decade breakdown of future projects that ends somewhere around Fallout: Old Vegas (I'm assuming that pre-apocalyptic settings are popular in 2103). It's more of a thought exercise, but Morgan and Britch said that they genuinely want Obsidian to continue beyond their lifespans. "Are we serious? … Yes," said Morgan. And why not? Nintendo was founded in 1889.

One of the pillars of the plan is staying "lean and invested," meaning small enough that none of Obsidian's employees feel like a cog in a machine. Morgan and Britch said that in recent years they'd been considering opening multiple international offices, but in the end decided to partner with existing studios rather than risk weakening Obsidian's culture by getting too big.

Leanness can also refer to Obsidian's games: It doesn't aim for unprecedented scale or the most advanced graphics, and before it greenlights a game, Britch says the studio spends a lot of time determining how much to invest in the project with the assumption that it will be a "mild success," not a smash hit.

They didn't call out any examples themselves, but the duo was clearly setting themselves apart from companies that pour enormous budgets into long and turbulent development cycles and then announce that the resulting game underperformed because it didn't immediately sell tens of millions of copies. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the most recent high-profile example of an expensive RPG that didn't meet its owner's sales expectations, and EA cut jobs at BioWare after the miss.

(Big bets do sometimes pay off, though: Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind as a recent example, though I can't say exactly how its scale and budget compares to Avowed's, and Cyberpunk 2077's launch troubles notwithstanding, CD Projekt continues to make a case for RPGs that take a long time and a lot of money to make.)

Obsidian has also laid off staff at times in the past, and has been in a precarious position at least once, but has appeared stable since Microsoft acquired it in 2018. That hasn't been the case for Microsoft's more recent acquisitions, which have been hammered with layoffs and studio closures from their new Xbox bosses.

The difference there can't be attributed to some secret sauce of Obsidian's—it's a much smaller company than Activision Blizzard or Bethesda, which Microsoft clearly had different plans for—but the studio's strong showing at a time when much of the industry seems to be reenacting Homer's jump over Springfield Gorge does lend credibility to the idea that Obsidian has sustainability ideas worth listening to.

Obsidian has released three games in the 2020s so far: survival game Grounded (we reviewed it positively), narrative adventure game Pentiment (we reviewed it positively), and now Avowed (another good one). Some studios don't even announce a new game in that amount of time.

Among other things not mentioned here, Morgan and Britch's plan includes building institutional knowledge by aiming for "the lowest turnover rate in the industry" and continuing to release the kinds of games they're known for (player freedom, worldbuilding, all of that) at a consistent pace, "not rushed, but often."

Britch described his vision for Obsidian as a 1973 VW bus with a trunk full of tools and a manual that's being continuously annotated, and summed up the plan by saying that Obsidian is more or less going to keep doing what it's been doing, "not trying to grow aggressively, expand our team size, or make super profitable games." It's aiming for somewhat profitable games, then, made well and at a consistent pace.

Prudent, but it didn't save Arkane Austin, also a mid-sized studio, from getting shuttered.

fills my heart with excitement

what sort of marketing is this? literal "spacer's choice" dumbfuckery; you've tried the best now try our mediocre games lmao

 

[Roguey]

holding onto talent

You dumbfucks lost all your best writers, what "talent"?

I guess Gonzalez is back but he's on thin ice after Horizon Zero Dawn.

 

[Dishonoredbr]

Welcome our new overlords, Larian, Warhorse and Owlcat as the only RPG studios worth a damn

 

[SayMyName]

Obsidian says it won't chase huge profits or grow aggressively, and that's how it's going to last 100 years in the RPG business: 'Are we serious? Yes'​

By Tyler Wilde
published 5 hours ago

The Avowed studio expects each game to be a "mild success" and budgets accordingly, say company leaders who want it to reach its 100th birthday.

In a talk at this week's D.I.C.E. Summit, an industry conference whose theme this year is sustainability, Obsidian Entertainment VP of operations Marcus Morgan and VP of development Justin Britch said they want the Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and most recently Avowed studio to make it to its 100th birthday. Obsidian is 22 years old now, so that's 78 to go, and the VPs think it can get there by staying lean, holding onto talent, setting realistic sales expectations, and not going all-in on delivering huge profits.

Obsidian's 100-year plan isn't—and I hope this isn't too disappointing—a decade-by-decade breakdown of future projects that ends somewhere around Fallout: Old Vegas (I'm assuming that pre-apocalyptic settings are popular in 2103). It's more of a thought exercise, but Morgan and Britch said that they genuinely want Obsidian to continue beyond their lifespans. "Are we serious? … Yes," said Morgan. And why not? Nintendo was founded in 1889.

One of the pillars of the plan is staying "lean and invested," meaning small enough that none of Obsidian's employees feel like a cog in a machine. Morgan and Britch said that in recent years they'd been considering opening multiple international offices, but in the end decided to partner with existing studios rather than risk weakening Obsidian's culture by getting too big.

Leanness can also refer to Obsidian's games: It doesn't aim for unprecedented scale or the most advanced graphics, and before it greenlights a game, Britch says the studio spends a lot of time determining how much to invest in the project with the assumption that it will be a "mild success," not a smash hit.

They didn't call out any examples themselves, but the duo was clearly setting themselves apart from companies that pour enormous budgets into long and turbulent development cycles and then announce that the resulting game underperformed because it didn't immediately sell tens of millions of copies. Dragon Age: The Veilguard is the most recent high-profile example of an expensive RPG that didn't meet its owner's sales expectations, and EA cut jobs at BioWare after the miss.

(Big bets do sometimes pay off, though: Baldur's Gate 3 comes to mind as a recent example, though I can't say exactly how its scale and budget compares to Avowed's, and Cyberpunk 2077's launch troubles notwithstanding, CD Projekt continues to make a case for RPGs that take a long time and a lot of money to make.)

Obsidian has also laid off staff at times in the past, and has been in a precarious position at least once, but has appeared stable since Microsoft acquired it in 2018. That hasn't been the case for Microsoft's more recent acquisitions, which have been hammered with layoffs and studio closures from their new Xbox bosses.

The difference there can't be attributed to some secret sauce of Obsidian's—it's a much smaller company than Activision Blizzard or Bethesda, which Microsoft clearly had different plans for—but the studio's strong showing at a time when much of the industry seems to be reenacting Homer's jump over Springfield Gorge does lend credibility to the idea that Obsidian has sustainability ideas worth listening to.

Obsidian has released three games in the 2020s so far: survival game Grounded (we reviewed it positively), narrative adventure game Pentiment (we reviewed it positively), and now Avowed (another good one). Some studios don't even announce a new game in that amount of time.

Among other things not mentioned here, Morgan and Britch's plan includes building institutional knowledge by aiming for "the lowest turnover rate in the industry" and continuing to release the kinds of games they're known for (player freedom, worldbuilding, all of that) at a consistent pace, "not rushed, but often."

Britch described his vision for Obsidian as a 1973 VW bus with a trunk full of tools and a manual that's being continuously annotated, and summed up the plan by saying that Obsidian is more or less going to keep doing what it's been doing, "not trying to grow aggressively, expand our team size, or make super profitable games." It's aiming for somewhat profitable games, then, made well and at a consistent pace.

Prudent, but it didn't save Arkane Austin, also a mid-sized studio, from getting shuttered.

Harvey Smith forced Austin to make a shitty open world Left 4 Dead clone that failed spectacularly and was a massive critical and commercial failure.

 

[Takamori]

https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rp...fter-avowed-but-the-fanbase-is-not-humungous/

Like in Battle Brothers? I remember that Sawyer has a boner for BB, but already throwing a fucking excuse right off the bat don't inspire me much confidence.
After Deadfire their collective dicks shrunk so hard it became vaginas, jesus christ. If you want to make this game say you will figure this shit out.