Obsidian General Discussion Thread

[Roguey]

Josh Sawyer... massive ego...

 

[SarcasticUndertones]

OK, so I did some checking on this guy, I have played some of his games. Fancy that.

 

[Bleed the Man]

I don't really like Obsidian, mainly because of piss poor, half assed quality control.. but if I was happy with everything else I could probably get over that, the main motivation for me being a frame of mind to actually want to hate on Obsidian is because of Chris Avellone.

Chris once said in an interview (this was after PS:T had fully established it's rep, can't find the interview anymore, can't prove what I read :/) [paraphrasing] That PS:T was too wordy, it would never be made again like that, but he came off as really disparaging towards it and if he looked down on it and by extension those of us who considered it the best thing since sliced bread.

Considering that it's the best thing he's ever been involved in it really put me off the guy, it made me think that PS:T was a fluke (and seeing the rest of his stuff maybe this isn't so far off the mark) and that he felt entitled to negate everyone's (generally agreed) opinion just because he made it (the quality of which he hasn't been able to duplicate since).

It just annoyed me, it stuck with me and I kind of ignore him now. (Like he knows I exist, lol.)

I think, don't remember that well and I'm paraphrasing as well, he ment the beggining of the game. That a bit more of action or such would have made a more accesible beginning for players. He was talking about accesibility (I think the question was something on the line of "what would you change from Planescape Torment?").

Still, he would be dead wrong on this one. The tutorial of Planescape Torment is fucking fantastic. It sets the mood for the game brilliantly, story wise and gameplay wise.

Although, as I said, I don't remember the interview that well, and I'm not going to bother looking, so I may as well be making stuff up.

 

[SarcasticUndertones]

I don't really like Obsidian, mainly because of piss poor, half assed quality control.. but if I was happy with everything else I could probably get over that, the main motivation for me being a frame of mind to actually want to hate on Obsidian is because of Chris Avellone.

Chris once said in an interview (this was after PS:T had fully established it's rep, can't find the interview anymore, can't prove what I read :/) [paraphrasing] That PS:T was too wordy, it would never be made again like that, but he came off as really disparaging towards it and if he looked down on it and by extension those of us who considered it the best thing since sliced bread.

Considering that it's the best thing he's ever been involved in it really put me off the guy, it made me think that PS:T was a fluke (and seeing the rest of his stuff maybe this isn't so far off the mark) and that he felt entitled to negate everyone's (generally agreed) opinion just because he made it (the quality of which he hasn't been able to duplicate since).

It just annoyed me, it stuck with me and I kind of ignore him now. (Like he knows I exist, lol.)

I think, don't remember that well and I'm paraphrasing as well, he ment the beggining of the game. That a bit more of action or such would have made a more accesible beginning for players. He was talking about accesibility (I think the question was something on the line of "what would you change from Planescape Torment?").

Still, he would be dead wrong on this one. The tutorial of Planescape Torment is fucking fantastic. It sets the mood for the game brilliantly, story wise and gameplay wise.

Although, as I said, I don't remember the interview that well, and I'm not going to bother looking, so I may as well be making stuff up.

As I said, I can't re-find the interview, I REALLY wish I could at least for my own peace of mind, but the general tone of the piece did stick with me and it always coloured how I see him.

 

[naossano]

One thing is was wondering recently.

Obsidian are often blamed for bugs in their games, especially on day one.
I was wondering if it was specific with Obsidian or if it comes with the package.

I don't recall any complex RPG, i mean real RPG with non linear plot and many mutually exclusive possibilities, that are free of bugs, at least on day one.
When you a crafting something so complex, with billions of possible playthrough, outcomes, unlikelyness, the process of debugging & testing is a thousand time bigger than a simple corridor FPS. It might seem understandable that there are still bugs on release, unless they have entire years only for debugging.

Do you have any instance of ACTUAL rpg that was bug free on release ?
And i insist on actual. If you think of a game that some people could argue about it being an RPG, it is better to exclude it as my point is more complex = more bugs, so Fo3/Shadowrun/Diablo doesn't count. (even if they could be enjoyable)

 

[Abu Antar]

Most rpgs are buggy. Bethesda games are if not more buggy, at least as buggy as Obsidian games. BioWare games also usually have bugs on release. This goes for most other rpgs that I enjoy. The problem is the consistency of media and reviewers pointing out that fact.

 

[Roguey]

If Obsidian games were fun, fewer people would care about bugs.

As I said, I can't re-find the interview, I REALLY wish I could at least for my own peace of mind, but the general tone of the piece did stick with me and it always coloured how I see him.

You may be thinking of http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art39332.asp among others and I agree with him. He's making games, not Depression Quest and Gone Home.

 

[Infinitron]

If Obsidian games were fun, fewer people would care about bugs.

As I said, I can't re-find the interview, I REALLY wish I could at least for my own peace of mind, but the general tone of the piece did stick with me and it always coloured how I see him.

You may be thinking of http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art39332.asp among others and I agree with him. He's making games, not Depression Quest and Gone Home.

It's more likely to be this: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/182612/from_torment_to_eternity_chris_.php?page=3

"flat-line vomit of text"

 

[Immortal]

Someone please point to a game Josh has designed and without question stand behind to this day.

didn't he design New Vegas?

When I say stand behind it.. I don't mean fanboys on RpgCodex, I mean that -he- stands behind.

Almost day one of release of Vegas Josh is interviewing about how disappointed he was in the balance of vegas, so much so he wrote his own mod to attempt to correct some of the mechanics that went over his head to make the game easier. I do really enjoy Vegas but my point is that to this day Josh has never designed a game that he didn't turn around after release and tear a new asshole about how it wasn't implemented the way he wanted or why it sucked.

The only exception might be Dungeon Siege 3.. I don't think I have ever seen him shit on that game post-release but man what a stinker.

 

[Duraframe300]

Someone please point to a game Josh has designed and without question stand behind to this day.

didn't he design New Vegas?

When I say stand behind it.. I don't mean fanboys on RpgCodex, I mean that -he- stands behind.

Almost day one of release of Vegas Josh is interviewing about how disappointed he was in the balance of vegas, so much so he wrote his own mod to attempt to correct some of the mechanics that went over his head to make the game easier. I do really enjoy Vegas but my point is that to this day Josh has never designed a game that he didn't turn around after release and tear a new asshole about how it wasn't implemented the way he wanted or why it sucked.

The only exception might be Dungeon Siege 3.. I don't think I have ever seen him shit on that game post-release but man what a stinker.

See, in my eyes being critical with your own work isn't a bad thing.

Josh is a special case in that he is always just talking in ideals. If the thing you aspire to is perfection, of course you're never happy.

 

[FuriousGamer87]

One thing is was wondering recently.

Obsidian are often blamed for bugs in their games, especially on day one.
I was wondering if it was specific with Obsidian or if it comes with the package.

I don't recall any complex RPG, i mean real RPG with non linear plot and many mutually exclusive possibilities, that are free of bugs, at least on day one.
When you a crafting something so complex, with billions of possible playthrough, outcomes, unlikelyness, the process of debugging & testing is a thousand time bigger than a simple corridor FPS. It might seem understandable that there are still bugs on release, unless they have entire years only for debugging.

Do you have any instance of ACTUAL rpg that was bug free on release ?
And i insist on actual. If you think of a game that some people could argue about it being an RPG, it is better to exclude it as my point is more complex = more bugs, so Fo3/Shadowrun/Diablo doesn't count. (even if they could be enjoyable)

Pretty much most JRPG are bug free on release though.
Ogre Battle : The March of the Black Queen comes to mind as one of the most open - ended JRPG I ever played.
Another is the SaGa series that is pretty much open ended complex RPG and bug free on release to boot.

And of course, let's not forget the final fantasy and dragon quest series.

 

[Athelas]

I don't think those games let you kill all NPC's or have skill systems or seamless battle transitions. wRPG's tend to be buggy because they have so many features.

 

[Infinitron]

ACTUAL rpg

 

[SarcasticUndertones]

.

.

Nope, neither of those interview, they are too reasonable. It stuck in my mind for a reason.

.

.

Sorry guys, I call bullshit on your apolo-gisms

The bugs issue, yeah fair enough other games have bugs and are even broken, but Ob have been so consistently buggy and broken it's become like a mission statement.

Kotor 2.. someone else's engine, someone else's franchise... buggy, broken, shredded.. absolutely unplayable for anyone who expects consistent story and a playtime that doesn't shit all over you every 20-30 mins, don't give me usual trot out of 'publishers fault' crap. Ob's statement about "we had a patch but atari wouldn't let us release it." Utter bullshit.. Atari wouldn't PAY them to release it, but it was supposed to be already completed (??), why wasn't it then released for free ?.."but atari wouldn't let us".. There isn't a company on earth than wouldn't let their product get fixed for the cost of nothing... and even then there were plenty of avenues for it to have 'snuck' in to players hands IF they had actually given a shit about their customers. It simply came down to Ob getting pissy and holding it back.. BUT if it IS the case that I'm talking through a hole in my proverbial and they had to stick to a contract that actually said this.. then DOUBLE FUCK Ob for signing such a piece of shit at the expense of their audience then releasing that pos game knowing that was what we were expected to buy. It took 6-8 YEARS for the community to get that game in any fit state for a player with at least a modicum of expectation to play and they get credit for the game.. Fuck Off!

NWN 2.. someone else's engine, someone else's franchise.. what a goddamned abortion that game was on release, AND it totally missed the point for the very existence of the original, for group, moderated play (DM Client.. we got it later (very later), but by then the community had mostly given up and gone back to NWN1).. it was buggy with game breakers galore and it took a machine several orders of magnitude, higher, in specs than published reqs to raise it to the level of slideshow.. and again shat and died every few minutes.. plus a warcrime of a patching system that could only be done on the OS root drive and took between 10-20 GB free space to get anywhere at a time massive harddrive weren't ubiquitous, I still remember moving a shitload of my system files in order to patch this monstrosity and it still wasn't in a playable state until years later when PC's caught up, not even so at the time of the 'vaunted masterpiece' (FUCK OFF!) MOTB..Sorry, but no.. Ob again don't get credit for a 'everyone on deck, last ditch attempt' at trying to sacrifice something of the burning wreck they had produced.. yes it was better, although it hardly deserves the dick-sucking it gets. Did 'Storms of Zehir' up hold this supposed ability to product white splashing quality? No, it did fucking not, Ob reverted to type realising they had done what was necessary to stop any rep that they retained from spontaneously combusting and if I remember it needed a fair amount of fixing too.

...and we're moving... Now we begin to reach contemporary work, as opposed to them coasting, well mostly slipping on banana skins of their own throwning and ending up flat on their reputation, along on the coattails of giants, well at least when Bio was a giant of reputation, and not a giant of pandering slopfests.

Alpha Protocol.. their first free rein on their own stuff, this towering giant of quality (see my nick if you have to be told) finally had the chance to show just what they were capable of when finally unshackled from the restraints of others...Yeah, and we did finally get to see, didn't we? A game where some people said it had great plot and great interaction, but most other people just said "Where? can't find it behind all the broken mechanics, unbalanced gameplay..and again an imperial shittonne of bugs and broken questing." WHAT THE FUCK..Oh yeah, Not forgetting a dialogue system ripped off from Bioware's new shit in a box... and tbh I don't have much else to say about it as it died an ignominious (sorry, deservedly ignominious) death and was banished to some dark corner of the cosmoshpere and so erased from the annuls that it isn't spoken of in the direst of hushed tone even here in the fair corner of internetland (seriously when was this last torn apart mentioned?)

Then came their triumphant return to the screwing in to the ground of other 'better' (yeah, this got me too, I can actually say this about DS, FUCK ME!) franchises.

'Dungeon Siege' *snigger* 3, a product that received their finest efforts at polishing and was successful in that goal by all account.. because none of the other accounts ever played it, being a generic piece of sputum, so ignored because of it's blanditude and lightyears distant removal from the expected product, it was a third person, control crippled, chopper of a game, that it too has disappeared, stricken from the tongues of even the most ardent trolls.. AND THIS GAME WAS A SUCCESS IN THE TERMS OF THE REASON FOR THIS LIST??!!?? FUCK EVERYTHING!

South Park.. I loved this, I loved the characters, I loved the setting, I loved the humour and I loved that it was so very very true to the source, it's just a pity Obsidian weren't responsible for any of that and the bits they did do, the quest design, content production and combat mechanics could have appealed only to babies with nothing else to do, seriously the gameparts of that game were fucking abominable and short oh so very short and pointless, the most involved content being collecting the pokemon rip offs and that wore thin after about 10 mins.. but there was loads of it.. This game was broken on release also and had bugs but was so short and lite that it took only one patch to have it spick and span.. but it still doesn't get a pass, because of it had ended up as anything but spick and span Matt and Tray would have kicked Ob's collective knackers in to the middle of the place wherever the hell AP lives now, or just sued them in to oblivion for bring disrepute onto their excellence. So "because they had absolutely no fucking choice in the matter" doesn't count as a reason to applaud. FUCK.. meh.

And we finally get (out of list ordering) to the elephant in the room their universally accepted Opus,

Fallout 3.. I'm going to ignore several things about this, it wasn't a patch on it's namegivers (1 and 2 obviously), got most of it's goodwill second hand from it's namegivers and was imbalanced as all get out to the point of that being considered a 'break'. I'd absolutely love also to ignore the fact that it used the Gamebryo as we ALL know what that's like as an engine, but that's where the problems lies. Obsidian went into this project knowing full well what kind of shitty-arsed broken garbage of a piece of software they were going use and knowing full well what kind of shitty-arse, broken piece of garbage their rep for polish had become.. and did nothing about it. The game was a broken hideous mess.. it was GAMEBRYO.. of course it was going to be an unstable, buggy, broken hideous mess.. So, that was an excuse to ignore quality control was it? By all means the questing, characters and story were fucking lightyears better than the pap Betsy had produced.. but ignoring finished product quality just because they could say 'Well, Bethesda did it", shouldn't have been an excuse, but oh boy the dribblng masses gave them another coast simply because of that reasoning. FUCK YOU!

So for all you goits out there who's spotty visage came from a vitamin overdose through cum-guzzling on Ob.. YES, all games do have bugs, but their developers don't all have a track record like this.

(Disclaimer.. This post has been written for my own entertainment and no offence should be taken.. unless it applies.)

 

[Infinitron]

You're not breaking new ground here, newbie. People have been saying this stuff for years. Nobody cares.

 

[SarcasticUndertones]

You're not breaking new ground here, newbie. People have been saying this stuff for years. Nobody cares.

Sorry, dude, but I just had to answer the 'but they've all got bugs' scrotewarbbling.

That particular arguement just annoys me.. and I felt like licking my own balls for a while.

 

[Drax]

Obsidian did the good part of Fallout NV, that's good enough for me.

 

[SarcasticUndertones]

Obsidian did the good part of Fallout NV, that's good enough for me.

I might have enjoyed it too, but it was too much fucking hassle to play, so I stopped.

 

[Volrath]

Obsidian did the good part of Fallout NV, that's good enough for me.

I might have enjoyed it too, but it was too much fucking hassle to play, so I stopped.

How was it too much of a hassle? Are you mentally retarded perhaps?

 

[SarcasticUndertones]

Obsidian did the good part of Fallout NV, that's good enough for me.

I might have enjoyed it too, but it was too much fucking hassle to play, so I stopped.

How was it too much of a hassle? Are you mentally retarded perhaps?

Yep, totally.

..And this game crashing every 20 minutes or so made me that way.

 

[Drax]

Obsidian did the good part of Fallout NV, that's good enough for me.

I might have enjoyed it too, but it was too much fucking hassle to play, so I stopped.

 

[naossano]

SarcasticUndertones >>

I don't know well enough the working conditions of the other project, but it is widely known that Bethesda was responsible for the Q&A of FoNV, that they screwed it a bit so metacritic would go down at 84 instead of the 85 that Obsidian needed for the royalties.

For the record, i had far more gamebreaking bugs with Fo3, that has zero Obsidian Imput.
For instance :
- Crashing every few minutes, even indoor, with no one around.
- The ground changing for something solid, to a void.
- Characters that kept disapearing, that i had to respawn/teleport constantly with console commands, probably because of that.
- Follower defending hostile animals agains't friendly NPC because of animal friend. So i had to use console command to kill Talon Company dogs and wild animals in order to save the caravan/the BOS/quest-related npc that would have been slaughtered by my own companions otherwise.
- The last quest without Liberty Prime on the first attemps. (game crash on the bridge)
- Dogmeat cloning himself quite often, and almost always grawling.
- Companions randomly killing each others when idling.

And i tried the game five years later. At least Obsidian make patch. Bethesda must not know what patches are...

 

[dukeofwhales]

I don't know well enough the working conditions of the other project, but it is widely known that Bethesda was responsible for the Q&A of FoNV, that they screwed it a bit so metacritic would go down at 84 instead of the 85 that Obsidian needed for the royalties.

I dont think anyone has suggested that Bethesda deliberately screwed with QA so with such precision that they could get the metacritic score to one point below what would have required them to pay a bonus. Pretty sure it was just Gamebryo being shit + Obsidian being new to the engine + Bethesda QA being incompetent meant it had a buggy launch.

 

[Roguey]

Brian Fargo confirmed that Bethesda moved the release date up by a few weeks so they'd have to ship an earlier (and buggier) build to reviewers. They knew they had a hit, just needed to bang it up a bit so it wouldn't score too well.

 

[SarcasticUndertones]

Brian Fargo confirmed that Bethesda moved the release date up by a few weeks so they'd have to ship an earlier (and buggier) build to reviewers. They knew they had a hit, just needed to bang it up a bit so it wouldn't score too well.

We already know that reviewers/sites are complicit with publishers and their review embargoes in return for freebies and ad revenue, they aren't 'made' to comply, they hide shit from us willingly. Further information on the underhanded tactic of publishers shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

Piracy is the only moral choice.