Obsidian General Discussion Thread

[A horse of course]

This information will come in use for your eventual "how Obsidian died" video in a couple of years

Wow that guy - or girl - seems very level-headed and probably pretty hot. I hope Chris takes their advice.

WTF HE HID MY TWAT

 

[Flou]

Her unplanned departure rule out the option that Dollerhyde left due to a publishing deadline (she is still reprsented by HLMA). now i more inclined to the hypothesis that her departure is due to the unstably of the production of avowed. it's all so important to mention that while she was assgined as lead narrative designer for avowed she also worked with sawyer on pentiment.

Or she just wasn't ready for such a role and failed at it, got butthurt and decided to leave.

 

[Flou]

Someone poked Avellone and he's claiming that Charles Staples left too.

Remember when ChrisAvellone stated there were a lot of high-level departures on Avowed? Only for one person to say nuh-uh without receipts and everyone believed that over the LinkedIn pages? Well, the narrative lead just left the studio.

Lead Level Designer for #Fallout New Vegas just resigned, too. Hope everything is okay.

Staples was the Design Director on The Outer Worlds. Not sure if that was a massive design hit here. Though at least the Systems Design on Armored Warfare was quite good. Hard to comment on the area design on Fallout: New Vegas when the game was made in such rush mode. At least it didn't completely suck ass.

 

[Briar Diem]

Staples was the design director on Avowed as well. Flou hit the nail on the head about the other (likely).

 

[KVVRR]

Carrie Patel and Megan Starks already work as Lead Narrative Designers. Promoting someone else for the job would create a void into some other project.

Patel's Avowed's project director, not narrative lead. Boyarsky's the creative lead on The Outer Worlds 2. Grounded has Michael Chu (Michael Who?) and Sawyer's keeping to himself on Sediment. Seems pretty bad to have to go through all the effort to find and hire someone outside the company after years of development (hence why they gave it to Dollarhyde when Soulban jumped ship). As Sawyer himself put it:

i mean that kinda shit happens. like once the game is "done" when it comes to Golden path(aka main storyline), the narrative director moves on, forced or other wise.

This is not true in any RPG I've ever worked on or seen the development of.

I've worked on one game that had a 6 month turnaround following the removal of two creative leads (Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows). It only shipped because the game's features and content were gutted and Midway death marched the team (then shut the studio down immediately after).

Michael Chu was the guy in charge for the Overwatch """"story"""" for the first ~3 years of the game's lifespan. The guy was hated because he actively seemed to release more "lore" (just small tips like "did you know X is Y's favorite food?") on twitter than in the actual game/shorts and what little did he write really wasn't anything special/he constantly retconned stuff.
That Obsidian went ahead and hired some blizzard schmuck with 0 actual experience writing stuff and put him in charge of one of their projects (even if it's one that requires as little as Grounded) should tell you everything about the current state of the company.

 

[Nano]

Michael Chu was the guy in charge for the Overwatch """"story"""" for the first ~3 years of the game's lifespan. The guy was hated because he actively seemed to release more "lore" (just small tips like "did you know X is Y's favorite food?") on twitter than in the actual game/shorts and what little did he write really wasn't anything special/he constantly retconned stuff.
That Obsidian went ahead and hired some blizzard schmuck with 0 actual experience writing stuff and put him in charge of one of their projects (even if it's one that requires as little as Grounded) should tell you everything about the current state of the company.

Michael Chu was one of the writers on KotOR 2, my dude.

 

[Flou]

Michael Chu was the guy in charge for the Overwatch """"story"""" for the first ~3 years of the game's lifespan. The guy was hated because he actively seemed to release more "lore" (just small tips like "did you know X is Y's favorite food?") on twitter than in the actual game/shorts and what little did he write really wasn't anything special/he constantly retconned stuff.
That Obsidian went ahead and hired some blizzard schmuck with 0 actual experience writing stuff and put him in charge of one of their projects (even if it's one that requires as little as Grounded) should tell you everything about the current state of the company.

Chu is friends with some of the team that was/is working on Grounded. They did not have a writer available at that time, so they used Chu who was between jobs to write whatever small amounts of writing they actually needed at that point. Not sure if he is still writing for the project.

 

[KVVRR]

Michael Chu was the guy in charge for the Overwatch """"story"""" for the first ~3 years of the game's lifespan. The guy was hated because he actively seemed to release more "lore" (just small tips like "did you know X is Y's favorite food?") on twitter than in the actual game/shorts and what little did he write really wasn't anything special/he constantly retconned stuff.
That Obsidian went ahead and hired some blizzard schmuck with 0 actual experience writing stuff and put him in charge of one of their projects (even if it's one that requires as little as Grounded) should tell you everything about the current state of the company.

Michael Chu was one of the writers on KotOR 2, my dude.

writing star wars fanfiction does not make him a writer
it just makes him human garbage

 

[Harthwain]

writing star wars fanfiction does not make him a writer

The official Star Wars game is not fanfiction, no matter how you look at it. The real question is the level of involvement.

 

[Nano]

writing star wars fanfiction does not make him a writer

The official Star Wars game is not fanfiction, no matter how you look at it. The real question is the level of involvement.

Michael Chu (Worlds of Warcraft) was responsible for much of Telos and the lightsaber quest plus some Nar Shaddaa quests, along with Mandalore and Bao-Dur.

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/obsidian-general-discussion-thread.84849/page-324#post-6829625

Definitely not the best material in the game, but still, he's an Obsidian veteran.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

writing star wars fanfiction does not make him a writer

The official Star Wars game is not fanfiction, no matter how you look at it. The real question is the level of involvement.

KOTOR games are 98% fan fiction after the mouse bought the franchise fyi
they're also some of the only good material to ever exist in the star wars franchise, especially if you're looking for post-original trilogy material

 

[KVVRR]

writing star wars fanfiction does not make him a writer

The official Star Wars game is not fanfiction, no matter how you look at it. The real question is the level of involvement.

In all seriousness I only knew him from his involvement on Overwatch, which was and still is handled horribly lore and storywise. I never cared for star wars nor kotor so I wasn't aware of his involvement in that game. But like I said, I doubt it was anything stand out. The guy's just not that good.

 

[Flou]

In all seriousness I only knew him from his involvement on Overwatch, which was and still is handled horribly lore and storywise. I never cared for star wars nor kotor so I wasn't aware of his involvement in that game. But like I said, I doubt it was anything stand out. The guy's just not that good.

https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,43258/

Educate yourself

 

[KVVRR]

In all seriousness I only knew him from his involvement on Overwatch, which was and still is handled horribly lore and storywise. I never cared for star wars nor kotor so I wasn't aware of his involvement in that game. But like I said, I doubt it was anything stand out. The guy's just not that good.

https://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,43258/

Educate yourself

almost everything in that list is a blizzard product, thanks for proving me right

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Who gives a fuck about anything Sawyer says. This guy literally talks about coded game mechanics, essentially 1's and 0's, like he's actually talking about processes for refining metal, hammering it out, cooling and forging it, and fitting it properly for war. I mean Jesus fuck. It's a video game. It's not actually material.

How fucking deluded can you be? He can't even get good game mechanics right, so who gives a shit.

Kate Dollarhyde on the other hand...

Does she have an onlyfans yet?

 

[Roguey]

Who gives a fuck about anything Sawyer says. This guy literally talks about coded game mechanics, essentially 1's and 0's, like he's actually talking about processes for refining metal, hammering it out, cooling and forging it, and fitting it properly for war. I mean Jesus fuck. It's a video game. It's not actually material.

How fucking deluded can you be? He can't even get good game mechanics right, so who gives a shit.

Kate Dollarhyde on the other hand...

Does she have an onlyfans yet?

She took nude photos of her friend for artistic purposes. None of herself though (she's asexual y'know).

 

[Alienman]

Of course she did.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Who gives a fuck about anything Sawyer says. This guy literally talks about coded game mechanics, essentially 1's and 0's, like he's actually talking about processes for refining metal, hammering it out, cooling and forging it, and fitting it properly for war. I mean Jesus fuck. It's a video game. It's not actually material.

How fucking deluded can you be? He can't even get good game mechanics right, so who gives a shit.

Kate Dollarhyde on the other hand...

Does she have an onlyfans yet?

She took nude photos of her friend for artistic purposes. None of herself though (she's asexual y'know).

Haha wouldn't it be funny if you get naked and I take pictures of you? Totally non-sexual because I'm asexual haha
...unless?

 

[Diggfinger]

Sawyer on Twitch tonight
https://www.twitch.tv/jesawyer


Interrupting my hiatus to say that I'm finally going to give the armor talk I said I would give a year ago, this Sunday. All about armor systems.




10:23 PM · May 19, 2022·Twitter Web App

 

[Infinitron]

I'll watch this later.

 

[ferratilis]

He's doing a talk about armor on his Twitch channel, will be uploaded to yt later.
https://www.twitch.tv/jesawyer

Lol at that photo from his youth

 

[ferratilis]

He said one of his favorite armor systems was the DT/DR system in Fallout 1 and 2, then goes on to say why Fallout 3 had a bad system with using only DR, how NV tried to improve that by using DT (which was not very good when facing material guns or nukes), then how he tried to fix that in JSawyer.

Spoiler

Then he admits the failure of DR system in PoE (which is actually DT, but somehow he called it DR which confused people even more), and the main problem was that some damage values were simply too high, like the Adra Dragon.

Spoiler

In order to fix this problem, he was inspired by Darklands which had a more consistent armor system, and he used it in PoE2 with varying degrees of success, since many players hated it, but he thinks it's much better.

Spoiler

If PoE3 ever comes out, it will probably have something like this:

 

[Infinitron]

Archived:

 

[Infinitron]

That didn't take long: