Obsidian...what happened?

[Goral]

Obsidian...what happened?

 

[Ol' Willy]

It's very sad, actually. Obsidian was a ray of hope in the dark world of moderately big studios, seemingly capable of producing some good, real RPGs. But something went wrong and all potential was lost, thus drowning Obsidian in the sea of mediocrity.

 

[JarlFrank]

Obsidian was always a mediocre studio tbh. They had some good ideas and designed some good quests and stories in games like KotoR 2, Mask of the Betrayer, and New Vegas, but the good parts of those games were all made by people who are either no longer at Obsidian or have lost their passion. The smaller non-big name people also had some turnover, and the new hires are your typical 20-something leftie Californian who write dialogues for medieval fantasy as if it's modern day LA. And if most of the writing is shit, there's not much left because all Obsidian had was the writing (and sometimes quest design).

What made KotoR 2 good? Avellone's well-written story. Mask of the Betrayer? Also the story, this time written by Ziets. New Vegas? The factions and the amount of C&C you get.

Gameplay-wise Obsidian has never been very good, though. NWN2 suffers from terrible encounter deisgn consisting of endless filler trash mobs - not that NWN1 was any better, but just because it's a sequel you don't have to copy the first game's shortcomings. KotoR 2 has worse encounter design than the first game. New Vegas is pretty decent as far as level and encounter design goes, so this is their strongest effort yet, and they improved some of Bethesda's shitty mechanics. But still, it's not a game you play for the combat either, at high levels enemy HP bloat becomes a huge problem (I played the DLCs when my character was maxed out, and most enemies are so bloated in their HP that it takes two entire magazines of my weapon of choice to take down a single enemy...).

Yeah, they often had to work with what they were given and had too short development cycles, so of course their games end up buggy and with some messy areas, but encounter design and systems design have never been their forte. If you strip away the story, you'd be left with utterly forgettable mediocrity.

 

[overly excitable young man]

Who cares? Let them be and ,under any circumstances, don't give em any more money.
Same with Fargos shitshow.

 

[Dexter]

I have fond memories of Fallout New Vegas and Neverwinter Nights 2, but their recent games are all mediocre to low. Especially the writing department has gone so far down hill that it's unreal. The stories in Pillars games make very little sense, and now we have this thing...the Outerworlds. I'm not even sure what to say about that. So soulless and boring...

KOTOR 2 (Chris Avellone, Ferret Baudoin, Michael Chu, Tony Evans, Dave Maldonado)
NWN2: MOTB (George Ziets)
New Vegas (John Gonzalez, Chris Avellone, Eric Fenstermaker, Travis Stout and various others)
Alpha Protocol (Chris Avellone, Matt MacLean, Brian Mitsoda, Travis Stout)
South Park: The Stick of Truth (Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Eric Fenstermaker)
The main thing Obsidian is usually praised and known for is going to be vastly different in this game. Even if their art department is half-way competent and does a good job, they're not going to be able to turn the tide if the writing sucks.

Personnel matters. What effect does anyone think it has on their products, that have always been kinda janky, flawed and buggy, but people always kind of overlooked and excused all of that because at least they always had writing and a somewhat interesting setting and characters to fall back on, when the people in charge decide to eliminate the one thing that made said offerings stand out?

 

[TemplarGR]

All their talent left the company between 2010 and 2015. They had names like John Gonzalez, George Ziets, and Chris Avellone writing their games. Now they have blue checkmarks.

FTFY. All the Codex cares about is Avellone. RPGCodex borg collective is simple:

Game has Avellone in credits* = Masterpiece

Game has not Avellone in credits = Piece of garbage/popamole

Company hires Avellone = The only hope mankind has for incline

Company parts with Avellone = I always knew these faggots were garbage and decline, hope they go bankrupt.

* Whether his writting was actually used in-game in any capacity is irrelevant, all that matters is that he was involved during development, even if his work was scrapped.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

There's few gay men in video games because homosexuality is inherently disgusting for heterosexual men AKA the massive majority of people who play video games.

 

[TemplarGR]

Obsidian was always a mediocre studio tbh

This is the truth. Obsidian has alwas been mediocre from the start. Their specialty used to be, getting a well known AAA CRPG and creating a more interesting spinoff/sequel due to better writing and quest design. That was their strength. No too shabby, but on their own hardly anything special. Proper quality development studios, like Bethesda, Bioware, or CDPROJECT, don't rely on others to create the games for them and then just mod them for a sequel/spinoff. Obsidian games are still quality but that quality was based on other people work, not their own.

Though to be honest, the Outer Worlds was a step in the right direction. It was the first time* Obsidian truly said "FUCK YOU WE ARE MAKING OUR OWN GAME", even if that game had to be limited in scope in order to be achievable by a company the size of Obsidian. It was still a good game, despite the usual RPGCodex edgelord-faggotry.

*Well, technically, PoE was the first, but it was really just a clone of BG in everything but name, built on the Unity engine.

 

[JarlFrank]

There's few gay men in video games because homosexuality is inherently disgusting for heterosexual men AKA the massive majority of people who play video games.

Even ugly lesbians are less disgusting than average gay men, true story.

That said, ToEE has a butt pirate as a companion!

 

[vortex]

Obsidian should make a game with skeletons, monsters, dragons, earth/fire elementals, fiendish creatures ... Lets make interesting personalities like sadistic villains, clumsy heros, fascinating quests, action packed combat yet challenging and hard. In other words where sexuality is not a center of discourse. Sexuality is such a banal, boring thing among people. Everybody has it.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

PoE would have been better if the story was as depressing all the way through as the first act was.

 

[JarlFrank]

PoE would have been better without a story than with the overwritten crap we got.

 

[Ol' Willy]

There's few gay men in video games because homosexuality is inherently disgusting for heterosexual men AKA the massive majority of people who play video games.

Then why there's so few games with cute lesbians (not dykes)?

 

[luj1]

That said, ToEE has a butt pirate as a companion!

Who was actually done well

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

Obsidian was always overhyped because it is really Black Isle Studios, one of the great historical RPG dev studios. Interplay had to close BIS down, so it became Obsidian, taking on BIS's high expectations and legacy, but unfortunately, it was never able to live up to them. In several years, BIS produced 3 all time great RPGs (PST and F1/2), but Obsidian, in almost 20 years of existence, produced one quality game (if modded), that being New Vegas, and one quality expansion (MotB).

Their model was ultimately completely different from BIS. People look at F1/F2 and PST today (and the far shittier Icewind Dales), and see the aging graphics and primitive stuff, and they might not realize how revolutionary those games were for late 90s. There was nothing exactly like PST or F1/F2 back then, and those games boldly broke new ground. Obsidian, for whatever reason, never had that kind of balls. Most of their games were derivative of other stuff, sometimes derivative of prequel from another studio (NWN2 to NWN, KotOR2 to KotOR), or derivative due to another studio's engine/license (New Vegas to F3, South Park to the show), but even when every once in a while, they got a chance to try something new, they either fell back to older stuff (PoE being badly derivative of BG but in a much worse way, ditto to Outer Turds and Fallout), or they did try something new (Alpha Protocol, Tyranny) but failed in every way. Even the same exact people that succeeded before with BIS failed at Obsidian (Avellone, Caine, Boyarski), due to being older, burned out, whatever.

Ultimately it was a combination of lack of talent, bad circumstances, bad management (who the hell would make Avellone a design lead for Alpha protocol instead of lead writer?), and just about everything else. One of the sadder stories in gaming.

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

I have fond memories of Fallout New Vegas and Neverwinter Nights 2, but their recent games are all mediocre to low. Especially the writing department has gone so far down hill that it's unreal. The stories in Pillars games make very little sense

??? PoE1 story was made sense bro and it was good. idk about poe2 tho haven't played that yet. Tyranny was kinda meh but I wouldn't call it bad

but yea fuck rick and morty in space outer worlds obviously but we all knew that was gonna be shit from the first trailer but you should have known the target audience for that game was

Spoiler

redditors

long before it even released so that one's ur fault bitch

Well, I think it's pretty funny that your post is full of typos and grammatical errors. The thing that you think is well written most likely isn't.

I checked and there are a total of zero (0) typing errors in my post
also you removed Kizuna from the quote
so basically, eat shit kid

 

[Dawkinsfan69]

this is now a vtuber thread

 

[JarlFrank]

Holy fucking shit you are a gargantuan faggot of herculean proportions you dimwitted wankstain

 

[Serious_Business]

Mostly lucid posts surprisingly ; you would have expected more political points - Obsidian became shit because of leftists, etc - but I'm not sure if game writing was any better when it didn't have a "left agenda". Not being interested in dikes and gays doesn't make you a good writer or something.

There's few gay men in video games because homosexuality is inherently disgusting for heterosexual men AKA the massive majority of people who play video games.

You're fucked, man. Supposedly almost 50% of US gamers are women, now. The old world is definitively dead, even though your imagination still lives in it. This idea that the demographic didn't change is ludicrous, gaming is such a big business, it wouldn't thrive much off basement-dwellers. Rejoice however, you can be cool now ; we know this is all you ever wanted

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Supposedly almost 50% of US gamers are women, now.

If you include shit like farmville and various mobile games, yes.

 

[A horse of course]

I still remember when Obsidiots (i.e. RPG Codex) would instantly leap to the company's defence by crying about muh evil publishers, muh development time, muh metacritic contract. Every single time. Like clockwork.

Mostly lucid posts surprisingly ; you would have expected more political points - Obsidian became shit because of leftists, etc - but I'm not sure if game writing was any better when it didn't have a "left agenda". Not being interested in dikes and gays doesn't make you a good writer or something.

There's few gay men in video games because homosexuality is inherently disgusting for heterosexual men AKA the massive majority of people who play video games.

You're fucked, man. Supposedly almost 50% of US gamers are women, now. The old world is definitively dead, even though your imagination still lives in it. This idea that the demographic didn't change is ludicrous, gaming is such a big business, it wouldn't thrive much off basement-dwellers. Rejoice however, you can be cool now ; we know this is all you ever wanted

Being a faggot or a leftist doesn't make you a worse writer in itself. But the Obshitian twatter blue checkmark writers are objectively worse writers because of their faggotry and leftism. Were they neither faggots nor leftists, their writing would simply be unremarkable.

 

[Rafidur]

There's few gay men in video games because homosexuality is inherently disgusting for heterosexual men AKA the massive majority of people who play video games.

Then why there's so few games with cute lesbians (not dykes)?

People can't fantasise about bedding them or something like that?

edit: actually I think TOW's would have been greatly improved if you could fix Parvati's issues through the power of cock.

 

[Generic-Giant-Spider]

I have fond memories of Fallout New Vegas and Neverwinter Nights 2, but their recent games are all mediocre to low. Especially the writing department has gone so far down hill that it's unreal. The stories in Pillars games make very little sense

??? PoE1 story was made sense bro and it was good. idk about poe2 tho haven't played that yet. Tyranny was kinda meh but I wouldn't call it bad

but yea fuck rick and morty in space outer worlds obviously but we all knew that was gonna be shit from the first trailer but you should have known the target audience for that game was

Spoiler

redditors

long before it even released so that one's ur fault bitch

Well, I think it's pretty funny that your post is full of typos and grammatical errors. The thing that you think is well written most likely isn't.

I checked and there are a total of zero (0) typing errors in my post
also you removed Kizuna from the quote
so basically, eat shit kid

DAB ON THIS BITCH ONE MORE TIME BABY YEAH

 

[Verylittlefishes]

what could possibly go wrong

 

[Nano]

The South Park RPG was trash, why are people here including it in lists of pre-decline Obsidian games?