RPG Codex Interview: Chris Avellone on Pillars Cut Content, Game Development Hierarchies and More

[Mustawd]

I feel like maybe this will end up like the "Why did Sirotech go Bankrupt" thread. Where someone makes a claim, and years later someone else shows up all random and verifies that claim.

I hope the IRS agent signs up just to see what he says.

Maybe he just signs up to tell Bester thanks for the laff.

 

[Hoaxmetal]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/8h57zx/chris_avellone_criticizes_obsidians_upper/

 

[fobia]

A bit more level-headed than the discussion in this thread, but I don't see anything that wasn't already discussed here?

 

[Alienman]

In before first IRS troll account post.

 

[commie]

Fuck....104 pages in 5 days!

MCA...the Swen Vincke of the older generation.

Did some good work 20 years ago....now writing snippets for Into the Breach (not to mention working on Codex favorites like Tyranny and DOS:2)

How long till the tide turns and he is cast out, tarred and feathered like Swen???

 

[dragonul09]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/8h57zx/chris_avellone_criticizes_obsidians_upper/

Most of them defend Obsidian and say that Avellone is a bitter and petty individual for revealing the shitshow that goes at the company and they also say that he's compromised by posting on a unruly site like RpgCodex, ahh reddit cockroaches never seem to dissappoint.

 

[jaydee2k]

Oh no not this again. Fuck off Chris. And you fucking fags still suckin his dick all day. Emberassing.

 

[Imoens pet]

Not at some guy doing his civic duty by reporting this shit.

Oh fuck of with this BS, since when the Codex turned into the champion of our society?

I wouldn't be surprised if MCA left this thread seeing how did it turn out.

Oh relax grandma, its all in good fun. Doubt he'd do it.

 

[J_C]

Not at some guy doing his civic duty by reporting this shit.

Oh fuck of with this BS, since when the Codex turned into the champion of our society?

I wouldn't be surprised if MCA left this thread seeing how did it turn out.

Oh relax grandma, its all in good fun. Doubt he'd do it.

Hope so. But we can never be sure about the mental state of Codexians.

 

[Imoens pet]

Not at some guy doing his civic duty by reporting this shit.

Oh fuck of with this BS, since when the Codex turned into the champion of our society?

I wouldn't be surprised if MCA left this thread seeing how did it turn out.

Oh relax grandma, its all in good fun. Doubt he'd do it.

Hope so. But we can never be sure about the mental state of Codexians.

Hmm good point.

 

[SerratedBiz]

I just wanted to post in this thread before it got immortalized in the Retardo Land of a court proceeding.

Also, MCA is a big boy and he knows what he's doing when he posts intimate business information about Obsidian on an online forum. This 'waaah but what if he never comes back' attitude is right there with 'waaah but what if people in the industry get pissed off' and is exactly what he's standing against by opening the lid on all this.

Aside from making up what Obsidian chose to never pay me, I set aside a legal fund to deal with any repercussions, and I will fight anything they bring to the table, tooth and nail. I welcome it.

Learn something from your hero, Codex.

 

[Big Wrangle]

But it's all okay - Paradox has already been in touch, and they aren't too happy with how Obsidian handled the work they asked for. Future revelations will likely be much more fun than mine.

Hurry up Paradox!

 

[Phanax]

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/8h57zx/chris_avellone_criticizes_obsidians_upper/

So long as their games are good, who cares how they treat people. Just give me a good rpg and take my money.

Gamers. Gamers never change.

 

[Big Wrangle]

So long as their games are good, who cares how they treat people. Just give me a good rpg and take my money.

But that mentality I guess he was completely okay with the shit Weinstein did.

 

[Tormented Seph]

My dream is coming true.
Four years ago I posted this on Avellone's facebook wall:

Now it is reality.

 

[Infinitron]

Chris Avellone is not swearing off publishers or AAAs. He's kind of doing the opposite of that - by implicitly making the point that Obsidian has had to resort to a more "indie" form of game development because they were too incompetent to work with AAAs.

 

[Tormented Seph]

Chris Avellone is not swearing off publishers or AAAs. He's kind of doing the opposite of that - by implicitly making the point that Obsidian has had to resort to a more "indie" form of game development because they were too incompetent to work with AAAs.

 

[Roguey]

I think the potentially more interesting answer would be to the second part of the question. I'm genuinely curious how a writer with as much experience as MCA would not stick to a word count. That's fairly basic craftsmanship. Was everybody else exceeding their word counts to equal measure and he wanted in on the action? Was he too high to give a shit? Did he want to punish the narrative lead? The people have a right to know.

Deadfire blowing past its word count without Avellone's presence is proof that everyone's doing it, but Fenstermaker said that Avellone's were significantly longer than everyone else's, so it's not quite "equal measure." It's certainly a failure of the project director not to crack down on this, though his intentions are good (most people want RPGs with a lot of content; in fact a lot of people here on the 'dex were upset about the relative lack of words coming from the other companions though I imagine most of them would prefer to trade a lot of those pointless prose descriptions and lore dumps for more non-exposition dialogue).

 

[Cross]

I think the potentially more interesting answer would be to the second part of the question. I'm genuinely curious how a writer with as much experience as MCA would not stick to a word count. That's fairly basic craftsmanship. Was everybody else exceeding their word counts to equal measure and he wanted in on the action? Was he too high to give a shit? Did he want to punish the narrative lead? The people have a right to know.

Deadfire blowing past its word count without Avellone's presence is proof that everyone's doing it, but Fenstermaker said that Avellone's were significantly longer than everyone else's, so it's not quite "equal measure." It's certainly a failure of the project director not to crack down on this, though his intentions are good (most people want RPGs with a lot of content) .

I already pointed this out before, but in his interview with the Codex, Eric Fenstermaker said that the primary bottleneck for Durance and the Grieving Mother wasn't the amount of text, but Obsidian's own absurd guidelines that a significant amount of all text must be voice acted.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=10231

The cuts came for length. The three limiting factors were time to implement, art resources for the dream sequences, and VO budget. There was a target length we had set upfront for all companions, and we had to stick to it. Otherwise we'd be, for example, voicing maybe one out of every six lines for Durance and the Grieving Mother, and it'd be conspicuously incongruent with the other companions, who had maybe 2/3 of their lines voiced. Unfortunately in this case it meant cutting down characters that had had a lot of research and creative energy invested in them, and there were some good ideas there that it would've been interesting to explore. It was a shitty thing to have to do, but we'd never have been able to implement the original versions in time to ship.

 

[Roguey]

I already pointed this out before, but in his interview with the Codex, Eric Fenstermaker said that the primary bottleneck for Durance and the Grieving Mother wasn't the amount of text, but Obsidian's own absurd guidelines that a significant amount of all text must be voice acted.

There are posts he made in this very thread where he explained what the primary issues were.

 

[Infinitron]

We've been over this.

The three limiting factors were time to implement, art resources for the dream sequences, and VO budget

Otherwise we'd be, for example, voicing maybe one out of every six lines for Durance and the Grieving Mother,

Because Fenstermaker's Folly chose to go into more detail about his voice acting example, some people decided that was the real reason the companions were cut, and ignored those two other things.

Even Chris Avellone, who clearly is out to make Obsidian look as capriciously incompetent as possible, commented on all three reasons that Eric mentioned. He didn't say, "Yeah, it was all about the voice acting, they totally could have implemented it all otherwise".

 

[Taka-Haradin puolipeikko]

While we're waiting for Chris to get drunk and post more saucy info, somebody recommend me some recent movie to watch. A thriller or a war flick preferred.

Memphis Belle.

 

[fantadomat]

This is going to the IRS today:

More Russian intervention i see. Maybe i should send this post to CNN or some other retarded news network in usa.

 

[Cross]

But even Chris Avellone, who clearly is out to make Obsidian look as capriciously incompetent as possible, commented on all three reasons that Eric mentioned.

Indeed, and it only supports what I said:

The art for the dream sequences would have required maybe 12 images, and it was designed so you could do 1 large image and split the scene, so each image could be repurposed. I will say there were other cuts (the GM’s special Planescape-y weapons and Durance variant equipment) that were just simply dropped and would have required little in the way of resources – it was more a matter of will vs. time in some instances.

That said, for the Eternity companions, I didn’t mind any cuts for length (it only took me a few hours to fix, which is nothing)

Do you seriously think the consequences of a high word count lie only in the text itself, and not the budget, time and resources needed to voice that text?

 

[Blaine]

You all realize that asking writers to constrain themselves to a hard word count while fleshing out a fantasy character with hundreds of lines of structured dialogue written from scratch is the same as asking them to be their own editors, right? We aren't talking about college term papers, here.

Editing your own work is extremely difficult and ill-advised. It's the job of an editor to pare writing down to size. If Obsidian planned for their game to have three novels' worth of dialogue, then they should have budgeted for a couple of editors. Doesn't matter if "everyone else's was less over." The fact that pretty much all of them were over should be a fucking hint, you retarded goofballs. Consider suicide.

This absurd focus on Avellone's word count is ignorant and wrongheaded, and the fact that it's such a huge issue only underlines the dysfunction that must be present at Obsidian. If going over a word count is all it takes to throw them into chaos, then they need to get their shit together.