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

[TT1]

Chris Avellone Tyranny belongs to Paradox. This is a game that you would like to work if Paradox wants to make a sequel and Obsidian is not involved?

I think its an amazing setting

 

[Prime Junta]

It's really cool to hear that going ronin has worked out so well for him.

(Although a full-bore Chris Avellone Production would be heavan.)

 

[Hines]

Raphael whatever he ends up doing next because working with him was really chill.

Zenimax made him sign a non-compete when he resigned from Arkane, so he can't do much game-wise beyond consulting for a while, but that would be cool.

That said, I'm sometimes able to list what companies I work before the actual game is revealed (Ghost Story), but that's hit or miss - Ken and the Narrative Lead did say it was okay when I was asked.

I can't wait to see what you're working on with those Boston boys.

 

[TT1]

It's really cool to hear that going ronin has worked out so well for him.

Ronin is a good name for MCA studio

 

[aweigh]

 

[Namesake]

Chris Avellone

As a game designer at a large, vibrant, yet unruly company, I deal with inexperienced managers and producers every day, frequently bringing me to breaking point with their incompetency and lack of structure. I often think they intentionally make things difficult in order to justify their jobs, and things would go so much more smoothly if the leads were in charge instead.

It's crushing my soul. Do you have any suggestions on how to proceed? Any hindsight insight on how you'd have handled yourself different if given the chance?

Thanks for all the info and insight, it's been lovely hearing that even Gods have to deal with this stuff.

 

[Glaucon]

Spoiler

 

[Jaedar]

I haven't played Underrail, but it's on the list. That's going to be a common answer about games, unfortunately.

Do you regret working so hard you don't have time to play games, or do you just like your work so much that it's a small sacrifice to make?

Perhaps more pointedly, as a game developer (or video game writer, not sure which title you prefer) how many games do you think you *should* play to keep up to date on your skillset?

 

[Prime Junta]

As a game designer at a large, vibrant, yet unruly company, I deal with terrible managers and producers every day, frequently bringing me to breaking point with their incompetency and lack of structure. I often think they intentionally make things difficult in order to justify their jobs, and things would go so much more smoothly if the leads were in charge instead.

damn maybe i should quit my day job and start consulting with game companies on practices and process... there's clearly untapped demand here

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

In the meantime, poe2 is already in top sellers.

 

[Blaine]

You are like a little baby. Check my ignore list. All in a single hour. That too for only changing my avatar to support Chris Avellone

I earn my ignores by making people so astronomically butthurt that they can't bear to read my posts.

Interestingly, the commie LARPers almost never put me on ignore (communard being the sole exception), even though I'd like to see them all lined up against the wall and shot. Mostly it's progressives who are upset with me naming the SJW once too often or Trumpposting.

I suppose being persecuted adds to the atmosphere and tone of the commie LARPing. How can you be a true commie without capitalist pigs out there waiting to string you up?

 

[Cleveland Mark Blakemore]

If confronted with evil (as categorized by existing employees who will soon resign - check back in a week or two for the latest round, even though one of them dropped yesterday), I will be prepared to fight it. I guarantee I have more in my bank account than Obsidian does, since they rarely think more than 2 months in advance - and unfortunately, their very, very expensive lawyer charges by the hour, which is unfortunate, but he knows, remora-like, what to attach himself to to get the most financial gain.

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.

Wow. The drama just intensifies.

( Cleveland Mark Blakemore , feel you're missing out on an interesting thread which may feel slightly familiar)

Seriously, too busy for a change having fun working on games (even the final cut of Grimoire) to bother with any of this drama any more.

 

[SpurdoSparde]

preferably, you want to keep a range of relationship options, not just romance (friendships, buddy-cop arcs, hate-mances, etc.)

The obsession with romances as the only type of relationship is a long time pet peeve of mine and probably others as well. If there was actually a wide range of relationships then people infatuated with romances might realize there is more to companions than that. It could even quell the hate die hard fans have for romances, or I'm just being too optimistic.

 

[azimuth]

Feargus in 2004:

FU: I must have been at least an OK boss, or it was just Interplay almost going out of business, but of the 36 people working here at Obsidian, 18 of them are from Black Isle. We also have a few people new to the industry and the rest have worked at such companies as Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Taldren, Totally Games, Treyarch, and Troika.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/qanda-obsidian-entertainments-feargus-urquhart/1100-6104565/

MCA in 2005:

Say what you will about Ferg, but he’s a good boss (and I’ve had some shitty ones) and he took us from Dragonplay all the way to Black Isle, and I think it was a good journey, and it definitely paved the way for Obsidian Entertainment being able to deal with publishers without getting ground to powder.

https://archive.is/I9h6#selection-865.215-865.520

So Feargus was MCA's boss for around 20 years, in which time Feargus ran a successive chain of world-renowned successful RPG outfits. Then all of a sudden Feargus has always been bad at his job and I wouldn't trust him with money and I hate him and oh gosh I'll just gossip about him on RPG Codex for a solid week before the POE2 launch like a big boy all on my own.

 

[aweigh]

Relationships change. What was alright 15 years ago may have become unacceptable. When you're younger you tend to think you can deal with anything.

 

[Prime Junta]

Interestingly, the commie LARPers almost never put me on ignore (communard being the sole exception), even though I'd like to see them all lined up against the wall and shot.

Come the Revolution, how are we going to find you if we've been closing your eyes to you in the interim?

(LOL at the LARPing. Projecting much?)

 

[Gangrelrumbler]

Feargus in 2004:

FU: I must have been at least an OK boss, or it was just Interplay almost going out of business, but of the 36 people working here at Obsidian, 18 of them are from Black Isle. We also have a few people new to the industry and the rest have worked at such companies as Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Taldren, Totally Games, Treyarch, and Troika.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/qanda-obsidian-entertainments-feargus-urquhart/1100-6104565/

MCA in 2005:

Say what you will about Ferg, but he’s a good boss (and I’ve had some shitty ones) and he took us from Dragonplay all the way to Black Isle, and I think it was a good journey, and it definitely paved the way for Obsidian Entertainment being able to deal with publishers without getting ground to powder.

https://archive.is/I9h6#selection-865.215-865.520

So Feargus was MCA's boss for around 20 years, in which time Feargus ran a successive chain of world-renowned successful RPG outfits. Then all of a sudden Feargus has always been bad at his job and I wouldn't trust him with money and I hate him and oh gosh I'll just gossip about him on RPG Codex for a solid week before the POE2 launch like a big boy all on my own.

He run a chain of world-renowned RPG outfits that was best known for delivering unfinished, buggy products and blaming all shortcomings on terrible publishers, who always seemed to be going out of their way to fuck poor Obsidian over. This thread is simply Karma.

 

[SwiftCrack]

In the meantime, poe2 is already in top sellers.

gotta love those prices

 

[Chris Avellone]

You did a great job of explaining why FU is so poorly suited for his present role. Would you mind doing the same for Parker? As in, why is Chris Parker such a prick?

This is a very long answer, so I’ll condense it: nepotism (family and friends), works hard but often ineffectively, has poor designer skills but actively gets involved in design (Josh simply started ignoring him after a while, which became a pattern Parker didn’t even have time to notice), and in many ways, Parker is like a little Feargus except he works harder and gets more involved, which causes problems.

Parker’s behavior with Feargus during the PoE KS drive final hours was soul-crushing. While usually these fights were brief, they became longer and longer between the two.

He repeats a lot of the same mistakes and never seems to learn from them – and it’s embarrassing to have to remind him of them when he brings them up in front of others and asks your opinion.

One very specific thing: Both Chris Parker and Feargus have a wonderful habit of giving you room to come to a solution, and then when you when you present the solution, they tell you “it wasn’t the solution they hoped you would choose” (they already had one in mind), and then tell you to go with their decision. Here’s the thing – I don’t even care about that, but in a company where there’s never enough time and never enough money, you can’t waste so much as a day on dithering bullshit – just tell me what you want, if I have a problem with it, I’ll tell you, but chances are, I’ll agree and find a way to make it work and we won’t spend even more time arguing about how we got to this in the first place.

We had this happen on KOTOR2 (I finally had to give up and give Chris the interface, which he wasted months of developer time on – and the programmers we needed - for almost no result). Feargus did something similar when Feargus asked us to decide who should be narrative lead on Eternity – and then when we said, “we should offer the job to George Ziets,” Feargus just said, “no, you should have chosen Eric.” There were tons of things like this where I wish they’d just cut to the chase, because it made you hesitant to make a call because there was always that lurking feeling it had already been decided. And it’s time you don’t get back in a company where again, there’s never enough time.

Part of my extensive post-mortem of Chris Parker (I had pages, since I was trying to learn how to be a better manager by what not to do) was at his best, he would only waste two people's time - yours and his. At worst, he would waste entire department's time or even the whole team's time with feature shifts. Worse, he'd throw tantrums about his own schedules – often trashing them and throwing away promises of personnel and resources in defense of something he was doing. I don’t care about someone wanting to change the schedule, but again, that time was never given back, and the sudden nature of these changes would waste even more time and more planning that had been done with the expectation of promises to be fulfilled.

Another issue was not stopping to think before launching an action. As an example, Parker and other employees spent months trying to help someone get their immigration settled. It cost a lot of time, was distracting, and was a time sensitive matter. But as we were nearing the finish line of a months-long process, Chris Parker suddenly asked, “do we even want to keep her?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – you’re saying this now? Didn't you think this through?

This was typical, but it’s worse when you’re playing with people’s futures here, and carelessly.

On the plus side (but also echoes “repeating mistakes”) is when one of our games has gone to shit, Chris Parker is often sent in to rescue it, and it is in better shape after, even if it's not going to be destined for the quality bin. However, it would be nice if the games hadn’t been bleeding internally in the first place (usually management-wise and staffing-wise). And it would be nice if we had someone consistent to be there who wasn’t Parker, since Parker has owner duties as well.

There was one telling meeting where Chris Parker told the company they were hiring someone to replace him for his position "to do what he did", and someone raised their hand and said, “but Chris, we don’t know what it is you do.”

 

[Alpan]

Feargus did something similar when Feargus asked us to decide who should be narrative lead on Eternity – and then when we said, “we should offer the job to George Ziets,” Feargus just said, “no, you should have chosen Eric.”

Wow -- talk about a timeline-shifting moment. Hard to imagine how the past few years in the Codex would have looked like had Ziets been the lead.

 

[Sensuki]

Can't believe we missed out on a GZ PE narrative because of that, ffs.

The story sucked balls.

 

[The Great ThunThun*]

Feargus did something similar when Feargus asked us to decide who should be narrative lead on Eternity – and then when we said, “we should offer the job to George Ziets,” Feargus just said, “no, you should have chosen Eric.”

Wow -- talk about a timeline-shifting moment. Hard to imagine how the past few years in the Codex would have looked like had Ziets been the lead.

It wouldn't be any ruined timeline then, would it?

 

[Zed]

Feargus did something similar when Feargus asked us to decide who should be narrative lead on Eternity – and then when we said, “we should offer the job to George Ziets,” Feargus just said, “no, you should have chosen Eric.”

alright i didnt really give a shit before this but

 

[Prime Junta]

Ziets... could have been the PE story lead?

 

[Chris Avellone]

Feargus in 2004:

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/qanda-obsidian-entertainments-feargus-urquhart/1100-6104565/

MCA in 2005:

https://archive.is/I9h6#selection-865.215-865.520

So Feargus was MCA's boss for around 20 years, in which time Feargus ran a successive chain of world-renowned successful RPG outfits. Then all of a sudden Feargus has always been bad at his job and I wouldn't trust him with money and I hate him and oh gosh I'll just gossip about him on RPG Codex for a solid week before the POE2 launch like a big boy all on my own.

Feargus kept BIS and Obsidian alive. This does not mean they were always healthy, but they were a place where RPGs could be made, that is true, and that's a good thing. My argument is that there were many things that could be done that would make both our company and our games better. There were reasons we couldn't build internal engines, why our developers (at BIS) didn't get support, and why without BioWare's Infinity Engine, BIS wouldn't have done much successfully (we had many, many failed projects - Torn, Stonekeep 2, etc. and those projects were incredibly expensive).

I did say a lot of positive things about Feargus in the ten years before and in an effort to be a good supporting owner, I did so in public even when he wasn't doing a great job - you had to start making excuses for why he skipped meetings, why he never got back to you or anyone else, why he would suddenly back out of conferences at the last minute, and explain to everyone who tried to get a hold of him that "he's busy at the moment, but I'm sure he'll get back to you." It was even worse when he'd asked you to set up the introduction, then left the person (usually a colleague of mine, or another figure in the industry) hanging. Giving excuses I felt was part of my job to help protect my boss, since at the time, I believe he had protected me as far back at Black Isle and it was one of the reasons I joined up with Obsidian.

I did have to quietly warn people I know not to count on Feargus to show up to conventions he agrees to go to, as he would often develop a sudden emergency shortly before the event (or sometimes, miss the flight entirely). It became especially shitty when they'd advertised his presence well in advance.

But yes, I admit my public-facing message with Feargus was not negative - it couldn't be. At Obsidian, however, it was a different communication process and observations that got worse the more closely you worked with him and saw how decisions were made. The last year at Obsidian I worked especially closely with Feargus, and I got to see much more of his management style than I ever had - especially how he treated other employees.