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

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

You can't sue a company owner for incompetence, or for playing favorites, or for hiring his family and friends.

NONE of this is illegal, by US law.

It's like Chris said. It's just business. This is how US management culture is, and anyone who has been in a company for long enough to see how top management works, knows this.

Now, it could get him in trouble, in the sense that it could lead to him being black list by other company owners, or a law suit against him for lying.

But it seems he's ready for that and he hasn't said anything that he can't defend.

Guys, I do not know how the IRS works in the USA. But here is it how it works in France :

During our investigations we sometimes come accross some shady shit. Possible smuggling, drug dealing, illegal activites, embezzling, ghost employees, etc. Now, as tax people, when confronted to a situation like this, we do two things :

-Tax the stuff. Illegal income is still income. Illegal spending is still spending. For company taxes, every expense has to be done in the best interest of the company. We do not judge on opportunity of spending (you should have bought a cheaper car, etc), but we have our word to say on useless, unrelated spending that is not done in any way benefits the company. Not sure how it works in the US, but in France, it's the benefits that are taxed, meaning that some companies to do some bullshit spending to artificially reduce benefits. Ghost employees fall under that stuff. So what we do is substract the employee salary to the amount of spending they choose to deduce to their taxes, effectively ending in additional taxation. Again, let's take the case of how it works here : Suppose someone was paid a 100 k€ yearly salary and the company fails to prove that said person is actually doing stuff, we conclude she's a ghost employee and that she shouldn't be on their payroll. Company had record of benefit of 150k€ which "normally" (it's more complicated than that") is taxed 50k€. Well, without that ghost employee, the taxation should be out of 250k€, meaning they should pay (250/3) 88.3k€ instead of 50k€.
This leads to 33k€ of additional tax for each year we see this bullshit. We're allowed to go back three years, which means in this case the ghost employee will cost an additional 100 k€ to the company. And should we see any attempt at trying to dissimulate this or lie to us, we can fine an extra 40%, 80% or 100% (depending on how severe the fraud or opposition).

This kind of amount can effectively kill a company that is not doing that great.

-Depending on how severe and certain the stuff we see, there is usually a talk among the inspector and his heirarchy over the opportunity to denounce the fraud to legal authorities who can also fine severely said company, putting the final nail in the coffin, and forbidding the guy running the companies to ever have responsabilities again.

Again, that's just here, but I wouldn't be shocked if it's not that much different over here.

 

[Sextant]

how do you specifically write dialogue for companions? On a large Word document? In some markup language for parsing? Or is there some copy-pasting slave inputing your valuable output into little windows after the fact?

I figure they write it directly into Obsidian's own dialogue editor. Anything else would be inefficient.

You already said that you think MCA dumped his manuscript on some slave...
But do us a favor and stake out Fenstermaker and figure out if he is a white male racist. ;D

 

[L'Montes]

He probably meant he would keep them as gimps in the basement.

Spoiler

What is with all the retarded gay porn?! Can't you at least go for futa ?

Oglaf started as a straight-up porn comic, then they kept making jokes so now it's a sex porn comic

...sex porn?

Like, porn about sex? Revolutionary.

They have various strips that aren't sexual, but it did start as a sex comic, more or less. I don't know about porn though, it was always intended to be a humorous thing I think.

 

[Mebrilia the Viera Queen]

He probably meant he would keep them as gimps in the basement.

Spoiler

What is with all the retarded gay porn?! Can't you at least go for futa ?

Because futa is not gay? Oh i understand you are one of those...

"I watch futa because i can lust for male genitalia while not being gay."

 

[Roguey]

If a project is going critical, the manager's job is to figure out why and get it on the right track. This might mean reassigning people.

The problem with Pillars was the ill-conceived stretch goals, the blame for that going to whoever chose and approved those goals. Josh was hellbent on delivering those goals no matter what; perhaps that was the wrong call, but taking him off the project in mid/late 2014 and assigning some Chris Keenan to deliver a chopped up game before March wouldn't necessarily have given us a better game.

You already said that you think MCA dumped his manuscript on some slave...

Obviously he didn't really lock himself in his office for weeks or actually print them out.

 

[lophiaspis]

Chris Avellone what do you make of the trend towards degamification?

I mean the titles sometimes referred to as 'walking simulators', that forego all challenge based interactivity for more freeform or story-based world interaction. Dear Esther could be seen as a degamified Half-Life, The Walking Dead as a partially degamified Monkey Island, Proteus as a degamified Elder Scrolls, Gone Home as a degamified Bioshock, and now they are finally starting to find their own footing with self-contained works like Edith Finch and Life Is Strange.

Even Disco Elysium could in my opinion be seen as a degamified Torment, possibly without ZA/UM being fully conscious of this - in Marxian terms, their practice, thanks to their genius intuition, might just now be more advanced than their theory. Despite its complex stat and roll based RPG system, the way the story keeps going often in a rewarding way even if you fail a roll strikes me as totally subversive of traditional game design and more akin to freeform narrative PnP RPGs. The Metric system is more about making cool stuff happen in the world than achieving some abstract goal that if you fail you have to start over.

I would think a storyteller of your caliber would be studying this genre intently considering developers like Thomas Grip of Amnesia fame and others have argued that challenge-based interaction tends to get in the way of any emotion other than banal triumph or failure. On that note, it strikes me that arguably the most emotionally compelling moment in your whole oeuvre so far, namely the scene in the Black-Barbed Maze when Ravel asks Nameless One the famous question, is not gamified at all. There's no right or wrong way to answer that question. It's an interaction system rather than a game mechanic, and much more emotionally powerful for it. It's a moment of pure, beautiful, videogame storytelling, and this new genre appears to be based around dispensing with everything other than such pure immersive narrative moments to achieve an amazing refinement of narrative design.

Could you see yourself ever making one of these degamified narrative simulations?

 

[Zakhad]

They have various strips that aren't sexual, but it did start as a sex comic, more or less. I don't know about porn though, it was always intended to be a humorous thing I think.

Yeah I think 2house2fly meant to type that it became a "comedy porn comic" but then just doubled up the sex instead.

 

[Sextant]

If a project is going critical, the manager's job is to figure out why and get it on the right track. This might mean reassigning people.

The problem with Pillars was the ill-conceived stretch goals, the blame for that going to whoever chose and approved those goals. Josh was hellbent on delivering those goals no matter what; perhaps that was the wrong call, but taking him off the project in mid/late 2014 and assigning some Chris Keenan to deliver a chopped up game before March wouldn't necessarily have given us a better game.

You already said that you think MCA dumped his manuscript on some slave...

Obviously he didn't really lock himself in his office for weeks or actually print them out.

The physical work of cutting the dialogue down in the tool, refactoring all the scripting, and everything else meant that even with the companions brought down to proper length, their implementation time was still far beyond that of any other companions. There was time allocated to implement two companions who were written to spec in the first place, no more. Had to make a lot of sacrifices to the narrative schedule and pull a lot of overtime to get it done, and I was fixing Durance bugs long after all the other companions were set. It cost us up and down the game in terms of polish time at a vital stage.

Avellone locks himself in his office for a few weeks, writes a tome worth of character dialogue, prints it out and dumps it on Sawyer's desk for implementation. Sawyer sighs and tells him that they can't possibly put all this into the game; Avellone shrugs.

Then it happens again.

I la-la-love when my fantasies are right.

 

[Lycra Suit]

"George? Well, you didn't choose what I wanted, so Eric is the lead."

What a fucking idiot.

 

[Roguey]

Sextant the broad strokes of my fantasy were right, not the specifics.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

It's not like he randomly threatened to sack them because he had a bad day. He threatened to sack them if they miss yet another milestone and another deadline.

Let's not forget the context here - the Kickstarter money has run out, the beta was a clusterfuck of epic proportions and the state of the entire thing was so bad, it had to be delayed additional half a year, during which they had to spend their own money to put it to finish line, money they didn't have.

It's easy to be Captain Hindsight and rant about how shortsighted it would've been to sack two people who eventually ended up delivering a solid success, but at the time PoE was anything but - it was a mess and they weren't exactly performing up until that point.

If a project is going critical, the manager's job is to figure out why and get it on the right track. This might mean reassigning people.

Reassigning two leads of the crowdfunded project that is under massive scrutiny from both the media and the audiences, would be just as nuclear as actually firing them. And that's assuming you actually have someone to replace them with. Unfortunately it doesn't seem that any of the owners were willing to pull their weight, including our very own Chris Avellone who is quick to judge others, while conveniently ignoring that he last bothered to actually lead a project in the previous decade.

Like it or not, PoE1 was in shit state, something needed to be done, and giving Sawyer and Brenecke the whip ended up working for the best.

But hey, it's adorable to see Codexers who just 2 weeks ago on these very forums were calling Sawyer a spawn of Satan who ruined everything that was ever holy about Infinity Engine games, suddenly act as if it's inconceivable and heinous to threaten him with sacking. They know who they are.

 

[Sextant]

Thats why I am asking, Roguey. Why is Fenstermaker implementing MCA stuff? Why is he cutting already implemented dialogue and scripting?

 

[OSK]

I always discover these threads way too late. I've probably spent more time reading this thread over the weekend than I've spent on this site all year.

 

[Lycra Suit]

Unfortunately it doesn't seem that any of the owners were willing to pull their weight, including our very own Chris Avellone who is quick to judge others, while conveniently ignoring that he last bothered to actually lead a project in the previous decade.

That's a good point

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

What I don't like about how some of this is done though is pulling in other employees/ex-employees into the drama. If Josh has tried to resign multiple times, if Ziets or Gonzales didn't get along with Fenstermaker, or whatever the fuck, ok, but let those people come forward with that shit if they want to. Don't just throw stuff like that out there, that's being a huge dick as far as I'm concerned. Go after the owners if you wish but don't pull other people's shit into it that they may want to keep a private thing to further your own agenda. If they want to talk about it, then let them do it on their own time and not just because you decide to gossip.

It may not be illegal, just like what some of the shit the owners are pulling may not be illegal, but it's still a dick move.

Don't be a hypocrite. The Codex lives and breaths on speculation about developers’ merits and fuckups. Now we finally have some authoritative figure that can actually give us a glimpse of the behind the scenes involving most Obsidian games and suddenly you adopt a holier than thou Cristian attitude. This studio was asking for our money and relying on our goodwill. I think we are entitled to some transparency for a change. If anything, developers that have been criticised here to no end like Sawyer turned out to be much better than we thought, even with privilegies involving PoE royalties and whatnot, while others that were ignored (e.g., Chris Jones) or avoided all the heat (Feargus, Parker, etc.) deserved most of the criticism.

 

[Roguey]

Reassigning two leads of the crowdfunded project that is under massive scrutiny from both the media and the audiences, would be just as nuclear as actually firing them.

inXile replacing Saunders with Keenan didn't cause any controversy except for Roguey-trolling here since I already had an axe to grind against Saunders.

Like it or not, PoE1 was in shit state, something needed to be done, and giving Sawyer and Brenecke the whip ended up working for the best.

"You have until March, but there's no way we can fund it past that date," would have sufficed. In fact, that's what Adler claimed was probably said (while admitting he wasn't there) in the first thread where we discussed it.

Thats why I am asking, Roguey. Why is Fenstermaker implementing MCA stuff? Why is he cutting already implemented dialogue and scripting?

Going by previous posts itt Fenstermaker more or less said "Don't worry, I can handle the rest, you can go on to Tyranny now." Time passes and he realizes he can't handle it, then comes to painful process of ripping out partially-completed work that would take too long to complete. Rather than, or in addition to, blaming himself for being foolish enough to think he could get it done, he blames the guy who gave it all to him in the first place.

 

[Xunwael]

Even Disco Elysium could in my opinion be seen as a degamified Torment...

Surely, the "degamified Torment" would be T:ToN.

 

[Prime Junta]

Let us not forget that "we", as in a few of us who actually do, blame Sawyer *not* for mismanagement. The blame is for trying to reinvent the wheel with "original, fresh, new, innovative and revolutionary" ideas that gave rise to PoE mechanics. Just making things clear so you don't mislead people.

As someone who likes Sawyer, I can corroborate. He's been hated on for not being a BG2 fan, not grokking IE gameplay, making a pseudo-classless game instead of a properly class-based IE successor, for fixing things that ain't broken, for being a bicycle-riding hipster, for a loooong laundry list of mechanics and design decisions and so on and so forth.

But to my recollection not even his most ardent critics have accused him of being a poor project manager, poor organiser, unethical, incompetent, or a dick.

 

[MajorMace]

I'm just like you guys ! Passion first ! Look at this goofy plate ahah...

guys ?

 

[Roguey]

Hey Chris, I remember something I'd like to know about.

Ferret Baudoin's departure from Obsidian. I heard a wild story about it, so I'd very much like to know some details to confirm/deny it.

 

[Goral]

Hey Chris, I remember something I'd like to know about.

Ferret Baudoin's departure from Obsidian. I heard a wild story about it, so I'd very much like to know some details to confirm/deny it.

You should tag him, I doubt he reads every post here. Chris Avellone

 

[Lycra Suit]

When I talked to Herve, he was strangely... pleasant. I was expecting something else based on everything others had said, but he simply tried to be making the best of a bad situation.

I've been saying this online since 2008.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

This could have a legitimate explanation -- they wouldn't want any potential legal complications stemming from third-party contributions. This isn't open source..

They could fix the thing with their code and deny using it. It seems more likely that Jones said "It is impossible to implement" or they got insulted by their fans doing their job for them.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Chris Avellone what do you make of the trend towards degamification?

Even Disco Elysium could in my opinion be seen as a degamified Torment, possibly without ZA/UM being fully conscious of this - in Marxian terms, their practice, thanks to their genius intuition, might just now be more advanced than their theory. Despite its complex stat and roll based RPG system, the way the story keeps going often in a rewarding way even if you fail a roll strikes me as totally subversive of traditional game design and more akin to freeform narrative PnP RPGs. The Metric system is more about making cool stuff happen in the world than achieving some abstract goal that if you fail you have to start over.

I would think a storyteller of your caliber would be studying this genre intently considering developers like Thomas Grip of Amnesia fame and others have argued that challenge-based interaction tends to get in the way of any emotion other than banal triumph or failure. On that note, it strikes me that arguably the most emotionally compelling moment in your whole oeuvre so far, namely the scene in the Black-Barbed Maze when Ravel asks Nameless One the famous question, is not gamified at all. There's no right or wrong way to answer that question. It's an interaction system rather than a game mechanic, and much more emotionally powerful for it. It's a moment of pure, beautiful, videogame storytelling, and this new genre appears to be based around dispensing with everything other than such pure immersive narrative moments to achieve an amazing refinement of narrative design.

In a well designed RPG, dialogue is gameplay. This is something Black Isle and Obsidian have always understood very well, MCA especially (even if he thinks he disagrees with the premise). The Ravel interaction is perhaps the best example. Choosing the wrong options with Ravel can give you a game over screen. Depending on how you handle her and your build, you can get massively more or less experience; you also get a variable amount of permanent stat boosts. I view the dialogue with Ravel as the real boss fight and the battle after is more like a nice dessert (it has substantially better encounter design than most fights in PS:T).

Also, I think you’re underselling Disco Elysium. Fail too many rolls and you’ll run out of health or volition points and lose the game.

The point, though, is that all of these active skill checks in DE are the gameplay. If anything, Disco Elysium is trying to regamify dialogue. ZA/UM realized something important: narrative and gameplay elements don’t need to be mutually exclusive. Combat should have narrative heft; interactions should be heavily based on stats, skills, buffs, dice rolls and, most of all, strategy, rather than just passive skill checks. I love this idea. Dialogue should feel like you’re under the gun and taking real risks, not like a CYOA, and the consequences of your choices should be more interesting than just pass/fail.

 

[Fenix]

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.

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.

I didn't think I'll write more of these oohs-aahs commentary, dried up my emotion batteries already, but this is simply mindblowing, truly.
And you've been withstanding this for YEARS...