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

[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...

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Holy cow. Chris Avellone, working at the highest levels of Obsidian sounds a lot like working at the highest levels of the Trump White House.

Feargus is an out of wedlock son of Trump and a hamster.

 

[Zakhad]

Feargus is an out of wedlock son of Trump and a hamster.

Nah, Trump would have just paid for the hamster to get an abortion, plus a little something to keep it quiet.

 

[Sigourn]

Chris Avellone Have you played Vagrant Story?

 

[Darth Roxor]

keep down the hamster racism ok

 

[deepfire]

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.

Well, that would be misappropriation, which I don't think is fair to attribute to Obsidian's culture, for all the angst we spill here..

It seems more likely that Jones said "It is impossible to implement" or they got insulted by their fans doing their job for them.

The second "still impossible to implement" I doubt -- there is a possibility that Jones would argue against the factual reality of working code, but that would be far too unreasonable.

Agree that the "insult" you mention could have added the emotional aspect to the legal side of affairs, though.

 

[deepfire]

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...

A distressing aspect of this is that the above exchange doesn't sound like the "whys" stood a fair chance -- or were even a safe thing to do.

 

[santino27]

WTF? Anthony Davis , can you confirm that? Why would anyone want to work in such a shithole?

While I'd love to have Anthony be able to comment/confirm freely, as he seems a cool, smart, and level-headed guy, you have to understand that (a) he's not an owner so might not have actually been exposed to all of this bullshit in a way that Chris was, and (b) he's still employed at Obsidian and is not going to risk being fired for the dubious gains of chiming in further on an incendiary codex thread.

 

[agris]

Blaine what do you expect is on the Big Board now?

 

[2house2fly]

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.

My mind was... elsewhere

 

[deepfire]

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

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

Off-topic, but interestingly, I think the following quote by Chris (taken from the OP interview) could be tangentially indicative of his opinion on TToN:

not a slam against inXile, but it was good they took the general “Torment” premise vs. doing a direct sequel to Planescape Torment

I don't think he supplies a rationale for this, so this is kind of leading..

But if true, I would certainly feel relieved.

 

[polo]

Just a friendly remainder for those asking for a tl;dr, use the fucking search function. Check 'search this thread only', and posted by "Chris Avellone". Done, everything interesting is posted by chris in here.

 

[MurkyShadow]

This thread is just growing faster than I can catch up. By the time I'm done reading, Barkley 2 will be released.

 

[Tacgnol]

This thread is just growing faster than I can catch up. By the time I'm done reading, Barkley 2 will be released.

I'm waiting for the film adaptation.

 

[deepfire]

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.

I believe it's even more important than that.

By burning out creative people in their toxic atmosphere, Obsidian can be seen as a dangerous covert agent of Decline.

This is qualitatively different from the pop-a-mole studios, which are available to our examination both internally and through their products.

Obsidian lures with its tantalizing promise -- and the victims are not just our wallets and hopes.

 

[santino27]

I'm waiting for the film adaptation.

Feargus will be played by Paul Giamatti.

 

[Lycra Suit]

I'm not exactly a long time regular but I would wager this is the best thread on the Codex ever.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Holy cow. Chris Avellone, working at the highest levels of Obsidian sounds a lot like working at the highest levels of the Trump White House.

Feargus is an out of wedlock son of Trump and a hamster.

But a human/orangutan hybrid can’t produce fertile offspring with a hamster (presumably the world’s fattest hamster in the case of FU’s mom). Which begs the question: if Feargus is sterile, who’s the real father of his children?

 

[Lycra Suit]

Don't bully Feargus' kids please.

 

[mondblut]

So Feargus was MCA's boss for around 20 years, in which time Feargus ran a successive chain of world-renowned successful RPG outfits...

...into the ground.

 

[Prime Junta]

But a human/orangutan hybrid can’t produce fertile offspring with a hamster (presumably the world’s fattest hamster in the case of FU’s mom). Which begs the question: if Feargus is sterile, who’s the real father of those kids?

Could they be cousins, or maybe half-brothers? An Oompa-Loompa who made with Jabba the Hutt and, after that, a capybara?

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Holy cow. Chris Avellone, working at the highest levels of Obsidian sounds a lot like working at the highest levels of the Trump White House.

Feargus is an out of wedlock son of Trump and a hamster.

But a human/orangutan hybrid can’t produce fertile offspring with a hamster (presumably the world’s fattest hamster in the case of FU’s mom). Which begs the question: if Feargus is sterile, who’s the real father of his children?

Plumber. Italian Plumber.

 

[Fairfax]

Some of the questions that people are asking ITT aren't new information. This is something that Feargus has admitted himself in interviews, as Chris states, though in less harsh language

But Feargus wouldn't bad-mouth Bethesda in public, so anything he said in this sense could be read as "let's not burn bridges".

He did call Bethesda "petty" for the Metacritic thing, which is very amusing considering the stuff MCA has revealed.

The shocking thing about Chris's revelations here isn't so much that they're all new, but that they're entirely consistent with stuff that's come out in dribs and drabs before. Like Josh and Adam going ha-ha about Feargus threatening to fire them the if Pillars doesn't ship by March. That made me go WTF? then but this casts it in whole new light.

That is not good management. A manager's job is to create the conditions in which the people he manages can get their shit done, and occasionally make tough calls when tough calls need to be made. This includes reassigning or even dismissing people if they're not working out, although that really ought to be a rare and sad occasion. "Perform, or else" is shit-tier.

It's consistent with what he did at BIS as well:

Ramsay: Tell me about the day you left Interplay. Why did you leave? What were you thinking?

Cain: While Fallout was in production, I was unhappy at how development worked at Interplay. People who didn’t play games, or didn’t even seem to like games, were making decisions about how to market the game, what features it should have, and when it should ship.

Worse, decisions were being made that changed the game and required us to do substantial changes, and these decisions could and should have been made months earlier. For example, the UK office said no children could be harmed in the game, but children had been in the design for years. Another example: Interplay spent a lot of money for an external marketing agency to develop treatments for the box and ad, and they were terrible.

My artists produced better work on their own time, but marketing did not want to use them. However, when Interplay’s president, Brian Fargo, saw their work, he liked what he saw, so the art was used. My role as producer appeared to consist of arguing with people and trying to defend the game from devolving into a lesser product.

In July 1997—Fallout would ship three months later in October—I had decided that I did not want to work on Fallout 2. I submitted to my boss, Feargus Urquhart, a review for my line producer Fred Hatch that recommended he should be promoted to associate producer and assigned Fallout 2. Although the review was not processed, Feargus gave Fred the game to see how he would perform. When the first designs were submitted, I really didn’t like them. Neither did Feargus, nor did Brian Fargo.

Leonard Boyarsky and Jason Anderson, who were the two artists and designers on Fallout with whom I would later start Troika, didn’t feel any different either. So, Leonard and Jason wrote a different storyline for the game, which Brian liked more, but he told me he’d like to see what I could do. When I asked Feargus about Fred’s promotion—his review was now long overdue—he told me that while he wouldn’t make me do Fallout 2, the promotion wasn’t going to happen, and Fred wouldn’t get the sequel.

Feargus planned to give Fallout 2 to the producer of Descent to Undermountain if I didn’t take it. While I personally liked that producer, I hated Descent. I thought the sequel would suffer under similar direction. I told Feargus that I would do the sequel and began working on a design.

Before leaving for Thanksgiving, I informed Feargus that I was thinking of quitting. I wanted him to know how I was feeling about development and how deeply I had been affected. I was worried that the same problems I had experienced during the development of Fallout would persist during the making of Fallout 2. Feargus said he understood.

When I returned, he asked if I had made a decision. I had not, and so I began work on Fallout 2. I worked out a new design and made an aggressive schedule to get the game out by the end of October 1998. I then started working on the game as lead designer and producer.

But the same problems resurfaced. For example, to save time and money, I had decided to have the same internal artists make the box for Fallout 2. Feargus was upset that I had made such a decision without consulting him, but when I talked to Marketing, they were fine with the idea. But then Sales decided to change the box size and style, which would create problems for making the second box look similar to the first. In a meeting with Sales where Feargus was present, I was told that the decision was made and “there will be no further discussion on it.”

I decided I had enough. Leonard and Jason, who could tell I was unhappy, had told me weeks earlier that they were unwilling to work on the sequel without me. Rather than simply quit, I remembered that Brian had told me years ago, after a programmer had quit under bad circumstances, that he wished people would come and talk to him rather than quit.

I went to Brian in December and told him that I was unhappy and wanted to quit. I decided to be frank and honest, and told him that other people also weren’t happy and might resign with me. He wanted names. I told him about Leonard and Jason. Other people declined to be mentioned.

Throughout December and January, the three of us met with Brian to discuss the problems and see what solutions might be found. We wanted to meet with Brian as a group to prevent any misunderstandings that might arise from separate meetings. In fact, I wanted Feargus there, too, but Brian only included him once toward the end. Brian seemed surprised that I was getting resistance to doing Fallout 2 my way. His attitude was, “You did well on the first game, so just do it again on the second.”

Unfortunately, this meant running to Brian whenever anyone tried to force their own ideas into the game, which didn’t seem like a good working environment. We discussed this problem and raised other issues at these meetings, such as converting our bonus plan to a royalty-based plan. Brian did not like the idea of royalties. As for how to handle creative control, Brian said I could divide the responsibilities with Feargus, so I could handle Marketing and other departments directly, and they would have to effectively treat me as a division director. This seemed unsatisfactory to me, but Feargus seemed very unhappy that his own authority and responsibilities concerning Fallout 2 would be greatly reduced in this plan.

It was unclear how some issues would get resolved, such as budgeting for equipment and maintenance, since I didn’t have a division director’s budget. Brian handwaved these issues, saying that we’d work them out.

At that point, I regretted not abiding my original instinct to walk out and trying to work things out with Brian. In mid-January, I decided to leave the com-pany. I told Feargus, who accepted my resignation and asked me to work until the end of the month. We went to talk to Trish Wright, the executive producer, who was unhappy to see me leave but accepted it. She warned me that Brian might be very upset, but I wanted to tell him that day. I returned to my office and told Leonard and Jason that I had quit, effective at the end of the month. Then I went and told Brian.

As expected, he was not happy. We talked for an hour, but the meeting was cut short because I had a dental appointment. While I was at the dentist, Leonard and Jason also decided to tender their resignations. I didn’t speak to Brian after that day, and I finished out the month with my team.

My team was surprised and unhappy, having heard nothing of my months of meetings with Brian. I met with them to make sure the design for Fallout 2 was up-to-date. And I met with Feargus; my replacement, Eric Demilt, who would produce Fallout 2; and other designers, such as Chris Avellone and Zeb Cook, who would assume my design responsibilities.

I made sure that everyone understood the new design and where all of my documents were located on the local network. Phil Adam, the head of human resources, met with me once, to get my view on why I was leaving, but I otherwise did not interact with Brian or the administration.

On my last day, I packed my personal effects and went to Human Resources to process out. I was redirected to Legal, where I was asked to sign a letter that reminded me of my confidentiality agreement. I learned later that Leonard and Jason were not asked to sign such a letter. And then I went home, wondering what to do, now that I had a good title under my belt but had effectively cut ties with my last company.

 

[Fry]

The Codex, of course, is in Australia,

Da Codex servers appear to be sitting in the USA, I'm afraid.

Not that it matters. No one is going to sue.

Yes and Apple's headquarters and main staff are in the USA but they're an Irish company. With a Dutch offshoot apparently.

They're not. The corporation is registered in California. They just funnel an obscene amount of cash through the Irish division at very low tax rates because both US and Irish tax law allow such things.

My point was the US-based Codex servers could be seized if it came to that. Which it won't.

 

[Blaine]

keep down the hamster racism ok