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

[Ezeekiel]

Maybe Chris has *permission* to say this stuff and this is all a prelude to a big exodus or coup at Obsidian after Pillars 2 release?
Be pretty funny if Sawyer and Co suddenly announce their own new studio, out of reach of the wicked claws of upper management or whatever.

Way to start a new studio. "OHAI publishers, work with us, we're really cool and laid-back and not the least bit difficult to work with!"

Maybe the publishers are in on it and were all like (along with Todd Howard of course):
"Hey Chris and co... Stop wasting your talent at Obsidian... It's too fucking hard to work with Orc-Heart, make your own studio or oust him so we can work with you easier, we've been watching this crap for ages now."

It *could* be true in some parallel universe!

 

[Deadass]

inb4 TimCain and boyarsky leave obsidian after project indiana unsurprising cancellation

 

[Jenkem]

 

[Nano]

holy shit Feargus killed DS3??

This has been hinted at for quite some time.

Can you explain the reasoning behind the gun witch's character design in DS3? It's really disappointing to see such obvious and cliche cheesecake after the progressive and positive treatment of female characters in FONV.

I had virtually no involvement in Dungeon Siege 3, but I believe that's a question for Feargus.

I've got one for you George: when I departed DS III in June 2009, the creative foundation you were laying was awesome. I expected another story masterpiece. But the final game (10/2011) didn't excite most critics with its story. What the heck happened? =)

Good question, Kevin. The DS3 story went through so many rewrites that I don’t remember exactly where it was when you left the company, but I’m sure it was early in the process – probably right after I finished the Ehb sourcebook.

My early drafts of the story were truer to my usual narrative tendencies. They were more personal - focused on the player – and they depicted a “grayer” version of the Legion. One of the storylines – possibly the one you remember – also included a lot more supernatural elements.

However, it was decided (above my pay grade) that we should keep the story focused on a threat that affected the nation or the world. Also, there was a desire to ensure that the Legion was clearly Good. I think the underlying impulse was to avoid a lot of narrative complexity, which makes sense in a franchise like Dungeon Siege.

So at that point, I started a long cycle of story revisions. Normally, the iteration process is where your story gets progressively stronger. But in this case, I remember feeling that we’d ended up with a weaker, more watered-down story than some of the earlier versions.

Is there any particular reason why Dungeon Siege III wasn't more unusual?

Yes, definitely. First, we were bound by the Dungeon Siege license, and the DS world is a fairly standard fantasy setting, albeit with a few twists. Second, Higher Powers wanted DS3 to be more mainstream… and not a personal storyline like MotB. Third, narrative was not a top priority on DS3, so the story and setting got less attention and resources than combat and gameplay.

And then

So Richard Taylor wasn't the reason Dungeon Siege 3's story sucked?

Richard Taylor is never cited as the reason any game sucked, ever. That guy is amazing.

The Codex dilemma: the guy who wants sexy women in video games also wants bog-standard save-the-land storylines.

Maybe the conflict Feargus had with Ziets on Dungeon Siege 3 is the reason he didn't want him to be the lead on PoE? Wouldn't surprise me considering how big his ego comes off from the stories in MCA's posts.

 

[Ninjerk]

I believe this is the Eastern Euro cutie that what's his name with the Monkey Island av was hoholposting about earlier:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...pdate-59-meet-the-devs-polina-hristova.84630/

I'm half-cringing at my own response in there in retrospect.

 

[Perkel]

Tried to paint my take on this thread and ended up with this. I don't know what to make out of this.

this was my first take:

 

[Prime Junta]

Tried to paint my take on this thread and ended up with this. I don't know what to make out of this.

Fan art. This thread is going places. At least there are no furries in it.

Spoiler

yet

 

[Roguey]

Maybe the conflict Feargus had with Ziets on Dungeon Siege 3 is the reason he didn't want him to be the lead on PoE? Wouldn't surprise me considering how big his ego comes off from the stories in MCA's posts.

Doesn't seem likely to me, given that after DS3, Ziets became creative lead on Stormlands and only left because he was laid off when it was canceled.

 

[Korron]

Well I hope Chris leads something some day. I'm done with KS for the most part, but I'd come out of the woodwork to pledge for that. Our top 50 list has his finger prints all over it. The man deserves the chance of having his complete creative endeavors realized if ever he's interested in the chance.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Ironically, the root cause for most of this stuff is probably Obsidian's staying power. I mean, we're talking about a core group of 10-15 guys who basically worked together since the Truman administration and most of whom don't have any other serious job experiences apart from Interplay, itself a highly dysfunctional company.

Then they've basically reached a relative peak of their respective professions by giving birth to Obsidian, most of them still in their early 30s, and where do you go from there? In this industry, if they were more competent, they would be bought up and probably eventually shut down by EA or some other giant. And if they were less competent, they'd go tits up on their own and also shut down. They did neither and are still around.

The owners are probably loaded, but not the FYIFV level of loaded, so they still have to stick around despite growing increasingly out of touch with how things are actually done, and slowly turn into this good ol' boys club that basically prays on younger talent.

Chris being the writer, his skillset doesn't really grow out of fashion, but other owners who were more technical guys, well a 50 year old dude isn't really meant to be a code monkey. He needs to transition to project management, but some people are just not meant for management positions.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

Why tho? What does picking the right dialogue option to get the most XP add to the, pardon me, experience?

Because character progression and failure are also intrinsic to the simulationist nature of cRPG gameplay, because the ability to make different choices is the ability to make bad choices, and you learn with experience so you get XP. It’s self-explanatory.

And why do people even assume that computer simulated worlds have anything at all to do with traditional games and sports?

Because they are games? Look, just because you try to simulate aspects of the real world in a fictional game world does not mean they are all about simulation. No, they are not. They are about attempts to surpass challenges in this fictional world. The difference between cRPGs and other genres is that your gameplay is governed by stats, skills and you have more narrative choices. That’s it. Thinking that cRPGs or other games are like books or movies is a confusion. You are right that this creates a tension between traditional narrative structures and gameplay, but that’s because narrative structures in cRPGs are different, they need to make concessions to gameplay. Besides, notice that the character building vocation of cRPGs aims to realism, not simulationism unqualified. That's a big difference. Simulationism for the sake of it and dissociated of stats and skills has very little to do with cRPGs. Darklands has better simulation than Skyrim, even though it has worse graphic fidelity.

Adding stats to dialogue makes it feel like a CYOA though, doesn't it? Combat can get away with it because it can be hundreds of rolls in just one encounter, never mind over the course of an entire game. That lets the randomness of rolls even itself out over the course of the fight. Adding rolls to dialogue either feels frustrating and gamey in a way that pulls you out of it (e.g. 60% chance to get Eden to kill himself; such roleplaying). And doing it without rolls just gets you boring crap like Age of Decadence, where with the right social skills you walk around literally erasing settlements from the map with your tongue, the correct dialogue options helpfully pointed out to you by the UI. It's just gambling or heavy-handed railroading.

So games that make choices governed by stats are CYOA, while games that make you decide by trial and error are more cRPGish? That’s an inversion of values. Gameplay in cRPGs are and should be governed by stats, at least most of the time. Besides, it’s false that all dialogue options in Age of Decadence are transparent that way. Some options require your discernment to understand the consequences, no matter how good your stats are. Another day, another player buthurted by stats hurting much immersion and making a caricature of Age of Decadence. Why I’m not surprised?

 

[Nano]

Maybe the conflict Feargus had with Ziets on Dungeon Siege 3 is the reason he didn't want him to be the lead on PoE? Wouldn't surprise me considering how big his ego comes off from the stories in MCA's posts.

Doesn't seem likely to me, given that after DS3, Ziets became creative lead on Stormlands and only left because he was laid off when it was canceled.

Maybe he was included in the layoffs because Feargus didn't like him With Stormlands, Ziets was still in the company and Feargus didn't have the "he's out of house" excuse, and there was nobody else to take up the lead writer task (because it would've been too much for Eric to work on South Park as well as an AAA project, compared to PoE's AA size).

 

[Latro]

Chris Avellone Is there any truth to the fan theory that Bethesda hate and are intimidated by the popularity of Fallout: New Vegas?

(I hope you can treat FO:NV with objectivity despite whatever ~process issues~ you may have suffered from during its development, the game's cult classic status is undeniable)

I honestly have no idea. Whenever I have met/spoken to Todd Howard, he was always very pleasant and didn't seem pissed or resentful or anything of the sort.

as expected from todd "gorilla grodd" howard

 

[Blaine]

Thread data (Avellone posts are actual quantity rather than posts/hr):

 

[The_Time_Master]

Those portraits have been changed in the final game if you look at the streams (there's a reason they were all removed from the last beta update)

Not diverse enough?

 

[Keppo]

I just want to be part of this but i have nothing to add, just ignore it.

 

[Chris Avellone]

Its funny the leaker of that info being you and blaming Obs afterwards, also you

It is widely believed that when that statement was revealed, that it was blaming Bethesda.

It wasn't, it was recognizing we as a studio should have done better - and even a little bit better (1%) could have had huge benefits (and we could have kept people we had to let go).

My feelings then are the same as my feelings now, and I stand by that. It's an unpopular stance (the anti-underdog stance usually is compared to the underdog needs a little more training montage moments), but I believe it's the correct one.

Bethesda was trying to encourage us to do a quality job, they didn't have to, and we missed the mark - but within the realm where it was clear we could have fixed it.

I wrote post-mortems as reminders and plans to myself about how we could fix this in the future (clear hierarchy, keep the people who can make the decisions focused on reviewing the content and enacting change and finding bugs vs. adding more features/getting lost in the weeds, etc.).

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

Chris Avellone

I have two questions. The first is about the role of realism in game design. I remember vividly that Vince once asked you in an interview whether Fallout 2 had too much pop elements that were inappropriate for the setting. You stood your ground and said that there was nothing wrong with it, because it was fun. This clash of opinions encapsulates perfectly the disagreement between realist supporters and everyone else. Fallout and Fallout 2 are weird games in this sense because they have some adult elements and tone and wacky stuff, but games like Age of Decadence are much more serious. It seems clear to me that most players and developers don’t care about the plausibility of the game world, but only about the quantity of content, replayability, combat, etc. Besides, if a game world is more realist it will make the gameplay more restrictive for a variety of reasons. I think that more realist settings are more restrictive, but they are also more immersive and intrinsically interesting. Do you think this can ever be a worthy trade-off, or do you think that cRPGs should abandon any pretension to take themselves seriously? I remember you mentioned in different interviews that the developer should pander to the player’s ego and such. Do you still stand by this view?

The second question is about the role of active gameplay (combat, exploration, interaction with the game environment) and passive gameplay (text-adventures, choices in dialogues, etc). It seems that most players identify active gameplay as a synonymous of gameplay, while text-adventures and dialogue options are described with derision as CYOA stuff. You tried something different with a dialogue system restricted by time constraints in Alpha Protocol; Disco Elysium and (still in concept) Titan Outpost are trying to improve dialogue systems and making them more active, but it is easier said than done. Do you have new suggestions on how to improve dialogues?

 

[Big Wrangle]

How much should we donate to the Codex in order to have Chris as a full-time poster?

 

[Chris Avellone]

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".

Feargus didn't do it to Bethesda, but he certainly painted a different picture of how the Microsoft Stormlands cancellation went down - because he had no choice.

While I don't think all of Microsoft's requests were something we could have done (although they might have been willing to pay to have it done), there was room for discussion and middle ground, but they were repeatedly told "no," in very forceful terms. Having got the same reactions to feedback I've given, I can say it makes you hesitate before doing it again.

When it started becoming apparent they were going to pull away, Feargus worked very hard to try and save that relationship, but it was too late. It was definitely not something Feargus wanted, however, but after the fact, he had little choice but to highlight the nobility of the studio's stance when the project was canceled, and arguably, the story also worked well for crowdsourcing messaging as it garnered a lot of sympathy (it's one reason the documentary video for the KS feels disingenuous).

From my view, it was not a case of a noble developer standing up to the big publisher even though that makes for a better story... the developer drove the publisher away, when that was the exact opposite of what upper management wanted to do (they wanted to do large, expensive AAA titles).

The event certainly did a lot of damage to the studio, and we had to let a lot of good people go as a result of the decisions of a few, and I think it could have been handled differently if we weren't so difficult to work with overall on multiple levels.

As icing on an otherwise dismal layoff day, after I had had to go through letting people go (who were not on Stormlands and had done nothing to contribute to its failure), I came back to report to the other owners, only to hear from Feargus that one employee he was going to let go was retained - our front desk receptionist, Feargus's sister. I still wonder to this day if that had meant I could have kept one of the employees we had who had an equivalent salary and was actually contributing to our projects, but I was too furious at the news to speak.

 

[Chris Avellone]

In other news, the Fearg is suddenly active on Twitter again, posting pictures of dogs and license plates and other things to demonstrate how completely unconcerned he is about any of this.

https://twitter.com/Feargus

Actually, with a Feargus message/tweet, you have to look a little closer for subtext.

In this, it's an indirect way of patting-self-on-the-back as Feargus is trying to showcase what a hard worker he is by leaving work so early in the morning - implying he’s been burning the midnight oil, like the rest of the dev team.

Dev team: my condolences.

 

[Chris Avellone]

Chris Avellone, why would you have chosen Ziets over Fenstermaker to work as the Creative Lead of Eternity? Ziets was brought in as a strech goal to work on the game and wasn't a full time employee at Obsidian (afaik). Wouldn't that have been a bad management decision and alienated rest of your writers and driven them away from the company? I imagine a Creative Lead position given to an outsider wouldn't have resulted in much joy with the full time writers you had to choose from.

There's a lot of assumptions here (this isn't an attack on you), but let me do answer it from another direction: Eric was already overworked and full-time on another project, and that was part of the decision.

 

[Kingston]

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/artic...tertainment-survival-success-and-independence

Q: Selling up to a publisher brings with it a certain kind of security, and Obsidian hasn't done that yet. There's a lot more independent studios now than ever before, but they're much smaller. Does working on the scale you have require a different approach? Is there a common law when it comes to surviving as an independent in this business?

FU: Actually, it feels more dangerous. When you're a five-person studio you can all go unpaid for a while. I've got 200 people and they've all gotta be paid. That changes your whole mindset. That totally matters. I want everyone who works at Obsidian to always have a pay cheque. The owners have taken periods of time where we didn't get paid, but it's our company - we can do that. But everyone else has always been paid for more than 13 years.

The challenge is that that means there's always a gun to your head. So that's the game, right? 'Developer, you need to do this.' But I don't think I should do that. 'Well, then you don't get paid.' I want to pay my people, so the math is pretty simple.

Q: The math is simple, but not every company finds the answer. When you've got a gun to your head the challenge is also to stay honest.

FU: It is. Well, you have three choices: you can spend your own money, you can lie, or you can do what you're told. And, generally, we've always chosen that we'll just do what we're told - even when we don't believe in it.

I think that's maybe the difference now from where we were before. I also know this - and I'd give this piece of advice to anybody, and it's hard to do and it's hard to take - when you have that gun to your head you've got to get the gun away. At some point in time you have to go, 'I'm not going to keep on doing this.' I solve a short-term problem so my people will get paid, but to do that either I'm going to feel dirty or I'm going to tell those people that, guess what? All of your creativity doesn't matter. You have to do what our publisher tell us.

So this is complete bullshit, I take it?

 

[The Great ThunThun*]

In other news, the Fearg is suddenly active on Twitter again, posting pictures of dogs and license plates and other things to demonstrate how completely unconcerned he is about any of this.

https://twitter.com/Feargus

Actually, with a Feargus message/tweet, you have to look a little closer for subtext.

In this, it's an indirect way of patting-self-on-the-back as Feargus is trying to showcase what a hard worker he is by leaving work so early in the morning - implying he’s been burning the midnight oil, like the rest of the dev team.

Dev team: my condolences.

Chris, what position would you see yourself ideally suited for in your career?

 

[ga♥]

Spoiler

la luz extinguido...mios dios...