Feargus ended up changing his mind and canceling the WL2 time (although I don’t know if he spoke to Brian about this -
Backspace failed because Stormlands got them fired because they were in the middle of a prototype and thus, were all considered expendable despite their skills and how much they'd done for the company (again, Feargus's sister was retained, however).
On top of this, Feargus would often request pitches and proposals from Obsidianites, then never do anything with any of them.
The cruel bit was once they submitted them, even though Obsidian would do nothing with them, that meant they were all owned by the company and would gather dust.
- so at that time where our finances became healthy again, I brought up that since we had the means to do so, we should pay back the employees who gave up their paychecks to keep us going.
My comment was met with silence by all the owners.
I repeated the concern, but when I brought it up again, Feargus simply said, "we never promised we'd pay the employees back," as if that excused things - but paying the employees back didn’t seem like a technicality to me, this was the right thing to do. He then said he wanted the matter dropped.
The only joy I had was when Jones and Parker would go at each other's throats (they hated each other for the simple reason that even if Parker was flawed, at least he did something - and Jones was all about not doing anything). Overall, as little as I respect Parker, at least he saw Jones for the production "oh, there's no way to do this" blocker that he was.
The reason wasn't explained to me (even though we were asked to make a decision between Josh, Adam, and I as to who the Lead Narrative Designer should be) beyond Feargus said, "George? Well, you didn't choose what I wanted, so Eric is the lead."
While being a buffer helped (slightly), the issue started coming up that Feargus would do sudden pivots on elements he had approved and the team had spent a lot of time on. He would also forget he approved them and would assume he hadn't when he saw a decision he (now) didn't like had been made.
Feargus barely interfered with the DLCs and said I did a good job with them - when he did get involved briefly, it was much the same suffering as other projects went through when they had his attention. I also had the blessing of Parker barely being involved in the DLCs as well, which was a godsend.
One reason I said no to the Planescape KS, however, was because after I drafted the specs and sent it to Ferg as requested, it sat with him and he didn't read it for months (it wasn't long, but I think it fell off his radar, despite the fact he asked for it).
Unfortunately, being assigned to Alpha Protocol also hurt chances of having a shot at doing Project Director work on New Vegas, so that was an added disappointment (although to be fair, Feargus never asked me or brought it up with discussion with the owners, instead, Josh came to him and asked for it first and Ferg agreed - this isn't a negative, as I think Josh did a good job, but I would have loved to work on it, especially after all the Van Buren work. I should have camped out outside of Ferg's office.)
Ferg was actually surprised later on when he heard I would have been interested ("You wanted to work on it?"),
That said, what I’ve spoken about is only 30% of what transpired, along with other issues. The other amount I would, however, support, speak to, and be willing to testify to if it came to it, but it’s up to others to bring the issues up. If they do, I’m happy to help however I can, and they can count on my support.
