Kleptocratic debt serf
Augur
- Joined
- Oct 25, 2012
- Messages
- 232
That remains to be seen. The criticism may seem valid, but as to whether or not they are correct time will tell.
Chris Avellone you said that you were in financial problems with all medical procedures going on that time (or healthcare, idk) but later you said that you have more money than obsidian in your account. How this transition happened so fast?
And, after this revelations, did you receive any support from the industry? A call, email, whatever supporting you? Like "hey buddy dont worry we are with you", etc.
Darth Roxorthey don't often have a lot of money in the bank, especially around review time
Interesting. I guess it requires a lot of animation that you wouldn't otherwise need in an RPG? Or it just needs a lot of time to adequately develop the relationship?
I hadn't considered the animation aspect (although if you were doing a ME game, you would have to invest in that, too - I've rarely worked on a game with relationships that needed cinematics except for Alpha Protocol, and you're right, those were still an additional time sink to be sure), but adding a relationship arc can be as tough as adding another companion quest. You can sometimes unite the two, or share design and dialogue elements to make it easier, but it can be a lot more work to do properly.
Also, even when the romance is consummated, you'd still need appropriate reactivity to that (maybe not just in the core game, but in future games that save scripting states). It's likely why companion relationships were a stretch goal in PoE2: They're expensive to do.
Chris did you play grimoire?
What are your thoughts on ridable turtles?
Edit: Never mind found itOkay, caught up with the state of Chris-tendom again. Woo-whee, what a ride. Reactions:
(1) The spat between EFen and MCA is unfortunate. EFen is among the best game writers currently working, and over the last several years has clearly been a more reliable writer than Chris. Which does not preclude him from having a fragile ego and not working well with other talented writers. Whatever the case may be about that, his writing is still really good.
(2) Unreasonably relieved that Josh is not on Chris's shitlist. He seems like an all-around Mensch, a deeply ethical person, and it would have broken me a little to discover he was a part of the evil stuff that's been going on here. (Also a comrade, since his unionisation speech anyway.)
(3) If even a quarter of what Chris is saying about Feargus is true, and the bombs just keep dropping... oh man.
Carry on men. Thing keeps on going this way, it'll start the Revolution, and the USA is the only place it can succeed since it won't get immediately invaded by the USA.
Christ this moved fast, I doubt I’ll ever catch up at the rate this is going. Sorry to hear you were fucked over Chris.
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.
- My wife is very supportive about giving me time to write (she's busy with game development, too, so she understands the hours). The cat is not so supportive.
Wasn't it shut down again in 2014? Herve wanted to revive it after that?I even got offered to become the new head of Black Isle Studios, which I couldn’t do, and didn’t think I’d be good for the job, so I didn't take it.
Okay, caught up with the state of Chris-tendom again. Woo-whee, what a ride. Reactions:
(1) The spat between EFen and MCA is unfortunate. EFen is among the best game writers currently working, and over the last several years has clearly been a more reliable writer than Chris. Which does not preclude him from having a fragile ego and not working well with other talented writers. Whatever the case may be about that, his writing is still really good.
(2) Unreasonably relieved that Josh is not on Chris's shitlist. He seems like an all-around Mensch, a deeply ethical person, and it would have broken me a little to discover he was a part of the evil stuff that's been going on here. (Also a comrade, since his unionisation speech anyway.)
(3) If even a quarter of what Chris is saying about Feargus is true, and the bombs just keep dropping... oh man.
Carry on men. Thing keeps on going this way, it'll start the Revolution, and the USA is the only place it can succeed since it won't get immediately invaded by the USA.
Well there we have it. Christ it seems like Feargus is the type to cut off his nose to spite his face. How the hell has Obsidian lasted so long with him in charge?That is where I get conflicted. Avellone's contempt appears directed at the upper management and not so much the developers (with exception). I still am curious if Sawyer falls within the alleged clique of those getting special treatment. Still, there is Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky (for now...).
I want to apologize if I missed any questions, it’s hard to track them all in the thread – if I missed someone, I apologize, it wasn’t personal, there’s just a lot to read (and apparently on Reddit, too, which I didn’t realize).
I don’t have any issues with Josh, he’s not part of the upper management I mention here (he wasn’t even Design Director until a while after I left, I believe), and I think he’s a good Project Director. I also don’t have any issue with Tim, Leonard, Charlie, Tyson, Rich (Taylor) etc. and they are not part of this either - I like them all and respect their work very much. I am looking forward to Project Indiana.
Josh did turn in his resignation more than once, and apparently (!) Feargus did threaten to fire him and Adam if PoE1 didn’t come out in March, which I never knew. (Yes, owners didn’t talk amongst themselves when they threatened to fire senior employees, apparently, because why would they – it was symptomatic of the poor communication at the studio. I also was never told when Feargus decided to move PoE1's ship date from Sept to March, he didn't mention that fact, either) I only heard about the firing threat when I read about it in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels (at least in the draft I read). I think threatening to fire Josh and Adam under any circumstances isn't a smart move, especially since Obsidian always struggled with trying to find good leads and good programmers. I don't ever think you should threaten employees like that, either.
I also support the idea of making financial and resource sacrifices if it will make the end result better (I supported PoE2’s delayed launch), which was also apparently the crux of the threat.
Special treatment is a much larger issue because all that I observed wasn't consistent, it often made things confusing for other employees (hey, why does so-and-so always get to come at 11?) and bred resentment if not explained, and it can be disruptive to a lead if an owner tells an employee to take the day off or tell them they don't have to make up work afterhours... because they may actually have to and their lead needs them to. My opinion is you don't give special treatment, you showcase it in raises and reviews, and you make the reasons explicit, but be very careful of outward facing special treatment in case it could be mistaken for something else. Inward special treatment can also be bad if discovered (hey, why are Josh and Adam getting royalties on PoE and we aren't? Even if "understood," finding this out can be bad for morale - my opinion is you spread the wealth).
I will say one unfortunate aspect, is even after MotB and Vault 11, Chris Parker still took time to shit on Eric's area designs, which got tiresome (this was on South Park).
Chris Avellone Did you play Underrail? If so, thoughts?
And have you been followed Vince Dweller's The New World sci-fi cRPG? Would love to hear your thoughts about it.
In the spirit of being open and honest, are you reuniting with Arkane to work on Prey's standalone DLC?
Other random answers (some may have been here, some on Reddit – if I’m wrong, I’ll post the right answers on Reddit).
Ubisoft: So Ubisoft didn’t really cut ties to Obsidian that I know of, nor did Obsidian turn them away because Obsidian had too much work – the conversation, to all accounts, never happened at all, because Ubisoft never spoke to Obsidian about doing the second game. One day the sequel was announced, and it was my understanding it was a surprise to Obsidian that anyone was working on a sequel – Obsidian didn’t proudly defy Ubisoft and tell them to fuck off because they were too busy: Ubisoft didn’t even call.
Transition from Publisher to Developer, Reversal of Roles: Feargus went through what I feel may have been poor training as a studio lead at Black Isle. In that position, he had more control over the projects, the funding, and more importantly, outside developers – in his role at Interplay, he was very much the publisher, and he was the one who made calls on BG1, BG2, etc. He controlled the funding, could make demands, could withhold payments, and also force capitulations in features and schedules.
Unfortunately, I believe this set a bad precedent for Feargus dealing with publishers in the future because we became one of the same outside developers he had formerly overseen when he was a publisher - the roles were reversed, and so was the power.
Suddenly he had to experience it from the other side, and he didn’t take to it well – the control was gone, and suddenly his demands could be ignored and fought, rather than accepted. The leverage was gone.
Even more importantly, Feargus’s behavior no longer had to be ignored by the person on the other end of the phone or in discussions in the conference room: Where once if Feargus asked a developer or contractor to do something, they would largely have to swallow it or fight to be polite in order to get paid or keep their project going, the reverse was very hard for Feargus to deal with, and led to a lot of shouting matches (which you could hear down the hall), and even hanging up on publishers. We knew about this because he’d come brag to us about when he hung up on a studio head or producer, which made me even more depressed, since it meant we’d likely lose another contract with no back-up plans (he actually did the bragging rounds from owner office to owner office when he shouted at someone in the studio as well, as if he was showcasing the strength of his management style).
Worse, Feargus didn't learn from this - instead, he passed the behavior along. When Feargus was in charge of outsourcing and other remote contracts, he behaved much like the publishers he railed against, which was depressing as well.
Overall, the position of having to answer to someone else didn’t often go well, and it’s much the reason I think Obsidian would be better off finding a way to completely self-publish their games because I don’t think any other option is going to work in the long-term.
Financial Matters and Ethics: I also don’t know where the training for handling and responsibility for finances came from, but we didn’t see eye to eye on that, either, as I've said.
It went beyond the transparency in finances - the biggest shock came when the matter arose about paying back employees (not the owners, but our employees) who had given up their paychecks to keep Obsidian from going bankrupt. When we did start getting money in the bank again after this bleak period, however, the company's spending began accelerating again.
This made me uncomfortable, 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.
Fortunately, another owner did finally admit he agreed with me some time later (mostly because one of the unpaid employees confronted the owner on what was going on with it), he was someone Feargus would listen to, and when he brought it up (this time he asked for my support, even though he had been silent before), we were able to push Feargus into establishing a payback plan and get restitution for the employees who sacrificed for us - and this was well before any owner paychecks resumed (by this point, the owners were resolved to not getting paid back, so it wasn't a huge shift).
Overall, it seemed a shameful way to treat our employees who had sacrificed for us, and I wasn’t happy we even had to discuss compensating them – it didn’t seem to be something we should discuss, we should simply do it because it was the right thing to do.
This entire fucking post holy shit. And if Chris is right about Paradox being pissed there goes yet another publisher. Also fuck Feargus for being such a scumbag he’d willingly fuck over his employees when they fucking worked to keep the lights on out of loyalty.Other random answers (some may have been here, some on Reddit – if I’m wrong, I’ll post the right answers on Reddit).
Ubisoft: So Ubisoft didn’t really cut ties to Obsidian that I know of, nor did Obsidian turn them away because Obsidian had too much work – the conversation, to all accounts, never happened at all, because Ubisoft never spoke to Obsidian about doing the second game. One day the sequel was announced, and it was my understanding it was a surprise to Obsidian that anyone was working on a sequel – Obsidian didn’t proudly defy Ubisoft and tell them to fuck off because they were too busy: Ubisoft didn’t even call.
Transition from Publisher to Developer, Reversal of Roles: Feargus went through what I feel may have been poor training as a studio lead at Black Isle. In that position, he had more control over the projects, the funding, and more importantly, outside developers – in his role at Interplay, he was very much the publisher, and he was the one who made calls on BG1, BG2, etc. He controlled the funding, could make demands, could withhold payments, and also force capitulations in features and schedules.
Unfortunately, I believe this set a bad precedent for Feargus dealing with publishers in the future because we became one of the same outside developers he had formerly overseen when he was a publisher - the roles were reversed, and so was the power.
Suddenly he had to experience it from the other side, and he didn’t take to it well – the control was gone, and suddenly his demands could be ignored and fought, rather than accepted. The leverage was gone.
Even more importantly, Feargus’s behavior no longer had to be ignored by the person on the other end of the phone or in discussions in the conference room: Where once if Feargus asked a developer or contractor to do something, they would largely have to swallow it or fight to be polite in order to get paid or keep their project going, the reverse was very hard for Feargus to deal with, and led to a lot of shouting matches (which you could hear down the hall), and even hanging up on publishers. We knew about this because he’d come brag to us about when he hung up on a studio head or producer, which made me even more depressed, since it meant we’d likely lose another contract with no back-up plans (he actually did the bragging rounds from owner office to owner office when he shouted at someone in the studio as well, as if he was showcasing the strength of his management style).
Worse, Feargus didn't learn from this - instead, he passed the behavior along. When Feargus was in charge of outsourcing and other remote contracts, he behaved much like the publishers he railed against, which was depressing as well.
Overall, the position of having to answer to someone else didn’t often go well, and it’s much the reason I think Obsidian would be better off finding a way to completely self-publish their games because I don’t think any other option is going to work in the long-term.
Financial Matters and Ethics: I also don’t know where the training for handling and responsibility for finances came from, but we didn’t see eye to eye on that, either, as I've said.
It went beyond the transparency in finances - the biggest shock came when the matter arose about paying back employees (not the owners, but our employees) who had given up their paychecks to keep Obsidian from going bankrupt. When we did start getting money in the bank again after this bleak period, however, the company's spending began accelerating again.
This made me uncomfortable, 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.
Fortunately, another owner did finally admit he agreed with me some time later (mostly because one of the unpaid employees confronted the owner on what was going on with it), he was someone Feargus would listen to, and when he brought it up (this time he asked for my support, even though he had been silent before), we were able to push Feargus into establishing a payback plan and get restitution for the employees who sacrificed for us - and this was well before any owner paychecks resumed (by this point, the owners were resolved to not getting paid back, so it wasn't a huge shift).
Overall, it seemed a shameful way to treat our employees who had sacrificed for us, and I wasn’t happy we even had to discuss compensating them – it didn’t seem to be something we should discuss, we should simply do it because it was the right thing to do.
whatever do you mean, blaine-chan ?We have reneging staff members right here on the Codex, after all.