Obsidian General Discussion Thread

[S.torch]

There is absolutely nothing wrong with Fanfictions. I've read a lot over the years and there are quite a few that are great. I still have some of them saved even though it's been years. Of course you can't pretend that every single thing written by a fan will be good, it's not like every single thing written by "professionals" is either, especially nowadays. I remember in the manga, anime and book community the quality of fanfiction was especially high because people drew on all sorts of things to write their stories. It was amazing to see how someone could take a minor detail put in by the author and make a whole story out of it or give it a perspective you didn't expect. It's definitely something that fires the imagination and helps you develop yourself, plus you make more than one person very happy writing it and they can then become a fan of yours too. It's no different from being an artist and doing fan-art or making mods for games. In RPGs, people have always made their own characters, modules, settings, etc.

What I really doubt is if these people who spend all day on social media are interested in fanfics. It just seems like another case of empty posturing.

If a lot of fanfic writers seem crazy it's because they are, they know in detail the things they like and are quite intense about it. The vast majority have moved to sites like Wattpad, where they can write all their stories with ease and freedom so that others who like them can read them. There many of those stories have gained quite a lot of popularity and some have even received adaptations, such as series on Netflix.

 

[agris]

Christ it won’t be long before Obsidian is a BioWare tier hellhole of pandering to Twitter schizos.

Edit: your incel shtick at the end is

 

[0sacred]

*snip*

tell me you're retarded without telling me you're retarded

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

The rule of three Ms: no mavericks, no martyrs, only mediocrity.

 

[None]

It is like they are only learning about fairly basic management practices. Define a minimum viable product, manage scope, measure tasks in time to completion, etc. Everything she is talking about is a failure in management, not in individual contributors. This all comes across as a classic case of a manager who loathes their work and does whatever they can to make sure they do less.

Also, got to love her analysis on what motivates the "mavericks" and "martyrs":

A lot of times maverick and martyr behaviors are driven by deep rooted fears, needs, or goals and we need to understand what those are. It might be a desire for autonomy or ownership. It might be out of fear for the outcome of the project. Or it might even be misalignment on what done looks like.

Note she includes no positive attributes. Sounds like a really wonderful company to work at.

 

[Gargaune]

Carrie Patel's 2022 GDC lecture: No Mavericks, No Martyrs: Sustainable, Collaborative Production
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbRVE_y1m18

[...]

It's such a privilege to glimpse into the creative processes behind so magnificent an achievement as Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire.

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

Note she includes no positive attributes

To be fair a desire for autonomy is a positive trait, although I see how for a manager type this can be a damn with a faint praise.

 

[vortex]

It's such a privilege to glimpse into the creative processes behind so magnificent an achievement as Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire.

Now I know who was responsible for long loading times in Deadfire. It was the Maverick.

 

[None]

Note she includes no positive attributes

To be fair a desire for autonomy is a positive trait, although I see how for a manager type this can be a damn with a faint praise.

Which is why I included it. To her, desire for ownership or autonomy have the same negative outcome: deviation from her model. The more control others have, the less she has.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Well... she's not exactly wrong, but the problem that she's implicitly identifying is more exactly that whoever is in charge is uncomfortable with saying "No". When people aren't told "no" and are instead told "oh, man, I wish we could do that! That would be so cool!" they think they are being told "Yes!".

When in actuality 99.9% of the time what their supervisor is trying to communicate is "Don't fucking do that. We don't have the time or money, and it will ruin morale for either you or the team or both and ohgodplease don't go down this weird specific rabbit hole that will eat up my weekends for the next six months".

Saying "no" is a hard skill for most people to learn. I had a crash course in it early in my career and as much as I hated going through it, that experience has proven every bit as professionally valuable as my years in grad/post-doc education.

 

[Cael]

Well... she's not exactly wrong, but the problem that she's implicitly identifying is more exactly that whoever is in charge is uncomfortable with saying "No". When people aren't told "no" and are instead told "oh, man, I wish we could do that! That would be so cool!" they think they are being told "Yes!".

When in actuality 99.9% of the time what their supervisor is trying to communicate is "Don't fucking do that. We don't have the time or money, and it will ruin morale for either you or the team or both and ohgodplease don't go down this weird specific rabbit hole that will eat up my weekends for the next six months".

Saying "no" is a hard skill for most people to learn. I had a crash course in it early in my career and as much as I hated going through it, that experience has proven every bit as professionally valuable as my years in grad/post-doc education.

Problem these days is that the motherfuckers take No as a challenge to their manhood and will go ape destroying everything in a self-righteous tantrum.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[NecroLord]

Soyer sold his soul a long time ago.

 

[Roguey]

Thought he wasn't going to answer New Vegas questions anymore because his memory has rotted?

 

[v1c70r14]

Soyer sold his soul a long time ago.

He never had one in the first place. Out of all the people to become star devs that get to be named in conjunction with video games Sawyer is one of the strangest cases since he never did anything noteworthy or put out any particularly good work. He's no Derek Smart, no Christ Roberts, but also no Hidetaka Miyazaki or Yoko Taro or Hideo Kojima. So why are people talking about this totally irrelevant guy who never amounted to anything and isn't going to put out anything interesting or relevant anytime soon?

 

[None]

So why are people talking about this totally irrelevant guy who never amounted to anything and isn't going to put out anything interesting or relevant anytime soon?

Schadenfreude.

 

[v1c70r14]

So why are people talking about this totally irrelevant guy who never amounted to anything and isn't going to put out anything interesting or relevant anytime soon?

Schadenfreude.

Why though? It's not like he ever made something that crashed and burned, or overpromised, he's like the janitor in a Wells Fargo building, why is his name even known to people? Lurking the Codex all I know is that everything he touches is soulless but without this forum I wouldn't have known about him being involved. It's not like he's this auteur or have any strong ideas or identity of his own, bad or good. It's not like with other game devs people talk about that almost become a brand, where you can tell what kind of game it will be just from the names involved.

 

[Roguey]

He never had one in the first place. Out of all the people to become star devs that get to be named in conjunction with video games Sawyer is one of the strangest cases since he never did anything noteworthy or put out any particularly good work. He's no Derek Smart, no Christ Roberts, but also no Hidetaka Miyazaki or Yoko Taro or Hideo Kojima. So why are people talking about this totally irrelevant guy who never amounted to anything and isn't going to put out anything interesting or relevant anytime soon?

New Vegas is a 13 year old classic.

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Soyer sold his soul a long time ago.

He never had one in the first place. Out of all the people to become star devs that get to be named in conjunction with video games Sawyer is one of the strangest cases since he never did anything noteworthy or put out any particularly good work. He's no Derek Smart, no Christ Roberts, but also no Hidetaka Miyazaki or Yoko Taro or Hideo Kojima. So why are people talking about this totally irrelevant guy who never amounted to anything and isn't going to put out anything interesting or relevant anytime soon?

If not for the historical accident of Chris Avellone being preoccupied with salvaging Alpha Protocol, Josh Sawyer would never have been project lead on Fallout: New Vegas and hardly any Codexer would care about him. However, since in our reality he did fall into this position, many Codexers give him credit for creating a Fallout 3 with skill checks and a coherent setting.

 

[rojay]

So why are people talking about this totally irrelevant guy who never amounted to anything and isn't going to put out anything interesting or relevant anytime soon?

Schadenfreude.

Why though? It's not like he ever made something that crashed and burned, or overpromised, he's like the janitor in a Wells Fargo building, why is his name even known to people? Lurking the Codex all I know is that everything he touches is soulless but without this forum I wouldn't have known about him being involved. It's not like he's this auteur or have any strong ideas or identity of his own, bad or good. It's not like with other game devs people talk about that almost become a brand, where you can tell what kind of game it will be just from the names involved.

You're not paying attention. Don't worry, there's no reason to pay attention to game developers for the most part, but if you were paying attention to RPG game developers and not just reading this forum you might know his name from games like Icewind Dale 2, Fallout: New Vegas, the two Pillars of Eternity games and most recently Pentiment, which seems to have done well for a weird, niche game.

Schadenfreude is an apt term for this thread, but more in the sense that if Sawyer dropped in to check it out he'd be laughing his ass off at those of you who have dickburn about how successful he is.

 

[Infinitron]

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dead-zone-with-josh-sawyer/id1512844649?i=1000608577288

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Carrie Patel's 2023 GDC lecture

 

[MajorMace]

Carrie Patel's 2023 GDC lecture, The Most Important Question in Game Development: https://gdcvault.com/play/1029358/The-Most-Important-Question-in
10:10 illustrate the dynamic between area designers (which responsible for quest design) and the narrative designers (which responsible for story and character development).

I'd be surprised if Avowed didn't feature a swampish bog area called the quagmire now.
But not as much as if the game ever gets released though.

 

[BlackheartXIII]

I highly skeptic about Avowed creative quality, consider the poor conceptualization of TOW (narrative and gameplay mechanic wise), Nu-Obsidian creatives gravitation toward fandom (tumblr culture/fan fiction) and it's simplistic juvenile themes and tropes (YAfication).
Also since Obsidian became more Bioware-ish, i wonder if they are going to plain Avowed launch regards to Dragon Age (i met one of Dragon Age's producers earlier this month and it's seems that EA are heavily-invested on it's success).

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

Soyer sold his soul a long time ago.

He never had one in the first place. Out of all the people to become star devs that get to be named in conjunction with video games Sawyer is one of the strangest cases since he never did anything noteworthy or put out any particularly good work. He's no Derek Smart, no Christ Roberts, but also no Hidetaka Miyazaki or Yoko Taro or Hideo Kojima. So why are people talking about this totally irrelevant guy who never amounted to anything and isn't going to put out anything interesting or relevant anytime soon?

The only dev that has worked on anything that even remotely resembles an RPG here is Taro. And the rest of the devs work or have worked in genres that have a different sort of fanbase than rpgs. RPG fans in the west liek Sawyer because he's soft and thoughtful, just like them (or, literally me, as kids these days like to say).