Obsidian General Discussion Thread

[Infinitron]

He was The Outer Worlds 2 lead environment artist.

 

[Abu Antar]

You got any idea what else he worked on?

 

[Cologno]

Looks like a higher-tier nobody from the games he's worked on. Cape shit and a title from the Israeli milsim series Call of Duty were his previous big titles before Outer Worlds.

 

[TheCumGuzzler]

Looks like a higher-tier nobody from the games he's worked on. Cape shit and a title from the Israeli milsim series Call of Duty were his previous big titles before Outer Worlds.

At least Black Ops was the only title worth shit in CoD, the environment in zombies was really good.

 

[Infinitron]

He was The Outer Worlds 2 lead environment artist.

This is a nice gesture:

We lost Terry much too soon and wanted to make sure some of his art was immortalized. Enjoy a small sampling of what Terry brought to our games with a rendition of the main theme for The Outer Worlds, "Hope" in a style that would be near and dear to Terry.

 

[Infinitron]

https://forums.obsidian.net/announcement/65-the-community-blog-an-invitation/

The Community Blog (An Invitation)​

The journey of our community has spanned two incredible decades, which was launched February 7th, 2004, and is marked by our support for Obsidian and its remarkable creative endeavours. To further accentuate the richness of our community's diversity and its connexion with Obsidian, we are excited to introduce a new feature: the Community Blog.

The primary objective of this blog is to extend an invitation to the community to pitch ideas for blogs, which will range between 500 to 800 words (the blog could be text-based, a vlog, even a short podcast!). These blogs will be published regularly and will provide a platform for our members to share their unique perspectives and experiences. We envision publishing a blog monthly, which will delve into the realm of gaming, specifically focusing on the individual's encounters with Obsidian's games. Moreover, we encourage exploration of the broader implications for an industry that continuously evolves, weaving together storytelling, technology, escapism, and social commentary.

If this resonates with you, we invite you to connect with Fionavar by sending them a private message with your pitch (https://forums.obsidian.net/profile/49-fionavar/)! The author for each monthly blog chosen will receive a ‘thank you’ from Obsidian for your creativity up to twice a year. As well, each writer will also have a blogging badge attached to their profile after posting.

As the Squad extends this invitation for the first blog, which is slated for publication on May 7th, we want to thank you for your support of Obsidian and its unfolding creativity. We hope this regular new feature, which will be published on the 7th of each month as content is available, will capture the community’s excitement and interest in the gaming industry. Together, let's continue to shape the narrative of our shared enthusiasm for gaming and its profound impact on our lives.

Anybody want to write a short essay that tastefully asserts the superiority of Avellone-era Obsidian?

 

[Cael]

https://forums.obsidian.net/announcement/65-the-community-blog-an-invitation/

The Community Blog (An Invitation)​

The journey of our community has spanned two incredible decades, which was launched February 7th, 2004, and is marked by our support for Obsidian and its remarkable creative endeavours. To further accentuate the richness of our community's diversity and its connexion with Obsidian, we are excited to introduce a new feature: the Community Blog.

The primary objective of this blog is to extend an invitation to the community to pitch ideas for blogs, which will range between 500 to 800 words (the blog could be text-based, a vlog, even a short podcast!). These blogs will be published regularly and will provide a platform for our members to share their unique perspectives and experiences. We envision publishing a blog monthly, which will delve into the realm of gaming, specifically focusing on the individual's encounters with Obsidian's games. Moreover, we encourage exploration of the broader implications for an industry that continuously evolves, weaving together storytelling, technology, escapism, and social commentary.

If this resonates with you, we invite you to connect with Fionavar by sending them a private message with your pitch (https://forums.obsidian.net/profile/49-fionavar/)! The author for each monthly blog chosen will receive a ‘thank you’ from Obsidian for your creativity up to twice a year. As well, each writer will also have a blogging badge attached to their profile after posting.

As the Squad extends this invitation for the first blog, which is slated for publication on May 7th, we want to thank you for your support of Obsidian and its unfolding creativity. We hope this regular new feature, which will be published on the 7th of each month as content is available, will capture the community’s excitement and interest in the gaming industry. Together, let's continue to shape the narrative of our shared enthusiasm for gaming and its profound impact on our lives.

Anybody want to write a short essay that tastefully asserts the superiority of Avellone-era Obsidian?

"Connexion"? The frakk-?

 

[Sannom]

Whoever wrote this is probably french. Although I'm surprised that they don't make the opposite mistake, that's what happens most often with french people used to english nowadays.

 

[ds]

Whoever wrote this is probably french.

Or just a hipster.

 

[Latelistener]

I see that Bethesda is rewriting the west coast lore of Fallout as they see fit with the new Fallout TV series.

That's a real shame, but F1-F2-FNV fans can't do nothing about, not that there is anyone left to protest.

 

[Infinitron]

Suddenly, RPS interviews Josh Sawyer (not just about the Fallout TV show): https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/wh...ore-josh-sawyer-doesnt-care-it-was-never-mine

Whatever the Fallout TV show does with New Vegas lore, Josh Sawyer doesn’t care: “It was never mine”​

The Obsidian design director on Pillars of Eternity II burnout and living with dead projects



What’s it like to watch a smash hit TV show set in the backyard of a game you’ve made? It’s a question which Fallout: New Vegas project director Josh Sawyer is uniquely qualified to answer.

“The show really does capture the aesthetic of Fallout 4 and 76, while also feeling like it is set on the West Coast,” he says. “If you’re a fan, then you can see where the plot elements have been pulled from in previous entries. And if you’re new to it, thankfully, those plot elements are fairly straightforward. So I think it’s a good show for fans and a good show if you’re new to it, even though there’s a lot of stuff going on. I’m certainly interested to see where they’re going in the second season.”

The LA setting of the Fallout TV show has seen its writers play with many of the same toys Sawyer did in New Vegas - namely, the New California Republic and the Mojave desert. In fact, some fans were vocally concerned that events in the Amazon adaptation had written their beloved game out of canon, prompting public reassurances from series custodian Bethesda. “Everything that happened in the previous games, including New Vegas, happened,” Todd Howard told IGN. “We’re very careful about that.”

By the time we speak, Sawyer has seen the finale of the Fallout show. But for three days prior, he was “inundated with the discourse”, as fans tweeted their worries and outrage directly to his account. “I understood why there was maybe some confusion or ambiguity,” he says. “I don’t think I necessarily would have jumped to the conclusions that other people did. But I could see why some people might be aggravated or annoyed.”

Sawyer himself, by contrast, is philosophical about the impact the TV show or any future Fallout entry might have on New Vegas. “This might sound weird, but whatever happens with it, I don’t care,” he says. “My attitude towards properties that I work on, and even characters that I create, is that I don’t own any of this stuff. It was never mine. And the thing that I made is what I made.”

Sawyer remains very proud of the New Vegas team’s work and believes the game stands on its own. “If later on other people working in the space do new things with it and change it, I’ll maybe have opinions on it, but I don’t get attached to things in that way,” he says. “I don’t feel like it’s healthy for me to be really invested in something I have no control over, frankly.

“There are things that I might watch and say, ‘I don’t think I would have taken this that way’, and then there are other things that I think are really cool. But it’s not my space, it was never my thing. I was a guest working in it. So I try to keep a level of distance between myself and the setting.”

Fallout: New Vegas was not, in fact, the first time Sawyer was invited to be a guest in the Fallout universe. In the dying days of legendary RPG studio Black Isle, he was made project lead of the game originally intended to be Fallout 3. Codenamed Van Buren, it was an isometric RPG that closely resembled the earliest games in the series, rather than the first-person Bethesda sequels that came later.

For Sawyer, a longtime admirer of the original Fallout’s open-ended design, it was an extraordinary opportunity. But the development of Van Buren became apocalyptic in itself, as Black Isle owner Interplay slowly disintegrated. Sawyer resigned, believing he’d lost his one shot to work on a Fallout game. “It was a dream of mine,” he says. “Losing that hurt.”

This organisational dysfunction was typical of the environment in which Sawyer began his career. He spent years conceiving a sprawling Dungeons & Dragons RPG dubbed The Black Hound, only for Interplay to lose the rights to make it. He led the making of Icewind Dale II over a truncated period of just ten months - so that his bosses could cover the sudden gap left by the cancellation of another Black Isle RPG, named Torn.

Even after Sawyer landed at Obsidian, the cancellations kept on coming. While Obsidian is now part of Microsoft, it used to be a contractor - constantly vulnerable to the changing whims of the publishers it worked with. Sawyer devoted huge chunks of his career to promising games that were abruptly shut down, like an Aliens RPG. He lost 40 colleagues to the “very, very awful” layoffs in the wake of the doomed Xbox One exclusive Stormlands.

Although Sawyer doesn’t play down the impact of all this devastation, he’s capable of speaking about it with well-developed detachment. “I do have to maintain some emotional distance, because sometimes these things are completely out of my control,” he says. “And I need to be able to move on with my life and my career, frankly, when things go wrong. So I can’t really despair. I have to look at it and try to understand how things happened the way they did, what role I played in them, and how I can improve or protect against those things in the future.”

As a result of all this pain and upheaval, Sawyer has embraced a utilitarian attitude to his craft. “The successful early projects of my career were almost all content sequels or spin-offs of existing tech bases,” Sawyer says. “And it focused my mind very heavily on the production process. Very quickly I adapted to, ‘How can we make something fresh in a very short period of time, using what we have?’ It was a very lean and bang-for-buck approach to development.”

Image credit: Bethesda Softworks

That thinking served Sawyer well when Obsidian was given 18 months to make Fallout: New Vegas. “We took a shipped game and made a spin-off without really changing the underlying tech very much,” he says. “So we focused almost entirely on content. When it came out, it was criticised for playing very, very similarly to Fallout 3.”

Over time, however, fans have come to appreciate where Obsidian did put its time and energy. “Our team had the luxury of focusing on conversations and quests, and really making those as robust and dynamic as we could,” Sawyer says. “A lot of the philosophy that I approached New Vegas with was the philosophy of Fallout 1, or how I interpreted it. Fallout 1 was foundational for me in understanding how role-playing games should be made.”

While Sawyer notes that a lot of the quests in New Vegas are fairly straightforward - “not that fancy” - he says that players tend to celebrate the choice-driven standouts. “And they remember how the factions work and how flexible that is,” he says. “There was a lot of effort put into making sure you can twist and turn through the different factions and resolve those things how you want.” Players felt empowered by the fact that you didn’t have to kill anybody in New Vegas - yet you could kill anyone (“except for kids”).

“I think that’s what has lasted,” Sawyer says. “The initial impact where people said the gameplay feels very close to Fallout 3 is totally fair. But then as time stretches on, and people play them side by side, the fact that we had so much of our time to focus on the content, I think that’s what people were excited about.”

It’s very rare that a big-budget game is made in 18 months these days. In fact, many take half a decade. That shift has led to a rise in developer burnout - a risk which occupies Sawyer’s thoughts often in his current role as Obsidian’s studio design director. “Because these projects are so long, if they go wrong and you're stuck in them for a long time, it can be extremely draining,” he says. “I have to be responsible with people’s time.”

Image credit: Obsidian Entertainment/Versus Evil

Recently, Sawyer tweeted that burnout had replaced crunch as the primary hazard of the game industry. “Even though some studios have very strict no-crunch policies, people are still being asked to do either impossible things, or things that they don’t really believe are for the good of the project,” he says. “And you eventually just start to tune out and feel very demoralised.” Burned out developers not only feel awful, Sawyer says, but do bad work and make irrational decisions. He speaks from personal experience.

“With Pillars Of Eternity II, we were in a position where we knew that we did not have enough time, nine months before we hit that wall,” Sawyer says. “We raised concerns to management, and the options were either to invest more time in it, or to cut scope and staff. And they didn’t want to do that.”

The problems were compounded when Sawyer was blocked from cutting a major feature - and when, midway through development, Obsidian committed to voicing every character in the game. “It was that feeling of accelerating towards a brick wall,” Sawyer says. “We knew that it was happening, and the closer we got to it, the more stressful it became. I and a lot of other people on the team became really harsh, and were snapping at people. I didn’t really recognise myself at a certain point because I had very little tolerance for time being wasted and questions and things like that. I was pushing people in a way I had never done on a game before.”

Eventually, Sawyer went home and sent a letter to Obsidian’s owners - to say that he wouldn’t return to work until the schedule was extended. “Every day I come in, I leave feeling worse than before,” he wrote. “I feel like I’m making the game worse every day. I just can’t do it.” The studio owners relented, and when Pillars Of Eternity II released, it reviewed well. “But it didn’t sell well, and that was very demoralising,” Sawyer says. “I was like, ‘Damn, I was this huge, awful asshole to this team’. And it felt like a big waste.” It took him a year afterwards to recover.

Image credit: Xbox Game Studios

When Microsoft bought Obsidian, Sawyer went to CEO Feargus Urquhart - and said that if he was going to stay at the company, he would need to work on a much smaller project. That turned out to be Pentiment, a narrative-driven murder mystery set in the Holy Roman Empire. It gave Sawyer a chance to heal. “Pentiment was a really great experience, the exact opposite,” he says. “A lot of people don’t come out of burnout, they have to limp through a lot more development. I’m in a very privileged position.”

From his first days at Black Isle, Sawyer had three dream projects: a D&D adaptation, a Fallout sequel, and a historical game. Now that he’s managed the hattrick, his goals are less specific, and more reflective of the lessons he’s strived to learn.

“There are a lot of games that sound like they’d be fun to make,” he says. “And I don’t have one idea I’ve got to make before I kick it, or feel like I need more success than I’ve had. I just want to make good things, and treat people well on those teams. And for them to feel like they grow and come out better than they went in.”

 

[Latelistener]

He forgot to mention Tyranny, a project that could arguably be a lot better than PoE2, but was severely butchered because Obsidian siphoned funds from Paradox to PoE 2.

I wonder what happened with Tyranny team, Roguey?

 

[Roguey]

I wonder what happened with Tyranny team, Roguey?

Scattered to the winds.

 

[Hobknobling]

Here an Glassdoor review by a former Obsidian designer (Feb 23, 2024):

Management is untrained, production department inconsistent.

Probably Avowed related., which reminds me of this specific GDC lecture: https://gdcvault.com/play/1029358/The-Most-Important-Question-in

I have worked as an IT consultant my whole work career and I know exactly what this means. It is a dysfunctional company where the ivory tower leadership lords over the technical staff. A deep divide exists within the company.

This is often characterized by lofty and misaligned internal statements made by managers who have no practical experience with what the company is actually doing. There is an overgrown HR department which dedicates itself on shitting on the technical staff on behalf of the upper management and making up stupid busywork for itself. All the leadership is being hired from outside of the company instead of promoting technical people. Technical quality is secondary to abusing entrenched market positions and long-term customers and that keeps the company afloat despite all the mismanagement and constant bad decisions.



Steve Jobs talks about the same thing here from a slightly different angle. Unfortunately for Obsidian, they cannot survive if they build a company like this since even their Reddit fanbase will eventually wise up.

 

[Russia is over. The end.]

Unfortunately for Obsidian, they cannot survive if they build a company like this since even their Reddit fanbase will eventually wise up.

Some companies can do no wrong. If Obshitian starts doing gay romances, I think they can stay afloat forever then.

If you disagree, explain Bethesda to me. Starfield was a fiasco. Did it even matter? Everyone bought it. By the time their next shit comes out, everyone will forget how shit Starfield was. The hype is so easy for these companies, I envy them. As an indie, there's nothing I could do to get even a fraction of this unconditional gobble reflex.

 

[Morgoth]

Lucky for Feargus, Parker et al, Microsoft doesn't understand games. So they can continue with grotesque inefficiencies, it won't matter in that ocean of MS money. Only $ growth matters, not skill.

 

[Nano]

Unfortunately for Obsidian, they cannot survive if they build a company like this since even their Reddit fanbase will eventually wise up.

Obsidian's founders minus Avellone have been horrible leaders for decades and their reward was a Microsoft payout. They won.

 

[Hobknobling]

Lucky for Feargus, Parker et al, Microsoft doesn't understand games. So they can continue with grotesque inefficiencies, it won't matter in that ocean of MS money. Only $ growth matters, not skill.

Unfortunately for Obsidian, they cannot survive if they build a company like this since even their Reddit fanbase will eventually wise up.

Obsidian's founders minus Avellone have been horrible leaders for decades and their reward was a Microsoft payout. They won.

Oh, they definitely got their bag. Obsidian's only future is working on design-by-committee trash at the Microsoft Game Pass gulag. Avowed already looks like a promising start.

 

[RepHope]

Judging by the studio closures today, I doubt Obsidian will survive Avowed flopping

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

About time uncle Phil cracked the whip.

 

[Roguey]

Judging by the studio closures today, I doubt Obsidian will survive Avowed flopping

Sure they will. But the Avowed team wouldn't.

Getting rid of Arkane Austin was an acceptable loss because they still have Lyon. Obsidian has The Outer Worlds 2, and the success of Grounded and Pentiment shows that they're worthwhile to keep around as a maker of smaller games.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

TOW2 will be shitcanned, everyone will be sent to the Fallout mines except for the Grounded 2 team.

 

[ferratilis]

I have a feeling that even if Obsidian is shut down, Josh and Feargus will survive and move to another MS studio. Those two guys somehow always fail upwards.

 

[Butter]

Avowed DLC will be scrapped when the game flops. I think TOW2 will still release, and then also have its DLC scrapped.

 

[AwesomeButton]

There is no one to produce anything interesting with the Pillars IP. Pity, I still think it's a good setting, that ended up in the hands of incompetents and cookie cutter narrative designers.