Company News The Knights of New Vegas: A History Of Obsidian Entertainment

[circ]

I'd rather have MCA just write a visual novel and spare us from whatever shitty gameplay we'd have to endure to read his writings.

Eh, mechanics would probably be dumbed down for consoletards, so yeah. But I quite like the gameplay of MM VI-VIII.

You must not have played many Obsidian games then. Although for some inexplainable reason, KoTOR II's camera is not something I'd fault it with, or controls. Half-assed and incomplete story, yes. But oh I forget, you can't blame anyone but evul publishurs especially with Obsidian.

 

[Broseph]

I've played NWN 2 OC, which was shit, and New Vegas, which was great. I'm not saying an Obsidian MM game would be perfect, but I'd certainly trust them with it more than any other AAA dev out there.

 

[LundB]

Infinitron, you may be a bro, but linking to a Gawker media site like Kotaku is a nearly unforgivable sin.

 

[Infinitron]

Sometimes they have exclusive content. What's a bro to do?

 

[LundB]

Copy-paste the entire thing and shoot any lawyers they send.

"But officer, they looked just like a palestinian child, I swear!"

 

[Roguey]

Obsidian also talked to Take-Two about a game they called Futureblight. "We were gonna look at using the Neverwinter Nights engine to do a Fallout game," Urquhart said. "We thought that would be cool."

So Obsidian was going to steal the concept of Troika's rtwp PA-game?

One of those publishers was Disney, who enlisted Obsidian to design a video game prequel to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
...
"We put a lot of challenges in front of us," Urquhart said. "It's this interesting thing, I think, as an independent studio. And I'll give anybody this advice that I can. When somebody offers you something as an independent studio, you take it. You take it, because it's feast or famine. That's what we've found."

Barbie RPG: Definitely totally possible.

They didn't have any sort of game specification document, Urquhart said, which is now something they require for all of their games: a listed, documented set of guidelines for exactly how a game will be designed and developed.

This is one of the most embarrassing things I've ever read about a veteran game development studio.

"We started getting into these arguments which were completely not helpful," he said. "Is it 70% RPG or 30% action, or is it 46% action and 50%... These things were not helpful. What we needed to say is: in a mission, Michael can do these things, you know, and this is the toolkit. He can unlock things, he can hack things, he can throw bombs, he can interact this way, he can interact that way."

Yesssssss.

Part of the problem was Sega's indecision, Urquhart said. "A great example is there was a whole segment of the game, which was really cool, and it probably cost $500,000 to make. It was a long sequence, lots of mocap and all this kind of stuff. And at the time Sega felt it just didn't fit the game... and so $500,000 cut. And you know, I understand: they pay us to make the game. It's totally their right to do that. It can just derail."

This is probably the cinematic QTE sequence of Michael Thorton struggling with a terrorist and jumping out of a plane that Alexander Brandon talked about. $500,000 for a QTE session.

Sega has no interest in making a sequel right now—development was costly and challenging, Urquhart points out—but anything could change, particularly as word of mouth for Alpha Protocol continues to spread. "It sold okay," Urquhart said. "We don't know if they made money or lost money, but we do know—and that's the interesting thing—it keeps selling."
"Now, knowing everything we know now, we would love to do Alpha Protocol 2, and everybody here would love to work on it," he said. "[Because] we now know what it is and how to do it... I'm hoping maybe in even a couple of years, [Sega] will get to kind of a point where everybody has kind of moved on, and the baggage is swept away. People are still positive about the brand. We get asked [about a sequel] all the time, still. It's become a cult classic."

I figured AP would eventually become Obsidian's Bloodlines even though a lot of people who inexplicably like the latter hate the former.

In 2006, as Neverwinter Nights 2 was finished and Alpha Protocol was just getting started, Obsidian was approached by three publishers at around the same time. One wanted to work with them on an "original fantasy RPG," Urquhart said.

I'm disappointed by how vague this is.

"We've talked to the Bethesda guys more than once about doing games," Urquhart said. "They called me once about Star Trek, and I was probably being a little bit too much, too arrogant of a developer... This would've been like 2007—way before the movies—and it was like, Star Trek wasn't in a good place. I don't know what I said, but I now know it probably sounded arrogant."

I bet Jaesun's going to be upset.

It's also very funny to me how Feargus Urquhart will say yes to Snow White, Dungeon Siege, and South Park, but give an arrogant "No way" to Star Trek. And good riddance.

Obsidian wasn't getting paid at this point, but the prospect of a South Park RPG was hard to resist, so Urquhart agreed to keep plugging away at it.

Desperation is a turn-off, Feargus. Must have been pretty desperate.

They've got two promising games on the way, and even just a few months ago, major publishers were knocking on their door: Urquhart told me he's been talking to Bethesda, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., and LucasArts.

Meh, talk is cheap. It only matters once the contracts are signed.

He's even got a dream project: Knights of the Old Republic III. On next-gen consoles.
"I think doing something like that on [Orbis and Durango] and things like that might be—I would be disappointed as a gamer if that never got made," Urquhart said. "I think a lot of gamers would be disappointed as well."

I would be perfectly happy to see KOTOR remain dead forever. Let Revan be the final canonical word, if only for all the angst it produces.

 

[Infinitron]

Why, Roguey. Are you suggesting that dear old Feargy is faking his optimism?

 

[Roguey]

Like the Ed Wood of game developers.

 

[Kirtai]

"We as a company got into a big room and we said, ‘We are not gonna make buggy games anymore,'" Urquhart said.

So they designed an entirely new bug-tracking system—a computerized program that automatically sends crash reports to their engineers. Their last bug-recording system, Urquhart said, involved pens and paper.

That revelation deserves a lot bigger response than that. Seriously, a pen and paper bug tracking system?

 

[Tigranes]

Yeah, that is pretty awful. I hate judging on limited information but I just can't imagine a situation where that works well.

The Seven Dwarves pitch and the projected K3 all sound pretty meh to me, I hope they get the chance to do an original IP AAA game at some point... or AP2, which I would love.

 

[Infinitron]

Well, he said it involved pen and paper, not that it was fully pen and paper.

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

Right now, I'm imagining them writing bugs on post-it notes and sticking them to some dude's monitor to fix when he gets a chance. At the very least, type it into a spreadsheet. Since they were just playing the game when it crashed, we know they had computers.

 

[Kirtai]

I have to wonder how many major bugs went live due to that bugs post-it note falling off a monitor and down behind a desk.

 

[Jaesun]

I bet Jaesun's going to be upset.

Yeah. I've been wanting them to do a fucking Star Trek cRPG forever. Damn Feargus!

 

[Grunker]

Can you imagine... Might & Magic with writing from Codexian god emperor MCA...

Why the fuck would you want MCA writing in a game that is essentially about open-world dungeon-crawling?

 

[Roguey]

I hope they get the chance to do an original IP AAA game at some point

I see no reason now why they should ever do this unless we're talking about a hypothetical situation where they get multi-million profits from Eternity and Eternity-related products and are able to risk $10-$15 million of their own money into a PC-exclusive (the average budget of a single platform game was 10 million back in 2010 so this wouldn't be "cheap").

 

[Roguey]

Can you imagine... Might & Magic with writing from Codexian god emperor MCA...

Why the fuck would you want MCA writing in a game that is essentially about open-world dungeon-crawling?

I'm under the impression it would have been more like Dark Messiah. Ubisoft's not going to fund a big expensive blobber in the 21st century.

 

[Grunker]

Can you imagine... Might & Magic with writing from Codexian god emperor MCA...

Why the fuck would you want MCA writing in a game that is essentially about open-world dungeon-crawling?

I'm under the impression it would have been more like Dark Messiah. Ubisoft's not going to fund a big expensive blobber in the 21st century.

I wasn't refering to the game proper, I was refering to the thought of dick-wanking to an M&M-game written by MCA.

 

[Broseph]

Eh, why not? A game like M&M doesn't need a good story, but it certainly couldn't hurt.

 

[tuluse]

I wonder what Warner Bros contacted them about?

MORTAL KOMBAT THE RPG?

Dude.

It's obviously Loony Toons RPG.

I would really like a DC rpg written by MCA.

 

[Jaesun]

I'm still curious what the M$ XBAX 720 or whatever next-gen game they were working on but was canned.

I'm still so fucking pissed off at SEGA for not even viewing the fucking Alien prototype Obsidian sent to them and didn't even try it. FUCKING FAGGOTS! I so fucking wanted that Alien RPG. May you burn in hell SEGA.

 

[Wyrmlord]

They've got two promising games on the way, and even just a few months ago, major publishers were knocking on their door: Urquhart told me he's been talking to Bethesda, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., and LucasArts.

Sounds like the roles have reversed. Is it safe to say now that Obsidian is the commercially successful superstar and BioWare is now in the dark struggling for its existence?

Has the apprentice completely surpassed the master, or do I speak too soon?

 

[Harg Harfardarssen]

I'm still so fucking pissed off at SEGA for not even viewing the fucking Alien prototype Obsidian sent to them and didn't even try it. FUCKING FAGGOTS! I so fucking wanted that Alien RPG. May you burn in hell SEGA.

I bet they did and just pretended they didn't. There's no way anyone could resist their curiosity. They probably smoothed it out with in-house programmers, who they then murdered so no one would know that there was a fully-functional, awesome aliens rpg. To this day playing it is like the top, super-secret perk for everyone in the SEGA C-suite.

 

[tuluse]

They've got two promising games on the way, and even just a few months ago, major publishers were knocking on their door: Urquhart told me he's been talking to Bethesda, Ubisoft, Warner Bros., and LucasArts.

Sounds like the roles have reversed. Is it safe to say now that Obsidian is the commercially successful superstar and BioWare is now in the dark struggling for its existence?

Has the apprentice completely surpassed the master, or do I speak too soon?

Other than TOR, I bet every Bioware project has been successful for what it is.

 

[eric__s]

Obsidian is a good company, the people there are all extraordinarily talented and I'm glad things are looking up for them.