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New Community Blog (The Unintentional Gatekeeping of Video Games)

Blogs

Pillars of Eternity Backer Site Blog

Now Available: XXXL T-shirt sizes

Due to popular request, we've added XXXL t-shirt sizes both to tier rewards (which you select in surveys) and for addon T-shirts.   We'll be looking in to adding women's sizes as well. Just waiting for some confirmations.   For those of you who have completed orders and would like to switch to a XXXL t-shirt, please contact us and we'll be happy to help.   For those of you who'd like to hold out for news on women's sizes, not a problem. You can either complete your
Pillars of Eternity Backer Site Blog

Now Available: Paying/Canceling Open Orders

Hi everyone,   Some of you have had some problems either with Stripe or PayPal and have found that you have an open order sitting in your profile and aren't sure how to either try to pay for it again, or to just cancel it out right.   We should have an update posted in the next day or so that will allow you to take care of that.   It will refund any pledge credit that was associated with the open order so you can start over.     Update: This is now in
Pillars of Eternity Backer Site Blog

Coming After the Holidays: Edit shipping information

With respect to shipping address information, we would like to provide a way for you guys to update your shipping address at any time for as long as possible up to the launch of the game.   Next month when we're back from the holiday break, I'll be working on adding this to your profile so that you can keep us up to date with your current address.   We'll also announce in backer updates when we're starting to get close and when we'd need to have a locked shipping address. We'
Pillars of Eternity Backer Site Blog

Eternity Site 1.0

Hi everyone!   I wanted to introduce myself - my name is Darren Monahan and I'm one of the co-founders of Obsidian Entertainment, and lone wolf programmer of the Eternity site. I'm the man probably responsible for any issues you may have had (...of which I hope, are none, but if you did, I profusely apologize!)   Over the next few months we'll be adding more stuff to the Backer Site, and I thought it might be helpful to have a casual place where we could let you know when we
Chris Avellone's Blog

Project: Eternity and Characterization

Character building for games isn’t easy, and it requires a lot of effort, especially when it comes to companions. I’ve had the good fortune to work on a variety of titles with strong support characters over the years, and I enjoy writing them a great deal. I still can’t believe I get paid to do this (don’t cut me off, Feargus).   There are a few guidelines I try to follow when designing companions (some of these are dependent on the engine and franchise).   - Combat/Challenge
Joshin' Around!

building better worlds

Oh. Hello there.   I wanted to put some ideas into words to help express what it means to build a world at Obsidian. It takes a lot of time and effort from a boatload (dirigible-load) of people, but there are some guiding principles that keep us focused on building worlds we love that we hope players will love, too.   No matter what the flavor of the setting may be -- fantasy, sci-fi, modern day espionage... a town in Colorado -- worlds are places we want to explore filled wi
Chris Avellone's Blog

Home is wherever I'm with you

It's been a while - aside from Obsidian work, I've been doing quite a bit of talks here at Dragon*Con and across the sea in Spain at Gamelab on a variety of subjects, from advice to getting into the industry, to Kickstarter, and even our approach to designing characters for video games. Even better, I'll be doing the same coming up here in October at Austin GDC's narrative track concerning Obsidian's narrative approach - and going through our design process at the end of the month overseas conce
Chris Avellone's Blog

Challenge vs Frustration: Bloggin' on Time Limits

So a designer's job is to make jumping through hoops fun, and calibrating the challenge/frustration ratio of jumping through said hoops.   This blog post stems from a question from the AMA Brian Fargo and I did on Reddit (long ago) concerning the issues with this in regards to one infamous piece of game design: time limits, and how two different games dealt with the challenge.   From a gamemaster/game designer perspective, the idea of time limits is appealing. It creates pres
Chris Avellone's Blog

If you're heading up a Kickstarter, let us know if you want help.

Obsidian gets applicants for internships all the time from schools across the States, and it may be that if you're forming a Kickstarter, you may need a lot of technical, production, and development help for tasks that students and juniors would love to do to contribute to their careers and education.   If you're running a Kickstarter and would like to consider a pool of applicants to help you hit your game's mark, let us know - there may be interns/juniors in your area or could assist
Chris Avellone's Blog

Torment and Character Agency

Some Planescape: Torment questions from Joe Hogle, an undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh, posting the reasons for some design choices.   (BTW, if you guys ever have questions you want to answer for research papers or just because you want to know, feel free to email me at CAvellone@obsidian.net, let me know when you need them by, and if it's okay to blog the answers.)   In many RPGs, including the Fallout games you
Chris Avellone's Blog

Old World Questions

Some Old World Questions from Rocky Justice (thanks, Rocky):   1. What is your official title? I know in the credits it says you're a writer, but I was wondering if there was a more specific title for your job. Also, how'd you get in to your line of work? Did you study writing in college, or was it something you discovered later on?   I'm Creative Director here at the studio - I'm involved with the design department, giving advice on best practices, design methodology, and he
Chris Avellone's Blog

Why did NCR ask the player/Courier to bring the package to the Divide?

Because Twitter would make this too fragmented:   (Spoiler alert)   NCR sacks Navarro in the West, recovers a bunch of tech they don't understand, as history has proven.   They do, however, recognize the symbols (American flag, silo stencils, etc.) and recognize it might be tied to the same symbols and markings the NCR found at the Divide.   NCR hires a Courier to take the item there. They don't for a second think that anything bad will happen as a result,
Chris Avellone's Blog

Old World Blues Contest Winners.

Fallout New Vegas DLC contest this time was to suggest research projects for DLC3: Old World Blues, taking you to the technological graveyard of the Big Empty, one winner:   I chose the one from Blinzler below, because like Old World Blues, it draws upon the history of Fallout and in this case, Blinzler's entry reminded me of the Burrows (even though the Burrows never existed, one of the goals of Old World Blues was to dig into the history of how certain inventions and critters in the
Chris Avellone's Blog

Honest Hearts FNV shirt winners + honorable mentions.

Here are my ruthlessly subjective winners for the most honest act in Fallout: New Vegas that made your heart hurt.   Of the 200+ entries, here are the winners followed by a lot of honorable mentions.   Next contest for Old World Blues should be up on Twitter soon. It'll probably involve experiments. Or captions. Or something blue-sy.   Warning: Spoilers below.   Winner ==============   KnotworkOrange Created my account just to answer. Though
Chris Avellone's Blog

Results of Fallout New Vegas Movie Script contest.

We had a few winners with the Fallout T-shirt contest - the contest: do a one sentence Fallout movie pitch (in honor of the Fallout movie script being leaked).   Lot of submissions (and too much to do in a Twitter post). I finally decided to break it into 3 categories: Best Trailer Speak, One That Made Me Laugh, and the Most Honest. So without further ado...   (And forgive the formatting, this'll be the last time I experiment with size, color, or fonts).   First the
Chris Avellone's Blog

FNV Perk Contest Winners.

Couldn't fit all the entries on Twitter, so here's a selection of winners for the Fallout New Vegas perk contest.   Broke them into Most Useful/Interesting, Most Ennio Morricone-Inspired and Most Humorous. #FNV   Most Useful/Interesting: @ericsiry Six Million Cap Man, @Spartan3995 The New You!, @Spartan3995 Burden to Bare, @Soultaker696 Sole Survivor.   Most Thematic and Ennio Morricone-Inspired: @ericsiry Trick Shot, @gogukaizer Evil Eye, @amoebasoid A Few Caps Mor

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