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Have a great Thanksgiving. My friends in the Great White North have already celebrated theirs. Hopefully, they found much for which to be thankful. For those in other countries around the world, may you find cause for celebration. May your homes be filled with warmth and happiness. As Lincoln might say, may we all be touched by the better angels of our nature. Fair winds and following seas. God bless you all.

Happy Thanksgiving everybody!

Absolutely loving the game and decided to chronicle the journey of my Captain Hawthorne (a former tossball mascot named Brewer Cole) and the intrepid band of the Unreliable. I also have an instagram page for it: https://www.instagram.com/theouterworldsadventures/ One of the immediate things that struck Brewer about Phineas Welles was that in picking somebody to save the universe (alright, the colony) he was not just going to pick just anybody. It was only after careful deliberation would he choose just the right person for the job!

https://jesawyer.tumblr.com/post/189270621926/its-become-a-bit-of-a-meme-lately-that-obsidian I can understand where feeling comes from, and I think a lot of it has to do with the relative ages of people in leadership positions. Depending on the specific game we’re talking about, it’s a type of game that some of us have already iterated on 2, 3, or 4 times. And when it comes to things like dialogue structure and quest design, there’s even more structural commonality between our projects, regardless of the underlying genre or camera perspective. I’ve been a game developer for 20 years now. Regardless of my intelligence or creativity compared to a junior designer, I have seen enough quests move from idea to document to alpha implementation to beta to launch to have a pretty good sense about how certain approaches are going to go. There are some quest concepts or details that are - and I stress that I do not mean this pejoratively - naïve. The quest designer does not, and could not, understand the technical implications of what they are trying to do. When it comes to quest design (especially) a little bit of knowledge can be a very dangerous thing, because as with learning any discipline, it’s hard to comprehend how much you don’t know once you get the basics down. One of my favorite bicycle frame builders is Richard Sachs. He’s been essentially building the same type of brazed steel frames for over 45 years. I have one of his 1978 frames and it looks very similar to the frames he builds now. He’s one of the higher-profile living frame builders and he’s vocal about his opinions. In an interview, he recounted interacting with a talented young frame builder who had been working for a few years, built several dozen frames, and concluded he had pretty much learned everything there was to it. Sachs’ reaction was, “You don’t even know how to make the right kind of mistakes,” This is one thing for a craft like frame building, where it’s often (today) one person working alone as a hobbyist. It’s another thing in a big team environment like game development where 30-100 people are trying to work together on a big, interconnected project. More experienced leads tend to be more conservative and critical about design, not necessarily because of some ideological stance, but because we have seen things go very wrong and we want to prevent the kind of collateral damage we have seen play out in the past. Players remember quests like Beyond the Beef, and rightly so, because it’s a very fun quest with a lot of interesting ways to approach and resolve it. What players don’t remember, because they weren’t there, is how long Beyond the Beef took to complete, and the impact it had on the designers’ schedule and the project as a whole. And players don’t remember the cut content, some of it the product of months of a designer’s time, because it was hopelessly broken or inherently not fun to play through. When I write this, it’s not to put blame at on the quest designers. It’s my responsibility to review their work and to approve or disapprove it. On a game like F:NV, which was almost half-my-career-ago, I very often said, “I don’t think you should do that,” or “I wouldn’t do that,” with an explanation of why and some suggestions for alternative approaches. These days, I am more likely to say, “Don’t do that,” because I have seen 10 out of 12 soft warnings go ignored and yield some really tremendous headaches and heartaches. In contrast, when I see young teams (and by this I mean inexperienced developers with inexperienced leads) working, I am often pleasantly reminded of what naïveté can produce - as long as you have the time and money to burn through your mistakes. I talk with and visit a lot of teams at other companies, and there are some high profile developers I’ve visited where their design process is less of a process and more of an ad hoc “fling **** at the wall” experiment that goes on for 3-5 years. Sometimes the cost of this is just time, which is money. Sometimes the cost is polish. Sometimes the cost is burning out half a generation of young developers. Sometimes it’s all of these things. If you’ve never been at the helm when your project goes so over-budget that the company is in serious peril, this might not seem like a big deal. If you’ve never been in charge when the game comes out and gets slammed for being sloppy, buggy, and messy - when a reviewer straight-up says the team that worked massive overtime to get the game out “phoned it in” - this might not seem like a big deal. And if you haven’t watched the people on your team, people for whom you were responsible, get burned-out or laid off because of crunch, or stress, or a project cancelation, it also might not seem like a big deal. But if you have been in that position, it’s hard to see the consequences of inaction and not try to mitigate them, consciously or unconsciously, by pushing for more tried-and-true approaches to design. I’m not saying it’s an objectively good thing, but it is, I think, a natural reaction for leaders who see things go wrong over and over. Personally, I do hope we take more chances at Obsidian in the future, whether it’s on big projects or small ones. Some of this will involve putting less experienced people in leadership roles. Limiting the project scope itself also helps. Small projects and DLCs are easier to experiment with in good conscience because the impact on the company will probably be low if it fails. But when it comes to our big projects, our more experienced leads will have to be more open-minded about letting certain things wander a little bit. There are additional layers of experience and perspective that I will (hopefully) gain if I remain in the industry another 5, 10, 15 years. Hopefully that will allow me and other people working in leadership positions at the company to let people take more risks in good conscience. I want to help people make the right kinds of mistakes.

A dramatic reenactment of the Dallas Cowboys in the 2nd quarter:

It seems like you're looking for an "idea guy" position, but that is, as mentioned many times before, not a very worthwhile role on its own. Everyone has ideas, everyone has their own worlds and stories they'd love to see made into a game, or their own mechanics they'd love to implement into one. But having an idea means very little in the process of actually implementing it, and what developers look for is people who can actually do and not merely think up. Basically this: https://davidmullich.com/2015/11/23/sorry-there-is-no-idea-guy-position-in-the-game-industry/

I'm working, but Happy Thanksgiving to all the forumites. I'll get a turkey sandwich at whatever truck stop I wind up at tonight.

I'm going to go run in the rain for an hour with some friends before eating some turkey with family. Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I'm taking Sunny & Bella with me to the VFW in a little while. We'll have our Thanksgiving there. Deep fried turkey, smoked ham, lots of sides and I'm bringing desserts. I ordered a large sweet potato pie, pecan pie, apple pie, and a pound cake from the Kroger Bakery. We are celebrating together with the American Legion and Marine Corps League this year so it should be a pretty good turn out. Afterwards I expect cigars, expensive whiskey and football long into the evening. I only wish Tommy were here.

Di verus, don't go to every district and pick up every quest like some touristy nasenale.

Bah humbug. .... Oh wait, wrong holiday. A toast to good food and the warmth of loved ones.

^ I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe those emails weren't 100% on the level.

That's how you announce delays: Oh, yeah, also Stanley Parable: Ultra Delux Edition has been delayed to 2020. Also: There is Stanley Parable: Ultra Delux Edition in development.

I'm sorry for the dialoogue issue you have run into. We have our development team looking into it and hope to have a fix for it shortly. In the meantime, to expedite your request, you can send an e-mail to our publisher, Private Division at support@privatedivision.com. This will get your issue into their queue and allow us to prioritize requests to ensure the fastest possible turn around time. We apologize again and thank you for your patience while we work to resolve the issue.

I watched a 12 minute speed run that a few of the developers of The Outer Worlds where commenting on, I thought that was cool instead of being offended by the person skipping their hard work. They did point out the obvious fact that the person had to of played the game quite a bit to understand how best to exploit it. Anyway one of the things they mentioned/wondered about was how he would handle Tartarus as the lowest NPC level was 25 there. They made it sound like it was hard set level so I don't think your level has any affect on it.

Pretty sure the "playing it safe" was more about the kind of quests and their complexity and not the games setting. And yeah, later Oblivion games don't feel as "free" anymore as before. Just check out all the permutations in Beyond the Beef, which Sawyer pointed out. This quest is BIG with lots of different options. I have yet to see anything like that in the Outer Worlds. It's exactly how he says... risky quest, very bug-prone, can cost you lots of (development) time. So instead you go with "the usual quest formula", which maybe has some choices and different consequences, but is never super complicated at its core.

OP is obviously a really cool guy with no time for trolling. If super cool OP says it's bad, I tend to agree with him. Glad OPs not angry though. Else I'd be scared for Obsidian. Scary cool awesome OP nice post OP.

Again, depends on what you mean with "risk". Developing a Star Wars game might not be much of a financial risk but Josh is clearly talking from a design perspective, and in that sense a lot of things could either go wrong or be underestimated due to an initial optimism going into the project. I'm not a dev myself but I've seen similar things all too often in film production, where certain time schedules were set under the assumption that the scenes or shots in question could be resolved in said time, which didn't account for many foreseeable obstacles and complications. I've ran into the situation of shoots that should've ended at 10pm extending all the way to 5am all too often, and often paired with a schedule that required us to be on a different set at 8am that very morning. As Josh alludes to, an overambitious schedule can lead to a failure in planning which in turn could lead to overtime, which means a *lot* more money when working with unionized workers, which could also lead to burnout, vice recividism and so on, so forth. In a way, KOTOR 2's a pretty good example of this too, far as I know - Obsidian started with an ambitious plan which to my understanding got even more ambitious through production, but which eventually led to a lot of content scrapped because they ended up having to rush to meet deadlines and so on. The end result was a pretty broken, unfinished game that required fan patches and the likes to be the game we recall today. I reckon what Josh refers to as avoiding "risks" is to avoid situations in development that could threaten to become quicksand, the way naval combat in Deadfire became and so on. Though I could be incorrect. That said I feel the question and answer have relatively different connotations of "risk" too. I might be mistaken though, as I've heard people complain that in terms of game mechanics and systems The Outer Worlds feels pretty safe as well, but still, I feel like the question and usual criticism stems a bit from the narrative elements not being risky, not involving unlikable or controversial characters or major narrative subversions or big genre reinventions or whatnot, and it's not really what Josh responded to. I can get that criticism even if I reckon Tyranny for example is a pretty subversive game all around.

I like POE/deadfire, but they didn't really take any risks. Though it's hard to take risks when you are one flop of a game away from bankruptcy.

Same here. I have over 50 hours in and I think I'm getting close to the end mission, however, there are at least 25-30 other missions on my list to complete and half the planets to explore. I've seen vids where people are speed running the game in 12 minutes. That makes no sense to me, nor does it make sense to rush, if that's what people are doing during a normal play through. I imagine a lot of people fast travel everywhere and just play the main missions. If you do that you're missing out on the best part of the game, IMO. My plan is to complete as many of the side and faction missions as possible before I end the main campaign. My hope is I'll still be playing for at least another 50 hours.

I have many, many problems with this game but I never felt like it was particularly short or anything. Of course, I didn't expect anything like NV or any other open world game because... well, they said that's not what it was going to be beforehand. Good length for a game as far as I'm concerned.

The most important thing here, whether you believe the main story was too short or not, is if you had fun. If you did there's really nothing to discuss from there. We can compare TOW to other games from here until the end of time but it won't make the main story any longer. I'm having a ton of fun so far and think I have less than 9 hours in so far. I noticed a lot of back and forth between folks arguing about whether a game is a "real" RPG or not and it started getting personal. Everybody needs to chill, TOW is an original IP that plays like Fallout and is a hell of a good time.

https://www.pcgamer.com/everquest-and-pantheon-developer-brad-mcquaid-has-died/ Brad McQuaid of EQ fame died.