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So, the first game I played that was made by Obsidian was Knights of the Old Republic 2. It was to be representative of the early productions of the studio. Yes, admittedly, it was rushed, technically very flawed and was clearly lacking content that was cut to make the deadline. But it was still a gem, inserting shades of grey in the normally two-toned world of the Star Wars universe, and in doing so making the world feel that much more real and worthwhile. The characters were believable; they didn’t just exist simply to further the story, but they each had their own agenda, and they were all tied to the player character in their own unique way, as was slowly revealed throughout the story. And this is what I feel Obsidian so often manages to add to a world, whether it’s an Obsidian original, or borrowed from another’s intellectual property. They take their narratives seriously; they build their worlds to be believable and they allow their characters to live their own lives and not simply be window dressing for the main characters. I remember going through Mask of the Betrayer, the Neverwinter Nights 2 DLC, for the first time and being awed by the gravity of its story. This was a story of mythological proportions, pitting you against the laws of its universe and death itself, and in a way where you were never quite sure what exactly was the right choice to make. The ending did not offer simple black and white choices, a hallmark of the sort of Obsidian games that I hold dear, and of which I cherish fond memories. I kept following Obsidian throughout the years, and each time I would look forward with anticipation to whatever the studio would come up with next. Fallout: New Vegas was a huge success, of course. And when the studio started doing Kickstarters for their own IP, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind to throw some money their way. It did not leave me disappointed, both Pillars of Eternity games wove exactly the sort of deep narrative, rich with lore and worldbuilding, that I have come to expect from the studio. Remarkably, the studio has not lost its soul throughout the years, as exemplified by the 2022 release of Pentiment. Set in the fictional town of Tassing in historical 16th century Bavaria, this game plays like a detective story. But the catch is that actual detectiving is a fool’s errand. Whoever you end up picking as the culprit, you never have enough evidence to be certain that you have picked the right perp. Not that the powers that be mind very much; they’re happy so long as someone is seen to be executed for the crimes. You could say that the true objective of Pentiment is to unravel the underlaying plot, and to eventually confront the real thread spinner that has immersed the quiet town of Tassing in a state of chaos. But I don’t think that’s quite right. For me, the real objective of the game is to, if only for a moment, make it possible for you to transport yourself to a different time and a different place, and to contemplate what life was like for people in those days, and what kind of choices they were confronted with as the last vestiges of the old were being blown away by the winds of modernity. And now, it will not be long before their next much anticipated game will come out. I will be honest, when I first heard of the studio working on what was then still considered to be the studio’s answer to Skyrim, I was sceptical. It seemed like they might be biting off more than they could chew, and I felt the sort of formula behind Skyrim didn’t seem to play to the studio's strength. But now that I’ve seen the first previews, I’m glad to see that it’s actually nothing like Skyrim. It seems smaller in scope, less focused on a large open world, and actually aiming more for a smaller, more intimate experience. A lot has been made about the combat, and luckily the latest news seems to be that there’s been a lot of improvements on that front. But what I find more interesting is that once again Avowed looks to have characters with their own voices and their own agendas. And once again there seems to be a rich story with plenty of mysteries to unravel. I honestly can’t wait, and I’ve always taken the week after the release free from work, so I can fully enjoy it without any distractions. I’m sure I’ll have a great time.

One of the primary reasons I continue to be drawn to Obsidian Entertainment, reaching back to the days of Black Isle, has been its commitment to great storytelling. This has been a quality that I believe has and continues to set it apart in the creative venture to tells stories through the gaming medium. I would like to delve into their artistic storytelling by highlighting just three examples that display their unique approach to narrative design. For me, I was hooked by their stories back in 1990s. When I discovered the stylised ‘isometric’ game of Fallout. It illustrated to me the importance to establish a foundation for narrative depth and complexity. In these early days, I believe Fallout telegraphed this hallmark of Obsidian's later works. The game's post-apocalyptic setting, moral dilemmas, and branching storylines captured my attention to the extent that much sleep was lost and it set my expectation quite high for storytelling in video games. And it all began with a water chip … Though the post-apocalyptic genre has always captured my geeky imagination, it has always been the fantasy medium to which I have been drawn. Some of the first books I dove into, as I discovered the power of the written words, were Tolkien’s and the vastness of Middle Earth. As I shared this passion with so many, Obsidian’s first foray into the genre, particularly through Gary Gygax’ D&D worlds, from Icewind Dale to Neverwinter nights, was amazing, but Obsidian’s ability to create its own IP was when they went to the next level. For me, the evolution of Obsidian has been their ability to create immersive worlds that come alive in dynamic ways. At the launch of the first Kickstarter for Pillars of Eternity, I knew that something amazing was happening in the maturation of the company’s ability to weave tales. The dedication to illustrating rich and detailed environments had me lost for hours. The world of Eora, which I believe will be further expanded in Avowed, exposed me to a living, breathing world with its own history, cultures, and conflicts. The depth of the lore and the complexity of the characters means my choices unfolded in meaningful and engaging ways. Beyond just the first title in the franchise, with Deadfire it was clear to me that my choices had consequences. This is a recurring theme in Obsidian's games, where my agency as a player is paramount. The storylines are often not linear path, but they present multiple divergent paths that lead to different outcomes. This approach not only offers opportunity to replay (if one had the time!) but it allowed me to feel like I was the agent helping the story unfold. Deadfire’s narrative, as an example of Obsidian’s narrative commitments, was further enriched by its well-written dialogue and memorable characters. The last example that I will touch on in this blog is the storytelling that shines in The Outer Worlds. If Fallout was post-apocalyptic, this recent addition to their creative library involves a journey through a dystopic future where the rich and autocratic corporations’ rule and individual freedom is intentionally oppressed. The story unfolds with satire on capitalistic greed. The satire presents a story that unfolds with a nimble wit and dark humour, which I believe is an essential component of Obsidian’s taletelling. As with their other stories, I felt I could become the Stranger. The character offered me a blank slate that allowed me to become the Stranger as I realised my choices would affect the fate of entire colonies, need alone my companions in dramatic ways. The writing is clever and thought-provoking, with plenty of twists and turns that kept me up much too late far too often! Let me conclude this musing, by focusing on Parvati’s Companion Quest. This component of Obsidian’s storytelling is what hooks me every time. Their ability to weave storytelling to liberate the player to see more widely through an artistic medium allows me to commit to the outcome of the story. Parvati’s relationship with Junlei is rich, human, and inspires me to see outside of the box. It allowed me to feel like I was hanging out with Kaylee from Firefly, recognising that in this dystopic future, love endures. The human connexion and emotion this questline evokes are profound, standing as a powerful challenge to the very real-life struggles we face outside the immersion of great gameplay. If a creative story can stir our hearts and show us options that translate into how we might aspire to be better human beings to one another, then those are the games I will passionately continue to play. And that is the true power of storytelling that I continue to experience from Obsidian after over twenty-years of my relationship with them.

This is a story about sacrifice. It is also a story about nostalgia, but more than anything, it is a story about the sacrifices gamers make. We travel back to a time of low pixel count and greenish screens – specifically the summer of 1992. The radio that summer would blast SNAP! Rythm Is a Dancer and my cousin and I, shortly before our 13th birthdays, were in summer camp on the German island of Norderney. In the evening, after lights out, with eight kids per tent, obviously nobody slept. In our tent we did two things. Firstly, one of the boys had brought terrible horror novellas, and we read those. Over thirty years later I still have nightmares. Mostly because the story did not make sense – you can’t hide a whole labyrinth inside the walls of a bell tower! The second thing was eating chocolate and other sweets. And this is where this becomes a story of sacrifice. You see, the eating was predominantly done by the other six. The two of us would initiate it, but then we’d spend the night selling our stash to the others in the tent. In retrospect, we should have found a way to expand business to the other tents, but we were not even thirteen. There was a reason to this, which had little to do with entrepreneurial spirit. The camp organizers had permitted each kid a 50DM allowance per week for the two weeks of camp. Incidentally, as my cousin pointed out, 50DM was roughly the price of a new Game Boy game. Not eating chocolate but watching others enjoy my stash was not a choice. It was a sacrifice that only gamers will understand: others would eat so I could game. Everything went well. Until the very last day. It was hot. We were on our last excursion in town, killing time until we had to get the ferry. In the (heat of the) moment we decided to grab an ice cream. The worst 3,50 I ever spent. Also, one of the worst ice creams I ever had and most likely the reason why I still do not eat lemon ice cream. It almost put me off lemonade as well. An hour before we left, I dropped to 46,50. One, horrible tasting lemon ice cream was the reason I couldn’t pay for Gargoyle’s Quest solely through the chocolate black market. Mind, the entire process did turn Gargoyle’s Quest into one of my favourite games, even though it wasn’t really my thing – too dark in tone, too much jumping around spikes. In the end, the cool green daemon on the box cover turned out to be red! That was an unexpected plot twist. It highlighted something though about descriptions and plot relevance: how often do authors abuse the fact that in written format you do not have information until they give it to you? In comics, movies, and games, you see things from the start. Unless it is a greenish Game Boy screen and after hours and hours some NPC tells you: your skin is red. Two things I remember about Gargoyle’s Quest: how I made the money to buy it and how surprised I was finding out the protagonist was red. Also, the many spikes. Three things I remember about Gargoyle’s Quest: how I made the money to buy it, how surprised I was finding out the protagonist was red, the many spikes, and the gnarly trees, the inextinguishable flames, the different breath weapons… Among the many things I remember about Gargoyle’s Quest is that it is a game literally worth it’s weight in chocolate.

For a while now, I've wanted to write something about me and Obsidian. About the history, about the community, about the games. From Sith Lords and Project New Jersey up to Avowed and Outer Worlds 2. I've been here for 20 years. If it sounds like a long time, it's because it is. I first joined the forums on the day they opened, along with a bunch of people who had come here from the old Black Isle Community, which I was never a part of. Western RPGs were at a bit of a low ebb in 2004, especially PC ones. Bioware and Bethesda were the major RPG developers at the time, and already responsible for some of my favourite RPGs ever. However, while both Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights had a lot to offer, and I was very much looking forward to them, they ended up not quite meeting my expectations. Bloodlines came out that same year, and while great, it did not do as well as it deserved. To me, at least, it kind of felt like Obsidian would be the torchbearers for the kind of RPGs I wanted to play. C&C was the key design feature: Choice and consequence. Or as some of us used to say back then, "The Chosen One must choose!" I wanted games with multiple paths, where my gameplay choices affected the storyline and the world around my character. I wanted the sort of agency I felt I got in games like Fallout, Planescape Torment, or Baldur's Gate 2, but more so. I felt that the CRPG as a genre was good but could move forward and improve, and even back then I already felt that wasn't happening. With game budgets already ballooning, the trend was not to make games with loads of essentially optional content but rather to create games with very rigid critical paths, or open world games with very little gameplay depth. RPG features that I thought should be standard were falling by the wayside, instead of being improved and expanded upon. And that was what I often focused on when posting here on the forums. Or maybe not. Sometimes I did do some substantial posting, but frequently my posts were little more than short jokes, trying to get a laugh out of people. More often than not I was just lurking, perhaps silently agreeing with posters like Metadigital or Baley, while disagreeing with posters like Volourn or Hades_One. But it was without noticing that eventually the community became a part of my identity. It quickly became a daily online destination for me, a way to connect to like-minded people across the world. And it led to slowly making sort of online friends like Role-Player, Darth Drabek, or Rosbjerg, by being a part in events and side communities. I even met some forum denizens in real life, and thanks to the coming of Obsidian loot, I now go around in my everyday life with Obsidian stuff, be it a pen, a backpack or a t-shirt. My wife knows that Obsidian games are my jams, my kids sometimes used to wish they'd get gaming loot like me. Nowadays I don't post that often on the forums. I still lurk on a daily basis and help out a bit with stuff as time permits. What I think about, sometimes, are the people that have come and gone. People that have been around for a decade or more that I feel are still new users, users that were here for a short time but left an indelible mark. Forum posters that I cherished and enjoyed, and others who were infuriating and wrong. Essentially, in some ways I'm not the person I was when I joined. 20 years is a long time, I said. In the time I've been here I left a degree, went into another degree, got a job, started a career in an area I never thought I'd be in, became somewhat good at it, moved to another country, acquired a whole new family, lost my parents, learned to enjoy myself, developed a serious comic book reading habit. It's a lot and it happened without me noticing, really. But I'm still the same person, as well. I'm still a gamer, with a healthy focus on RPGs, I still furiously devour music and books and movies, I still have a terrible tendency to want to be right about everything, (to my own detriment "I'm right and you're wrong" brings me joy), I'm still a nerd, and I still want to finish that first degree. I also sometimes still wonder what it would be like to work at Obsidian. Even if I'm really not a fit for the company, or Irvine, or SoCal in general. Pretty sure my family would have liked it though.

Emerald Vale is the starting area of The Outer Worlds, introducing the player to the systems and the setting. The planet belongs to the Spacer’s Choice corporation, whose colony is on the brink of collapse. After discovering the body of their expected companion and going through a basic tutorial (how to hide, talk, and shoot), the player is free to explore a large map, while the main quest gently guides the story. From the local enforcement officers to the talkative and surprisingly cooperative ship AI, to the town, and beyond. Below are some observations on combat. Obsidian games are known for their engaging writing, interactive and thought-provoking stories, and intricate and well-balanced gameplay systems (that are not based on the player’s reaction time). There are quite a few essays dedicated to these aspects. Overall, the foes always fight to the death, but retreat to their area and instantly regain health if the player moves too far. The ranged human foes take cover. The melee opponents, be it animals or humans, just charge head on. When I killed two armed and armoured guards at the town entrance, the Junior Inhumer, an unarmoured civilian working nearby, whose only weapon was his shovel, continued attacking. A tutorial note helpfully informed me that the locals would forget about me shortly unless the faction reputation was “Kill on Sight.” When a non-playable character (NPC) discovers a player-made corpse, it takes them less than a minute to stop pacing and looking for the perpetrator and return to their routine. As the saying goes, “must have been the wind.” On a positive note, if the player’s character is discovered by a hostile NPC (or if the player made an NPC hostile to them), it alerts only the NPCs in the immediate area around, who could hear or see the fighting, instead of everyone on the map. It is worth mentioning that the shortcomings can be explained by the history of video games (in particular, first person shooters (FPS), action and role-playing games) and the designers’ assumptions about the players’ convenience - if the enemies tried to get reinforcements or flee and the player was interested in the experience points and loot from their bodies, chasing them would have been inconvenient, while the NPCs begging the player to spare their lives might cause the latter to think about their in-character motivation, and limiting NPCs’ attention span makes it harder for the player to lock themselves into combat-only scenarios. While there are 2 combat-related abilities, Cower (causes the foe to cover in fear for a few seconds) and Terrify (causes the foes to run away for a few seconds), that provide some variety of behaviour, they do not show the hostile NPCs as sentient beings with the self-preservation instinct or any social ties. With the in-game lore, it could be said that the NPCs are just very loyal to their corporations or fear the repercussions of the disobedience more than the protagonist, while on the higher difficulties, the combat might provide a significant challenge. Additionally, the lack of self-preservation fits perfectly well for the robotic foes, though they do not react strongly to corpses either. The region offers some variety of non-human living opponents, though they are like actual animals visually and narratively, while, as mentioned, the behaviour strongly differs. An animal would try to avoid contact with an armed and armoured human if they could, or, otherwise, to intimidate into the human into leaving, due to the likelihood of suffering injuries and being unable to provide for themselves in the event of combat, with very few exceptions (mating season, being unable to run, seeing the human as a threat to their children). In particular, canids might not look like regular fluffy dogs, but, despite the colourful scales and fins, they do resemble them, including the small ones (the teacup canids seen in the late-game areas). Many people have issues with hurting dogs in games, so it is understandable why one would want to create a dog-like hostile NPC without the negative feelings attached. Then there are sprats - cute little reptile space rats with large eyes and large ear-like appendages. I saw them escape the quarantine house in Edgewater and the guard shot them. There also were some aggressive “rabid” sprats in a house outside the town’s walls. Finally, the primals look like gorillas with fangs, but they also throw rocks (because The Outer Worlds has quite a lot of ranged weaponry for the player, every second hostile NPC must be able to shoot as well) and can dig underground tunnels. There are several areas with groups of them, but no quests attached. There are also chickens, but they are completely non-hostile. Some other animals are mentioned, but not shown in Emerald Vale - mantiqueens (giant mantis-like insects) and saltune, which is related to the one instance where Spacer’s Choice is described positively (granted, I assume the writers had thought of it as negative) - the company collects the already dead fish instead of torturing and killing living fish. As mentioned by Animal Equality UK, “wild fish often live in complex social groups, they use tools, and exhibit signs of anxiety and pain. However, fish are treated like commodities by the fishing industry.” So, the fictional evil corp managed to be more sympathetic than many real ones. Then again, piles of dead sprats could be seen at the Edgewater Cannery. As for human enemies, there are marauders, who are the guilt-free source of diverse combat encounters fitting for any player’s character since the marauders attack on sight. The Peril on Gorgon DLC sheds light on their origins, though in Emerald Vale, their behaviour does not quite match the narrative. They seem to form social bonds and hierarchies between each other and are able to tame and take care of their canids, who stay close to their handlers and show aggression only towards the player. In a side quest, a former worker NPC attempts to join the marauders’ ranks and she is not harmed by the ones around her. The marauders also are capable of planning - they laid mines around their encampment and near the back entrance to the abandoned Community Centre. Though, when the combat started, they charged right on their own mines with predictable results, then retreated when I moved slightly farther away from their camp. In terms of locations, the foes around story-significant structures are usually distributed thoughtfully and account for the more stealthy and less murderous players’ characters, while also interacting with the environment (e.g. the marauders looking at desks or sitting on chairs). On the other hand, most of the other enemies look as intentionally placed as the randomly generated camps in Dragon Age: Inquisition. In conclusion, I believe that making the NPC combat-related behaviour more realistic and diverse, while also considering the location, would increase the players’ immersion and engagement. Let the animals flee and the civilians alert the guards or just run for cover or try to surrender. The next Obsidian game, Avowed, takes place in the same universe as the Pillars of Eternity duology and has the first-person camera view like The Outer Worlds. I have heard that combat there will be unavoidable, but I hope for more complex and intelligent NPC actions. But there is another crucial technical quality of The Outer Worlds, which I would love to see in Avowed - the edition with the higher system requirements, Spacer’s Choice Edition, was cleanly separated from the base one and I was able to keep the better performing and more accessible version of the game. I would not be able to notice the 4K textures and Global Illumination nor to run the game with them on, so saving the storage space, bandwidth, and power, while enjoying the game, was most welcome. It would be great if Avowed had the VA and the 4K textures in an optional free DLC, available for the players who want it and not forced upon those who cannot use it.