Urthor
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Posts posted by Urthor
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I mean that's the intention I feel, question is whether that's going overboard on Obsidian's part. Now that I think about it, Ranger might just be "we are implementing all the PoE1 abilities in Ranger cool story" even though unlike priest all of the Ranger abilities aren't spells and have to be purchased, and there were a lot of different modal shots n business for rangers in PoE1 if I recall correctly (I hate playing rangers).
I'm sure the balance brigade will come through though, it's pretty clear that the lvl 8 and 9 abilities aren't as well balanced as the multiclassing because there wasn't a 6 month backer beta with people breaking classes. RIP +60% bleak walker Flames of Devotion.
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Rogue has the sneak attack mechanic
Ranger has a pet
They're "balancing" the class by making your abilities less powerful, because you are supposed to be taking out a guy with sneak attack as a rogue, meaning every fight has 1 less guy, and you have a pet who tanks for you as a ranger.
Ergo a ranger will do far less DPS than a Monk/Fighter/etc because otherwise the fights are too easy for him if he had the same output as a Monk with a pet as well.
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This is a very long answer, so I’ll condense it: nepotism (family and friends), works hard but often ineffectively, has poor designer skills but actively gets involved in design (Josh simply started ignoring him after a while, which became a pattern Parker didn’t even have time to notice), and in many ways, Parker is like a little Feargus except he works harder and gets more involved, which causes problems.
Parker’s behavior with Feargus during the PoE KS drive final hours was soul-crushing. While usually these fights were brief, they became longer and longer between the two.
He repeats a lot of the same mistakes and never seems to learn from them – and it’s embarrassing to have to remind him of them when he brings them up in front of others and asks your opinion.
One very specific thing: Both Chris Parker and Feargus have a wonderful habit of giving you room to come to a solution, and then when you when you present the solution, they tell you “it wasn’t the solution they hoped you would choose” (they already had one in mind), and then tell you to go with their decision. Here’s the thing – I don’t even care about that, but in a company where there’s never enough time and never enough money, you can’t waste so much as a day on dithering bull**** – just tell me what you want, if I have a problem with it, I’ll tell you, but chances are, I’ll agree and find a way to make it work and we won’t spend even more time arguing about how we got to this in the first place.
We had this happen on KOTOR2 (I finally had to give up and give Chris the interface, which he wasted months of developer time on – and the programmers we needed - for almost no result). Feargus did something similar when Feargus asked us to decide who should be narrative lead on Eternity – and then when we said, “we should offer the job to George Ziets,” Feargus just said, “no, you should have chosen Eric.” There were tons of things like this where I wish they’d just cut to the chase, because it made you hesitant to make a call because there was always that lurking feeling it had already been decided. And it’s time you don’t get back in a company where again, there’s never enough time.
Part of my extensive post-mortem of Chris Parker (I had pages, since I was trying to learn how to be a better manager by what not to do) was at his best, he would only waste two people's time - yours and his. At worst, he would waste entire department's time or even the whole team's time with feature shifts. Worse, he'd throw tantrums about his own schedules – often trashing them and throwing away promises of personnel and resources in defense of something he was doing. I don’t care about someone wanting to change the schedule, but again, that time was never given back, and the sudden nature of these changes would waste even more time and more planning that had been done with the expectation of promises to be fulfilled.
Another issue was not stopping to think before launching an action. As an example, Parker and other employees spent months trying to help someone get their immigration settled. It cost a lot of time, was distracting, and was a time sensitive matter. But as we were nearing the finish line of a months-long process, Chris Parker suddenly asked, “do we even want to keep her?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – you’re saying this now? Didn't you think this through?
This was typical, but it’s worse when you’re playing with people’s futures here, and carelessly.
On the plus side (but also echoes “repeating mistakes”) is when one of our games has gone to ****, Chris Parker is often sent in to rescue it, and it is in better shape after, even if it's not going to be destined for the quality bin. However, it would be nice if the games hadn’t been bleeding internally in the first place (usually management-wise and staffing-wise). And it would be nice if we had someone consistent to be there who wasn’t Parker, since Parker has owner duties as well.
There was one telling meeting where Chris Parker told the company they were hiring someone to replace him for his position "to do what he did", and someone raised their hand and said, “but Chris, we don’t know what it is you do.”
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Feargus kept BIS and Obsidian alive. This does not mean they were always healthy, but they were a place where RPGs could be made, that is true, and that's a good thing. My argument is that there were many things that could be done that would make both our company and our games better. There were reasons we couldn't build internal engines, why our developers (at BIS) didn't get support, and why without BioWare's Infinity Engine, BIS wouldn't have done much successfully (we had many, many failed projects - Torn, Stonekeep 2, etc. and those projects were incredibly expensive).
I did say a lot of positive things about Feargus in the ten years before and in an effort to be a good supporting owner, I did so in public even when he wasn't doing a great job - you had to start making excuses for why he skipped meetings, why he never got back to you or anyone else, why he would suddenly back out of conferences at the last minute, and explain to everyone who tried to get a hold of him that "he's busy at the moment, but I'm sure he'll get back to you." It was even worse when he'd asked you to set up the introduction, then left the person (usually a colleague of mine, or another figure in the industry) hanging. Giving excuses I felt was part of my job to help protect my boss, since at the time, I believe he had protected me as far back at Black Isle and it was one of the reasons I joined up with Obsidian.
I did have to quietly warn people I know not to count on Feargus to show up to conventions he agrees to go to, as he would often develop a sudden emergency shortly before the event (or sometimes, miss the flight entirely). It became especially ****ty when they'd advertised his presence well in advance.
But yes, I admit my public-facing message with Feargus was not negative - it couldn't be. At Obsidian, however, it was a different communication process and observations that got worse the more closely you worked with him and saw how decisions were made. The last year at Obsidian I worked especially closely with Feargus, and I got to see much more of his management style than I ever had - especially how he treated other employees.It just never ends.
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Seems like Deadfire literally just becomes "Get Hellwalker to 19 hit the might/critical chance cap, win." then. Both those high level abilities are outrageous. Oh and apparently crit gives you +50% pen, so you won't even need to empower inner death really.
Definitely no need to multiclass monk now.
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Also there's
And lasting empower for +20% hostile effect duration.
Resonant strikes triggering off double blunderbuss fun times.
*Five hundred percent crit damage and automatic overpenetration/accuracy*
That seems far, far better than the Ranger pass through on crit ability if you multi class, or whatever Monk/Rogue has going for it for ranged attacks. Single class Hellwalker it is.
The only question would be Nature Godlike or Hearth Orlan.
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Not necessarily, could just mean that POTD is merely hard with some attribute scaling formula and they haven't done a manual pass on the encounters. Most important thing IMO is that Veteran is much more difficult than Hard, first game really suffered from PotD being PotD and hard being extremely easy, and normal being ???.
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Pretty simple, if one of the 5 Blunderbuss pellets crit's, do you get an entire new Blunderbuss attack all over again with all 5 pellets, or is it just 1 extra pellet?
I assume it's just 1 extra pellet is applied, because surely it can't be the first one. Surely.
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Actually not sure what I'll do now that Soul Blade/Bleak Walker has been brought down to earth now that Flames of Devotion numbers aren't quite as high. Maybe I'll still roll that, but Definitely don't really want to play a Cipher that is casting constantly.
Maybe one of the Helwaker with guns builds? helwaker/Wizard with the summoned Pike doesn't sound bad at all either.
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Pretty much everything is multiplicative though, it's not "oh whoops one thing is multi and shouldn't be"
Sounds like they just accidentally wiffed the entire balance progression in the beta at a certain point then bedded it down for release. The armor setup shouldn't be naked vs paladin multiclass stacking DR to the eyeballs like it is now.
What'll happen is the same as in PoE1, 2.0 patches will change everything and invalidate old builds in 9 months, until then the power of multiplication stacking will make, shockingly, an unbalanced Josh Sawyer RPG.
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Expect: Baldur's gate 2. Game with double the budget or more of PoE1 that made Obsidian an 8 figure sum should be a brilliant 95 on metacritic masterpiece. Level design will be on par with the extraordinarily well done White March 2.
Reality: quests won't be as interesting as Larian's or CD Projects, writing in general will feel like a slight let down because of turnover at Obsidian, combat will have very little CC at all and pretty much just be a damage range between both parties, unlike in BG2 where managing mage CC was king, and PoE1 where it was tank and spank with disengage. All the hype will lead to mild 8/10 disappointment followed by enjoyment.
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I'm not sure if I'll play more casters this time around. There are classes which are "easy," and low micro, aka fighters and Paladins using the AI system to program a Flames of Devotion loop, and then there are casters throwing around CC which are high micro. BG2 was fine when you were controlling 3 casters in a 6 man party, Pillars got extremely hectic when you were microing 4 casters out of 6.
The AI system might change all of that though, if I can automate my priest buffs it might be high micro tanks for days.
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No, but good question.
Aside from making up what Obsidian chose to never pay me, I set aside a legal fund to deal with any repercussions, and I will fight anything they bring to the table, tooth and nail. I welcome it.
If confronted with evil (as categorized by existing employees who will soon resign - check back in a week or two for the latest round, even though one of them dropped yesterday), I will be prepared to fight it. I guarantee I have more in my bank account than Obsidian does, since they rarely think more than 2 months in advance - and unfortunately, their very, very expensive lawyer charges by the hour, which is unfortunate, but he knows, remora-like, what to attach himself to to get the most financial gain.
But it's all okay - Paradox has already been in touch, and they aren't too happy with how Obsidian handled the work they asked for. Future revelations will likely be much more fun than mine.
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Hey Chris, Now that you have burned all of your bridges isn't time to finish Arcanum
It is true, I will never get work again. What will I do? (I resisted adding a dramatic gasp to this, but I might do so in an edit.)
Unrelated (kidding but serious), I am happy to say I've been employed as a writer for Ghost Story Games (formerly Irrational) ever since my departure from Obsidian, and Ghost Story is great and their lore is amazing. Plus, their designers are smart (yes, Drew, I mean you) and I like what Ken Levine brings to characters very, very much.
I will expound later, after I desperately try and sift through my meager options, which don't include 10+ other companies doing exciting narrative **** - and not all of them in the States, thank god, because... well, U.S. games have a very safe feel to them.
The short of it is that none of the dozens of companies who reached out to me has ever cared overmuch about Obsidian and any troubles, because, well, it's Obsidian - most companies have bigger concerns to worry about.
Obsidian can keep doing whatever it is they do best. I wasn't sure what that was before my departure. I'm still not sure, beyond "I think it's a BG thing"... but there's often no mention of BioWare and their design principles when this is said. I will say Black Isle (Studios) would never have survived without what BioWare licensed to them (the Infinity Engine).
My take? I wish the developers well, but upper management? Get your **** together because the future is uncertain if you can't even develop and rely on your own tech.
For anyone thinking Chris is at all unemployed, Ghost Story games are the Bioshock guys doing "something" for 2K
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The MIG bonus is multiplicative in Deadfire. So every damage roll you do will get affected by your dmg mods like crit (+25% weapon base damage), overpenetration (+30% base) and so on and THEN the MIG bonus comes aorund and multiplies with that. In PoE is was simply an additive bonus. That's why MIG is much more important now. Imagine a Rogue with Sneak Attack and Backstab (+150%), doing a crit and he has 20 MIG (*1.6 dmg mod). Backstab's bonus of 150% gets multiplied by 1.6 and is worth 240% all of a sudden. Sneak Attack is pumped from 50% to 80%, the crit does +40% instead of +25% and so on.
More INT will lead to a longer paralyze and also a bigger cone. And also a longer linger time of your phrases!
oh what, that's insane. Sawyer went from "attributes don't matter" all the way in the other direction now? Unbelievable
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i really wish companions either had all their unique specializations or would allow for sub-classes..... unique specializations are just more interesting and aloths split personality could make for a great one...
Guess you're in a for a surprise then...
Critic/Reviewer?
It's already public knowledge that Pallegina and all the other companions have their own subclass no? They just only get to choose between 3 combinations, not all of them according to the other thread
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i really wish companions either had all their unique specializations or would allow for sub-classes..... unique specializations are just more interesting and aloths split personality could make for a great one...
Guess you're in a for a surprise then...
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If all of society applied the standard of evidence to convict to every wrongdoing #metoo pretty much would never have happened and Harvey Weinstein would be making movies. The burden of proof for saying "someone did something bad" in public should not be the same level of evidence needed to convict someone of a crime.
Also he's a big boy he probably knows if he is shooting himself in the foot or not over this. I wouldn't worry about him financially when he's incredibly well regarded across the industry.
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Do we know how far off the release build the backer beta is? Like do we know if they've changed mechanics for say damage penetration (I'm trying to figure out what influences damage of flames of devotion's burn/corrode bonus damage, apparently all modifiers that apply to the main weapon also apply to flames of devotion damage, and the burn/corrode damage is applied as separate lashes). Aka Flames of Devotion is probably amazing(ly over tuned) and is going to wreck made faces.
Or is there potential that there has been changes to core mechanics like what might modifies, what intellect modifies etc, since the last beta and nobody will know until "influencers" review the game?
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All the talk of refunds and boycotts are actually super effective because overall brand sentiment actually translates extremely well into impacting your product. It doesn't impact the bottom line on THIS product because most people are too lazy to cancel pre-orders, but on the sequel and DLC it sure as hell does impact sales and DLC attachment rates.
Like the honest to god actual reason that most of corporate America actually just isn't as unethical as Comcast because it's actually unprofitable to be unethical. EA has actually made a significant effort in this area because they've realized this which is why they canned ME:A so fast and basically were willing to write off micro transactions in Star Wars.
It's just super hard to sell something new when you are going uphill in terms of brand sentiment. The original product probably has a lot of sunk cost in terms of marketing and users already making their judgments on it even if a scandal pops up halfway through. They've already made the decision to purchase months before and have a significant sunk cost in terms of time spent watching marketing and their own anticipation.
But they are noticeably less accepting of your new stuff when the brand sentiment goes down because they don't have any sunk cost spent paying attention to the product.
Even if the boycott doesn't impact sales all the people selling stuff cringe hard when anything negative stuff hits the wall, but at the same time they need to be held accountable for unethical behavior otherwise bad stuff keeps happening.
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Deleting accounts is bad practice because suddenly their email/IP address information disappears from your system, which means no email/IP information for spam filter or for picking up multi-accounts. Database dependencies etc. If you delete Avellone's account, then Avellone makes a multiaccount to post racist abuse for example, if you deleted Avellone's account you'd have zero chance of catching him (you'd also have zero chance if he VPN'd up but hey that's the internet. Afaik IPB 3.0 doesn't allow you to sniff user packets for MAC address in the Admin panel but you can do that manually if you are so inclined).
Nobody ever deletes accounts on IPB on almost all forums, even though that is technically a feature that leaves all the old posts up under a "deleted user" with a blank avatar, it's just bad practice. Probably should just make sure the usergroup says he's left the company and leave it at that.
But "why isn't my account deleted" is a conversation users have with mods super commonly, and that's the answer. Weirdo new European data laws excepted, no you don't have a right to have your IP address data deleted off the system because that's how you filter out trolls.
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RPG Codex also actually organised and set up the interview with Avellone that Avellone then volunteered the answers for which started this whole mess so :shrug: when you actually organise game journalism things happen on your site
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I'm not saying Obsidian are evil, just that Chris' allegations are not necessarily wrong and he isn't someone you can't trust to talk about Obsidian having issues that are related to the senior management.
Him writing too much for Durance isn't Obsidian's fault, the issue is how Obsidian reacted to it and is expounded on at length why they were unprofessional in their reaction in the Codex posts that seemingly are coming out every hour at this point from Chris. Yes he's probably disorganised and probably not the perfect game director, but he has said repeatedly he doesn't think he's that good at game directing, there have been multiple quotes on that over the years. The issue isn't the overwriting for Durance or his bad project management on Alpha etc, because he has absolutely confessed to that fact over the years. The issue is how he was treated on leaving and how true his allegations that Fergus and co are not running the company particularly well are.
It's one thing to write too much for your characters and put your hand up, it's another to do a bad job then be treated unprofessionally by management about it then for the solution to be ballsed up.
Also re your points about Chris being Obsidian and being responsible for all these issues, that's something he actually addressed in RPGCodex posts that aren't copied over. Chris got no severance from Obsidian or stock, he apparently did not have an ownership stake and wasn't in any position to overrule Fergus. The picture of Chris as a founding shareholder who let things happen doesn't jar with him saying he left with nothing and how Fergus pretty much overruled the structure he set down for narrative design at Obsidian.
You can't really say it's Chris screwing the business deals when he's never ever held a job title that involved signing said business deals, he's always been "lead creative director" or narrative lead or somesuch. He's responsible for the games and product he made, not the jilted games he wasn't a part of because he's not Fergus signing the deals.
He also said Obsidian/Paradox offered him a role on Tyranny because apparently he "had" to be part of that game according to Paradox, but he said no and apparently was not involved after he left.
The Kotor2 Lucasfilm story has pretty much never been gainsaid afaik and the idea that it wasn't a holiday deadline issue is interesting, I'd like to see Fergus talk about that because that story is widely believed. But the fact you cite Fergus openly saying it was his ****up means that Chris is wrong about Fergus not being the sharpest pencil is a bit weird.
I also never said that bad management caused the Microsoft situation, I'm saying that the Tyranny situation and the Stick of Truth situation and the Glassdoor reviews mean that the burden of proof is not on Chris to prove that Obsidian are anything other than saints. Which is fair enough.
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Although sadly lately Avellone has come across to me as that old saying: "run into a jerk today, you ran into a jerk - run into jerks ALL day, maybe you're the jerk" - but that's probably because I rarely encounter interviews with him these days unless they're linked on this board, and this board generally links the clickbait. I mean, seriously, what's up with the BuzzFeed preamble? "What former employees say about Obsidian will BLOW your MIND!"
I think it's fair to say though that Avellone has never given the impression of being a jerk. The quiet guy in the corner who does his own thing and writes way too much for Durance and isn't the cool kid in the yard like Josh, yes definitely.
But keep in mind he is happily employed as a freelancer at a number of shops and is generally welcomed by a huge sections of the industry on a regular basis. He was invited back to work on Into the Breach after doing FTL. You generally do not invite someone back a second time if you don't like them and they are jerks.
Meanwhile, looking at Obsidian, Matt Stone and Trey Parker have referred to their fairly poor relationship with Obsidian working on the Stick of Truth, a game that Josh and Trey pretty much gave Obsidian to make as a love gesture to the studio from what I understand, since they are huge RPG fans. Sequel moves to Ubisoft.
According to Avellone's post earlier, Obsidian shadily lent devs whose salary was paid by Paradox to their own project, and after the completion of Tyranny, largely a financial failure almost entirely due to the fact some genius release it in the first two weeks of November next to 50 AAA games instead of delaying it a few months to January, Paradox has not published PoE2.
So when Obsidian seemingly has a history of seemingly burning business relationships behind them like that, and shall we say a troubled history delivering games on schedule and bug free, things start to be a little more suspicious.
All of Chris' talks about Feargus not setting standards, poor performance by senior management, while he's seemingly welcomed and chummy with almost all the people he used to work with? And Obsidian's Glassdoor entries being what they are? Maybe he isn't making all of this up.
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Chris Avellone: The Final Frontier
in Computer and Console
Posted · Edited by Urthor
Chris Avellone is making this all up without a shred of proof and Fergus' sister being employed on the front desk of the company is all your imagination :thinkingHD: