Blarghagh
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Posts posted by Blarghagh
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What would you have them say?Obsidian's silence is not reassuring.
*Sigh*
I don't know, I thought maybe they could have dispelled some of the stuff Avellone brought up.
If they'd be frank, they'd look unprofessional and petty. If they'd be professional, they'd look like a big robot company versus a popular indie darling. I can't imagine it changing anybody's mind and will probably both bring more bad publicity either way while bringing legitimacy to Chris' comments. I don't expect them to respond, I don't know what they stand to gain. Also, I'm sure all of them prefer to focus on Deadfire's impending release.
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RPG Codex was one of the communities basically 100% guaranteed to want to believe every part of this. That's why it's there.
Aren't they saying we'd be the ones to disbelieve it
This IS Obsidian's board. That's a fair expectation. But this board seems more apathetic about this subject than anything. I expected to wake up to a much larger thread, but apparently "Chris hates Obsidian" isn't as big a draw on this board as posting "Romance in PoE II".
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Sorry to hear that Oro.
Game dev is rough.-
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Yeah, not to mention then maybe I, as someone totally in Obsidian's corner and who can't stand CA's whiny, passive-aggressive narcissism, should pull my support of 'Pathfinder: Kingmaker' because he is involved with that project? It would never even occur to me to do something like that.
I meant his comments might be reason for lost sales. We had already one person in this thread to cancel his pledge. I am wondering how many more people could do the same...
Eh, I doubt anyone is going to be losing their job as a result of Avellone's comments on the Codex of all places.Wherever the truth lies, is not for me to judge, but pulling this type of stunt, just before the flagship of the company is released is a pretty big **** move on part of Avellone, which could mean that some people might lose jobs, if this impacts the sales of the game in a meaningful way.
And for that very reason, I am more inclined to believe, that Obsidian, is in this case the lesser kind of evil...
Even 1000 people cancelling, means about 50000 USD to be paid back. And that is basically money for 1 person contracted for 1 year...
Or maybe that 1 person is just one person. Or maybe that one person represents 10 percent, which is still just a handful of people.
Honestly the idea that 1000 people are going to cancel over this is fairly absurd. Single digits seems a better bet.
The only think about this whole thread that blows my mind is that there actually exist people for whom something as utterly stupid and meaningless and laughable as this story evokes such a passionate emotional response in them. I choose to reserve my passionate emotional responses to stories about children being gassed to death in Syria.
Completely off-topic, but when I did 'community engagement' for a terrible local mobile game company I'd often see those public social media "I DEMAND A REFUND" posts but at the time I also ran the customer service mail account and I'd rarely see a refund request. Two things confused me:
1) I don't know why they didn't follow through, our games were completely awful.
2) About a fourth of those social media tantrums came from territories the game wasn't even available in, so they could never have purchased it in the first place.
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In response to Josh saying RPGs don't always have to be isometric RTwP party-based RPGs, the entire point of this thread was to say 'yes, they do, everything else sucks' and I'm the one being unfair because I exaggerated how they all look the same on the surface?
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I agree, I hated the ending. It felt manipulative and will obviously be undone by the time the next one rolls around.
Loved everything up to the ending though.
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Aww, but step 9 is one of my favorites.
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And by the way, I'm not sure how you figure that the planned game was "thrice" the size of what we got. The droid factory was, what, 90% done? The droid planet was ~50%. And there was another planet left on the cutting room floor before any serious work was done on it, right? The disjointed endgame was the result of cutting those two elements and the necessary plot rearrangement late in the dev cycle to get the game out the door for Christmas no matter what.
Getting into this in a spoiler, since nobody wants to see me rant about how much I lament the state of KotOR II yet again.
I find the idea that the droid factory was 90% finished unlikely. It's got art assets and voice lines. There's nothing in that zone. Even the modders couldn't turn it into more than walking through some cutscenes. Besides that, I'd be hard pressed to say the zones that actually made it in the game are 90% finished.
Just talking art assets alone, nothing in the game has finished textures up to the standard of the original, at some point someone seems to have just given up and decided specular maps weren't worth the hassle and the lighting engine is either unused or broken in most of the game. A lot of the geometry is bugged or broken.
Outside of art assets there's abandoned stretches of content, placeholder encounters and itemization and the absence of a difficulty curve. But most of that content planned concerns branching story paths and character content. Even ignoring the nonexistent finale, there's still different planned fates of Telos and Atris, Czerka, unfinished or removed companions such as the Devaronian, the third acts of Dantooine and Nar Shaddaa of which fractions were implemented.
Even Obsidian's big selling point and the very vocal point of this game's companion design, the influence systen, doesn't work. The interface is in it and it changes some stats, but they never got time to implement the branching paths where it affected the character's fates and personalities. Bao'Dur may be 100% darkside but he'll still chew you out for kicking a puppy. The influence system, pretty much, got cut outside of a basic interface change.
Maybe the word thrice was an exaggeration, but I don't think the game Chris Avellone designed ever stood a chance at becoming a reality and tbh my view of him as a designer never quite recovered from that realization.
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Eh, QA gets overblamed when it comes to bugs and such. QA can test stuff until they're blue in the face, but if the developers keep updating and breaking it again it's no use. Most cases of buggy games can be traced back to QA not having enough time to test and, more importantly, retest. Most game-breakers that games launch with are the result of devs implementing a feature or fixing another bug at the last second, and not leaving time to test if that didn't break something new.
But I feel like I oversimplified that. Let's put it differently - who decides what the core game designs are and which are expendable, come time to cut things? In my experience, it's the lead designer. With the exception of massive technical features, if the lead designer says "we have time to do this", the rest of the team generally just has to deal with it and try their best to live up to that, and usually they can't even with deadline crunch. Feature creep is a game killer.
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Since when is specific QA work a designer's responsibility?
In my personal experience, QA can't test my stuff if I haven't had time to put it in.
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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.
I think the two of us are poorly matched in communication styles, we seem to both do a lot of "I didn't say that"
I didn't say he screwed the business deals, and like I said Feargus has been pretty open about his failures. Regarding KotOR II, I don't have the source on hand right now but Feargus admitted in an interview that he had gotten verbal confirmation for three more months of development time. His (massive) blunder came when he completely neglected to get the contract amended or get it in writing in any other way. Then LucasArts restructured, and the old contract was still in place, whereas Obsidian had been developing under the assumption their deadline was further away. I'd be the last to imply that Feargus can't be an idiot.
Where I consider Chris to have a major hand is generally in mismanagement of time and budget given to him as lead designer. Like I said, those three months are unlikely to have made a dent considering the scope and amount of content cut from KotOR II, at most it would have given them time to polish what they had up a bit more. It's not as simple as "he just wrote a bit too much for Durance", it's exemplary of a developer who consistently overestimates and overreaches. If we take Eric's statements about Durance and GM to be true, Chris' overreach on his two PoE companions alone cost them significant amounts of development time to implement a workable version. Apply this style to the lead of the entire design division of a game team and your game team and it's easy to see how KotOR II and Alpha Protocol ended up as the dictionary definitions of "feature creep".
Of course, that blame doesn't fall squarely on Chris' shoulders as game development is a team effort, and especially upper management should have caught this (and certainly never put Chris in that role again after KotOR II) but the consistent finger pointing on his part just serves to remind me of Peter Molyneux.
I'll take your word over his foundership and stakes, since I don't visit the Codex. It's odd since he's been widely credited as a founder of Obsidian, and it makes me wonder what kind of leverage they even had over him. But like I said, I'm sure Obsidian did screw this up. I'm just not buying Chris' version of events where he's the put upon underdog, especially after reading his answer to "how did you try to change from higher up the totem pole" was "I tried to have a conversation about it".
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As always, Twitter is to blame for this.
The internet in a nutshell.
Also, I'm pretty sure most people condemned that douche and his dogpiling brigade.
My favourite response was famous internet fat-man Boogie2988 posting a picture of a fat suit and posting "My culture is not your Halloween costume".
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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.
I feel like I'm being roped in to defending Obsidian, which is not my intent. I'm not saying he is making it up, and you bring up valid points. I'm sure Obsidian made mistakes, otherwise Chris wouldn't have [left/gotten fired/speculate as you wish] especially since he was Obsidian's big name, industry cred, cult darling seller. I'm not surprised Obsidian tried to dump those non-compete non-disclose clauses on him, and that's an awful move. But here's the thing, precisely BECAUSE he was their cult cred lead-singer-leaving-the-band-situation, I don't buy his "they pushed me out and it's all their fault" narrative for a second. You don't kick your main draw to the curb for ****s and giggles.
You're totally correct that Obsidian has a record of poor business decisions but for a lot of that time, Chris was Obsidian. And he has a similar history even before that. There's a reason all this freelance work he does is as a writer. In fact, by his own admission he was invited back to write on Tyranny (supposed contractual nonsense notwithstanding). Chris' portfolio coincides with the most egregious examples of Obsidian's "troubled history" with finished and complete products, and for such a big name in the industry a disproportionally huge number of projects he worked on, before and while at Obisidian, got cancelled. It's a testament to the power of his writing that he still got senior roles after serving as a lead designer on KotOR II, whose very public development failure and unfinished nature are all but legendary and would have buried the career of most other game designers.
Look back at early Chris interviews regarding KotOR2 cut content: Chris' plans seem to describe a game three times the size of what we got, and even the extra three months Obsidian didn't get wouldn't have made a dent in that. Alpha Protocol, his last credit in a lead design capacity exemplified it so much that the opening blurb on its Wikipedia page says that "it was generally considered by [critics] to be ambitious, but executed many concepts poorly". It's hard to find an interview where Chris doesn't lament plans or content he "was forced to cut" on games he had a lot of creative control over. Eric's description of the trouble he had implementing Chris' PoE characters because they had been developed with ambition and vision that was completely out of spec imply this hasn't changed. From an outside looking in perspective, it's hard for me not to conclude Chris simply can't work with budget, time or technological restrictions. If your content is always getting cut or releasing unfinished, especially when you're in a management role on those games, how feasible is it to keep claiming it's always someone else's fault?
This consistent finger pointing (remember when Chris threw LucasArts under the bus for KotOR II's ending, and Feargus stepped in to admit he screwed up?) paints Chris in a poor light and makes it hard for me to believe him at his word. We KNOW Obsidian has made a lot of terrible business moves because Obsidian has been relatively open about them - that LucasArts thing, Bethesda and the Metacritic deal, Microsoft cancelling their contracts and generally they take responsibility. Chris, however, generally puts the blame on others. If you keep finding yourself getting screwed, maybe it's time to consider how you keep ending up in that situation. That's what I meant with my "run into jerks all day" saying, I wasn't calling him a jerk. However, that quote you posted before you said he never comes across as a jerk, where he literally school-yard gossips about Eric not getting along with the other children in response to Eric defending his design decisions? Yeah...
Unpopular opinion: I think his departure from Obsidian, willing or otherwise, came far too late anyway. I think he's a fantastic writer and his newfound success as a freelance writer seems best for everyone, including his fans, since his poor game design work always just makes it harder to enjoy his stories. His cult status only served both parties to stay in a status quo that was never going to work and is probaly the reason this escalated to the point it did. I'm excited to see more of Chris' writing in games, but equally excited he's not filling senior roles. He's at his best as an idea man and a wordsmith. That said, it's sad that it's lead to bad blood and drama.
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These expectations, however, are now apparently in use today, because it’s not what they were about, but who speaks to them – which is a topic for another time. In my opinion, the truest test of a manager is they treat the facts they are evaluating as facts, not judging them based on the person relating those facts. True story from a DS3 designer (who left for Blizzard after Stormlands) - we did one not-so-amusing test of this during Dungeon Siege 3, where we had two people tell Feargus the exact same thing, and he dismissed one out of hand, but gladly listened and agreed with the other – even though they were both telling him the exact same thing. At that point, I did break a little inside, but I added it to my manager post-mortem of what not to do as a manager.Haha, really? This sounds like a poor scientific experiment. What's the lesson here for managers? "If you disagree with one person who comes to you with a problem, you're not allowed to change your mind if more people say the same thing"?
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Now Eric Fenstermaker is slinging some mud himself, publicly accuses Avellone of sabotaging PoE's development "at a vital stage":
If Avellone hurt PoE's development that much, maybe he really was fired?
This doesn't seem like mudslinging? This just seems like defending himself.
Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but as I recall Eric Fenstermaker left Obsidian in 2016 and is now a freelance writer/designer just like Avellone. So the Codex labeling him as "Obsidian Entertainment" seems a misrepresentation.
https://forums.obsidian.net/topic/89393-is-eric-fenstermaker-still-at-obsidian/?p=1848340
Fenstermaker's account does jive with my personal observation that half the time Chris describes having worked on a project at Obs (or anywhere really) he's talking about all the things he was forced to cut. Despite his claims of having accepted it as part of the industry his preoccupation with it makes it seems he has a lot of trouble with killing his darlings. I think Avellone's style and personality just didn't fit in a management position because of that and I can imagine this would cause a lot of friction and bad blood. That's all speculation on my part, though.
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!"
Either way, I do think Obsidian, based on Chris' account, possibly made some very questionable business and moral decisions dealing with his departure. But I doubt it's a good idea for Obsidian to publicly try to defend themselves. Chris is a critical darling and will always look like the underdog in the face of a company the size of Obsidian. They'll just come across as corporate speak regardless of what they say. Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
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Wow, acknowledging RPGs don't have to but do have other places to go and more ways to work than remaking BG1 all the time is apparently a very controversial view?
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Speaking of horrible creature features, I find myself unusually hyped for what looks like an awful, awful film: THE JURASSIC GAMES
SyFy style mashup between Death Race, Hunger Games, Ready Player One and Jurassic Park? I'm in, no matter how **** it looks.
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Thought that if I ever have a band I want to name it SWTOR Body Type 4
It was a slow day
My fantasy band name is Engywook, because I want to one up that ridiculous "Atreyu" metal band by picking a more minor character from The Neverending Story.
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For those not following the gossip chain, Infinitron's post above is Part 3 of this week's WTFBBQ Drama
Previously on WTFBBQ Drama
Part 1: The Initial Post.
Part 2: The Rebuttal.
I find it interesting how Avellone and Fenstermaker describe completely different experiences.
Also, sadly non-compete clauses wherever you can get away with them seems the standard in the game industry nowadays.
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Eh, I felt the opposite. Considering the spectacle is the only thing that made the original worth being a film instead of a saturday morning cartoon, this one was a waste of time entirely.Watched Pacific Rim: Uprising.
Not sure what the critics are on when they say this is worse than the first one. This was... almost a movie while the first one was just pretty in del Torro's usual unique visual style. And while I could see the twist coming (no, wait, they even spelled out the twist in dialogue the first minutes) the actual implementation was better than anticipated.
Eh, of course it's still saddled with the inanities of the setting but at least this time around nobody's pretending that one of the Jaegers is actually analogue and can withstand an EMP (while still having the usual brain to mech interface, right).
I'll take 'just pretty in Del Toro's style' over this any day, since that means it had atmosphere, pacing, dynamic choreography, scene composition, good sound design and all those things any action movie should have to be, at least, watcheable. Uprising had some of the worst and most boring action scenes I've ever seen. The worst creature feature since Godzila 98.
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I love cartoony designs, but they have to fit. WarCraft is silly, so it works. PoE wouldn't be able to get away with it.
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Clearly they'd be organic, vegan and gluten-free. No butter, because those are expensive enough.
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Lions being social felines is the exception to the rule, right? Are there any others?
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I spoiled myself with who lives and dies in the Avengers. A few surprises for me!
Don't worry, this movie felt so much like a comic book crossover event that you never stop feeling like they'll obviously reset the whole thing. The accuracy is uncanny.
Half the casualties having sequels in active development doesn't help.
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I lol'd. Here's a fan translation:YMD is superior above all else, and the American format is actually MD,Y a colloquial reformatting of YMD.
"We completely screwed up the best system by misusing it since forever and being morons, but that original system nobody even uses was better than yours so therefore our malformed idiocy must still be better than yours."
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Game dev is rough.
Chris Avellone: The Final Frontier
in Computer and Console
Posted
You mean us? Mods here are just volunteer fans. We've got no more special say or insight into Obsidian than anyone else. Not sure how we'd confirm anything. That I'm personally not a fan of Chris' body of work other than his writing does not really mean anything for Obsidian.