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I would imagine 1. To keep things on budget and on time and 2. Rein in mission creep.

It's p. interesting to me that all the people on other forums who I used to argue with over Bioware's inherently rigid design philosophy post-KOTOR and the winnowing of C&C in their games have now openly expressed that they're done with the company. They're pretty level-headed folks, too, not BSN types. To be fair, for most of them the frustration has to do with the second blatant instance in as many consecutive games of major day-one DLC and the squandering of the Dragon Age franchise. With Mass Effect now definitely finished in its current form, there's just nothing to look forward to. That will probably change when / if they announce whatever IP they're working on next.

I wrote thing

Man I'm going to be dreading checking my email every morning for the next few weeks, waiting for Obsidz's obit. If the owners haven't been paid in 6 months then it stands to reason that 100% of all SP income is going into keeping the ship afloat. They need another project, yesterday. Godspeed to all those laid off. Rough break.

It's worth noting that one of the more interesting things about ME3 is how it works w/r/t Wrex.

There is some notable reactivity in the third game to choices made in the first two. Not as much as in The Witcher or AP, of course, but it's there. The thing is that it almost exclusively relates not to different situations that the player is put in but in which characters are involved in scenes. For example

I assume a full green bar gives you the third (green) choice in the Final Moments of the game. There are a number of different tiers of earth-****edupedness that EWA determines. Like I think if you go in at or near minimum . Don't quote me on that one, though. The minimum for the "surprise ending" is 4,000. You fill the bar well before you hit that number.

One hopes, but they stuck with the "everything in DA2 is deliberate" line for months and months despite it being in all respects a more obvious rush job than that one 15 minute section of ME3. The rest of the game feels pretty well cared for.

Also fwiw the scuttlebutt is that the story architect of ME (Drew... Karpyshyn, I think?) had a more coherent ending drafted but somewhere along ME3's development cycle he got shuffled to SW:TOR, leading the team to do last-minute rewrites (he resigned from the company last month, which may or may not be telling) resulting in ME3's ending, which honestly feels like it came from another game entirely. I'd believe it, if just for the fact that the ominous dark matter / star death mystery from the Tali portion of ME2 (which I think Karpyshyn was responsible for) seemed like heavy foreshadowing but is entirely ignored in ME3. Apparently the original ending had something to do with that. Also rumor is that the first big DLC will be involve taking back Omega from Cerberus with Aria. Seems like a really safe bet. ALSO also, , but of course you all knew that

The ending is very clearly supposed to be final. I would be very, very surprised if they sprung on revisionist DLC (both because I would think Bioware is satisfied with what they put out, and because doing so would set a new-low precedent for DLC content). I can accept the hokum that was the Final Choice (it's not like I wasn't expecting metaphysical fluff, given Bioware's cliche-heavy MO), but I was expecting something along the lines of Throne of Bhaal or the Fallouts or even Dragon Age: Origins, in which you get denouements for your party / the major factions of your game. At the very least, I wanted some big battle scenes of my ME2 party members fighting against the Reapers on Earth. The incoherence of the final cutscenes suggests to me that the ending was rushed, but it baffles me that EA would elect not to give Bioware the development time to wrap up a flagship title from a flagship studio. Maybe I've been overestimating the amount of pull Ray & Greg have with corporate.

FYI the "optimal ending" EWA number is 4000, not 5000. Still a high bar with the no multi / no iOS rate of 50%

That was not just bad but KOTOR2-caliber baffling. "there's got to be a mountain of cut content" baffling.

Tim Cain certainly comes off as very much invested in his unadulterated creative vision

There's a "teaser video" out but it's a fake made by someone masquerading as Beamdogger, btw

a fan-made port doesn't really preclude the production of a commercial version of the same. I doubt GemRB would really cut into their margins, especially if they included "new and updated content" (including but not limited to an HD makeover)

Cool deal! I imagine this one will be more somber and serious than PAX East back in Alpha Protocol day (no apple juice ) but I really wish I could see it. The AP one was recorded by... SEGA, I think. Hopefully someone gets on this as well.

I don't know what the budget for FO1 was, but by all accounts the team wasn't terribly huge.

A horror RPG's not all that difficult to imagine. One could argue that at the root of the experience of horror is loss of control, and that's easy enough to simulate. Since it's fresh in the mind, think of the original Alien, specifically the sequences in which Kane / Lambert / Dallas go out to the derelict ship, or when Dallas is in the air vents, and think of placing the player in the role of Ripley in those scenes. Better yet, just think of the scenes in Aliens where Ripley is in the troop transport and the marines are advancing into the power plant. You place the player in the scene with characters but don't give full control over them, and force the player to make choices as the pressure escalates (like The Witcher but with characters actually worth caring about). Think of that first scene in Indigo Prophecy / Fahrenheit, and how intense it was the first time you played it. Wouldn't it be nice to have a whole game full of those?

It might seem that way but the degree to which Kickstarter funding is a zero sum game is probably more marginal than we realize. Geeks have deep pockets. Indeed, geek culture as it's currently understood is based almost entirely on consumption. All sorts of things get funded through Kickstarter and the most successful tend to be either nostalgia- or meme-based (see: Pomplamoose, any number of chiptune albums, a thousand "documentaries" about Nintendo games and short films about zombies, etc), and the amount of money that people can raise on the site is really surprising and frequently baffling given how vague their plans often are. There was a musician, for instance (Deakin of Animal Collective) who raised $25,000 for a benefit show / album to take place in Africa, only to basically just make it a vacation. The sky is the limit. That's true, but This is not really true, not the part about Tim Schafer being a household name. There are a number of factors at play here, the greatest of which is probably the rise of social media that is heavily populated by upper-middle class geeks who have a lot of walking around money and deep investment in the memories of media they consumed as children. I would bet you hard cash that what kicked off Schafer's meteoric Kickstarter success was a front-page feature on Reddit. Raising that kind of money with that celerity, it's a near-certainty. And it's not like the cult of Schafer is all that huge. Not a lot of people played Psychonauts, at least, not a lot of people paid for it. Schafer's epoch was the Lucasarts era (in fact a lot of folks probably associate adventure games he wasn't involved in with his name, similar to the ways in which the Obsidz guys still get credit for Baldur's Gate every once in awhile). The thing with Reddit is that what they commit to in their ending-of-It's a Wonderful Life way is often arbitrarily decided and based on knee-jerk sentiment (which can be both good and very, very bad), of which nostalgia is the most obvious. It doesn't take much beyond "visionary 90's game maker starts Kickstarter campaign" to whip folks into a frenzy. And if that doesn't work, the watchword for Kickstarter is novelty. Novelty novelty novelty. slap the word "steampunk" on it and watch your pledges bump. Again, not necessarily the case. The market might be diluted to a certain extent but if Obsidian were to differentiate itself well enough it would have no problem raising money from its cult. From outside that demographic, who knows (add some novelty! Iso-90's design is a start). But Kickstarter is purely speculative (a big part of what makes it such a blessing for artists and a font of gauche spectacles like some youtube video schmuck raising $150,000), so if they set a goal and don't get enough pledges, they haven't wasted anything but the time they put into making and submitting the proposal. And I suppose whatever effort on other projects they could have used with that time. But in all likelihood if Avellone does put up a kickstarter it will be on his own time, because it's not really a huge undertaking.

Even though another Alpha Protocol in the style of the first isn't really possible, I'd be enthused about a semi-sequel. Remember SEGA's promo material for the game, that basically replicated a short sequence of game choices, sans combat? Something like that (like the "choose your own adventure" visual novel that AP was always curiously described as) stretched out to full-length, with various minigames and the like, would be ideal, at least for me. If something in the AP IP is out of the question, I'd still like to see something along the lines of what AP was (allegedly, based on apocryphal sources) going to be in early revisions - a choice / consequence heavy game that relied heavily on drama without being particularly combat-heavy. Like Heavy Rain but less... top-heavy, less melodramatic. Maybe a horror RPG of some sort? I'd prefer another real-world setting, but failing that, a sci-fi or near future setting would be good as well. I watched Children of Men recently and I think its not-quite-current, not-quite-cyberpunk near future would be the sort of thing that would be interesting to explore in a game.

Dude it's Blizzard. Bellyache all you want about their product, whatever, but they made some deeply seminal games in the 90's and were I someone interested in going into the field, they'd be on the top of my list for dream employers. You can also take it as an indication of the respect Obs gets within the industry, that this Giant selected him to be on their team. Remember that Gonzales also jumped ship shortly after adding a AAA game to his list of writing / design credits - it's a huge, huge merit badge in the job market. We have our core guys who seem (knock on wood) like they've chosen Obsidian because it <i>is</i> their dream company. Certainly Avellone and Sawyer seems to be in it for the long haul, and not just because they get the big fancy titles. Then you have Matt McLean, who's leading a project (hopefully not a springboard to Activision! Fingers crossed!) and seems like he's committed. Turnover means open positions, and any open position could turn into a great, great asset to the company. A new Tim Caine or MCA could walk in the door. Turnover happens all the time, we've dealt with really cool people coming and going, but more than perhaps any other, this departure has a certain, bright future and is to be celebrated (some, like Mistoda, left to pursue personal passions at great risk, others like Alex Brandon can't make ends meet in Orange County). Thanks for everything Nat! Godspeed to you.

From a minute or two ago. Seems unlikely to be related to South Park, and VA stuff is generally worked out pretty late in development, right? Or is that just recording? Anyway, just got some folks into Bloodlines so I'd kill to have another good White Wolf game but that seems a bit unlikely given the sorry state of White Wolf as a company and the Vampire MMO (though maybe Activision still has rights?). More importantly, it's been outright stated that Josh's project is an original IP, possibly the "Like Tolkien if Sauron won" universe Feargus talked up once a year or two back.

I imagine it's an opportunity cost thing, similar to what MCA said on Twitter in regard to Alpha Protocol getting a smaller-scale downloadable sequel. Smaller projects take less time to crank out, have lower overhead and thus need fewer sales to break even, but you're still paying team members full-time, plus you have to add in the work that they could've been doing on other projects in your cost assessment. Even a small number of set-aside people could be responsible for the successful implementation of good content on another project, content that in their absence would be cut. Worse still, that lack of staff could cause delays or other problems. So you have to weigh the benefit of making a small game against the cost of diverting manpower from the games they would otherwise be working on. I believe MCA intimated that when you look at it this way, the costs of making smaller games gets really high, unless you score a massive hit. With that quote I think what he was saying is that Obsidian is not in a strong enough position to start taking on those micro-projects at this point without it damaging the business model they use (3 AAA products in development at once), and moreover there's the implication of working outside the publisher system and just going straight to digital distributors, which adds on a whole mess of other concerns. Getting to a point where Obsidz can develop and publish its own games from a financially sound position might take awhile.

Industrygamers MCA interview

I've been DMing a (retooled / rejiggered) Van Buren PBP game. It's a bit of slow going (as PBP games are wont to be) and my sea leg acquisition is definitely visible at points but we're nearing the end of the prologue (the Tibbets / Big Empty prison, renamed The Big Top to avoid clashing with Old World Blues). Only took us 2 months and one player dropout! You can read the thing here, if that's your bag. I've been heavily drawing from advice / documentation I acquired from Josh back in NWN2 day, when he lacked the good wisdom to prevent fans from directly contacting him. I also collaborated with Ausir to some extent when I was first pulling it all together. Good times.