Flouride

While Starks and Poddar work on TOW2 it doesn't necessarily mean that they won't work on Avowed. At least before this Obsidian has used pretty much all of their narrative designers on each game. Naturally Starks and Poddar will be more focused on TOW2 and won't have as much work on other projects, but they will still share some of workload if there's enough work to go around. You might not see a companion written by either of them on Avowed, but writing a few NPC's for the game is something that they could do. As far as I know Obsidian writing staff currently consists of: Carrie Patel (Game Director on Avowed) Megan Starks Paul Kirsch (Working on Avowed) Nitai Poddar Connor Walsh Kate Dollarhyde Kelsey Beachum Jay Turner Josh Sawyer (Creative Director, but writes for the projects he leads) Leonard Boyarsky (at least he wrote for TOW) Daniel McPhee (not sure if he is still around) Olivia Veras (She's an area designer, but has writing credits on Deadfire)

It is a better trailer than the one for Starfield.

Brandon Adler - Game Director Megan Starks - Narrative Designer Nitai Poddar - Narrative Designer Dan Maas - Production Director Kevin Kirst - Lead AI Programmer

Leaked info, where?

Kate Dollarhyde is the Lead Narrative Designers currently on Avowed. Lucien Soulban had that role earlier, but he left to Torque Games.

No idea at all. He has been on the project since summer last year. He worked on Avowed as Gameplay Design Director until July of 2019.

I'm sure there are people at Obsidian who would love to make the 3rd game in the series. Brandon Adler is leading a project of his own, maybe that's Pillars of Eternity 3. He did lead two of the DLC's after all. Naturally the team won't be as large as on Deadfire, but then again is that such a bad thing? It's not like they are in any rush to get it out this time. Obsidian has Outer Worlds DLC #2 coming up next year, Grounded is getting updates almost monthly with the full release scheduled for next year. Avowed is supposedly coming out in late 2022 or early 2023. Sawyer's and Adler's projects have been both worked on for some time now, maybe one of them will revealed sometime next year.

Umm, what? Haven't you checked out how many of the bigger/mid tier indie developers got either bought or just outright quit making games in the 2000s and 2010s? If anything Mr. Slam Dunk should be praised for his efforts in keeping the company up and running for such a long time. Had it not been for Kickstarter we might not have such companies as Double Fine, Larian, InXile and Obsidian left. For a while the playing field for indie developers was really bleak. At least for now there's GamePass and there's Epic that give these companies some options. But if you are trying to make AAA games, you are in a dire place as an indie. The costs are heavy and there aren't that many publishers handing out money.

Nicole Evanich - 3D Character Animator

Compiled a list of all the people mentioned here: Chris Parker - Game Director Lucien Soulban - Lead Narrative Designer Paul Kirsch - Narrative Designer Jorge Salgado - Lead Area Designer (?) Kayd Hendricks - Senior Area Designer Seth May - Area Designer Maxwell Matzenbacher - Senior Combat Designer Martin Smith - Senior System Designer Kevin M. Lee - Senior System Designer (I'm not completely sure on this one) Kyle Koenig - System Designer Nick Carver - Senior Technical Designer Robert Nesler - Art Director Dimitri Berman - Lead Character Artist James Chea - Senior Character Artist Can Etiskol - Senior Character Artist Zoe Nicole-Aprodite Smith - Junior Character Artist Daniel Platt - Senior 3D Artist Bobby Hernandez - Lead Concept Artist Schwinn Masavisut - Concept Artist Hoya Lee - Senior Lighting Artist MaKayla Hensley - Junior VFX Artist Jason Diaz - Animation Director (?) Derek Zivolich - Character Animator Eric Feinberg - Character Animator Amor Santos - Senior Animator Paul Burg - Senior Programmer (He developed the system for world interactions and population management in RDR2) Gabriel Paramo - Senior Gameplay Programmer Jeff Chung - Senior Software Engineer Joseph L. Rubino - Cinematic Director Scott V. Gilmore - Senior Audio Designer Pearl Ko - UX Designer Kimie Kim-Mizutani - UI Artist

I believe he started his own studio.

Few additions: Kimie Kim-Mizutani - UI Artist Seth May - Area Designer Kayd Hendricks - Senior Area Designer

How do you even get those mint chunks? I managed to get 4 because of graphic glitch, but can't seem to break the glass to get the rest.

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2020/07/31/grounded-over-one-million-players/ The little game that could. Big congrats to the team. Well deserved and well beyond anything I expected from the game.

Not necessarily. Those 3 DLCs were planned from the beginning as was post-production support. It really depends on how you work your budget for the game, did you add those things into the original cost of the game or will you keep those as separate things in your books. Those DLCs did create some revenue as well and they must have had a projection on how much they would make from sales. I personally would count the cost based on everything I'm doing for that game. Initial release and development cost, post-production and the DLCs. That's somewhere around 15-25 million dollars. You mark that money for Deadfire, no matter what as you've sold that package to your customers during Fig campaign, Deadfire + DLCs. After Pillars of Eternity they had cash to use, Fig gave them 4? millions dollars. If I'm Feargus, I'll use whatever money I make from Fig campaign and create the DLCs with that money. They planned for the campaign well before and did not promise anything ridiculous or too costly this time. And most likely had a more realistic estimate on how much they would be getting from the campaign. You promise those things as Fig stretch goals that you were most likely going to put into the game in first place and if you don't reach something, that's some money saved. Anything that comes after Deadfire's release date is revenue and is money in the bank. Deadfire might not have made profit, but they are getting money in that they can and will have to spend on the next project if they want to keep their staff and have something to work on after Outer Worlds is done. I don't think it's just Feargus who does that and I'm not taking Avellone's word as canon here either. It's a commonly used trick in the business. You'll have someone working on the game in a phantom role or very diminished role to get a little extra money, that you use for other things. Every cent counts when you are running a studio that burns about a million dollars month.

Coalition and all those studios stuck working on the next FIFA, NBA, NHL games? But, yes. Most studios will want to work on multiple different IPs. While working on FIFA games might give you a guaranteed paycheck each month, any creative type will get sick and tired of doing the same stuff all over again. Feargus even commented on this on the gameindustry.biz interview, and how he wants to be able to shift his workforce from larger projects to smaller projects and vice versa. I think they are well aware that if you have someone working on same kinda games or the same IP for years, at some point that person will jump ship and go work for someone else. When you give those same workers different opportunities from larger scale games set in different IPs and worlds and the smaller projects where they have more of say on the outcome, those workers will stay longer.

Seems like they are not working on the DLCs. Carrie Patel is Game Director on the 1st one and Brandon Adler is the most likely candidate for the 2nd one as his LinkedIn has him working as a Game Director. Though as Cain & Boyarsky are the co-directors on Outer Worlds, I'm gonna presume they are aware what the DLC teams are creating even though they are not fully working on those projects.

That would not make much sense. Outer Worlds got released late last year. No way they started to work on the sequel in 2017 or 2018 when those projects got started. It's a known fact that there is an upcoming "large project" in the works at Obsidian with a very small team working on it currently. It's in early pre-production and will get staffed up as development on other projects allows it. That would make it Project Arkansas or whatever state got it's statehood after that if there's some other small project being made.

Outsourcing. With Microsoft paying for the development, Obsidian can and will use outsourcing on this project. You can get a ton of art assets by outsourcing some of that development to freelancers and other studios. As far as I know Obsidian has multiple Outsourcing Managers working for them, whom they've hired after MS bought them. Just look at the credits for The Outer Worlds: https://www.mobygames.com/game/playstation-4/outer-worlds/credits They used Virtuos studios for a ton of art assets and animation. Chinese labor is just so much cheaper than hiring the same amount of artists and freelancers from USA.

Ah, okay. I didn't do the count myself so thought I would ask. Yes, that would leave about 80 people to work on Alabama, Mississippi and Illinois. The cancelled project did have some of the Pillars of Eternity team working on it. It might have even been Pillars of Eternity 3. (Cancellation occurred in mid/late 2019) In a way it would make sense that they cancelled/postponed that game in favor of Avowed. Two different games set in Eora would be a bit too much, especially if Avowed stole the setting and maybe even parts of plot from Pillars of Eternity 3. Avowed could and should have a bigger impact on Obsidian and their reputation as a whole, where as Pillars of Eternity 3 would be same old stuff. With the limited staff members available (and Feargus not keen on expanding too much), they had to focus on Avowed.

Naturally the issue is money. Back in 2018 Obsidian released Deadfire. That gave them a cash injection (even if it was way less than they expected). 2 years and 7 months ago was in beginning of 2018, Feargus and Obsidian as a company expected high income from Deadfire sales when they started their pre-production on Avowed. Feargus has always been smart with the money side of business and probably dug into the reserves a bit (or just used some of the funds they received from Private Division to fund it or parts of it check Chris Avellone's posts in May 2018 about how this works) while waiting for the payday that was supposed to be Deadfire's release date. Even though Deadfire didn't sell as much as hoped, that's still money in the bank for the company that they can use to fund projects (unless they took a business loan to fund the game in addition to their own cash and Fig money). That money won't naturally last long, when the company burns about 1 million dollars a month. But at that point you most likely aren't gonna cancel the project, since you can't go for 3rd Pillars of Eternity on Fig either when the last one didn't sell well enough. You would have to wait a year for that option to be viable or even more. Now, are you gonna cancel the game your team has been planning for the 5 to 7 months and do something completely different and eat the pre-production costs? Or are you gonna offer it to different companies with Microsoft being one of them. Microsoft liked what they saw based on the pre-production, got interested enough to offer up to buy the company all together and saw rest of the stuff Obsidian was making. Matt Booty and Phil Spencer have been really open and consistent on the fact that they want the companies to decide which projects they want to tackle. Avowed was the one Obsidian wanted to make. Hence when the deal was being set to stone, Obsidian could focus on the project as they didn't have to worry that their money would suddenly run out if they didn't have a publisher. They had just found one and now they don't have to worry about the cost as much as previously. Scope of game most likely got bigger at this point. Deadfire team gets free at this point as well and some of them want to make a game called Grounded (Project Maine) while others create the three dlcs. Alabama got it's statehood before Maine did. So yes, Avowed has been in pre-production before or little after Deadfire got released. If Obsidian was able to announce Grounded late last year(?) that game had been in the works for quite some time. If the project names were the other way around, I would say sponger is full of it, but to me the timeline matches and makes completely sense. Klobrille (well known insider, who knew Obsidian was going the bought way ahead of anyone else) seems to agree.

They also had Project Illinois and Mississippi back then. Avowed went into production after them or at least got it's project name after them. We know that they cancelled at least one project in 2019. Maybe even two. Obsidian didn't have exactly 190 staff members to work on games back then. You forgot that Q&A and all the admin staff are about 20-30 people at Obsidian.

Well two insiders seem to agree on this information. That 7 months in pre-production doesn't mean much. It could and should have been a very small team at that point. Back when Obsidian was bought by Microsoft those insiders were saying that there's a project at Obsidian that Microsoft was really interested in. That project was not The Outer Worlds, nor Grounded. To me that's another proof that Avowed was being worked on in some capacity prior to the announcement that Microsoft has bought the company. Full production on the game obviously started when Microsoft deal finalized. Obsidian started recruiting heavily sometime before the official announcement. Even though the game has been in production for two years now, doesn't mean that team has been quite big in the beginning of "full production". Obsidian has always been quite agile in moving staff members from one project to another. For example concept artists are likely done with Outer Worlds way way sooner than those building the areas into the game. Pre-production and start of production relies quite heavily on concept art, so when environment artists and animators etc. jump in, they have a base idea of what the Leads / Art Director is looking for. Based on the job openings at Obsidian, they still aren't done staffing their projects.

Work on Awoved started 2 years and 7 months ago according to some people over at Resetera. It's been in works longer than Grounded that is just about the get released into Early Access. So it seems likely that it's been in pre-production few years ago. They've been hiring bunch of people for the game ever since 2018 and 2019.

You can also add Scott V. Gilmore as Senior Audio Designer to the list of devs working on this.