Flouride
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Posts posted by Flouride
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It is a better trailer than the one for Starfield.
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Brandon Adler - Game Director
Megan Starks - Narrative Designer
Nitai Poddar - Narrative Designer
Dan Maas - Production Director
Kevin Kirst - Lead AI Programmer -
On 6/12/2021 at 4:54 PM, kanisatha said:
That they left doesn't automatically mean they quit. People make choices based on their life needs, and especially nowadays with the aftermath of the pandemic, there are many possible reasons for someone making a change in their life.
Also, according some leaked info on Avowed, the game's development is coming along very well and is far further in development than generally assumed/known.
Leaked info, where?
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On 5/22/2021 at 11:10 PM, Draxicus said:
The two things I'd love to see in Xbox conference are Eric Fenstermaker stepping in and announcing he is the director and lead narrative designer for this game, and an in-engine trailer. But a man can only dream...
Kate Dollarhyde is the Lead Narrative Designers currently on Avowed. Lucien Soulban had that role earlier, but he left to Torque Games.
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2 hours ago, kanisatha said:
Any idea what the project code name is for Adler's project? You always seem to know this way ahead of anyone else.
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.
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On 9/1/2020 at 7:36 AM, Theonlygarby said:
I think the saddest thing would be not getting an end to what was supposed to be a trilogy.
Deadfire is very unsatisfactory as an ending. So many unanswered questions. Maybe avowed will answer those? But I doubt they would confuse new players by having it be a sequel to deadfire.
If we never get a POE3 then I hope avowed or an eora based game eventually does answer those questions
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.-
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On 8/7/2020 at 2:22 AM, ZyroMane said:
MCA is obviously the definition of disgruntled former employee. However, whether or not Mr. Slam Dunk embezzled funds into the coffers of his relatives, he almost certainly mismanaged the company so bad for them to always be in the gutter when that was not true about other independent developers. Sure, still not Pitchford, but still. (Eh, everyone hates their boss.)
TOW was a personal disappointment, but I was dreaming of an AP or DS3 after MMOs, RTwP Iso games, and that digital card game. That's on me. Grounded might be more my scene, If I was into survival games (read: the demo was fun.) I'm probably just setting myself up for further disappointment, but, while I don't think Skyrim is a great game (Daggerfall is my favorite Elder Scrolls,) I still had fun, and I'm hoping for some fun from Avowed. Not ever going to be Swordflight, but some nice dungeon design would be great. First-person orlan gameplay, with appropriate mechanical differences, would be a ten out of ten from me though.
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.
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Nicole Evanich - 3D Character Animator
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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-
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2 minutes ago, Anthonyrex said:
What's George Ziets up to these days?
I believe he started his own studio.
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Few additions:
Kimie Kim-Mizutani - UI ArtistSeth May - Area Designer
Kayd Hendricks - Senior Area Designer
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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.
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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.-
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6 minutes ago, Achilles said:
The "cash injection" was covering post-production support for the title, plus 3 DLC, plus turn-based mode, plus pre-production on a AAA title? Sorry, I'm still not buying it. I'm also not buying Avellone's accusation that Feargus was using Private Division money to pay for other projects. In other words, I continue to suspect that they were using part of their reserves to fund the post-production work. Maybe he was confident enough in the deal that he didn't feel that was a huge risk, but Microsoft had screwed them before, so...
All that to say, I have every confidence that they were working on a pitch for what would ultimately become Avowed, but
- that's not the same thing as "pre-production" and
- it may have looked very different before Microsoft got involved
You and I appear to agree on 2 and, as I've stated elsewhere in this thread, I'm not sure the semantics of 1 are necessarily worth fighting over.
As for the veracity of what the sources says, only time will tell. For now, I take it all with a grain of salt.
Last word is yours
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.
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On 7/14/2020 at 4:54 PM, Achilles said:
Name a studio that only makes games for one IP.
From a less cynical perspective, one could argue that games are art and developers are artists. Artists are creatives and just as painter would whither making copies of the same landscape for the rest of their lives, developers want to play in lots of sandboxes, rather than one.
From a more cynical perspective, multiple IPs means multiple projects (and multiple project teams). This allows you to make money selling the newest installment of, say, Fallout this year and more money selling the latest iteration of, say, the Elder Scrolls series next year. More IPs = more money (and less risk).
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.
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1 hour ago, Wormerine said:
Does any one know if Cain/Boyarsky work on the DLCs for OW? If not it is possible they moved to work on the sequel.
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.
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1 hour ago, kanisatha said:
Well it's also possible that one of those projects (IL or MS) is TOW2, which some people seem to believe exists at least as an exploratory project. And according to some of the recent articles on Avowed, its team is around 100 in size.
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.
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1 hour ago, kanisatha said:
This leads me to ask a question of the many of you who seem to be rather knowledgeable on these kinds of questions. If we look at comparable AAA RPGs from recent years, CDPR is said to have many hundreds--perhaps as many as 500-700--people working on CP2077. Larian has around 300 working on BG3. Skyrim surely had several hundred on its team. Yet Obsidian has only about 100 on the Avowed team. How is this possible? How can this work? Can someone please explain this to me?
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.-
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28 minutes ago, Adridactelo said:
QA usually participate when the game enters active production. According to Boyarsky, TOW was always around 70 developers, so in my assumption I've put ~ 80 to accommodate those workers. The same applies to The Forgotten Sanctum. I hadn't taken into account the cancelled projects tbh, but I suppose they wouldn't be made up of very large teams (probably about 5-10 each). I think it wouldn't be unreasonable to think that the Avowed team could be around 35-45 developers by then.
This is interesting, as of June 2019 Obsidian had 200 employees of whom 70-80 were working at TOW. Grounded was in development (~ 15) and Josh Sawyer was starting his project (~ 5). Removing admin staff and such (~ 20) there were ~ 80 people working on other projects.
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.
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1 hour ago, Achilles said:
The issue is money.
Any employee on your payroll consumes it. Cost of salary, cost of benefits, cost of payroll taxes, cost of retirement fund matching if you offer it (which I believe Obsidian does). When you have team members working on a confirmed project that someone is giving your organization money to complete, then you are comparing your projected burn rate against your actual burn rate and probably reporting that out fairly regularly to the person whose money your spending. I say "probably", but what I really mean is that's usually the first number they look at on whatever status report you're providing.
So, if Obsidian was making this game for Microsoft, then Microsoft gave Obsidian money *before* the acquisition was finalized. I've never worked in the game industry, but I have worked on projects where both parties were willing to proceed on a good-faith, handshake agreement. That means you start work now and I pinky promise to pay you later. Obviously, these cases are rare and I've only seen them occur when both orgs had a history of working together. Doesn't mean it doesn't work any other way, just saying that I'm extremely skeptical that it works that way in the gaming industry. And I'm skeptical that either one of the parties involved wanted to have actual money or money promised influencing whatever negotiations were taking place.
The other option is that Feargus was paying that out of Obsidian's reserves and *really hoping* that Microsoft would greenlight the game he was already throwing resources at when it came time to talk about what's next. This seems like an extremely foolish and irresponsible move to make. I've watched a lot of interviews with Feargus and he strikes me as pragmatic guy. I really don't believe that this was the case either.
If there's some third way of looking at this, I'm happy to hear whatever it is and adjust my thinking accordingly.
In the meantime, I'm guessing that "anonymous source" is talking out of his ass for internet points and attention.
Added by edit: btw, I've also worked on project that took less than 7 months to implement and cost more than $1m, so the fact that it may have been "only 7 months" doesn't mean anything to me. If it's one resource making 50k per year that's a very different burn rate than 10 or 15 people making 50k per year. Again, that money is coming from somewhere.
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.
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8 hours ago, Adridactelo said:
We could approximate by calculating the number of employees Obsidian had in December 2018 and how many of them were working on the known projects.
At that time Obsidian was working on TOW (~ 80), finishing The Forgotten Sanctum (~ 30) and starting Grounded (~ 10). If Obsidian had around 190 employees then it leaves 70 developers working on something else.
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.
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10 hours ago, Achilles said:
As someone who has worked in IT project management for about a decade and read several articles re: how difficult publishers *can be* (especially when it comes to funding), I'm extremely skeptical.
Was Obsidian's war chest sufficiently full that they felt they could fund something on this scale on their own? I doubt it. That means that someone was footing the bill for any production ("pre" or otherwise in 2018). It's possible that Microsoft and Obsidian had a hand-shake agreement that would have allowed pre-production to begin before the acquisition was finalized, but I have to imagine that would have made other aspects of negotiation very awkward and it seems a bit odd to me that either party would have gone there. Certainly possible, but slightly mind-blowing if true.
TL;DR - Microsoft-funded pre-production in 2019 makes sense to me. Self-funded or Microsoft-funded pre-production in 2018 does not.
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.-
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3 hours ago, Achilles said:
Skyrim took between 4-6 years to develop depending on whose number you look at. Development on Avowed probably started in early-mid 2019. 4 years of development would put us early-mid 2023 (assuming that Obsidian's production schedule has parity with Bethesda's).
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.
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You can also add Scott V. Gilmore as Senior Audio Designer to the list of devs working on this.
So who are the writers of Avowed?
in Avowed Speculation
Posted · Edited by 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: