Zoraptor

He'd have a point complaining about an asymmetric NDA if Obsidian had said anything bad against him, but so far it's been entirely one way in that respect. And again, he's made it patently clear recently why they would want an NDA and why it would not be an unreasonable stipulation. So far there's no reason why an NDA applying to Obs would be necessary or practically advantageous to him in any way. The reverse, not so much. Frankly, his belief that he'd have no legal recourse if Obs started slagging him off is utterly ridiculous. If they're defamatory then it doesn't matter whether there's an NDA, it's defamatory. At the most basic level: it's a tad, a mite, a smidgeon hypocritical to complain about someone else being free to hypothetically do what you yourself are actually doing, when they aren't doing it.

And the GPP is dead. Due to too much 'misinformation' supposedly. More likely due to Intel threatening to sue Jensen's arse off for trying to get laptop producers to sign up. Intel also has a huge war chest and the means to retaliate effectively, which no one else has- at least in the short term, it was on decidedly dodgy regulatory ground but that action tends to be very slow. May have been in the works a while as well, Asus seem to have instantly reverted all AMD cards back to ROG versions instead of 'Arez' (though their twitter says Arez branding will still be used for some things, so maybe it will be an Armor/ GamingX G1Gaming/ Aorus type situation).

I always presumed the Kuldahar name came from Kandahar as they're so close to identical. Fun fact: that effectively would mean it was named after Alexander the Great, since Kandahar was founded by him as yet another Alexandria. Much like other Alexandrias (apart from the famous one) its transliteration has drifted to what it is today.

Pretty sure they could force a buy out even under EU law. In most places you can force buy outs even on public companies if you control enough shares ('compulsory acquisition', here). It's particularly common for smallish companies to stop similar situations to this where one person goes kamikaze. Whoever suggested that the revaluation Chris wanted was to buoy up his pay out was almost certainly correct. It's spread to far more places than just the Codex though. It probably won't damage Obsidian amongst people who count financially because chances are they've been in similar situations with ex employees themselves, but it may make some casual purchasers avoid Obsidian. His story doesn't make sense, but he has stated he had an actual ownership stake. The inference is as above, he considered it undervalued and (presumably, since it's the only thing that makes sense) refused payment for it to avoid being bound by other legal provisions. Everything I heard was that the problem the troika had with BIS stemmed from upper management- Brian, basically, trying to stem off the cascade that lead to Herve- rather than Feargus who was just doing as ordered and as expected for head of a new division. And again there's inconsistency there- they're given creative freedom above and beyond but also criticised more than PoE2. But presumably PoE2's story is more (micro)managed than a project where the (external, presumably) design director has no power, so will have already gone through the criticism stage continuously as developed- that's the point of having a design director with 'executive' power. And, of course, Chris loves working for Ken Levine who is renowned for... giving creative freedom and also being very liberal with his criticism (an approach I and apparently Chris personally like, but some people do hate it and Ken has had people extremely upset over it at times). Hmm. I can't help but suspect that there's some projection going on there. Chris clearly felt that he was creative and unfairly criticised for it himself. I suspect he was more criticised for being too creative given what even he has admitted to. He was clearly still valued at Obsidian as a writer, at least. Otherwise: got to be very careful speaking for other people under any circumstance, doubly so under the current ones. And if there's one thing worse than dragging ex employees into things- at least they can talk if they want to- it's dragging current employees in. He probably saw pitch documents and the like, then can infer from beta/ released story information which one they went for. The preferential treatment/ criticism part must either come from someone at Obsidz (or be inference, or even made up) though.

Maybe Obsidian simply got offered a better deal? Satisfies Ockham's Razor better than a conspiracy in the lack of any other evidence. Remember, Paradox only came on board for PoE1 very much when it was on the home straight. And to be honest I could tell you that the 'usual excuses' have- on occasion- allegedly applied to Paradox as well. There isn't a publisher in existence that hasn't had some 'ethics' problems. I won't go into details because it's hearsay (with some pretty good supporting evidence, but still hearsay ultimately), and I don't think PoE2 isn't being published by them due to such issues.

Larger websites/ magazines would vet what he says against the possibility of them being sued and they'd also go to Obsidian to get their side of the story. A fair bit of what he has said would likely not be publishable due to being potentially defamatory. If you got a good journalist they might also ask about inconsistencies and seek clarifications, as well as questioning his timing. The Codex is a good place because it is just a forum, he'd laid the groundwork by answering unrelated questions for a few months to boost his already considerable goodwill there and, well, codexers do so love spreading the drama. They also quite patently aren't above sticking the knife into people they feel have betrayed them, like InXile. For all we know he may have gone to journalists first, and been turned down. I doubt it though, personally. It seems far more like an attempt to get grass roots traction a few days before Deadfire launches in the knowledge that any comment Obsidian made in rebuttal would be counter productive. If he thought his comments would stay Codex only he was hideously- and frankly, unbelievably- naive.

I watched Outcast and can barely remember anything about it apart from Philip Glenister and that I thought it was pretty good at the time. I guess that means it was enjoyable, but not memorable.

An 'NDA' isn't retaliation, and is fairly standard practice in most contracts*. If, as he claims, he left on his own terms they couldn't force an 'NDA' at that point even if they wanted to- though normal rules about disclosing commercial information presumably apply since they're base line legal requirements. They could only force a 'non compete', the other interpretation of his claim, if they were paying him and evidence is absolute that he was allowed to work elsewhere even before leaving. *every single employment contract I've signed has included an 'NDA'- and that includes high powered positions such as working at a petrol station and packing tomatoes to stuff where it was 100% sensible for the employer to put in. True, but it'd be weird for a company the size of Obsidian, which was co-founded by five different people who put their own money down as capital, to not issue internal shares to its owners. Like, really weird. Surely you must have some sort of ownership delineation mandated in the US though? So far as I am aware it's an absolute requirement here in NZ to have who owns how much of a company specified in order to be a company. Pretty sure it's a requirement even for company like entities such as Trusts. It's definitely a requirement for Partnerships/ See Look Through Companies here as I've ended up administering one (without being a Partner).

To deal with the 'new' stuff... People will leave Obsidian soon, there's no doubt, it's inevitable. PoE2 is shipping, and people always leave after a product ships as contracts run out and it's a natural inflection point. There would be nothing unusual about that at all and it won't prove anything since people leave companies all the time. The person he's referring to as already left is presumably PoE2's producer, but for a 100+ person company I'd suspect you'd lose at least 1 person per month no matter how good you were, and that still gives an expectation of 8 years employment on average. If Chris wants to sue, talking publicly is utterly moronic and any lawyer he's retained with his huge war chest would tell him so in no uncertain terms. Trying to get others to sue for him is unlikely to work and him ranting would be used against them if they relied on anything he said. Kudos to him though, he apparently went from in debt and struggling to having a massive war chest in... 2 years? 3? The accusation that Obsidz used Tyranny money to work on other projects is likely true, just From A Certain Point Of View true. PoE2 and Tyranny use the same engine, improvements done to/ for one will almost inevitably be used in the other- that's the nature of using the same engine and indeed, much of the point in using the same engine. Tyranny would have benefited from work done on PoE1's engine as well. The ownership thing is fishy, and another situation where there's obviously some sort of submerged rock we cannot see- it happening as Chris suggests seems utterly implausible, unless he wasn't a literal owner (~shareholder) and that was just a management label. I do feel compelled to point out: "I didn’t want royalty payments from Eternity" is again not consistent with him being desperately in debt and wanting out (I'd go so far as to say it's, and my god do I hate using this phrase unironically, virtue signalling given his comments about ethics). His work for FTL/ WL2 etc while still at Obsidian is also not consistent with claims of them not wanting him to ever work in RPGs again nor with trying to 'force' him to work on Tyranny as was suggested. Oh my god, Chris Avellone actually is my dad. I never knew. (my dad wanted to reject a forced- on the employer, and very generous- severance package to keep 'fighting evil' even when he wanted to literally retire, and practically had to have a pen superglued to his fingers to get him to sign it) Oh god yes. And dragging other people into it as well. Mostly though, the attitude that he's big enough to ignore his own rules and suggestions further indicates that it's extremely unlikely that Obsidian management was the sole problem. "Whaaat? We love him, and tell your friend that we miss him very much! :(" No.

Anybody badmouthing anything without a whole lot in the way of evidence is bad by default, pretty much. I'm not actually aware of anyone at Obsidian saying anything bad about Chris publicly anyway. He was pretty much just stereotypically wished luck on his future endeavours and that has been it, so there isn't really anything from that side to believe. Only person connected to Obsidian who gave Chris a bit of a serve was EricF, and only after Chris very unclassily dragged him into the mess in the first place. That's also why no comment is best policy, all Eric's comment got was a bunch more equally unclassy allegations from Chris and an attempt to drag yet another person into it. Theoretically that's a great combo, but if there's one guy with worse scoping problems than Chris Avellone it's Ken Levine. His ideas for SS2 went way beyond what was achievable and both Bioshock/ Infinite went through all sorts of revisions and alterations until he had his hand forced to stop tinkering. And while I really like KenL for his vision and ideas even if they don't always work out, and he seems to be very genuine as a person; but his tendency to be... polarising in his management style is pretty legendary.

No ex Obsidian dev has used their work accounts to post after leaving so far as I am aware. The only ex Obsidian staff I'm aware of posting after leaving are Cant/ Eldar who already had a forum account and Matt Rorie who was marketing (and that's iirc, and only one post after leaving). If Roguey is to be believed dev forum accounts can only be used on site anyway. He has a better argument for having his account deleted. Even then iirc it's a non trivial task to actually delete an account/ posts instead of locking them and hiding the posts, and there's no obligation to do so unless it's legally required. Indeed, there's no obligation to allow anyone to say anything here or on any other company forum, let alone allowing a disgruntled former employee to vent their spleen using an 'official' account.

Whatever else, Chris should not be dragging other people into this. If John Gonzalez is highly successful let him be successful and don't drag him into your personal feud to make a point (worse, to make someone else not involved until you criticised them look bad), that's extraordinarily uncool. Also, hating management roles and not being good at them means your management ideas are highly unlikely to be valued because, well, your management roles have been a mess which strongly implies your management ideas result in said messes. Say what you like about Feargus but he's kept Obsidian going for 14 years, one suspects that for all his expectation setting processes Chris would not have managed 14 months. They'd no doubt have been an extremely aspirational 14 months to be fair, but... It would have been an extra 3 months though, not 6. Given release state I very much doubt they could- or should have even tried, really- have got the droid planet in, though the droid factory must have been close to inclusion even with the short deadline. Given Chris's tendency toward being over enthusiastic in content production we may simply have got a larger, but equally 'broken' release if he was not reined in. Unfortunately, given his recent behaviour and despite admitting that he doesn't like/ isn't good at management he'd likely be using that as another stick against Obsidian as well. Ultimately, Chris's problems as a designer/ manager/ writer all seem to stem from the same base issue, he just plain overproduces content. That's a better flaw in theory than underproducing, but it's still a flaw since it gums up the production pipeline and that stuff has to be implemented/ cut/ proofed/ edited etc etc. For that reason it's worse, practically, than underproducing if you're producing far too much. And, critically, he did it in PST and was still doing exactly the same thing 15 years later when it came to PoE time. It's all very well to be self critical but it's another to act on the self criticism, and even if Chris's word were gospel it certainly would not be only Obsidian not learning from their mistakes. Ubisoft owning the rights was the critical thing, if Derp Silver or Nordic had picked up the rights things may well have been different. IIRC they implied they were more or less happy with Obsidz and said that the main reason for the delays in SoT was their continual tinkering with the script. Having said that, the Ubi San Fran (which still amuses me, given the Smug episode of SP) sequel did not seem to have the same problems.

Sorry, I meant that Chris was implying they tried for a 'non compete clause', not that you were implying it but reading again I can see how it read the other way. That's what I would assume as well, lacking any other information. The firing implication is extremely tenuous, given Chris basically said he left after he'd paid off his debts, to whit: The last bit definitely implies he only quit after saving enough to clear whatever debt there was so there was no more 'leverage'. If he'd been fired it would be a massive coincidence if it was exactly at the right time for his debt to have been cleared. Sounds to me like he either worked out his contract or handed in notice as soon as it was viable, nothing more or less.

Gog released Star Wars Ep 1: Racer. Yippee This is where the fun begins I've been looking forward to this etc etc.

Like Valmy pointed out, we have to see the issue from Obsidian's perspective as well but still, that sounds extremly hostile to me. Why would they want to revoke his rights to work on any RPG and how is that even possible?! Non-compete clauses are something pretty commonly attempted by companies. If you'll recall the creator of Ark got into trouble over this a couple years ago. Apparently they're not enforcable a lot of places, but it's still a way a company tries to protect itself from getting staff poached by direct competitors. I doubt it was a genuine 'non compete clause' as implied, I'd suspect that if Chris asked out of his contract then the reply was "fine, but you cannot work on RPGs until its term runs out/ time x" which is far more reasonable since an early release is doing Chris a favour so quid pro quo should be expected. He essentially seems to be asking for such favourable treatment while still expecting to have benefits of employment- like medical insurance- maintained which would be rather on the nose. That's why I'm extraordinarily skeptical of Chris's claims being accurate, they're not internally consistent and read far more like an internal rationalisation. To be fair though, the whole thing is like a river flowing around a submerged boulder- you're judging what and where by the ripples rather than seeing it so it's speculation, and may be unfair speculation. But Chris is making it very easy to assume that he was the problem, especially since Obsidian hasn't been publicly contributing to the river at all. The issue of any ownership stake is a lot more murky, but there isn't even enough information to speculate on that, except what no legal action from Chris implies.

I'm reminded of what happens in a lot of air crashes- pilots train and fly for literally thousands of hours then end up crashing and killing everyone on board because they're stalling and despite all their training and experience the most basic of reasoning kicks in: "I want to gain altitude so I have to point the plane's nose up". Yet every pilot knows and trains for the fact that in a stall you have to point your nose down to increase speed first, and hence to overcome the reflexive logic of pointing your nose up to try and gain altitude. Dude shouldn't be a police officer/ security guard any more for sure, but part of the reason for training is to find those who cannot cope or will freeze. On the positive side, it's a lot less likely that guy would have randomly shot a black guy for having a 'dehumanising gaze' or cellphone or failing to obey mutually contradictory instructions etc as seems to happen an awful lot when police do act reflexively, decisively and instinctively.

Trouble is, as always, that Chris's recollections don't fit what everyone could see, to whit (1) Obsidian didn't make any real comment about him at all, and no negative ones and (2) they didn't have a restrictive employment agreement when he was actually working for them- since he was off working and being a stretch goal on multiple projects outside Obsidian, even prior to leaving. If they wanted to leverage debt to 'control' him all they had to do was stop him working independently. He either didn't have a contract anywhere near as restrictive as made out or he was allowed to work independently to get that money and remove the 'control', which I rather suspect was just a standard employment contract, as below. Indeed, that freedom to work on FTL, Wasteland 2 etc allowed him a natural lead into and exposure for his work for the Larians and Bethesdas. It looks far more like he asked for an early contract release and didn't like the terms offered for it so took that as being 'unfair' and leveraging whatever his situation was, and worked out his contract doing stuff for other people. If he wanted an early release from a contract then he has to accept that the company he works may want something in return- and that's especially true if you're obviously going off to work at the opposition. That isn't a personal slight, it's standard practice since you've made an agreement, you're asking to vary its terms and they're not obligated to indulge you in any way. Indeed, depending on how the company is set up indulging friends to vary their contracts may well be exactly the illegal/ unethical treatment Chris rails against. I actually started out supporting Chris as well, but everything he's said since has steadily reduced that support to the point I wish he's shut up about anything other than rpgs, if only for his own sake. I say it every time, but he comes across as That Guy At Work who thinks management hates him and everything is set up against him and everyone else at the company hates him too. They usually do- because he wanders around seeking support for his grievances and basically not doing his job while making it unpleasant for everyone else. He usually has a point with his grievance, but blows it out of proportion. I have some personal experience of that sort, my dad always ranted about how his employer was crap and the management was crap etc. I ended up working with him for a while (because no one else would, which is a bit of a spoiler) and you know what? Management was crap and incompetent and was actively trying to get him fired or to resign. You know what else? My dad made life unpleasant for just about everyone else there whether they were management or not and was deliberately and pointlessly obstructive all while claiming he was fighting the good fight. He did do his job, more or less, but spent so much time arguing with management that he'd stopped doing it well. Just a reminder, by Chris's own admission he had one friend left at Obsidian, out of 150ish employees. That's not a number that says that management was the only problem. More like nice work Fairfax, or maybe nice work Sensuki. Infinitron's just the newsbot.

Bibi's presentations are always meme gold, and fact dross. Only thing missing from his powerpoint slides was use of comic sans/ impact font instead of boring old default times new roman. I presume the stats commentary is that you kind of have to have a sensible set of questions to be statistically accurate about. If you ask a load of loaded questions the mathematical statistical accuracy doesn't matter in the slightest because the questions are bad so anything got from them is bad as well.

I'd say that Stalker feels like an RPG because it's extraordinarily immersive and does excellent world building/ atmosphere which are usually found in RPGs and other story heavy genres- but if you leave feelings aside it is clearly a shooter by any objective criteria. Despite character advancement being a central facet of RPGs Stalker with its dozen or so weapons and 8ish armour types manages a feeling of character achievement and advancement that few RPGs attain with all their stats and levels even if it's still exactly the same Mr S wandering around, just with a Vintorez and stalker suit instead of a Makarov and paper maché suit. I'm actually playing Mass Effect Andromeda at the moment- not far in, maybe a couple of hours and it's OK. The animations etc are fine so far, it's a bit Dragon Age Inquisition with lazars and fewer stats combined with the old ME staples of plink plink weapons and pervading cheesiness but that's more or less what I expected. So far the most annoying thing is the graphics giving a strong uncanny valley vibe, technically it's great and my theoretically underpowered 580 is coping with near 4k resolution well, but there's this rather odd feeling that everything looks... 'artificial' for want of a better term.

I presume that should be 'the agreements made by the US should --not-- be binding only so long as the next election'? They haven't changed their heart, I don't think there's any chance of a genuine Road to Damascus moment. They have changed their behaviour because they've achieved what they wanted/ needed- they have nukes, and missiles able to hit basically anywhere in the world. That was their one strategic aim as it gives them security no matter what. All the stuff they're rolling back so far is cosmetic, or would have to happen anyway. The nuclear test facility they are shutting is by most reports either fundamentally ruined or nearly so already, for example, so there's no real concession in shutting it down when it cannot be used even if they wanted to. It does make a nice gesture though. For all that Trump is patting himself on the back for his approach 'working' all he's done is make sure that North Korea relies more on China (and Russia) to selectively apply sanctions. While neither has any desire to see fighting in Korea, quite the opposite, neither has any desire to help the US and weaken North Korea either. If anything Trump's approach got the DPRK to full nuclear power status faster even if the underlying reasons date back to previous administrations, and his unpopularity overseas and tendency towards unreliability and intemperateness makes Kim's attempts to look reasonable far, far easier.

Difficult to see how he could have played it better. Everything he's conceded is trivial while he's made lots of cosmetic gestures so most of the world will reflexively blame Trump if their talks fail. Only thing he's been a bit lucky with was Park being a corrupt cultist so the far more amenable Moon was elected in her stead. If he actually gives up nuclear weapons I'd be very surprised, verging on vowing to eat my keyboard if it actually happens surprised.

SOHO, though that was eventually fixed and iirc is still operational today. The most famous outright failure from conversion error is probably the Mars Climate Orbiter where the satellite pancaked into Mars. Non space, but there's also the Gimli Glider incident which is 100% worth reading about (or watch the Mayday/ Air Crash Investigation ep) just because it's a pretty awesome story.

I knew it was Tesla and wrote Apple for some reason- apparently he did work at Apple for a time, just not recently. And since I mentioned Intel's problems, their earning call for their financial results confirmed that bulk production for their 10nm process is now slated for some unspecified time in 2019 having been initially expected in 2017- and that would be 3 years after initial production started. The competition for Ryzen 3 may well be yet another 14nm skylake iteration.

A bit peripheral to Ryzen itself but, Jim Keller who was perhaps the most important contributor to the Zen architecture (and earlier K7/8/Athlon/ x64) has joined Intel after finishing work at Apple. Which is exceptionally good news for them since their main line CPU division seems to be having some significant problems. Yeah, the RAM prices are cartel pricing, at some point they'll get smacked by Europe again or provoke the Chinese to start producing large scale. Lots of gpu oversupply rumours going around now, but I'm not expecting too much since high RAM prices inflate GPU prices as well. Should be some 2nd hand bargains though, but mixed in amongst some overworked dross.

Thing about the lootboxes is that after all the complaints Battlefront 2 was found to be the only game out of four complying with Belgium's gambling rules. Ironic, EA could get busted for FIFA18 but not for the game everyone actually complained about. They already do that though- that's basically what PEGI is, applying rating laws (the censor) to video games. We have some games outright banned here such as Manhunt as they didn't pass the censor. Even in the US there's a lot of 'soft' censorship from Walmart/ MS/ Sony Ockers now have a refund facility that isn't limited to 2hrs either thanks to their ACCC, and the refund facility only exists at all due to Euro/ Aus/ NZ consumer protection laws being habitually broken by Valve.