Feargus Urquhart

Hi Everyone, Tim Cain is looking for questions that he can answer in his next update. So, when you have the chance, get on over to reddit and put up a question and vote for others. http://www.reddit.co...ns_answered_by/ -Feargus

5: Well that's a loaded question. So I'll go with a safe answer - both. This is pretty much because I like working on both licensed properties and original settings. I really believe that they both have their place in the industry and in running a healthy independent development studio. While I do think that licensed games can be less risky, it's not particularly the reason why I don't have a specific preference between them and original ideas. I guess I look at it as a game maker and not just a business guy. That may seem odd, because normally the business guy would say that making licensed product is the smart way to go because lower risk is always better. However, if you run an independent studio one of the things you always think about is the "end game" - what are we really trying to do here. Are we just going to be independent forever or are we looking to get purchased by a publisher. Creating original ideas (also called new IP - "Intellectual Property"), when successful, makes a studio more attractive to a publisher since they are getting more than just people and technology when they buy you. That's why you see a lot of studios really pushing to get their own IP published. But, I often look at making licensed products differently and as I've said before if you can't make a good game with a license then that's not the fault of the license but the fact that you're a poor game maker or the development environment (time, money and resources) wasn't right. What I think you can get from licensed products is your excitement in the license and the defintion of the game world by the license. Personally, I was ecstatic when I was offered the position to work on AD&D games (now just D&D) and then just as excited again about working on a Star Wars game when I got that opportunity. You see that to a greater or lesser degree with everyone on a team that is working with a cool license. Plus, you get to use the license to help focus the game. I've seen a to of games with incredibly orginal settings flounder because the team could never really define what they were trying to do. You see that a lot less with licensed products, because the "box" of the game is already there. Now there are a lot of people that see that as un-creative or boring, but I believe that's just a mindset. Having said all that, it may sound like I think making licensed games is the end all be all. I don't. As an industry we can't just make licensed products because we will then only ever be a secondary outlet for ideas. If new ideas never come from us then I think that makes us less. Plus, without new worlds and ideas, I would never have gotten to play a lot of the games that I've loved. I do think it's more of a gamble to create an entirely new game though, because you are starting at zero with the player. When you have a license, like let's say 24, the player most likely knows who Jack Bauer is - which means you don't have to put much explanation into that aspect of the game. You can get the player into the story or action faster without needing as much of an introduction. It's why most fantasy games have elves. We all know what an elf is - they like nature, live a long time, are more magical and have pointy ears. The player will invest their feelings of elves into the game without you having to do much. If they love or hate elves then you already have those emotions to work with when weaving the story or action of the game. So what does that all mean for Obsidian? Well, as I said at the beginning. I want to do both. Two of the products that we are making right now use licenses and one is an original IP that we are creating. By next year, that ratio might be more like one licensed products and two original IP games. But, it wouldn't surprise me if that didn't bounce back the other way a year or two from after that.

It is hard to get published, however if you have something to show that's different. A lot of publishers are often looking for product that they can ship fairly quickly to make up for products slipping out of a particular quarter or year. They often call these "oportunistic". The best place to start is to call up the publishers you want to talk to and ask for their Business Development department. It is the job of the people in those departments to talk to pretty much everyone and if as I said, if you have something playable they will be instantly more interested.

4: Two answers in a month, hey at least I'm getting a little better at this. It is funny as you get older that time does seem to just speed on by. Well enough on that tangent. So, as it turns out, between when this question was asked and today many of you have probably already seen Sega's announcement that we are going to be making an Aliens RPG for them. I can't really go into anymore details about it other than to say it is an RPG and there are Aliens in it. Well I can say a little more in that we are focusing a great deal on the RPG aspects of the game, so no one needs to run into the hills with worry that we are going to make DOOM with Aliens in it and one extra stat slapped on it. As for future titles, I would like us to continue making both Fantasy games and games placed in other genres - like Post Apocalyptic and SciFi. A number of us have been toying around with the idea of a Post Apocalyptic Fantasy world. There are a number of campaign worlds out there that explore this idea and I think a really cool video/computer game could be made within a world like that. While we couldn't go with the campy 50's feel of Fallout (campy as in the Pip Boy look, not campy as in culture references), I think the tension created by having all the different fantasy societies trying to scrape by and rebuild would make for an interesting world to explore. As for a straight SciFi game, I don't have an real specific ideas about what we might do just yet. I know a lot of people around here love 40K, so I was thinking of talking to THQ at some point about whether they would like to a 40K game that is more RPG than RTS. Finally, I should probably talk about the twin gorillas in the closet. I'm sure there's a correct analogy in there somewhere, but that's what came to mind. Anyway, I'm speaking of the the KotOR3 and Fallout gorillas. Both of those are games that I and everyone else here at Obsidian would love to make. I don't know if we will ever get the chance, but I do continue to talk with LucasArts about what might be going on with KotOR3. As for Fallout, like I said, I'm not sure if we'll ever get the chance, but I know that I'd love to make another Fallout - plus, I think Avellone's already designed the next 12 of them.

3 4 6 7 8 13 15 16 Haza!

Zarathustra217

The walkmesh in KotOR2 is a part of the art file for the level and then is exported as the walkmesh. Are you looking for the format of the walkmesh itself?

3: It's a love, hate relationship? Actually, I think my actions, unfortunately, speak louder than words in that it's been almost a year and I never answered all of these questions. I could say it's time, my family, getting NWN2 done or any of 100 other excuses. But, the reason is that I never scheduled my time or prioritized it high enough to make sure that I got up here and answered these questions. While fairly lame of me, I'm going to try to put more of my time aside for the community here and on the NWN2 boards. I think that one of the difficulties for us over the past year, and a little bit more, has been that our community has been split between here and the NWN2 boards. That's made it hard for us to talk about NWN2 or talk about Obsidian based upon where we happen to be spending our time online. I think it's also made it hard for us to really explain to everyone about what we are doing with NWN2 and what we are doing and what we want to do with it. I'm hoping we can come up with better ways to do this, but I can say that Rob McGinnis has been awesome in helping things go more smoothly on the NWN2 side of things. As for our forums in general, what I like about them is that they keep us honest. They can almost be like a referendum on us when we've done something stupid. Now that's not to say that I don't want to put my hands through my screen sometimes and throttle the person on the other side - I do. But, I think reading even the flamiest of flames makes us think - once we see through the burst blood vessels in our eyes. I look at even these posts as having something in them that must be grounded in either a misunderstanding or something that is wrong that we should look at fixing. It's not always the thing that the person is talking about in the post itself, but something else that is deeper. It's how I look at reports from our testers sometimes. Often they get as angry at us as the community does and sometimes what the are angry about is not actually what we should fix. The analogy I often use is the difference between a symptom and a disease. What people are angry about is the symptom - the thing that made them angry. However, the real problem, the disease could be something entirely different. That's where we try to dissect what people are talking about so we can figure out what we should really focus on and fix, or at least explain that we can't do anything about it. So, overall, I'm glad we have people who talk about things here and over on the NWN2 boards. However, I don't think we've done a great job in the last year of doing our part. Or rather, I should say, I don't think I've done a great job in the last year.

First of all, sorry for taking so long to get to the next question. I've been sick (which seems to be a trend lately) and coming back from E3 meant some long days. 2: That's a good question and it's one that we wrestle with every time the owners of the company get together to talk about what we want to do as a company. Every Monday we have a lunch meeting of the owners, and one of the topics yesterday was what are the right sort of projects for us and what are not the right projects. How RPG-centric should we stay and is it bad staying too RPG-centric. It's a hard call a lot of the time and we often don't agree. What we do know is that we have certain talents when it comes to making RPGs - story, characters, world building and character development systems. Whatever types of games we do make should use the things that we are good at. In other words if we were to go off and make an RTS (we aren't right now), we would probably make one that was more like Warcraft 3 than Age of Empires 3. However, we also know you shouldn't try to turn another genre into something else all of the time. Adding a lot of Dialog and Story to Battlefield 2 would just be stupid. BF2 is all about multiplayer team combat in games that last 10 to 20 minutes. While we will probably try our hand at other genres when we can utilize our talents in those games, I do want to have a "hardcore" RPG in production at all times whenever possible. It's a hard goal right now, since selling a hardcore PC RPG to a major publisher is pretty difficult, but I think we just need to figure out how to do what we want to do in terms that work for a publisher.

1: In my mind it really comes down to the type of CRPG that you are trying to make and what the focus of it is going to be. If you are making a combat focused RPG then you have think of who are you making it for and how do you want it to feel. Do you want it to be something that someone can pick up and play for 10 minutes and get through a bunch of combats - then you need to have a fairly fast action combat system that lets you cut through enemies quickly. If you want to make it for players that like strategy then you have to slow it down, make it more stat based and focused more heavily on having a heavy rules implementation of something like D&D. If you aren't making an RPG that focuses on combat then picking the right combat mechanic is much less important. For example, BG and Torment both used the same combat engine, however Torment could probably have had a different combat engine (not FPS though) and it would have had less of an impact on the feeling of the game then if the combat system was changed in BG. As for what I like - that's a tough one. I do miss the Infinity Engine combats, but I worry they are either on a long hiatus or a permanent one. It seems like a lot of games are becoming much more personal and action based, which seems to imply the latter. However, combat in WoW is not pure action and there are certainly a lot of people who like that. Ultimately what I like about combat in RPGs is the ability to feel like I chose a good strategy and that I was able to use the abilities of my character(s) to the fullest. Doing those things is probably the goal we should all have when designing combat systems for RPGs no matter whether they are Oblivion, Diablo, KotOR, BG or Fallout style.

Hi everyone, well I'm at E3 now and I feel bad for not responding to my own top 10 until now but my son gave me some wonderful flu that put me on ice chips and dry toast for a bit. So, I'll answer this question first and then I'll be answering more questions over the coming days. First off the people that will be at E3 are going to be all the Owners of Obsidian except for Chris Jones, so Darren, Chris Parker, Chris Avellone and myself will all be at E3. Showing off NWN2 in the Atari booth are about 8 other Obsidianites - Scott Everts (long time BIS/OE level/tech designer), Patrick Mills (QA), Kristen Wong (Artist), Ryan Rucinski (Producer), John Morgan (Producer), Anthony Davis (Producer), Jesse Farrell (QA), Joe Bulock (QA), Nathan Chapman (Lead QA). Josh Sawyer is also going to be roaming around the Atari booth showing the game from time to time. E3 for me is mostly going to be showing the game and doing interviews, which, and not to pull back the curtain too much, is to say the same exact thing slightly differently about 30 different times at the show. It's tough to "sell" a game as complex as NWN2 in 10 second sound bites. Now not all of the press I talk to need 10 second sound bites, which mean we get to talk in more detail. However, we try to say mostly the same thing so we don't forget to hit on the important things about the game. So, if you happen to see a number of interview with me from E3 - sorry that I'm probably saying the same thing over and over and over again. What we do want to do when it comes to talking about the game more is releasing more and more info on-line as we get closer to ship. Maximus from NW Vault was nice enough to accept our invitation to come visit Obsidian yesterday and he spent about 5, maybe 6, hours at the studio and I got to have lunch with him. He got to talk to pretty much everyone on the team he wanted to and I think he'll be releasing a lot of pretty detailed info about the game soon. As for the other projects we are working on right now being at E3, we won't be talking about them other than telling people we are working on them when they ask. I'm not sure when more details on the project we are doing for SEGA will be announced, but I would be suprised if it was before the end of the year. Well that's a much longer answer to the question, but I know it's been a long while since I've been up here for which you all have my apologies. I'll get to another question within the next day.

We are going to get a patch released and are working to do so. I apologize for the time it has taken to be released and wish it was more within my control to get it released as quickly as possible.

For IWD3, I would probably use what we are creating for NWN2. We would have to make modifications to make a party system work, but with all the changes we've made I think it would work well. As for the amount of effort it took to make the 2D IE games vs. the latest 3D stuff, I guess there is a fairly long list of reasons why. Maybe the succinct way I can explain it is that comparing 2D backgrounds to 3D ones is like comparing the making of a movie set vs. an actual building. In 2D the artists usually only have to worry about making the things that actually face the camera. Plus, when it comes into adding the detail they can bring the picture into a paint program and touch it up. They can also be pretty "sloppy" with how they build things. This is because as long as you don't see the sloppiness in the final, it doesn't matter how they got it to look that way. 3D engines are much less forgiving - if they take a piece of geometry and just stick it into another, you can get errors with lighting, shadows, collision, Z sorting, etc... And if the error is bad enough, the level won't even load. Like I said, there are a lot of other reasons why it's harder and takes larger teams, but the above comparison is probably one of the main reasons.

I always find this topic both hilarious and extremely depressing. When I was first buying games, something like 20 years ago now - they were priced between $29.95 US and $49.95 US. Does that range look familiar? That's what it is today. However, 20 years ago it cost me $3 US to goto a movie and it now costs me $10 US. I get confused why it has been ok for everything else to go up in price, but not computer games. CD's were like $13.99 full price when I was buying them in the late 80's and now at Tower they are like $18.99 or more when not on sale. What is even more of a pain is that it no longer costs $100K to make a game but more like $5M to $15M. I know this all comes off as whining - but like I said this topic always makes me laugh and cry.

It was Michael Crawford, but he only worked on the first one and I'm not sure how much he really had to do with it. Brian told me the story once, but it's lost somewhere in the back of my mind. And the way Bard's Tale used the manual, I am pretty sure, is that it required you to type in the four letter name of the spell. The infamous MIBL for Mind Blade (possibly Mangar's Mind Blade).

The game's that I put the most time into are probably: Wizard's Crown Phantasy Series Wizardry 1 and 5 Bard's Tale 1, 2, 3 Wasteland Civilization 1 Colonization King's Quest 1 Might and Magic 1 and 4 Mars Saga Ultima 2, 3 and 4 Masters of Orion 1 Dungeon Master (Apple IIGS version) Kief the Thief (think that's the spelling) Pool of Radiance and Curse of the Azure Bonds (didn't continue after those) X-Com and X-Com Terror from the Deep

A bought the Final Fantasy 1/2 cartridge that came out a bit ago and was putting in time with that. I'd recommend it.

I played 1, 5,7 and 8. I remember 1 the most because of the time I put in on it with a friend of mine in front of his dad's PC when we could use it. 5 was my favorite because of the somewhat more refined gameplay compared to the earlier ones and it was still the simple dungeon that you decended into. I liked it better than 7 and 8, because I felt like I was getting lost in those ones. 7 was almost too big - it was crazy how big of a world they were able to get on a couple of floppy's. I was really looking forward to 8 and it even looked like Black Isle was going to publish it at one point while I was there. After it came out I played it for quite a while, but got frustrated once I started hitting the large battles that seemed to take a ton of time waiting for things far away to either finally get to you. The one thing I've always like about the Wizardry games is the character system. I'm just a big geek, but I really liked how you could change classes and how in 8 the gun that one of your characters had would improve with your level and skill.

I always swore I would build all of my machines as well. But when I was able to save $500 at Dell compared to all the lowest prices for each piece off Pricewatch, I couldn't justify it to myself anymore. A good example, we just bought a Dimension 8400 that included a P4 660 (3.6GHz), 2GB 533 RAM, XP Pro, Office Basic, DVD, 160GB SATA Drive, NVideo 6800GT 256MB, 2 Year warrenty plus 2 of the new 24" Widescreen LCD Monitors (1920x1440 native) all (computer and monitors) for $3100 before tax.

Man you guys really have a good deal of fear of management don't you?

We buy most of our stuff from Dell, even our home machines. If you check out www.gotapex.com you'll find absolutely crazy deals from time to time. I bought a computer for my dad over the weekend that will come out to be about $580. A P4 3.0, XP Home, 512MB RAM, 160GB SATA drvie, CDRW and a 19" LCD. Not the newest or greatest stuff, but for a little more I could have gotten him a 19" LCD with the 12ms re-fresh. It didn't have a video card though, since he really didn't need one. Again, that site is www.gotapex.com. Also, on Dells, we have had no problem upgrading them or getting Dell to fix them. A part of the technical support might be because we are a company, but I don't think we are big enough to really get that special of treatment.

In general the process was a 3D pass, followed by a lighting pass, followed by a 2D touch-up pass. The extent of each pass was dependent on the artist in charge of each of the area. So, generally what would happen is that a 2D area layout would be made by a designer on graph paper or in some paint or simple layout program. From there, an artist would often build a very simple 3D representation of the area to make sure that sizes and spaces looked right to both him and the designer. After that, the artist would model and texture either the entire area or the parts of the area that were easier to do in 3D. For Torment, we used mostly Lightwave to do the areas, while for Icewind Dale base models were often done in Lightwave, but the final scene was put together in MAX. The next step was lighting the areas. A lot of the IE games ended up being lit by a guy named John Dickenson although some of the other artist lit their own areas as well. John would spend a bunch of time with each area getting the lighting to look right and then he would render out the final. For an 8x8 level (the largest) that ended up being 5120 pixels by 3840 pixels. Although for IWD1 and IWD2 we often stuck to a max of 6 x 6 or 3840x2880 for IWD1 and 4800 x 3600 for IWD2 (we went to 800x600 screens for IWD2). After the lighting, artists would touch-up the areas using either Photoshop or Painter and that would then be the final area. The only thing that was left was to render were all the parts of the picture that had alternate looks - things like open doors, pulled chains, broken walls, etc... The area with those changes would be rendered and touched-up and then a process was run to only keep the 64x64 tiles that had changed between the versions of the same area. Some areas were done in 3D very quickly and then spent more time in 2D touch-up - a lot of the snow areas in IWD2 were done this way. While other areas were rendered and that was pretty close to the final - I am pretty sure Dragon's Eye from IWD1 is a good example of this. There were some other things that needed to be done to make the areas work in the game correctly including walkmeshes and occlusion polys, but those really didn't have to do with the art itself.

I think I may have commented in another thread that the tough thing is that it is hard to get a publisher to invest in a more traditional CRPG. For us to make one, we would most likely have to do it with our own money. It is something we kick around quite a bit, since after NWN2 we will have at least a part of an engine. Chris Avellone and I were talking at lunch on Friday about how we could do it. One of thing the thinks we are kicking around is trying to do a certain amount of design and pre-production while we are working on other projects.

Wow that was witty.

If it makes the surviving ones stronger, maybe we could be onto something.