Feargus Urquhart

It's not so much that there is no market, it's just a market that many publishers don't understand and there is a stigma about making PC only games right now. I've seen this happen a lot in the industry over the past 10 years. People were more interested in buying a crappy CD-ROM game than a floppy game, a poor looking 3D game compared to a 2D game, a boring real-time game compared to an engaging turn-based game, etc... Unfortunately publishers like to fund what is currently fashionable because they see that as safe. That's why I said we would probably have to fund a game like ourselves. I think there is a market, but I don't have the $2M it would take to make the game.

We were not able to budget for our own testers on KotOR2, all of the testing was handled internally and externally by LucasArts. On Neverwinter Nights 2, we have included money in the budget for testing, so we will be hiring our own small testing staff. It won't be gigantic group, but we hope that it will help.

Everyone is entitled to their opinion, but I don't feel that KotOR2 was a shocking disappointment.

I wish it was as simple as we compile the patch and post it. When your in "big-time" game development things always seem to have about fifteen more steps. Quotes indicate sarcasm in case anybody was wondering.

My advice - don't ever choose to do a job like mine.

Forgot about that article. There are some things that are right in there, but there are also a lot of assumptions that are somewhat inaccurate.

The Developer+ thing just means that our icon shows up as a Developer and that we have Moderation and Admin ability. I have not idea what the posting thing that was being referred to means.

Crunch does occur and will probably continue to occur in the game industry. Most of us signed up knowing we would alway do some crunch time, however the amount that EA asks/requires/demands its employees to put in is excessive. I put quite a bit of crunch time in myself from around May of 1997 until October of 2000. I wouldn't say that I worked straight through during that time, but it was pretty close. We are trying to limit it as much as possible and we don't require employees to put it in. I think I've only ever "required" it on one of my projects at Black Isle and that was for people to work on Saturdays. I've never told or guilted people into working seven days a week. There are a lot of people that will put the time in because they want the game to be great and I guess you could say we take advantage of that. Our latest attempt at Obsidian is to be more strict about monthly milestones, so that we are making hard decisions about the game every month. Yes this means that we cut and change things about the game every month, but it hopefully limits the crunch time for the team and also means we leave ourselves a healthy amount of pure QA time at the end. This doesn't work perfectly and we do allow things to slide over milestones, which we know will really only hurt us in the end, but it's because we want the game to be the best that it can be.

Not to keep these threads alive, but it should be soon on the patch. We haven't changed anything about the patch in a while and are just going through the steps of getting it released.

You probably won't seen anymore IE games. It's unfortunate in many ways, because I do think there is a hole left by them. I really enjoyed the strategic play, which is one of the reasons I got Interplay to sign up the original BG. The problem is that the game style is pretty much PC only and the engine is 2D. Both of those things together would pretty much get you laughed out of any publisher's conference room if you pitched that kind of game to them. We do kick the idea around here every once in a while about making a game like those that were made with the IE, but we are pretty sure we would have to fund it ourselves if we did.

Yah Yah....

Oh crap, I forgot about that. Hmmm.... Let me think about this for a bit and see what we could maybe do.

I just thought I would post here as well as one of the other forums. As far as we know right now, there is nothing stopping the patch from being released, so it should be very soon.

Just going to comment on the speculation that there isn't a patch - that's silly. As for the patch, as far as we know there is nothing else stopping it being released, so it really should be soon.

This is one of the funny things about the game. There are some people who vastly prefer the heads that we created for the game and there are others that really don't like them. I find it kind of strange. I actually implemented (put them in the game, not made them), so I'm I know how you can change them back. Most of them can change back if you can get the PMH* and PFH*.mdl and .tga files from the first game and put them in the Override folder for your game. That won't put all the KotOR1 heads back, but it will put most of them back. Oh, and there is only one less player head in KotOR2 compared to KotOR1. It happens to be an Asian Male Head though.

There are multiple versions of the interface, so that at higher resolutions you are getting different art - not just something scaled up. [someone could look in the game files if they don't believe me. ] I guess it never occured to us that some people would want the non-scaled version of KotOR1 as well as the scaled version. I'll ask if we could maybe put that in a future patch (if we do one).

It's kind of tough, since you need to get a Visa and that costs money. Some people go with a TN which is easier in some ways, but more strict when it comes to what sort of education you have as compared to an H1B which is harder to get but more lax in the requirements - if that makes any sense. Companies will hire Canadians, however if they have to pay $3K to $5K just to get you a Visa then they question why they shouldn't just hire someone who they don't have to pay that for. In Obsidian's case, we tend to shy away from it mostly because we are in Orange County, California. There are so many people in the area that make games, we can usually find someone local to come work for us. That means we don't have to pay for interviewing, re-location or Visas. For a more Senior Level person, that could mean saving something like $10K or $15K per new hire.

We pretty much work entirely on Dell Systems. We have a number of different models, but mostly 4600's, 8400's and a few Precision 470's. As for automated testing. We are doing a certain amount of automated testing on the new NWN2 world editor. Since we decided to completely re-write the editor and wanted to be able to load a certain amount of NWN1 material into it, the programmer on it has used some data checking programs to make sure that the same stuff that goes in, is the same stuff that comes out. When it comes to game testing, we don't really do any automated testing. Most game apps are hard to automate when it comes to testing, since the interfaces are fairly non-standard. What ends up happening is that a bunch of people are thrown at the game and split up amoungst different areas of the game. On KotOR2, there was a d20 tester, and then a tester in charge of each of the worlds and then light side quick play through testers and dark side quick play through testers, long play through testers and then just other random testers playing through.

I haven't heard that there is going to be a Polish version of the game. It's possible though, since if they wanted to just do text, just dialog.tlk would have to be translated. CD Projekt was able to do a number of Infinity Engine game translations with very little help from Bioware or Black Isle.

Another thing you can do is to put together at least a moderate sized module for NWN. That would help you learn how writing applies to games and also a little bit about scripting. We tend to have our designers work on what they are good at. Some designers do a lot of writing and only a little bit of scripting, while other focus a little bit more on systems design and scripting. Then we have scripters who just focus on scripting, so that designers and writers don't have to.

Just a comment on an earlier part of this post. We were able to budget for a QA team on NWN2, so we will have at least a small one ourselves on it for almost a year.

This is what was sent to Gamespot as the official comment from LucasArts and Obsidian: "We've heard from some people that they feel there was another ending that was not realized in the shipping version of the Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords. The truth of the matter is that much like a movie a certain amount of the game ends up on the cutting room floor. This is often because the original ideas or design just don't make sense when put in the context of the final game as it is being put together. When it comes to KOTOR II, there was material cut at various times in the game's making, including at the end of the game's development cycle. We don't feel that the amount of material was much more or less than we have had to cut from any of the other games that any of us have worked on. Ultimately, both Mike and I are proud of the game and of the talented people at Obsidian who made it with the assistance of LucasArts. Sincerely, Feargus Urquhart, Obsidian CEO & President Mike Gallo, LucasArts Producer"

I love being referred to as "Obsidian Exec #1". It makes me feel so powerful.

The patch is coming out soon. I know the following is a lame excuse, but the week that GDC happens (Game Developers Conference), which was last week, things sometimes slow down a bit in the industry. We'll try to post when it is coming out in the next few days.

Don't take this as we are making KotOR3 or making it using Unreal 3. This is just a comment on making a game like KotOR with Unreal. It's my opinion that a game like KotOR could be made quite well with Unreal 3. A fair amount would need to be added to the engine like dialog, combat and character development systems, however the Unreal engine has been developed over the years to make it easier to use for games other than FPSs. I would bet that it would be harder to make a top-down game like the Infinity Engine games or Fallout in an Unreal engine, since the engine was not made to have a camera that is almost out of the game world. Oh, and pathfinding would be another challenge, since RPGs generally have a lot more things trying to path all at the same time across the whole level than FPSs.