Fionavar

Please join us for a little, some, or a lot of the Extra Life Anniversary event this coming weekend, November 15-17. More info is below but know how important the Forum Community has been in supporting Obsidian. Please consider this an invitation to help us now help the chids!

The latest Community blog by @melkathi has been published: Ghosts & Goblins & Chocolate! While you check it out, please consider what musing might be percolating for you! Looking for new submissions for December 7th and into 2025. Please DM if you would like to explore this further

This is a story about sacrifice. It is also a story about nostalgia, but more than anything, it is a story about the sacrifices gamers make. We travel back to a time of low pixel count and greenish screens – specifically the summer of 1992. The radio that summer would blast SNAP! Rythm Is a Dancer and my cousin and I, shortly before our 13th birthdays, were in summer camp on the German island of Norderney. In the evening, after lights out, with eight kids per tent, obviously nobody slept. In our tent we did two things. Firstly, one of the boys had brought terrible horror novellas, and we read those. Over thirty years later I still have nightmares. Mostly because the story did not make sense – you can’t hide a whole labyrinth inside the walls of a bell tower! The second thing was eating chocolate and other sweets. And this is where this becomes a story of sacrifice. You see, the eating was predominantly done by the other six. The two of us would initiate it, but then we’d spend the night selling our stash to the others in the tent. In retrospect, we should have found a way to expand business to the other tents, but we were not even thirteen. There was a reason to this, which had little to do with entrepreneurial spirit. The camp organizers had permitted each kid a 50DM allowance per week for the two weeks of camp. Incidentally, as my cousin pointed out, 50DM was roughly the price of a new Game Boy game. Not eating chocolate but watching others enjoy my stash was not a choice. It was a sacrifice that only gamers will understand: others would eat so I could game. Everything went well. Until the very last day. It was hot. We were on our last excursion in town, killing time until we had to get the ferry. In the (heat of the) moment we decided to grab an ice cream. The worst 3,50 I ever spent. Also, one of the worst ice creams I ever had and most likely the reason why I still do not eat lemon ice cream. It almost put me off lemonade as well. An hour before we left, I dropped to 46,50. One, horrible tasting lemon ice cream was the reason I couldn’t pay for Gargoyle’s Quest solely through the chocolate black market. Mind, the entire process did turn Gargoyle’s Quest into one of my favourite games, even though it wasn’t really my thing – too dark in tone, too much jumping around spikes. In the end, the cool green daemon on the box cover turned out to be red! That was an unexpected plot twist. It highlighted something though about descriptions and plot relevance: how often do authors abuse the fact that in written format you do not have information until they give it to you? In comics, movies, and games, you see things from the start. Unless it is a greenish Game Boy screen and after hours and hours some NPC tells you: your skin is red. Two things I remember about Gargoyle’s Quest: how I made the money to buy it and how surprised I was finding out the protagonist was red. Also, the many spikes. Three things I remember about Gargoyle’s Quest: how I made the money to buy it, how surprised I was finding out the protagonist was red, the many spikes, and the gnarly trees, the inextinguishable flames, the different breath weapons… Among the many things I remember about Gargoyle’s Quest is that it is a game literally worth it’s weight in chocolate.

The November 7th is formatted and ready to be published! Until them, please (re)explore the submissions already available in The Community Blog. As well, I continue to take submission for new entries. Please DM if you have an idea for December 7th or into 2025! https://forums.obsidian.net/blogs/category/2-community-blog/

Thanks for sharing this amazing affirmation! I have let @The Guildmaster, @SChin, and Admin know ...

I remember my first MS-DOS 'real' 386 computer ... the incandescent glow I am sure was designed by Stephen King and was never conducive to sleeping well after gaming on it! Thanks for the sharing of you, Pidesco, always a gift to learn of another's journey!

Latest 7th blog is live from our @Pidesco

For a while now, I've wanted to write something about me and Obsidian. About the history, about the community, about the games. From Sith Lords and Project New Jersey up to Avowed and Outer Worlds 2. I've been here for 20 years. If it sounds like a long time, it's because it is. I first joined the forums on the day they opened, along with a bunch of people who had come here from the old Black Isle Community, which I was never a part of. Western RPGs were at a bit of a low ebb in 2004, especially PC ones. Bioware and Bethesda were the major RPG developers at the time, and already responsible for some of my favourite RPGs ever. However, while both Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights had a lot to offer, and I was very much looking forward to them, they ended up not quite meeting my expectations. Bloodlines came out that same year, and while great, it did not do as well as it deserved. To me, at least, it kind of felt like Obsidian would be the torchbearers for the kind of RPGs I wanted to play. C&C was the key design feature: Choice and consequence. Or as some of us used to say back then, "The Chosen One must choose!" I wanted games with multiple paths, where my gameplay choices affected the storyline and the world around my character. I wanted the sort of agency I felt I got in games like Fallout, Planescape Torment, or Baldur's Gate 2, but more so. I felt that the CRPG as a genre was good but could move forward and improve, and even back then I already felt that wasn't happening. With game budgets already ballooning, the trend was not to make games with loads of essentially optional content but rather to create games with very rigid critical paths, or open world games with very little gameplay depth. RPG features that I thought should be standard were falling by the wayside, instead of being improved and expanded upon. And that was what I often focused on when posting here on the forums. Or maybe not. Sometimes I did do some substantial posting, but frequently my posts were little more than short jokes, trying to get a laugh out of people. More often than not I was just lurking, perhaps silently agreeing with posters like Metadigital or Baley, while disagreeing with posters like Volourn or Hades_One. But it was without noticing that eventually the community became a part of my identity. It quickly became a daily online destination for me, a way to connect to like-minded people across the world. And it led to slowly making sort of online friends like Role-Player, Darth Drabek, or Rosbjerg, by being a part in events and side communities. I even met some forum denizens in real life, and thanks to the coming of Obsidian loot, I now go around in my everyday life with Obsidian stuff, be it a pen, a backpack or a t-shirt. My wife knows that Obsidian games are my jams, my kids sometimes used to wish they'd get gaming loot like me. Nowadays I don't post that often on the forums. I still lurk on a daily basis and help out a bit with stuff as time permits. What I think about, sometimes, are the people that have come and gone. People that have been around for a decade or more that I feel are still new users, users that were here for a short time but left an indelible mark. Forum posters that I cherished and enjoyed, and others who were infuriating and wrong. Essentially, in some ways I'm not the person I was when I joined. 20 years is a long time, I said. In the time I've been here I left a degree, went into another degree, got a job, started a career in an area I never thought I'd be in, became somewhat good at it, moved to another country, acquired a whole new family, lost my parents, learned to enjoy myself, developed a serious comic book reading habit. It's a lot and it happened without me noticing, really. But I'm still the same person, as well. I'm still a gamer, with a healthy focus on RPGs, I still furiously devour music and books and movies, I still have a terrible tendency to want to be right about everything, (to my own detriment "I'm right and you're wrong" brings me joy), I'm still a nerd, and I still want to finish that first degree. I also sometimes still wonder what it would be like to work at Obsidian. Even if I'm really not a fit for the company, or Irvine, or SoCal in general. Pretty sure my family would have liked it though.

Next week's 7th blog is being prepped for posting. Until then, why not checkout the contributions this far: https://forums.obsidian.net/blogs/category/2-community-blog/

Thanks, @Hawke64. Grateful for you analysis! I would be interested in your thoughts about the romance component with NPCs and how AI comes into the discussion for you.

I am excited to share that the most recent Community Blog is now out. It is another game mechanic exploration shared by @Hawke64, Commentary on the Combat-Related NPC Behaviour/AI in The Outer Worlds. Please check it out. As well, I am now taking submissions for October 7th's edition so please DM me if you have a musing you like to discuss regarding the ongoing invitation to contribute to the Community Blog!

Emerald Vale is the starting area of The Outer Worlds, introducing the player to the systems and the setting. The planet belongs to the Spacer’s Choice corporation, whose colony is on the brink of collapse. After discovering the body of their expected companion and going through a basic tutorial (how to hide, talk, and shoot), the player is free to explore a large map, while the main quest gently guides the story. From the local enforcement officers to the talkative and surprisingly cooperative ship AI, to the town, and beyond. Below are some observations on combat. Obsidian games are known for their engaging writing, interactive and thought-provoking stories, and intricate and well-balanced gameplay systems (that are not based on the player’s reaction time). There are quite a few essays dedicated to these aspects. Overall, the foes always fight to the death, but retreat to their area and instantly regain health if the player moves too far. The ranged human foes take cover. The melee opponents, be it animals or humans, just charge head on. When I killed two armed and armoured guards at the town entrance, the Junior Inhumer, an unarmoured civilian working nearby, whose only weapon was his shovel, continued attacking. A tutorial note helpfully informed me that the locals would forget about me shortly unless the faction reputation was “Kill on Sight.” When a non-playable character (NPC) discovers a player-made corpse, it takes them less than a minute to stop pacing and looking for the perpetrator and return to their routine. As the saying goes, “must have been the wind.” On a positive note, if the player’s character is discovered by a hostile NPC (or if the player made an NPC hostile to them), it alerts only the NPCs in the immediate area around, who could hear or see the fighting, instead of everyone on the map. It is worth mentioning that the shortcomings can be explained by the history of video games (in particular, first person shooters (FPS), action and role-playing games) and the designers’ assumptions about the players’ convenience - if the enemies tried to get reinforcements or flee and the player was interested in the experience points and loot from their bodies, chasing them would have been inconvenient, while the NPCs begging the player to spare their lives might cause the latter to think about their in-character motivation, and limiting NPCs’ attention span makes it harder for the player to lock themselves into combat-only scenarios. While there are 2 combat-related abilities, Cower (causes the foe to cover in fear for a few seconds) and Terrify (causes the foes to run away for a few seconds), that provide some variety of behaviour, they do not show the hostile NPCs as sentient beings with the self-preservation instinct or any social ties. With the in-game lore, it could be said that the NPCs are just very loyal to their corporations or fear the repercussions of the disobedience more than the protagonist, while on the higher difficulties, the combat might provide a significant challenge. Additionally, the lack of self-preservation fits perfectly well for the robotic foes, though they do not react strongly to corpses either. The region offers some variety of non-human living opponents, though they are like actual animals visually and narratively, while, as mentioned, the behaviour strongly differs. An animal would try to avoid contact with an armed and armoured human if they could, or, otherwise, to intimidate into the human into leaving, due to the likelihood of suffering injuries and being unable to provide for themselves in the event of combat, with very few exceptions (mating season, being unable to run, seeing the human as a threat to their children). In particular, canids might not look like regular fluffy dogs, but, despite the colourful scales and fins, they do resemble them, including the small ones (the teacup canids seen in the late-game areas). Many people have issues with hurting dogs in games, so it is understandable why one would want to create a dog-like hostile NPC without the negative feelings attached. Then there are sprats - cute little reptile space rats with large eyes and large ear-like appendages. I saw them escape the quarantine house in Edgewater and the guard shot them. There also were some aggressive “rabid” sprats in a house outside the town’s walls. Finally, the primals look like gorillas with fangs, but they also throw rocks (because The Outer Worlds has quite a lot of ranged weaponry for the player, every second hostile NPC must be able to shoot as well) and can dig underground tunnels. There are several areas with groups of them, but no quests attached. There are also chickens, but they are completely non-hostile. Some other animals are mentioned, but not shown in Emerald Vale - mantiqueens (giant mantis-like insects) and saltune, which is related to the one instance where Spacer’s Choice is described positively (granted, I assume the writers had thought of it as negative) - the company collects the already dead fish instead of torturing and killing living fish. As mentioned by Animal Equality UK, “wild fish often live in complex social groups, they use tools, and exhibit signs of anxiety and pain. However, fish are treated like commodities by the fishing industry.” So, the fictional evil corp managed to be more sympathetic than many real ones. Then again, piles of dead sprats could be seen at the Edgewater Cannery. As for human enemies, there are marauders, who are the guilt-free source of diverse combat encounters fitting for any player’s character since the marauders attack on sight. The Peril on Gorgon DLC sheds light on their origins, though in Emerald Vale, their behaviour does not quite match the narrative. They seem to form social bonds and hierarchies between each other and are able to tame and take care of their canids, who stay close to their handlers and show aggression only towards the player. In a side quest, a former worker NPC attempts to join the marauders’ ranks and she is not harmed by the ones around her. The marauders also are capable of planning - they laid mines around their encampment and near the back entrance to the abandoned Community Centre. Though, when the combat started, they charged right on their own mines with predictable results, then retreated when I moved slightly farther away from their camp. In terms of locations, the foes around story-significant structures are usually distributed thoughtfully and account for the more stealthy and less murderous players’ characters, while also interacting with the environment (e.g. the marauders looking at desks or sitting on chairs). On the other hand, most of the other enemies look as intentionally placed as the randomly generated camps in Dragon Age: Inquisition. In conclusion, I believe that making the NPC combat-related behaviour more realistic and diverse, while also considering the location, would increase the players’ immersion and engagement. Let the animals flee and the civilians alert the guards or just run for cover or try to surrender. The next Obsidian game, Avowed, takes place in the same universe as the Pillars of Eternity duology and has the first-person camera view like The Outer Worlds. I have heard that combat there will be unavoidable, but I hope for more complex and intelligent NPC actions. But there is another crucial technical quality of The Outer Worlds, which I would love to see in Avowed - the edition with the higher system requirements, Spacer’s Choice Edition, was cleanly separated from the base one and I was able to keep the better performing and more accessible version of the game. I would not be able to notice the 4K textures and Global Illumination nor to run the game with them on, so saving the storage space, bandwidth, and power, while enjoying the game, was most welcome. It would be great if Avowed had the VA and the 4K textures in an optional free DLC, available for the players who want it and not forced upon those who cannot use it.

The next addition is coming to the Community Blog in a week! If you haven't had a chance to catch-up, please do give them a read, including the last one by @MedicineDan, We are What We Play. Finally, if you have an idea and would like to create something for this community feature, please do reach out through DM regarding this ongoing invitation!

@Chilloutman I have checked with Admin and that is the standard UI for the platform, so likely not possible. Let me know if there is anything else you need

I will pass this on to Admin. Thanks for sharing this, @Chilloutman

Thanks, @MedicineDan! I remember the Satanic scare. I was just being introduced to D&D at a community centre where I learned to love RPGs and play chess. I also recall the community centre had to decide whether to continue to provide space for D&D sessions. I am most grateful they decide to continue to offer this resource. For a child, of a single parent, there were already enough strikes against my family and this exposure and that centre were likely resources that helped me navigate such challenging times.

The newest blog by @MedicineDan is now live. Get a cup of coffee or something cold on this summer day and take some time to explore "We are What We Play" ...

I believe, somewhere in our hearts, we are what we play. We don’t become angry half orcs slaughtering villagers or bold knights fighting for justice, but those ideas become part of our person. They swirl around in our heads like swarms of butterflies. I have been formed as much by games as I have by the events in my life. I played games as a child. Recess had tag, dodge ball, and kickball. At home, we would play the occasional board game. It wasn’t until my mom received the original grey Dungeons and Dragons boxed set as a gift in 1978 that games became a peculiar focus in my life. I was only nine years old at the time. I didn’t understand every word, but I understood enough to know I wanted to play. Wanting and doing are two different things and my nine-year-old self could not grasp every concept. That didn’t stop me from valiantly trying to construct modules. No one else had much interest and so I would fashion what, to my mind, were elaborate maps and imagined encounters for players who did not exist. Sometimes the idea of the game is as entertaining as the game itself. Sometimes, I think, the idea of the game *is* the game. In 1981, after I returned from Guam, my eldest brother brought over an Atari 800. Magic! Two-word text adventures were simply brilliant! Unlike my experiences living on a tropical island, there were plenty of kids in California who wanted to play games like Dungeons and Dragons and some of my friends would also come over to my house to play computer games. If solitary play fueled my imagination, including other players forced me to put that imagination to practical use in a game setting. Sharing a computer meant one person could be at the keyboard while the other one or two would be forced to stand in back yelling comments or barking orders. As I grew into my teens, Dungeons and Dragons became central to my life. I would hunt out modules to play with friends or, more often, simply read and imagine playing. There wasn’t enough time to play everything. One of my best friends liked to play, but his mother, a staunch evangelical Christian, was convinced that Dungeons and Dragons was Satanic, so we played Gamma World. However, soon after, her pastor proclaimed all RPGs were Satanic and it was difficult for him to play. I loved his mom, and she was very kind to me, but she gently explained that I should enjoy my life on earth because, as a Catholic, I was bound for hell. …And she was certain RPGs corrupted young minds! Lol Alas, I’d started drinking and smoking at 12 years old and much of my time was spent in callow and self-destructive behavior. If only the pull of games had been stronger, it may be that I would have been a much more useful member of society earlier in my life, but I was not. Turns out games hadn’t corrupted me, but I was still corrupted. The fault, as always, was my own. I was 17 when I graduated from high school and immediately joined the United States Navy. Far from being rare, it turned out a lot of my fellow sailors were gamers. I often wonder if I would have had even more chance to game if I’d been stationed on a ship. Not a lot of chance for other things shipboard. I was always land based, however, and mostly overseas. We did have some great computer games. One of my fellows overseas, an army grunt if I remember correctly, would use such creative names as Prelf for his elven priest and Dwight for his dwarven fighter. : Eldar’s shaking his head with a bemused smile icon : As it seems, some of us didn’t have our imaginations enriched by gaming, but what some lacked in imagination they returned back with practicality. Same manual, different lesson. When I returned home, basically bummed out and aimless, I wandered around a lot. I’ve had a variety of jobs ranging, in no particular order, from cashier to human resources for Longs Drugs, meter reader for the gas company, teacher at a parochial school, wedding photography salesman on the Las Vegas Strip, quality assurance for a video game, security guard, and registered nurse with a couple of others I’m probably forgetting. I’m currently a nurse practitioner. I’m done floating around in the ether, so this one is going to be my last. As you can tell, gaming has been more consistent than employment for me. Like a lot of gamers my age, there are particular computer games that were fundamental in my developing tastes. Zork would probably be the first and foremost. Fallout and Baldur’s Gate, of course. It’s now that I invoke Planescape Torment. What words exist that have not been said of PST, good, bad, or somewhere between? I won’t add to them here. It is for me what it is. I love the game. As an aside, my wife loved this T.V. show during the 1990s called The Pretender. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but just this year my wife found it again on some streaming service and we discovered the main character did the voice work for The Nameless One. During all this time, talking about games has been as important as playing them. I’ve spent considerably more time discussing PST than playing it. Same for all of my favorite games. I became part of the online community at Black Isle Studios and eventually, a bit before the place folded, I was a moderator. Sadly, I can’t remember the names of all the people there. One of the moderators at that time left a message on my answering machine, playing his guitar and singing a song. I don’t remember who it was, but I remember the song. That was some point after I’d dropped off the face of the earth for months. Being someone with a number of character flaws, I’m a bit of a wanderer by nature. As they say, I’m constantly pushing people away with one hand and pulling them closer with the other. Eventually, since everything was quickly going to a fire sale at Interplay, I signed up as a community member at Obsidian. I want to address particular Obsidian games since this is the Obsidian board and I’ve loved a number of Obsidian titles. I’m currently hundreds of hours into Grounded, for instance. I’ve spent thousands of hours enjoying Obsidian games, but I can’t go on without owning to a past of which I am ashamed. I don’t know who all is at Obsidian at this time. I sent word asking someone there to help me find work and he arranged to have me do quality assurance on Mask of the Betrayer. I tried my best to do a good job, but I was an utter failure. My personality defects were simply too great to put in quality work. I refuse to submit anything here without giving a nakedly truthful account. Ironically, Mask of the Betrayer was an excellent title. The story, the unfolding of every element, was so well done I always believed it should have been a stand-alone title outside of NWN2. After I worked on Mask of the Betrayer, I was bereft of hope. Not because of my work on MotB, but because it threw into stark relief how lacking in distinction I was as a human. I realized, with my degrees in history and classical studies, with my wife and varied job experiences, that I had done nothing to justify my existence, let alone distinguish it. I fell into abject despair and rarely left my house. I gained weight and eventually weighed over 400lbs. Even so, in all this, I gamed. Games were the last frayed strand of a rope to which I clung, and my grasp was starting to fail. The point of this isn’t my sad state. I have a private blog that serves perfectly well in order to flog myself. My point is that, in a pinch, I had games. Maybe you’ve all heard the story of the man who is falling from a cliff, clenching the roots of a tree. Looming on the cliff above, there is a ferocious tiger. Below him lie jagged rocks in the distance. The man, desperate and despairing, sees a berry on a bush growing from the side of the cliff. He takes the berry and eats it. Savoring the flavor, he thinks to himself, “I have tasted no berry sweeter than this.” Games. I’m clearly in a much better place now. I’m a professional and I help people in my practice. …But games. New Vegas. Pillars of Eternity 2. Mask of the Betrayer. Masterpieces. I have tasted no berries sweeter than these.

If Guidelines were violated the messaging would have been different and via DM. It was simply an encouragement to recognise the sensitivities involved and as a response to some concern that was brought to my attention. hope this is helpful. Feel free to follow-up in DM if there are concerns.

The fourth addition is coming to the Community Blog on August 7th. Please check out the previous contributions and also DM me if you have a musing you would like to create!

As the conversation is unfolding, I will remind all community members that OBS' fora are grounded in an understating of inclusivity and celebration of diversity. Do indeed debate but also remember that discriminatory or (ex)implicit argumentation that diminishes the dignity of others is contrary to the ethos of this community and the Forum Guidelines.

Thanks, Hawke64. I appreciate the challenge and shared hope :). Some of the Devs have referenced that Avowed will be akin to Outworlds in regard to story-style and gameplay: does that comparison help with some of your wonderings?

Thanks for this, @Hawke64. As we anticipate Avowed, I am wondering what you might add from this piece regarding hopes and expectation in the shift to the different platform and such?

Thank you, Bruce, for sharing your journey into gaming. It's intriguing to see how our reading interests lay the groundwork for our digital inclinations. The recurring theme of the power of storytelling is striking, as it not only motivates us to engage in gaming but also to connect with and remain loyal to exceptional storytellers

The latest blog by our very own @BruceVC is now live. Get a cup of joe and take some time to explore "My Gaming Journey" ...