20th Anniversary Forum Event: Devs Q&A!

[Fionavar]

Thanks to everyone who participated. Below you will find the Top Three Dev Questions, community member contributor, and a Dev's subsequent reply. Happy 20th Obsidian!

Q: I've seen that there is someone who's head of XBox research for Obsidian. How do the developers work with that person and their team? What are the kind of things that Obsidian can ask them/they bring to Obsidian? (Question submitted by Sannom)

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A: We work with the Xbox Research Team - it's not just one person, we've worked with a few folks over the years and have dedicated people at Xbox Research for Obsidian games. Research helps to answer questions about how players play our games to improve the experience by providing their expertise in gathering and providing data through surveys or playtests. The playtests identify pain points in user interface design, analyze difficulty, and uncover if the tutorial is not teaching an essential mechanic properly. If something isn't landing as well as we hope, they offer solutions to explore and try. At a higher level, they can help gather data about what fans like about Obsidian games, aid in marketing and trailers, and even were essential in the creation of the Arachnophobia mode in Grounded. It's been great working with that team to make our game experiences better.

- Adam Brennecke (Director of Grounded)

 

Q: Are we ever likely to see a similar complexity of choice and consequences as done in Alpha Protocol in any future games? Or was the combined reactivity of conversations, character attitudes, the timing of when and where you met characters and mission choices too stressful, frustrating, and convoluted for testing and story writing to revisit that approach? (Question submitted by Raithe)

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A: Obsidian has on several occasions looked into doing an Alpha Protocol 2 but has never gotten the opportunity.  However, if we were to do it we’d pursue the same complexity and depth of player choice and its reactivity with story and characters.  Which is my roundabout way of saying that if the correct game idea came along, be it AP2 or some other similar project, we’d be down to get that crazy again.  It was convoluted and stressful and difficult to test, but most games are, and the end product was a super cool and a highly unique experience.  I think maybe we’d put less love into the insanely extreme, unlikely outcomes (the kind our level designers wouldn’t have even knew existed if they did read the scripts) but I think we’d make it deeper and more rewarding in other ways. 

The tricky part is that for all its complexity, in AP there is only just one Michael Thorton – and while it’s up to the player to truly build their own MT – he is limited in many ways.  The world also consists of essentially one-off, largely linear missions, and conversations and characters are highly constrained.  I won’t dive too deeply on the topic, but generally speaking, that’s a huge trade off in terms of complexity when compared to our other heavily choice and consequence based games.  Those games typically allow some level of character generation and bigger broader complexity in terms of factions, NPCs, and quests, etc.  These are different kinds of complexity and, at least for Obsidian, we know we can’t do both at the quality level we’d want or we’ll get ourselves in a scope-hole we can’t fill.

So yes we’d love to do another game like AP, but to do it and do it well we’d need to make a game that was much more similar to AP’s experience and less like Fallout: New Vegas or The Outer Worlds.  Is that a concept we can sell?  Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to since Alpha Protocol but that hasn’t stopped us from trying.

- Chris Parker (Co-Founder)

 

Q: You guys obviously do a lot of research on your games, given how detailed and plausible your worlds are so that even little things stick in memory, like rings considered to be tacky to use as jewelry in Tyranny or yacht's name in Alpha Protocol being a reference to cult soviet cartoon, and it's clearly more than "lets google this sh†t", so here's my question - how do you do your research? (Question submitted by bugarup)

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A: Research depends on the person, but we use books, YouTube videos, academic articles on JSTOR, and even employ experts/specialists (as we did for Pentiment) when we just can’t find the answers ourselves.  We know that if we get something wrong, tens of thousands of fans will let us know, so it’s in our best interest to be diligent.

- Josh Sawyer (Studio Design Director)

 

 

[kanisatha]

Congrats to the three winners!!

Would be nice if we had a community manager type posting at least short replies to all the questions asked.

[Fionavar]

Hi kanisatha,

I will pass that on. The set of questions were reviewed prior to submission and finalisation in order to be able to pass on what could be short-listed. I will follow-up should there be a possibility in addressing your encouragement.

[daven]

Aw no answer about Chris Avellone.