Obsidian Entertainment studio tour

[Bendu]

[Labadal]

4 Projects. Probably Tyranny Expac, Pathfinder Adventures stuff, Pillars of Eternity 2. Last one would be Cain/Boyarsky? 

[injurai]

4 Projects. Probably Tyranny Expac, Pathfinder Adventures stuff, Pillars of Eternity 2. Last one would be Cain/Boyarsky? 

 

Gotta get my grubby hands on that Cainarsky!

[algroth]

Anyone else try to pause through the "let's skip this" bits to try and see if they could get some more info on the Cainarsky project?

Edited August 30, 2017 by algroth

[smjjames]

About where is that 'lets skip this' bit?

[algroth]

About where is that 'lets skip this' bit?

 

There's a few moments where Feargus rushes the tour so as to avoid revealing things about the project. Those are the moments I meant.

[smjjames]

At about 13:20 ish I think? Where he says something about something they don't want to reveal yet (Feargus thought the guys were working on Tyranny or PoE stuff initially, I think) and then the guys rushed to hide the screens.

[Azdeus]

I really love all the art on the walls, also that board game room; Awesome.

[injurai]

Anyon else try to pause through the "let's skip this" bits to try and see if they could get some more info on the Cainarsky project?

 

I did exactly that, couldn't see anything. Some of the art on the walls towards the end of the video I couldn't recognize so I was wondering if per chance any of those were from the new project, but you still couldn't make much out anyways.

[Ethics Gradient]

Everything about the video is awesome and glorious.  It is little stuff like this that shows a company can have a community strategy that goes a couple steps further than the occasional twitter press release.

 

Virtual tours, twitch streams, Extra Life, OEW, random stories entirely unrelated to gaming; it all goes a long way integrate the actual people responsible for developing wonderful games and fanbase that supports them.

[Infinitron]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-08-30-share-your-favourite-moments-from-obsidian-games-and-win-consoles

 

Share your favourite moments from Obsidian games and win consoles!

 

We're indulging in a bit of a celebration of the work of veteran role-playing game studio Obsidian Entertainment over the next couple of weeks, and as part of that we would love you to share memories of your favourite moments from Obsidian's classic games, past and present. We'll be rewarding our favourite memories with prizes!

 

The prizes come courtesy of Paradox Interactive, which is publishing a couple of Obsidian titles this month: the console version of the studio's old-school role-player Pillars of Eternity, out now; and the first expansion for last year's villainous RPG Tyranny, called Bastard's Wound, released on 7th September. Here's what our lucky winners will take away:

• One Xbox One S console with a copy of Pillars of Eternity

• One PlayStation 4 console with a copy of Pillars of Eternity

• 10 pairs of PC keys for Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny (the base games)

• The console winners and six of the PC key winners also get an exclusive limited edition Pillars or Tyranny medal, as awarded to members of the Obsidian development team after launching the games

To enter, simply share your favourite moment from an Obsidian Entertainment game in the comments below this article. (You'll need to log in or register an account with Eurogamer to do so.) We're accepting entries up to and including Tuesday 12th September.

 

To jog your memory, here's a list of Obsidian's best-known games to date:

• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II - The Sith Lords

• Neverwinter Nights 2

• Alpha Protocol

• Fallout: New Vegas

• Dungeon Siege III

• South Park: The Stick of Truth

• Pillars of Eternity

• Tyranny

We suspect we'll be seeing a lot of suggestions from KOTOR 2 and New Vegas, but Alpha Protocol and South Park have their fair share of memorable moments...

 

In the meantime, look out for a load of coverage of Obsidian's culture and history on the site. A couple of weeks ago, Chris and Bertie (plus some of our friends at VG247, Rock, Paper Shotgun and USgamer) visited the studio and were given a wealth of exclusive access to the veteran staff there to talk about their games - including some fascinating ones that were cancelled or never got past the pitch stage, and also some titles from Obsidian's 'parent' studio, Black Isle, which made Fallout 2 and Planescape Torment, among others. As a taster, here's Chris taking a tour of the studio with founder and CEO Feargus Urquhart:

 

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2017-08-29-fallout-new-vegas-studio-turned-down-a-game-of-thrones-video-game

 

Why Obsidian turned down a Game of Thrones video game

 

With the penultimate season of Game of Thrones finished on TV and a colossal amount of people talking about it, it's hard to imagine any video game maker ever passing up the opportunity to get a piece of that franchise pie. But as I found out recently, Obsidian Entertainment did - it turned down Game of Thrones.

 

Obsidian - the creator of Fallout: New Vegas, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, South Park: The Stick of Truth and Pillars of Eternity (among many others) - was offered the opportunity to make a game based on George R. R. Martin's story in 2005 by Electronic Arts (well, EA Partners).

 

It was six years before Season One of Game of Thrones aired on TV, nevertheless Obsidian co-founder and CEO Feargus Urquhart was well aware of the Song of Ice and Fire books - he'd followed them since the series started in 1996. He knew intimately what he was turning down, and he believed he had a good reason why.

 

The promo for the very first season of HBO's Game of Thrones.

 

"My feeling was, understanding the IP at the time, it's about this political intrigue, and people's connection to the IP is to all these characters - that's how the books are written, each chapter is a person and what's happening to them," Urquhart told me when I visited Obsidian recently.

 

"Other than what weird stuff is going on beyond The Wall, and the dragons, and some hint [of fantasy/magic], there are no magic users, there are no clerics, no thieves. Basically there's dudes with swords and armour and a little bit of mysticism, but within the main land [the Seven Kingdoms] there's no goblins, no kobolds..."

 

What would players play beyond a soldier? What would they fight? Not much was known about beyond The Wall at this point. It was really relationships between key characters that set A Song of Ice and Fire off.

 

"And," Obsidian co-founder and vice president of development Chris Parker added, "you can't give the player a character they can play that is important in this world. All of the important characters are all clearly spelled out and you can't even really go have a conversation with them."

 

"Looking back at it," added Urquhart, "the only thing we could have done is what BioWare did with Knights of the Old Republic. They basically said Episodes 1-6, you can't touch it, so we're just going to go way back. But even then some stuff had already been written about it in the [star Wars] Expanded Universe. With George R. R. Martin there was no other... they talked about some history... we could have done that."

 

Or, do what The Lord of the Rings: War in the North (2011) did and pick on a spin-off thread, in this case the other Fellowship up north who were doing a bunch of stuff to help the main Fellowship Tolkien wrote his books about. Obsidian actually pitched this LOTR idea to Warner, but then Warner bought Snowblind and made War in the North.

 

"So maybe there could have been something we could have done," said Urquhart, getting back to Game of Thrones, "but we were starting to think more about open-world RPGs, and we wanted our players to have agency, to be important in the world.

 

"Back then [real-time strategy games] were more relevant and I said, 'I just don't know how we could make... It just feels more like an RTS game.' You have different factions and you put more political intrigue in there."

 

French developer Cyanide must have felt the same way, or been listening, because in 2011 it tried exactly that. A Game of Thrones: Genesis was an RTS set centuries before the book timeline but sadly it wasn't any good.

 

Episodic storytelling expert Telltale adapted Game of Thrones much more recently in a well-received series told from the perspective of a footnote-obscure northern family loyal to the iconic Starks.

 

Surely Obsidian would choose differently today, assuming the deal were right, but back in 2005 things were very different. A Song of Fire and Ice hadn't been blown into the stratosphere by HBO Game of Thrones fever, and it was just one of many game possibilities floating around Obsidian Entertainment. I spent hours with Feargus Urquhart and Chris Parker combing over Obsidian's past and unearthing many more of those possibilities - and I have plenty of tales to tell beginning roughly a week from now. Stay tuned!

Edited August 30, 2017 by Infinitron

[HoonDing]

It's clear they don't have a gym in their basement.

[ShadySands]

Passed on GoT and Trek...  oy vey

 

Sucks that their LotR pitch was thieved like that though

[HoonDing]

 

 

"Other than what weird stuff is going on beyond The Wall, and the dragons, and some hint [of fantasy/magic], there are no magic users, there are no clerics, no thieves. Basically there's dudes with swords and armour and a little bit of mysticism, but within the main land [the Seven Kingdoms] there's no goblins, no kobolds..."
 
What would players play beyond a soldier? What would they fight? Not much was known about beyond The Wall at this point. It was really relationships between key characters that set A Song of Ice and Fire off.
 
"And," Obsidian co-founder and vice president of development Chris Parker added, "you can't give the player a character they can play that is important in this world. All of the important characters are all clearly spelled out and you can't even really go have a conversation with them."

The above is nonsense, just look at Cyanide's GoT arrpeegee.

[injurai]

It's clear they don't have a gym in their basement.

 

Now we know why Josh bikes.

[Flouride]

4 Projects. Probably Tyranny Expac, Pathfinder Adventures stuff, Pillars of Eternity 2. Last one would be Cain/Boyarsky? 

 

Yup, though it might be Tyranny DLC #2 by now. Constant Gaw who worked on upcoming DLC shifted onto a different unannounced project in July according to her LinkedIn profile.

Edited August 30, 2017 by Flouride

[smjjames]

 

4 Projects. Probably Tyranny Expac, Pathfinder Adventures stuff, Pillars of Eternity 2. Last one would be Cain/Boyarsky? 

 

Yup, though it might be Tyranny DLC #2 by now. Constant Gaw who worked on upcoming DLC shifted onto a different unannounced project in July according to her LinkedIn profile.

 

 

It's certainly possible. Feargus or the other guy (not sure who said it) said that it looked like Tyranny or PoE stuff.

[injurai]

 

 

4 Projects. Probably Tyranny Expac, Pathfinder Adventures stuff, Pillars of Eternity 2. Last one would be Cain/Boyarsky? 

 

Yup, though it might be Tyranny DLC #2 by now. Constant Gaw who worked on upcoming DLC shifted onto a different unannounced project in July according to her LinkedIn profile.

 

 

It's certainly possible. Feargus or the other guy (not sure who said it) said that it looked like Tyranny or PoE stuff.

 

 

Good catch.

[FlintlockJazz]

Not one of them was caught slacking off on Facebook!  What kind of workplace is this??!

[Infinitron]

The Month of Obsidian continues: http://www.usgamer.net/articles/the-last-days-of-black-isle-studios

The Last Days of Black Isle Studios
The crucible that defined some of the best RPG designers ever.

Feargus Urquhart remembers the moment that he knew that it was time to leave Black Isle Studios—the team he had founded a little more than five years before it was under Interplay.

Interplay had been struggling with debt and other issues for years before Urquhart finally decided to leave the studio he named for a region of Scotland, his ancestral homeland. But he had nevertheless held on all the way through 2003, if only out of the vain hope that they could finally finish Fallout 3.

Interplay lost $20 million in 2003, but Urquhart knew that it was over well before that.

"For me, I was very aware of what was going on at Interplay in general, and I tried to share that as much as I could with everyone in Black Isle," Urquhart remembers. "The point where I felt that Black Isle was not going to get the support it needed from Interplay anymore was when Interplay lost the [Dungeons & Dragons] license. Interplay could have figured out how to keep it, but it was a lower priority. This meant a game that people had been working on for two years had to be scrapped. After that happened, it felt to me like the writing was on the wall and both Black Isle and Interplay itself were probably not going to be around much longer.

That summer, Urquhart wound up departing the division he had helped to create after a seven year stint. And then the clock started ticking.

Today, Urquhart and many other Black Isle alums are at Obsidian, an RPG studio that has managed to forge its own legacy. But Black Isle is still there, hovering in the background. The console version of Pillars of Eternity, which landed earlier this week, is a spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate–a Black Isle staple. Many of Obsidian's fans go all the way back to Black Isle.

While relatively short-lived, Black Isle was a crucible that wound up binding together a team of highly talented creatives together through their careers. To understand what Black Isle meant, consider what Interplay founder Brian Fargo told Gamepressure years after the studio's closure. "At the time, if I had had such an opportunity, I would have fired everyone in the company except for Black Isle Studios and kept 40 people–and everything would still go on," said Fargo. "I would rebuild Interplay from there. But nobody would allow me to do that."

Black Isle inspires such feelings in part because its rise was so meteoric and because its pedigree was so undeniable. The very name conjures images of Tolkien-esque battles against orcs in foggy lowlands and dread swamps: perfect for a studio that would go on to build its name on great RPGs. It was an initiative formed within Interplay by Brian Fargo, the man who had designed The Bard's Tale and other classic RPGs, and was ultimately defined by two properties: Fallout and Dungeons & Dragons. Under these umbrellas, Black Isle Studios produced some of the most loved RPGs of all time, including Fallout 2 and Planescape Torment.

Their secret was their commitment to open-ended design and storytelling. It spoke to people who found traditional design boring, including the now-legendary designer J.E. Sawyer, who has worked on many of Black Isle Studios' and Obsidian's best games.

Sawyer vividly remembers playing Fallout in college before eventually joining Black Isle. Fallout was still technically an Interplay series back then, but the seeds that would define Black Isle were there. "I went in and I killed everything. I get the evil ending and I'm like, 'Wow, that's so cool. The game just lets me just lay waste to all these things,'" Sawyer remembers. "The more I looked at Fallout, the more I realized that the structure of it allowed me to go straight from Vault 13 to the Necropolis. You can do that. You would never do that on your first playthrough because you don't even know the Necropolis exists, but the game's structure actually allows you to do that and you can get the water chip very quickly."

Not long after, Sawyer joined the newly-formed Black Isle, which was tasked with making Fallout's sequel. The team he joined was extremely young, he remembers, which gave it a particular energy. Many were just getting started in the games industry and had big ideas about what they wanted to create. Both Sawyer and Avellone got their start at Black Isle, and the small size of the studio meant that they were quickly given a lot of responsibility.

From the start, the culture was chaotic and often disorganized. The studio frequently had to rely on tech from other studios, most notably BioWare's Infinity Engine. The Icewind Dale team was composed almost entirely of junior designers.

But youth and ambition translated into energy. Practically everyone at Black Isle was a workaholic. "I remember people loved working on games. Maybe not every single person but overall the feeling was that people wanted to work hard," Sawyer says. "We never had required overtime but people were there all the time. Not that everyone was exactly like me, but we all really just wanted to make cool games, and we were in our 20s."

"It was a little more stressful than Obsidian in a lot of ways. There were more personality problems to manage, I think in part because there were so many us who were very young and inexperienced and we were just brats and professionalism was not a thing that we really understood," he continues. "If we got into arguments, they could just be big, stupid arguments. For the most part, though, we got along on stuff."

Avellone, now working on Divinity Original Sin 2, remembers too. "It was disorganized, and often had to rely on other companies’ tech–notably BioWare’s Infinity Engine, which arguably kept the majority of our projects running, since Black Isle couldn’t seem to build an engine of its own," says Avellone. "We also had to keep producing Infinity Engine games like Icewind Dale that could be done faster and with less RPG content again and again with increasingly short time frames."

Fargo agrees, "I think their biggest accomplishment was producing some of the finest RPGs of the 90's under difficult conditions. We were never financed like the big boys at Interplay and we were forced to be scrappy and produce games with far less resources than most."

The need to keep churning out games, as well as the departure of several experienced developers following the conclusion of Fallout 2, brought with it sometimes brutal pressures. Still, Black Isle won awards and critical acclaim. It was named IGN's RPG Studio of the Year in both 1998 and 1999. Though times were changing rapidly, starting with the rise of console and the decline of traditional PC gaming.

Within a year or two of Black Isle's creation, Interplay entered a period that Fargo later called "tough and not very fun." Interplay had been around for more than 15 years by that point, by then times were changing. Games were becoming more expensive to create, and absent MMORPGs, PC gaming as a whole was on a downward slope that wouldn't be reversed until roughly 2011. Interplay's games were often critically acclaimed, but high profile busts like Star Trek: Secret of Vulcan Fury (canceled) and Freespace 2 (a beloved flop) put the studio in dire straits.

Black Isle itself was doing fine, but struggles in other departments put more and more pressure on the group to make up the difference. Even Black Isle was not immune to Interplay's turmoil. Difficulties with Torn, an RPG that was to have used the LithTech engine, resulted in its cancellation in July 2001. For the first time, Black Isle experienced layoffs.

Sawyer remembers the day before the layoffs hit. "They actually brought me in the day before the layoffs and they said, 'Here's what happening. Tomorrow we're going to cancel Torn, we're going to layoff a handful of people, and we're going to start developing Icewind Dale II,'" says Sawyer. "Though Feargus will dispute this, at the time he said, 'We need to develop it in four months. What do you think?'"

"I said, 'No way it's ever going to happen. It's never ever, ever going to happen.' They're sort of like, 'Well, we're under the gun. Interplay is in a lot of trouble.'"

The management eventually got their way.

Sawyer left that office and began work on Icewind Dale II shortly after the layoffs, writing the story and the major characters in just 48 hours. He remembers the arguments that resulted from the intense pressure they were under, "It was really rough. I think that Icewind Dale II was the beginning of hard times from my perspective," says Sawyer. "Torn got canceled, people got laid off, and that was the beginning of everyone really stressing and thinking, 'I don't know if this is going to work out.' We had people leaving because either they were really fed up or stressed out or they just were going, 'I don't know if this is going to really pan out in the long run.'"

Sawyer and his team didn't finish Icewind Dale in 4 months. They actually finished it in 10 months–still a remarkably short time for an RPG. But the writing was on the wall.

Last Man Standing
It's easy to fool yourself when your company is crumbling all around you, especially when you're young. You see the signs–the resignations, the reduced budgets, the empty offices–but you want to believe that everything will be alright. It's what keeps people coming back until they're either laid off or show up to find themselves locked out.

The dream of Fallout: Van Buren (also known as what would have been Fallout 3) kept much of the staff onboard through the turbulent 2000s. Urquhart was among those who knew the end was near, but nevertheless wanted to see the project through. It was a passion project for the studio: ask any Black Isle alum what their legacy is, and they'll always point to Fallout. Avellone had spent years developing its design, which he imagined as an interesting take on the Prisoner's dilemma. Black Isle had gone as far as designing its own 3D engine for the project. It was to be their magnum opus.

As usual though, events leading up to Van Buren's development were chaotic. Sawyer was working on Baldur's Gate III: The Black Hound, which he had to pause to work on another game that had to come out in a relatively short timeframe. Then Interplay lost the D&D license and the Black Hound was canceled. The studio shifted gears to Van Buren; but by then, Black Isle was hemorrhaging too much talent. As conditions worsened, the talent most closely associated with Black Isle began to drift away.

Brian Fargo resigned from Interplay in early 2002. Urquhart followed in early 2003, and Avellone joined him a couple months later. For Avellone, the final straw was the cancellation of The Black Hound. "When Baldur's Gate III: The Black Hound got canceled [in 2003], I realized we probably wouldn't have many more games left in the studio," says Avellone. "So even though I loved Fallout: Van Buren and had worked on it for years, I knew it would likely follow the same fate as BG3, so I ended up resigning. It was a difficult choice, but it was really the only choice to be made."

That summer, Avellone teamed up with Urquhart and Interplay alums Chris Parker, Darren Monahan, and Chris Jones to found Obsidian–the team considered by many to be the spiritial successor to Black Isle.

That left Sawyer.

Anyone stuck in a failing company can identify with Sawyer's plight. Plugging along with what he called a skeleton crew, Sawyer did his best, but it was painfully apparent he didn't have the resources he needed to finish the projects put in front of him. "At a certain point I realized that we're never going to get this, like there is a handful of really talented people working their asses off to make the game they've dreamed about making for years and years and years and we're never going to get to finish it."

Together with Tom French, who had taken over as producer on Van Buren, Sawyer tried to get Interplay's upper management interested in the project. He was met with deafening silence. "We were working hard to make something amazing and they never came over and looked at anything. It was really disheartening," he says. "It basically made me think, 'They have either no interest or no care for what we're doing.'"

The end finally came when one of Sawyer's last artists was pulled from his team. "The moment I decided to leave was literally, we had a great character artist on our team, and he was pretty much the only artist we had left. Interplay senior development pulled him over to a non-Black Isle project," says Sawyer. "I'm like, 'Okay, you know what? If you're going to take the only senior character artist off of this project, you have no interest.'"

Sawyer left Black Isle on November 21, 2003. Less than a month later, Interplay pulled the plug. Black Isle Studios was dead. Interplay would try to brand the name a few years later, but it was little more than a name. The talent was long gone; and in any case, the supposed Black Isle revival never went anywhere.

"It was really, really disappointing. I can't say that it was completely heartbreaking because I got to make a bunch of cool games. There are a lot of things I would do differently if I had to make them over again, and they were made kind of under duress," Sawyer says. "But also the people I worked with were great, I learned a lot of stuff, and even though we didn't get to make Fallout 3, we got to play through the tabletop stuff. The process itself was enjoyable. I think what was more disappointing than not getting to work on Fallout 3 was seeing how Black Isle just collapsed over time."

Sawyer would eventually join Avellone, Urquhart, and many other Black Isle refugees at Obsidian, where he was able to help realize the dream of Van Buren with Fallout New Vegas. Obsidian would eventually have problems of its own, but that's another story. Suffice it to say, Obsidian has managed to outlive its predecessor by a considerable margin, and has in recent years managed to build out a niche that didn't exist 15 years ago.

For those who were there, Black Isle remains an indelible part of their lives. Many still have fond memories of the experience, and talk glowingly about the influence the studio had on RPGs. It was a monument to the uncertain nature of the video game business, and a crucible that helped produce some of the best games ever, even if it crushed those who made them.

That its influence is still felt today is a testament to the energy and talent that fed Black Isle's best years. It's been almost 15 years now since Black Isle closed their doors, but its legacy still lives on. Not just with the fans who adored their games, but at Obsidian. Kept alive by those who persevered through the darkest times of Black Isle, and more importantly, the best times.

[Flouride]

That's a great article. It's still depressingly sad that Black Hound and Fallout 3 never got released. 

[Blodhemn]

Too much nervous laughter, but expected in gaming "journalism". Nothing new. Nice lounge area though, I guess.

[Infinitron]

https://www.vg247.com/2017/08/31/do-you-shoot-grandma-or-help-her-across-the-street-the-anatomy-of-a-good-in-game-choice-according-to-obsidian/

 

“Do you shoot grandma or help her across the street?”: The anatomy of a good in-game choice, according to Obsidian

 

Obsidian Entertainment is one of the absolute masters of the role playing game, and it knows its way around a gut-wrenching story choice.

 

It’s no surprise that founding staff who worked on the likes of Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment and the original Fallout series ended up creating a development house that’d keep the most traditional types of Western RPG alive.

 

As well as stints on some big external properties like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2, Fallout: New Vegas and South Park: The Stick of Truth, Obsidian had break-out kickstarter success with Pillars of Eternity. That’s led to something of a revival of the isometric computer RPG, with the studio currently working on sequels to Pillars and putting out a port of the already successful first game on PC.

 

Ask players what Obsidian is good at and most fans will answer the same way: it’s all about those choices. Fallout: New Vegas was widely praised for having writing superior to Bethesda’s two entries in the series, and without a doubt what makes Obsidian’s commercial struggle but cult classic Alpha Protocol stand out compared to its Bioware-crafted peers is how the game handles choice and consequence and the high-pressure espionage situations it places you in.

 

But what makes for a good video game choice according to those masters of the craft? Obsidian co-founder and CEO Feargus Urquhart knows a thing or two about crafting a strong moment of difficult player choice – so we put the question to him.

 

“It can be often too easy to make it about good and evil, right? So player choice needs to be legitimate and it needs to be about the player and not the designer,” Urquhart told me during a lengthy phone interview about Obsidian’s work in general. “I think that’s the biggest important thing. We’re at our best when we’re thinking about – okay, where is the player in the game? What do we feel that they’re thinking, what are they enjoying, and what are the type of players that they’re trying to be?

 

“When we do that and give players choice based upon that… of course we can’t say you can be any type of player. You can’t be a serial killer and you can’t be a nun! We still have to start with some sort of ground rules as far as what choices we’re giving the player to do… but it’s important to make those choices really make sense contextually within the quest and within the area of the game – it can’t just be do you shoot grandma or do you help her across the street. Now, fifteen, twenty years ago we were doing a lot more of that, but I think as time has gone on we’re understanding that better.”

 

It was this sort of nuance that really made games like Fallout: New Vegas and Alpha Protocol sing in spite of bugs or gameplay systems that just failed to come together, and unburdened by worries about facial animation this is an area where the 2D isometric Obsidian games have really doubled down, with subtlety to choices that actually hasn’t been seen all too often in gaming at all. While choices might be a studio strength, Urquhart says balance and restraint in player choices is an equal part of the process.

 

“Hard choices are good, but they’re tiring,” added Urquhart. “I think this is the other thing – so if you give players a hard choice that’s hard for anybody unless you’re a complete nun or a complete psychopath… those are great to have but they have to be used sparingly. This is because the player comes out of it kind of emotionally drained and if you do that too much… it’s like playing Doom 3! It just ends up like, oh my god, stop, let me breathe. I think that’s an important part of it, and I think that’s what we focus on.

 

Once a player has made a choice for it to have meaning the game itself must react, and this too is something Obsidian has proved skillful at. Where Mass Effect was more simple and clear-cut with its pulpy good-or-evil, paragon-and-renegade player agency, Obsidian’s Alpha Protocol was often more subtle, reacting to your actions in the world as well as how you spoke to people in ways that other games didn’t. A focus on how consequence echoes through the game is an enormous part of why Alpha Protocol, which in many ways was unremarkable, became a fan-favourite on Steam.

 

“The other thing we used to do and I think what we try to do better and better now is… consequence has a negative connotation. There’s this idea of… so, well, a consequence must be bad. No. What we mean is a reaction to what you did based upon how you did it. The player should always be ‘rewarded’ – in quotation marks – it’s not just that if you help this person you get 10 gold because you’re a good person but if you slit their throat you get all 1000 gold pieces on them,” Urquhart says.

 

“It’s not that – it’s more what we really, properly started doing in Alpha Protocol. So there’s an arms dealer, right – if you’re nice to him and you work with him then it means these kind of things will unfold across the rest of the game. Punch him in the face and slam his face into the bar and then another type of consequences and reactivity will happen. It’s not black or white, though. In a lot of ways it can all be rewards – it’s just different types of rewards, with the key reward being that what you get is tuned to how you as a player chose to go through that.

 

“That goes back to that immersion – it makes you feel like you’re in that game. If you slam his head in and he’s like ‘Alright dude!’ and then he reacts to that throughout the rest of the game and now he’s scared of you, the rewards in the game down the road, right through the game, are based on him being scared of you. I think that’s how we’ve tried to make choice as relevant and as impactful as possible.

 

“It’s tough. There is this modern… in our world today, not to make this about politics or anything like that, but there’s this idea of making everything so broad and so inclusive and all this and all that. That’s awesome, but I think that sometimes if we try to do that in a game it can risk flattening everything. In some ways we need to embrace the fact that ultimately we’re telling a story, and it’s fiction, and we’re trying to tell things that have themes, and we’re exploring those themes and those themes will require choices… and some of those choices in modern life you would never do. Some you’d go to jail for doing!

 

“That’s the difference between games and real life – it’s not meant to mimic real life, it’s meant for us to put players in these worlds and have them experience things that will be broader than real life.”

Edited August 31, 2017 by Infinitron

[injurai]

Too much nervous laughter, but expected in gaming "journalism". Nothing new. Nice lounge area though, I guess.

 

It used to be that games journalism was done by former programmers or even game developers. Now it's mostly done by journalist and media graduates.

[HoonDing]

Did Avellone's old office really get turned into a lavatory?