Obsidian Entertainment - Nathaniel Chapman and J.E. Sawyer Interviews
 

Obsidian has kicked up the 4th part of their community interview with Dungeon Siege III lead designer Nathaniel Chapman. This time, the questions are more general:
If you recall Will Ooi's recent interview series with Chris Avellone at Gamasutra, the spotlight has now moved to J.E. Sawyer. A sample from their conversation:
More information.

I found this exchange both sad and telling:

"WO: What are your passions in life?

JS: I don't really have any these days.

WO: Surely there must be something. You sound like the type of person with many intellectual passions. How about the motorbike riding across the country?

JS: I have a lot of interests. I just wouldn't describe them as passions. To be passionate would require a higher level of focus and dedication than I am currently giving to anything in particular."

This is exactly why I quit working in the game industry after a very brief foray. It kills your passions elsewhere…. a pure time vacuum that sucks up energy and joy…. and the joy of building the game eventually gets sucked up too…. or, at least that was my experience.

Well, that kinda explains their recent efforts.

What's that meant to mean exactly? Josh expresses a completely rational statement of fact about his own interests not being that individually focused or intense and suddenly this reflects upon Obsidian's recent work as a whole?

What a ridiculous thing to say.

Recent efforts like the outstanding New Vegas?

One good game out of three does not make them outstanding. Look I like there games but this company has problems.

Ghan didn't say they were an outstanding company; he said F:NV, which is one of their recent games, was outstanding.

Problems? Hyperbole much?

I think NV's success did wonders for Obsidian's reputation vis a vis publishers and gamers, it should have been their ticket to bigger and better projects.

It's kind of odd that one year down the road they've only followed it up with some NV dlc, the poorly received DS3 and no other announcements.

Any bets on what that franchise Feargus couldn't refuse is?

Not really the company is terrible when it comes to the technical side of there games. To many bugs and bad design decisions. On the other hand they know how to write good settings and campaigns.

The engine for NV was already developed so it helped them make a good game. So would you like to exaggerate more also?

Where did I exaggerate, exactly?

You mean their bland, dreary and extremely buggy New Vegas?

Yeah, though not the worst of the bunch.

:rolleyes: Yeah, that one.

It's never easy when people disagree about such things, but such is the way of differing tastes.

Yup.
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9, 10 characters….

Personnally I'll go and say that I don't feel Obsidian has released any bad and if anything their games ranks amongst some of my favorite RPGs.

KOTOR2 was great in spite of LucasArts's butchering (note to everyone: do yourself a favor an play the "completed" version with TSLRM), a IMO a better game than the first game.

NWN2 obviously had horrid technical issues, but coming into the game only a couple years after release I had no issues on that count. It has a very good main campain, MOTB was nothing short of a masterpiece, and SoZ was a nice throwback to old school D&D stuff even if a bit lackluster on the plot department.

Alpha Protocol played as a sneaker was a very good game IMO. I never got the complains about the technical issues eitehr since it ran flawlessly on my PC, but perhaps the console versions were that bad.

New Vegas was a great Fallout game in my book (but I'm a weirdo who loved Fallout 3 too).

Dungeon Siege III, while very much unlike DSI&II, was pretty much a great Dark Alliance clone in my book. I can't help to point that by all account the game and engine were very stable, which gives credit to the fact that using their own tech makes thing easier for them.

So basically I'm a big Obsidian fans personally. While their games tend to have issues in the polishing department (though hopefully if DSIII is a sign of things to come, things will go better if they stick to their Onyx engine), I think they tend to be great in other department, and I honestly consider that they offer the best writing of any RPG developpers.

People are probably gonna think I'm crazy, but I'm thinking: Final Fantasy.

Why ?

Well let's head back a few years: Square had a Final Fantasy outsourced to a western developper (GRIN) codenamed Fortress and based upon FFXII's Ivalice setting. It was also reportedly to have a more WRPG kind of gameplay and design.

Things did not go well however and Square displeased with the project, pulled the plug of GRIN's iteration (which basically lead to GRIN's demise as well) but rumor was that they gave the project to another unnamed developper.

Considering, Feargus has expressed many times over his love of JRPGs, (notably of Chrono Trigger, a Square game of course), and they have already worked with Square-Enix with DSIII and reportedly had very good relationship with them… some how I could just see them working on a some form of Final Fantasy spin-off, as horrific as it'd probably seem to many Obsidian fans :P

And clearly, Final Fantasy would fall in the "franchis nobody could refuse" category.

(On a personnal level I'd love to see Obsidian work on Ultima, Feargus said it was his dream project and it almost happened a few years back, but with the rumors of something being cooked up at Mythic that seems extremly unlikely).

-Sergorn

Nothing says the franchise has to based off of a prior gaming license… Though I'm not entirely sure what tv, book or movie franchises are left untouched?

Oh sure it could definitly be a non gaming license - I'd assume it's gotta be something either really huge or with a really strong cult status/aura.

I'm actually wondering what Obsidian is working on nowadays since all their announced projects (minus Wheel of Time, but last we heard it hadn't even started) have been released at this point.

-Sergorn

Like Sergorn I'm a big Obsidian fan, and I've enjoyed all their games so far. F: NV won GOTY here on the watch by a mile if I recall correctly, which is hardly surprising - it's one of the best games I've played in recent years. In fact, it blows most competition out of the water in my opinion.

There are no game developers I trust more than Obsidian right now, and the only other studio on the same level is Piranha Bytes. Beyond those two, everyone seems to let me down from time to time. PB probably has the best track record, but they also have the least variety and use the exact same formula every time - easy to maintain a track record under such circumstances.

Blizzard never really lets me down either, but I rarely get hyped by their work anymore. Also, they release a game twice per decade or something, so I can't rely on them to tend to my gaming needs.

Well, they have at least had problems in the past for sure.
There must be thousands of 3rd person games (not just RPGs) out there that have established a certain control scheme that feels natural and makes character/party movement a no-issue.
And then along comes Obsidian and craps out NWN 2's control scheme that is completely unintuitive and makes the simple act of navigating your character(s) around the map a royal pain in the ass.
Let's be honest here. They failed on the most basic level right there and it is outright scary that no one inside Obsidian either had the brains or the guts to speak up and tell someone how much the controls suck before the game was released in that state.

I got to give them credit for AP though. I really liked that game and would have been quite the happy stealthy camper if AP would have been so kind as to turn into a series. Oh well…
Haven't played FNV yet because post-apoc isn't really my cup of tea but if they ever release a GOTY edition with all of the DLC included and once that drops to below €10 I think I'll give it a try just out of curiosity.

Until then I guess I have to trust y'all that FNV is cool and I'd have to conclude that Obsidian have somewhat gotten their act together ("somewhat" because DS3 appears to be an in-between stinker).
In summary, I'd say that their problems have gotten far less but I'd personally find it problematic to call them a problem-free company ;) .

Um, Obsidian has problems because of a couple of games? Funny how piranah bytes and cd projekt get passes in this regard (to think the original witcher used the nwn engine, but I guess that is different.) CD projekt has made two action rpg's to date and can do no wrong.

Funny stuff here.