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

Parish the thought I'm critical of every company they better buy me a nice steak dinner and a car before I praise them as the next best thing, I have standards you know.

DArtagnan and Couchpotato potato pay for the games they play, about as much as we pay for their trolling/disgruntled comments. some people never had mothers i supposed that reinforced the notions about "saying something nice" or those that always have such negative criticisms of everything could benifit much on turning that into something they can affect like themselves perhaps. just my meaningless opinions and though i never may be eloquent i'd much rather be as such than weigh down the site with negatively rather than than excitement of and positive passion for a genre than presumeably most watchers care about...

rune_74 said:

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.

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Well they give people free shit so there's that.

Then again, Alpha Protocol was practically free last weekend.

rune_74 said:

Um, Obsidian has problems because of a couple of games?

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Since that seemed to be in reply to my post, I'd like to clarify or restate that they have problems because they have repeatedly failed at the most basic level of game design.

In today's gaming world no one should ever have to worry about how to move their character(s) around the screen or how the camera follows the action. The standards for this kind of stuff have long been established by hundreds of games where movement and controls just, you know, worked.

So why break this stuff on purpose? There is absolutely no use in doing it differently just for the sake of doing it differently but some knucklehead at Obsidian must have thought otherwise when they came up with the control schemes for NWN 2 and DS3.

Sorry, but that was just plain stupid of them. If they try to pull off something ambitious and seriously difficult, and then fail, then -depending on the circumstances- one might be able to be understanding and forgiving but I have no sympathy for them if they can't even get a simple 3rd person control scheme right. Again: That's failure on the most basic level and it does show that they have problems inside of their company or inside one of their teams at least. The origin and the nature of the problems will have to remain a mystery for anyone w/o inside knowledge.

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.

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PB isn't getting any passes from me at least. I was quite critical of G3 and given the nature of G3's issues (completely broken engine) I'd say that PB failed at the most basic level with G3 as well. They should have at least had a working engine after three years in development. That's the least one could ask for but they did not deliver.
Luckily for us, it seems like they have learned from their mistakes and that things are back under control.
Can't really speak for CDP since I've only played the super-patched EE Director's Cut of The Witcher and haven't gotten into The Witcher 2 yet. The issues with CDP's games never seemed grave enough, however, to give me the impression that they have any real problems as a developer. The first Witcher was a bit of a buggy release but they showed great support of the title. There was nothing basic or fundamentally broken with both Witcher games.

curious said:

DArtagnan and Couchpotato potato pay for the games they play, about as much as we pay for their trolling/disgruntled comments. some people never had mothers i supposed that reinforced the notions about "saying something nice" or those that always have such negative criticisms of everything could benifit much on turning that into something they can affect like themselves perhaps. just my meaningless opinions and though i never may be eloquent i'd much rather be as such than weigh down the site with negatively rather than than excitement of and positive passion for a genre than presumeably most watchers care about…

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Why thank you for the compliment. For the record I have a mother.

Now let me go take some happy pills to make me forget how most games dont leave positive feelings after playing them. If I cant remember a game after playing it doesn't deserve to be called a great game. How I wish my passion for gaming was what it once was but its not and I'm not sorry about it.

A few games still make positive reactions from me but there are not many.

Time to do something else, then.

I knew it took something bad not to be overly fond of Obsidian's work in recent years - so a trolling pirate is kinda mild

At least I'm not a Nazi for this!

Oh, and I quite liked Neverwinter Nights 2 and the Storm of Zehir expansion. Not a big fan of MotB because I hated the Spirit Eater mechanic, and I'm not a big fan of the "Torment-style" writing.