And 3 million lines of rambling crazy talk starting... now-
I consider Obsidian… …indies they even create much better games with 1/10000 of the resources.
First let me say that what follows is a rambling mess that I wrote before having any coffee today. That being said, I said a few things in here that I feel somewhat confident about and now that I have had a couple cups of coffee I can not sit still long enough to trim it down. Forgive the ineffectively self-medicating, coffee-habit-abusing, incessantly-rambling, OCD-having nerd that I am.
Obsidian is an odd case. They're small and relatively lightweight compared to bioware, let alone EA. That's true enough, but they have almost always been saddled together with one or more fairly massive companies for publishing if not also co-development. This is because the lion's share of their 7 announced titles (2 of which are upcoming, 5 previously released) are sequels or expansions to existing games using the same engine- updated to various degrees.
Of those 7 titles, 4 involved games where the engine was licensed from bio-ware, the rules were licensed from wizards of the coast, and the publishing was done by another company altogether. The settings in those 4 games (their 4 most critically well received) was also licensed rather than created in house.
Even though BioWare and the publisher (Atari for the NWN 2 main game and expansions and LucasArts for KOTOR 2) handled much of the logistics of coordinating the various partnerships and licensing arrangements, I still think that the weight of multiple juggernaught corporations getting involved in the marketting and scheduling created fairly unique challenges for Obsidian.
Perhaps this is why Obsidian games tend to have a strange blend of ambitious branching quests and rushed-feeling endings. In the case of KOTOR 2 I think the weight of both EA (with Bioware as a subsidiary) and LucasArts contributed to the admitted rushed end-game and numerous technical faults that still have only 3rd party solutions and/or require manually inserting lines into the configuration files.
Anyways, long rambling story short, Obsidian games feel like they lay somewhere between the mainstream Bioware internally developed RPGs and indie RPGs. They get the big name intellectual property to use in their games, have the small indie developer focus on the vision and feel for the game, but also suffer the pitfalls of both large and small developments. They have a very limited amount of resources both in terms of bodies in chairs and cash in the bank so content is often unfinished or simply cut at the last minute when another developer might have the resources to juggle to accelerate some parts of development to make up for others lagging. At the same time they do not have the luxury to simply wait until they're finished as truly independent developers would as they are beholden to other companies not just for publishing and distribution, but also their right to use the technology and intellectual property in the game.
I do like most of what Obsidian has done and I definitely agree that they do some of the most important parts better than Bioware. At the same time, even when they have done certain aspects better than BioWare- they were still highly dependent on BioWare for both technology and intellectual property. So really, most people's favorite Obsidian developed games are still very much tethered to BioWare (or if you don't like BioWare, you may be more inclined to say "infected by.")
My enthusiastic enjoyment of Obsidian's ability to create content for other people's technology is partly why I'm so excited about Fallout New Vegas. It's not somebody else's setting for a lot of the big shots at Obsidian- it was the only series they had developed both the content AND technology for when they were at Black Isle. So it's not like they have to read somebody else's literature to write the world and the characters. It's also one of the first Obsidian games where it actually seems like they and their larger corporate partner both had the same idea about how long it would take and were both pretty much right on the money. I suppose for Bethesda, who likes to take 4 years to develop a game, they weren't exactly equipped to be screaming at someone about a tight deadline. It also helps that they have had to do relatively little work with the technology nor have they had to do quite the amount of new-art creation as they had to with NWN 2.
They're a hybridization between the world of litigious intellectual property holders like WoTC and Lucas, the world of bottom-line obsessed mega-corps like EA, and the world of… whatever we want to call companies like Atari. I'm hoping they're figuring out how to balance it though because I always love the first 90% of any of the Obsidian games I've played. If they can keep it like that the last 10% then they I'd be happy to call them my favorite RPG developer. Indie? No, they're too much like a freelance content producer for the big companies to be called indie.
