Eurogamer asks how Obsidian kept the lights on during difficult times.
More information.Over the years, I've come to know what to expect from Obsidian, or so I thought. Obsidian makes RPGs, beautiful, intriguing, sometimes slightly shonky RPGs with great writing and vivid characters and just a lingering trace of thriftiness. They make games where the concepts, where the soul, trumps the budget.
And then they made Armored Warfare.
I've been worried about Obsidian, since then. Worried about a studio that can seem like a double-A developer in a triple-A world. Why was it making a free-to-play World of Tanks game when anyone who knew the studio would much rather a new Fallout: New Vegas, Alpha Protocol or Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic instead? Were publishers not interested in Obsidian any more? Over the last few months I worried that Obsidian was drifting away. And then this August I visit the studio and it starts to make more sense.
I learn what Armored Warfare, the studio's longest-running and most lucrative partnership, was really all about. (It is hard to know what tense to use when talking about Armored Warfare, to be honest: the game is out, but Obsidian's work on the project is over, and the studio has handed control over to Mail.ru.) Why tanks? Why Obsidian? Sure there was some desire to make a World of Tanks-inspired game, but more importantly this was an attempt to retain a size and level of craft that prospective publishers would be impressed by.
"What publishers look at a lot is whether you still have the ability to make triple-A assets," Feargus Urquhart, studio co-owner and CEO, tells me. "Can you work on these new consoles?" He can say Obsidian can, "but it's just words". "I can't show a pretty level working on Xbox One.
"One of the things we recognised with Armored Warfare - because the goal of Mail.ru at the time was to make a triple-A game that could transition to console - was this would let us make triple-A-looking tanks and triple-A-looking levels, and we would keep and potentially even grow that competency at the studio.
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