Obsidian Entertainment is a true titan of role-playing, having worked on some of the genre's biggest franchises including Fallout, Knights of the Old Republic and Neverwinter Nights. It's also responsible for 2014's seminal RPG - and one of the greatest licensed games ever - South Park: The Stick of Truth.
So why, after a decade of role-playing heritage, is the California-based veteran now working on a free-to-play World of Tanks competitor? And when will it return to the traditional triple-A RPG space it's known for?
The answer to the latter question is soon. In fact, Obsidian argues that its tank MMO Armored Warfare isn't even that far out of its wheelhouse (treadhouse?), and if you listen to chief executive Feargus Urquhart - which we did, for half an hour of discussion - it's clear there's been no great change of heart behind the scenes.
Zoom As an independent developer, Urquhart admits it has never been more difficult to get large projects off the ground. But that hasn't nullified his ambition to quickly get back on the saddle with another of the mega franchises it has become known for.
Kickstarter project Pillars of Eternity is still growing behind the scenes, and another crowd-funding project - which Urquhart is indeed an RPG - is set to be revealed soon.
But still, why the tanks? And how does a game about vehicle warfare connect with a studio famous for crafting stories, worlds and fantastical adventures?
CVG: Obsidian has had an interesting trajectory in recent years, experimenting with Kickstarter and moving into free-to-play MMOs.
Feargus Urquhart: We've been around for 11 years now. And as independent developers we have to, I don't want to say keep up with the times, but look at what else we want to do, what's available out there. What are the things that let us keep on making games? Because that's why we got in to do this in the first place. It's even why we left Interplay to start Obsidian.
It was just getting hard to make games at Interplay, and we were worried that we were just going to show up one day and there would be a locked door. So we wanted to make sure that we could continue to make games. And that's a big part of being an independent developer.
ZoomFor us, and me in particular, selfishly I love working on role-playing games. It's what I play. I don't know how many hours I have in Skyrim now. But I love playing role-playing games, I love making role-playing games. That's the trajectory we want to always be on, and Pillars of Eternity is a great example of that.
Right now, fewer major games are being worked on by independent developers than almost any time in the games industry. That's one of the challenges of being an independent developer right now. We could be done making a big game like South Park and then no publisher has a slot at that time to have a big team work on a big RPG.
That kind of puts us in a really weird situation as a business. We saw that was happening and that we needed to do different things. And out of that, in 2012 we saw what Double Fine and inXile did with Kickstarter and were like, well, we've been wanting to make these Infinity Engine style games again, and that was a great opportunity.
"Fewer major games are being worked on by independent developers than almost any time in the games industry"
On top of that it also meant that we get to own something, which is pretty cool, because it's gotten harder and harder to own what you make if you're doing big games. So we kind of jumped on that. And we're looking at what else we can do to Eternity.
Then the opportunity to do Armored Warfare came along. Of course, a lot of the game world is going free-to-play, and we have a lot of people here who love those games, who play World of Tanks, who play War Thunder, who play League of Legends - tons of League of Legends. I know a lot of people are like, "What? How does that have anything to do with what you guys do?"
A ton of making an RPG is of course making the world and story, but then another huge part of it is the character systems - and the balancing - and the XP tables - and the abilities - and balancing all of these 400 spells and 12 character classes and 9 races. All that together. That's a big part of doing something like a modern armored vehicle MMO. So you kind of tie that together with our abilities and what people like to do and so, hey, why not? We have the opportunity, why not take it? And it's good to try new things.
That's the stuff that put us on the trajectory we are on now. Of course, we don't want to get away from doing the big role-playing games. So we're still out there talking to people and seeing what we can make happen there.
Does Obsidian still define itself as a role-playing games studio?
Yeah, I think so. I always feel a little weird saying that, because some people go, "how does that have anything to do with an armored vehicle game?" Like I said, there's probably more similarities than you would think. But ultimately, we're the guys that do characters, and story, and factions, and open world, and player choice.
Those are the things that have really intrigued me about making role-playing games. Even though something like Eternity is very different presentation-wise from Fallout: New Vegas, we're absolutely evolving our systems and our tools to move things forward: how do factions work, how do factions intermingle, and your reputation and your karma with different factions, and how do companions work, and making our companions even more realistic and complex compared to our previous versions. We're always moving that forward. I'll selfishly go back to me, that's the stuff that I find really intriguing.
ZoomIs it as much about building those concepts as it is about building discrete mechanics?
Some of it is a mindset, but a lot of it also is the moving forward of technology. A good example is on Fallout: New Vegas. We used the dialogue system that we created and used on previous games like Alpha Protocol. Its foundation was even in the Neverwinter Nights 2 days.
This tool became a separate thing, it's not part of a world editor or anything like that. We just keep on working on that and making it better and better for our designers, particularly our narrative designers, to use.
Then we just connect it to whatever game or game engine we're using. So we're able to bring forward our knowledge and bring forward our process, and evolve things because we already have this base that we've been creating for years.
You have a formal tool for making dialogue across games?
Absolutely. New Vegas is a great example. That engine had a way that Bethesda used to write dialogues, which was different than how we did it. So what our tools programmers did was make our dialogue editor export our dialogue in a format that worked with that engine. It wasn't just a translation.
Their dialogue system, how that was input... I feel a little bit bad for the designers at Bethesda on Oblivion and Fallout 3 in that it was a very challenging way of trying to create dialogue trees. Our tool just did all that in the background, so our designers didn't have to fight the engine to make complex dialogue and dialogue responses work.
Now that Stick of Truth is finally released and you have several other projects going, do you see Obsidian doing more traditional triple-A partnerships?
Yeah, I think so. I would love to say that I could go up on Kickstarter and raise $15, $20, $30 million dollars to do our own big triple-A console game. But the reality is - minus Star Citizen - that's probably a little bit of a pipe dream. When it comes to making bigger console RPGs, us working with publishers makes sense.
We hooked up with Paradox to do PR, marketing, and distribution for Pillars of Eternity. If we really had to do it ourselves we could have, but if we were to say, "okay, we're going to get funding to do a triple-A RPG and then we're going to be the people who publish it", we'd have to bring on all these people.
It's a big apparatus to try to ship these big console RPGs. I think we'll always continue to talk to publishers, not just because of funding - although obviously that's a big part of it - but also just because of the realities of publishing big console projects.
ZoomSo for the scope of some of the projects you're interested in that relationship is still essential?
Absolutely. I won't even use names, but for us to go off and do our own Skyrim-like game that's going to be on next-gen consoles, I'd love to do that. I'm not saying we're talking to Bethesda about doing a Skyrim-like game or anything like that, but just saying that's something we continue to call up and talk to publishers about. We have a lot of experience doing that, we love to do it, and if we can get them convinced of an idea, or if they already want to do it, then that would be something that we would choose to do.
Has Obsidian intentionally cultivated a reputation for doing licensed RPGs?
Well, if someone called you up tomorrow and said, "Hey, do you want to make a Star Wars game?" What's the answer? I mean, that's how it happened with South Park. They called up and said, "Hey, do you guys want to make a South Park game?" And your quick, knee-jerk reaction is, "well, yeah!"
A lot of those opportunities have really come to us. Star Wars came to us, South Park came to us. Neverwinter Nights was more of a joint thing, because I'd worked on Neverwinter Nights back at Black Isle. We sometimes have licenses that we go out and say, "Hey, we'd love to make a game here." But a lot of the time people come to us. And it really comes down to that.
I could say no because I don't want us to be seen as the developer that just makes licensed games. But then I feel like I'd be turning down the opportunity of a South Park game just because, which seems weird.
"If anyone gives me any opportunity to make a Star Wars game, I'd make a Star Wars game"
Would you be interested in working on more Fallout or Knights of the Old Republic?
The answer for Fallout is easy because a lot of us here were the guys who worked on the original Fallout. I was the lead designer on Fallout 2, Tim Cain works here and he was one of the core guys who came up with the original Fallout. Me, Tim, and a friend of ours named Chris Taylor were the guys who worked on the S.P.E.C.I.A.L. system, which was the RPG system in Fallout.
When it comes to Star Wars, I was seven and my mom took me to see Star Wars, and I saw Empire when it came out, and I saw Jedi when it came out. I'm in the Star Wars generation, so if anyone gives me any opportunity to make a Star Wars game I'd make a Star Wars game.
Has there been any movement on the Wheel of Time license?
What happened there is that there is a company called Red Eagle, and they have licensed some of the Wheel of Time stuff. I think they're working on a movie, they do comic books, and they also have the game rights. So they talked to us four or five years ago and we put an agreement together to say that, if the funding comes through, we have an agreement to make the game with them.
Unfortunately for them, they were never able to acquire the funding. So all the agreements kind of went away. So there's really no connection any more between us and Red Eagle as it relates to the Wheel of Time stuff. But I think Brandon Sanderson is an awesome author, the guy who took over for [late Wheel of Time author] Robert Jordan. I read all his stuff and it's super cool.
You mentioned in December that you might have another Kickstarter to reveal around now...
We are working on what that is. I think we've come up with what it's going to be. We have to still firm up some details, but my hope is that we'll get one going before the end of the year.
I think we've got a good idea. I'm not going to share anything, but a few times in my career I have these things where I say, "hey, that's a cool idea!" and I've generally been right. So I think this one's going to be a cool thing.
Pillars of Eternity had a clear lineage from the Infinity engine games. Will this reflect another part of the team's lineage?
I'll give you a spoiler: it's an RPG [laughs]. We'll talk more about it soon, but it should be a cool thing once we get it all figured out.
ZoomWhat has been the biggest change at Obsidian since it was founded?
When we started the company, a lot of us felt like, okay, we're going to make these RPGs. We're going to have these two teams making RPGs and then we'll have a publisher that we hook up with and we'll make a lot of games for them. Maybe we get acquired by them, maybe we don't.
That was the trajectory - though not as much the acquisition part - because that's what BioWare did. BioWare hooked up with Interplay and did a lot of games for Interplay, and it helped them be successful. And that was an interesting thing about how independent development has evolved over the last ten years. A lot of developers may work with a publisher twice, but there may be years in between.
It's sort of what I said before, slots for an independent developer to work with a publisher are kind of few and far between. Sometimes when you're done with a game there just isn't that slot available. So even though you guys like each other a ton and everything went wonderfully, the publisher isn't prepared to sign up for another $30-$40 million game when you're done.
I think that's caused a change to what we have to look at and how we do it. We have to look at lots of different opportunities like Kickstarter, like Armored Warfare, and potentially acquiring our own licenses. That's changed our business a lot. The publishing of games has gotten big and complicated, and even for our publisher games we've had to do a bit more of the publishing than we originally expected, just because certain publishers work different ways.
What else has changed? A lot of it hasn't. In the first month of Obsidian I'm sure I had a conversation about damage resistance and damage threshold, which is the eternal struggle of how you model armor in an RPG. And yesterday we had a discussion about damage resistance and damage threshold. So there are certain truisms that keep on continuing about it.
"I'm 44 this year. That's not old in the whole scheme of things, but is that old in the game industry?"
We have changed how we manage our projects and who is in charge of them. Originally it was always an owner of the company, there are five of us, that served as the visionary or the person in charge of a project. All projects here are always assigned an owner, but the owner isn't running it day to day. But now we have people who have worked for us for a long time who run projects.
Josh Sawyer ran Fallout: New Vegas and now he's running Pillars of Eternity, Richard Taylor runs Armored Warfare. South Park was a bit different because Chris Parker, who is one of the owners, he ended up running the South Park project. I guess that's a big difference. We now have people who are professional project directors, and what's great about that is they don't have this other owner stuff that they have to get done. So they can focus purely on the project, and that's worked a lot better.
That reminds me of the direction Double Fine has taken in recent years: doing more projects and bringing up new people to lead them.
The other interesting thing is that, as we get older, I recognize that I'm 44 this year. That's not old in the whole scheme of things, but is that old in the games industry? And do we need to remember that as we look at who runs our projects and who is on them?
Not that our experience goes away and not that we don't have a lot to add, but when do we turn things over to the next generation of game makers? We're there to back them up and help them and provide a good environment for them, but they can now stretch their legs and go make awesome things.
ZoomDo you want your projects to come in a wide range of scales?
Sometimes we will want to go make something big, that's why we still talk to publishers about making the big RPGs. But there are some people that worked on Stick of Truth for four years. They don't want to get on something and know they're going to work on it for the next four years. That's a lot of time.
Dan Spitzley, who I worked with all the way back at Interplay, he was the lead programmer on PlaneScape: Torment, he was the lead programmer on Stick of Truth, he was the lead programmer on Alpha Protocol, all these things. And so Dan kind of went from lead programmer on Alpha Protocol, which was about three and a half years, to Stick of Truth for four years. So in seven and a half years he did two games - though compared to Blizzard that's a lot.
So he's getting put on a project that there is no way it's going to be four years. I think that's interesting to him. People also get the opportunity to work on big teams and small teams, and there's good and bad things about both. And just having the change is great for people.
Where do you see Obsidian in five years?
Where I'd like us to be is we've made another big RPG, we're maybe working on another one. We're on Eternity 3 or 4. We've also branched into maybe other product lines - maybe there is both the isometric Eternity and a Skyrim-like Eternity. Armored Warfare is just marching along and people are having a blast playing it.
"RPGs just figure out a way to keep on. I guess they're the cockroach genre."
And we're looking for what's that next RPG experience. Where do we take RPGs from now? That's where I still want to be in five years, us still being excited and into making RPGs and just making games in general that people love.
I think that's an important thing we need to do over the next five years, is not get to the point that we're doing things that tire us out or make us not want to make games. That's the trajectory I want to be on, still doing things that make us want to keep on doing it.
You picked a good genre to dedicate yourselves to, considering how influential RPGs have become in the last decade.
And they just stay around. I've always found RPGs to be pretty interesting from a standpoint that they just evolve with the times. Some genres just can't - flight simulators, RTSes, adventure games - but RPGs just figure out a way to keep on.
I guess they're the cockroach genre, I don't know [laughs]. That's probably the wrong way to put it. We just keep on figuring out that gamers love games like this, and we can make role-playing games that fit within that.
