Obsidian 20th Anniversary Documentary | Part 1

foreign [Music] obsidian 20 years ago people would always ask well what do you want like what do you want to do what's your exit plan what's the what's the long-term plan what are you going to do in 10 years everyone had all these questions and I always had a very simple answer which is we're gonna go make great games and most likely they're going to be RPGs thank you so in 2003 I had been working with producer cart at a studio called blackout Studios which was actually a division of interplay Productions and we made a bunch of very successful role-playing games there but it was pretty clear that interplay as a business was just not really functioning very well anymore at some point we lost the Dungeons and Dragons license during development of Father's Gate 3 and at that point we were looking in sort of the future and how things were going at interplay and decided it may be time to try to start our own thing interplay lost the license it meant a lot of the the sorts of games that we wanted to make particularly like we see in the D D Universe which is like the grandfather tabletop role-playing games uh we couldn't do any more and that was really sort of I think the last straw we were really having a hard time making games there and so we kind of looked at the writing on the wall and said okay so if we want to keep on doing this and then you know in particular do it together the only really way to do it was to leave in or play and start our own company being a small startup in the game industry you know it was an exciting time you know it was it was just all you know what what are we going to do today maybe what we do is we see if interplay is interested in spinning us off and that way we could work on other licenses maybe we could get Star Wars somehow or some other uh you know nerd Mecca license right and that just seemed like the time so in June of 2003 we all quit spent a bunch of time together talking about how we would form a studio what we were trying to do how we would make that successful and out of that Obsidian Entertainment was born thank you but when we started the studio you know the best price we could get for square footage of an office was free and that was it because it was my attic it was weird to come to his house for work so Fergus had a three-story house and the third story was was where we were all working I bought a house with me and my wife's first house and one of the weird options was to put a finished attic on which was 450 square feet of space so we thought well here's 450 square feet that no one has to spend any money on uh and it turned out it ended up it was one it was just me and then it was two people then three people and eventually before we actually got office space we had seven people up there so we would have to show up in the morning and and park and then like quietly enter his house and like sneak upstairs and then sit down and be quiet and then get to work upstairs and um we had nothing at the time right we were a brand new company we had no policies procedures like how do we do things how do we buy things one of the first things we did is hopped in my Ford Explorer drove to Costco bought folding tables and the cheapest office sure as we could and built all of our furniture to go up in fergus's attic we all kind of claimed our like this is my wall and this is where I'm going to sit under this window and Fergus kept his desk where it was and then we just started setting stuff up this was the day before you know very felt LED LCD screens uh and we had giant 27-inch monitors creating a ton of heat we even had to like we wanted to have a network and so we even had to have like loud servers and Loud switches um all while my wife was about eight and a half months pregnant and it was great because we needed a place you know to work uh initially it's not like you can run out tomorrow and just rent office space you know when you don't have any money and and there's no income coming in and so the fact that he had that that space for us to use was was awesome and it was a very it was just a cool environment for us you know we were all you know just in one room together kind of trying to fit wherever we could you know at a table folding table here or there and and and just you know it was a little chaotic but it but it was a neat experience [Music] when we first founded obsidian you know the first thing we wanted to figure out is like what are we going to do and what games we wanted to make and so we contacted different people one of the first games that we really pitched actually was an action RPG Star Wars game so we had worked on a game called Dark Alliance uh that was using sort of this action RPG uh engine and so we talked to developer snow blind they said we could use the engine uh and then we pitched LucasArts on this this idea and they were interested but they weren't didn't see me like they were incredibly interested but then what happened was is Simon Jeffrey who was running Luke was Arts at the time figured out that BioWare was not interested in in continuing to work on the Knights of the Old Republic series and he knew we were new there technology and that we wanted to deal because we're starting a studio and he put two and two together and out of that came Knights of Old Republic too when we first got the coder 2 contract we didn't really know what we were even getting into we hadn't actually played the game yet BioWare is kind enough to send two Engineers down to our our studio and these guys show up and we're like okay well our studio is actually first is this attic so let me take these two guys uh up to the attic and literally just have them work there for the afternoon it was just hilarious to have these two guys fly down they were obviously used to working in an office building they were a legitimate company they had all the things with a ton of people working on these like very highly respected games and they're taking their code base and dropping it off and like some dude's attic and we always thought that that was hilariously funny because they just looked puzzled the whole time they were doing it which was fantastic for me I thought it was hilarious uh everybody at least all the obsidian I thought it was hilarious so initially like when we started working on Kotor 2 BioWare was still trying to finish Kotor one so in those early days it was a lot of just discovery of how are they building this game development on coder was about 14 months for the coder 2 I should say is about 14 months from the time that we signed to the time that we ship the Xbox version so for me me I was the producer on the title and back then that basically meant that I was the manager for the entire team like sort of like the Project Lead and the team I think probably maxed out in the low 30s maybe about 32 people or something like that but it was very very busy for me um I knew that going into it we're not just starting a studio we're also making our first game we have to do everything you know as cheaply as possible and as efficiently as possible and so for me that meant a slow week for me was probably working like 60 hours busy week was probably more like 80 or 90 hours it was challenging there were some surprises there too you know we were starting this this new small company and I think at the time we only were expecting to have you know three or four programmers total that seemed kind of daunting at the time so I kind of sat down and and threw a lot of trial and error figured out how I could automate the process and and get it to the point where we were building the game nightly so that every day we had a fresh build and so I've worked on a lot of games that had a lot of cool things in them and sometimes had rough edges right and Kotor 2 was our first project the time was a bit compressed But ultimately I'm super proud of the game and having the ability to have worked at the company that produced It ultimately you know the game came out great so not as great as I would have liked would have liked it if it had a little bit more time to to cook but it was worth it in school I am a huge Dungeons and Dragons fan working on a nice window nice window too in particular um we were able to bring Third Edition to that and um that was one of the funnest times of my career I was honestly working on that project and then have a chance to take Neverwinter which to me was a beloved title and we had worked on Neverwinter one as the publisher for for some time back at interplay so to me it was extremely exciting the development of devoner knights 2 went pretty well I think there were a lot of ups and downs one of the first things we did which I I regret and not regret which I think is a lot of how I look at my past where we decided to completely change the editor so originally what we're going to do is take the editor from never one night's one and it was a very simple editor it used very big chunks um which made things easy to put together but it was hard to make it look more modern and what we were trying to do at the time was really have a game that looked more modern for a game that was going to come out in 2006 so we created a new renderer we created a new editor but unfortunately the editor that we hoped would get done in a few months really didn't get done for almost 15 months well you wanted to take Neverwinter one and marry it with this new generation of Graphics technology that had just started coming out in the industry and what we would do in the past is we would add shadowing like we just draw in little dark colors on things to give it like like uh look like it's bumpy um now with with normal Maps we could really make it look a lot more realistic so we decided to to make a new renderer and that kind of snowballed into a lot of changes that we were going to end up having to make ultimate right so you change the renderer then you have to change the tools then when you change the tools well the new renderer has some new some new limitations that you need to to do and so we we ended up snowballing quite a bit on features and that was that was certainly a lesson learned there they would come to me with ideas for how they wanted to change the tools and how they wanted to you know change the engine and things like that you know often I would push back a little bit being that we were a new company and I was more risk averse I guess you know trying to to temper what they were trying to do you know knowing that you know we still had deadlines to meet and things like that you know they did a lot to the editor you know the terrain changing how the train worked and I thought that that was a really good good move they um you know turned out really well yeah so there was kind of a lot of push and pull there but you know I think we did some some really good things with that tool set in that engine one of the other challenges we had was that uh Atari and this happens a lot of Publishers they wanted to make sure that we were going to make an awesome game and so they wanted us to put this vertical slide ice together I forgot what it was called at the time they wanted like three months into the project they wanted something that looked like the final game and so we had to really hack this thing together and if I remember right from Frank kawakowski and and Rich Taylor uh what they had to do is like we really didn't have like new rigs or new new things we could animate and stuff like that we could kind of create new creatures so in a lot of ways what they did is they basically put a lot of chickens into the game and then attached different characters to those chickens than the chickens so that we could then actually have things in the game that were ours versus the chickens of Neverwinter Nights uh so it was really kind of this really hack of number one nights one trying to show it as never nice too which worked uh but I think the thing that was frustrating is it really we spent a lot of time doing that uh where we could have just been actually moving number one nights to move forward if I could do this again I would really try to focus on providing them with very similar tools much more similar to the original so that it was much easier to do and it might have a longer tail as a result But ultimately I'm like really proud of the game I really liked the single player game itself and we continued to work on the tools and and update them and ship them out and I know some people still even play it to this day the one benefit of us doing a new graphics engine and particularly editor in everyone rights too it really gave us a lot more flexibility as we looked at what we're going to do after the main game comes out so I think with um mask of the betrayer and storm is here the what those games became particularly mask of the betrayer but I think storm busy here is really underrated that they were able to be more they would be able to more like full games in it themselves uh that felt differently than the core game only because of all the work we had done with the editor and the rest of the tools [Music] so one of the things I'm proud of that we did do throughout you know the time we were an independent developer was that we were always looking for new games we're always pitching new games we're always talking to Publishers about new games and while all of this was going on with Kotor and everyone writes too we were still pitching uh and we'd come up with this idea of a game called the it was like an action hero pitch Chris Jones actually was really into it when Fergus and I were on at lunch one day and just talking about games and different ideas for for what we could do kind of thinking back to my old tabletop role-playing games and when I played top secret and thought why don't we do something like that a more mission-based you know spy RPG like born Identity or something like that we started to talk to a lot of different people weirdly at the time Simon Jeffrey who had signed us up at LucasArts was now running Sega development or all of state of America and so we pitched this game and it made sense in our heads and it was a cool pitch and everybody got it I personally hated this pitch it was something that I thought just didn't make sense it wasn't in our wheelhouse there wasn't a good game that I could look at but I thought like oh that's kind of relevant we can sort of apply this you know there's all these movies that made perfect sense I thought were fantastic but there was nothing really in the role playing space that really uh fit really well in my opinion and so I wasn't a huge fan of that pitch and then we went and shopped it around to a bunch of different places and ultimately you know Sega was the place where it landed and I think what really helped there is again this was going to be a console forward game we now got a year of experience with unreal I think that made Sega feel better it made us feel better and it did it and and um it really helped us kind of continue to grow as a studio but then it was to figure out what did it actually mean we're calling it The Action Hero pitch the Espionage spy pitch uh and so we really have to figure it out so one of the things the team did initially is to watch a ton of spy movies and TV shows and they figured out like oh it kind of comes down to these different archetypes the JB's which is Jason Bourne James Bond and Jack Bauer from 24. and so then it was to figure out have a character that could be those things but we still weren't entirely sure how we wanted to work and I would say really those early days of Alpha Protocol the game was kind of being pushed in different places we started on unreal 2.5 and early development went pretty well like we had some good ideas for how we wanted to move forward we had some cool ideas for conversations we put together some prototypes um which did exactly what prototypes are supposed to do right they showed us like yes we should hone in on this thing and oh my gosh we should throw all of this stuff away this is terrible let's we're not going to do any of this stuff at one point we wanted to have these super actiony like falling in a plane as it's falling through the sky and you're kind of almost the controls are modified but you know I think we did that for Sega once and it was cost like five hundred thousand dollars to do like two minutes of gameplay so that's not realistic but also like right in that change over there is when epic released unreal three and we thought well it'll be better to get on unreal three earlier rather than later and that really put us in a tailspin in terms of the technology on the project because unreal 3 really wasn't ready for prime time when they released it and so we basically spent about six months developing a bunch of design stuff while we were really waiting for unreal to finish being updated by the engineering team which was just sort of having a lot of issues with it but eventually we were not as a studio uh completely happy with the direction so about halfway through the overall development time we basically stopped production on it um and and did a reboot on the project focused in again on all the things that we thought were most important to the idea of an action and a spy game all the things that we thought were coolest about choice and consequence what were all the characters that we loved the most the places that we love the most and sort of refactored the whole thing and then it took us about another year and a half to finish it out after that I would say and it took a lot I think that was what was challenging about the development of that game was it took a long time for it to figure out who it was going to be I do wish we had had figured out the game we were trying to make sooner so that we had more time to spend on like fixing up animations and making them making them better and have time to fix some of the bugs but in terms of the story and the dialogue like I I absolutely love that game Alpha Protocol became almost two games that were attached together one was the running around shooting action even with the RPG elements of sort of increasing your stats and new weapons and all the stuff you can make yourself look different and stuff like that but ultimately as an action game it wasn't that great I mean in certain instances it could be pretty good but for a lot of times the animations were awkward it didn't do the job the way that we we should have been able to do for that part of the game but it was tied to this other game which was it's like a reactivity engine um and I don't think any game before it or since it has ever given a player you know that much ability not much agency it's not about saying hey if you're good you get plus two points and if you're even you get minus two points it's about letting the player do what they want and then rewarding them no matter what because a lot of times you do something bad in a game you don't get rewarded so the idea was well no let's let the player be who they want to be let them be one of the three JB's no matter what and that part of the game that aspect of the game um people still talk about and it's just it's really interesting a game that in essence in some ways was not a great game or an aspect of it wasn't great but because the other part of it was so awesome people just people just remember it fondly and always talk about it it's still today I wish we could make a sequel I I would absolutely love to work on it in some way I love the concept I love the the campiness of it I love that it has like bits of James Bond and Jason Bourne and Mission Impossible but not any of those in particular if that makes any sense it's just the modern day spy RPG I think is still like a really cool thing that that we could still do really great stuff now especially after all the things that we've learned over the years in the end I'm really happy with how AP turned out because while it was really hard to get there we learned a lot of stuff and we created something that still is I think pretty unique it's still a remarkable role-playing game for all the choice and consequence you have and all those sort of cool characters and and setting specific elements that just make it a really unique experience let's get back to nerd Mecca Man Star Wars Dungeons and Dragons uh yeah aliens let's let's do it absolutely I was really excited too because Josh Sawyer our creative director was super passionate about the project when working with Josh he just he just brings this level of excitement that is it's hard to beat it's infectious it's really hard not to just get excited about it aliens was a Sci-Fi role-playing game set in the alien's intellectual property and it was fairly action based and it was a third person game where you were constantly going around by yourself with two companions from a cast of About 16 people total you were all kind of trying to work together to figure out a way off of this planet uh that was being of course overrun with aliens and it was using obsidian's internal technology Onyx so if you are familiar with aliens fire team uh I was actually quite pleased when I saw how fire team turned out because the gameplay looked like a nicer version of what we were going for with aliens Crucible when we were in negotiating with Sega over the aliens project Seiko was willing to give us a little bit of extra time and extra money to develop the tech alongside the game when working on Aliens what I was really trying to accomplish was to show that you could make a role-playing game in a setting that wasn't very traditional for a role-playing game I really thought that the aliens franchise thrived on the idea of the interpersonal relationships between characters and I thought that was really what in the best of obsidian role-playing games that's what's at the heart of the experience I thought that we could show that you could have something that was action based that had a really cool sense of horror with it but also was ultimately a role-playing game where you made decisions and you had these very meaningful interactions with the people around you but that's when we started to kind of run into other problems so one of the cool things about aliens is of course the aliens but having aliens run around in games is super hard and we worked on that and worked on it and worked on it and worked on it and so not only we were trying to figure out something really hard which was getting something to look like life-like and real like an alien running around in in the world um we're also building our own engine at the time you can't just ride an engine in a vacuum you need you need some goals and you need some things you're trying to accomplish with it so in that sense I think you know it was good that we were developing aliens alongside the tech you know we were confident that you know we could make the game look good so we weren't focusing on on that side of things we were focusing on you know the mechanics of the game and our tools Pipeline and things like that so what we were delivering as Milestones to Sega never really looked that good because we were focused on functionality first the people at Sega seem to to struggle to to understand that you know that that was just part of our process and so they started to get a little wary as to where the game was going to end up they couldn't see where it was gonna you know visually where it was gonna be we weren't doing as good a job as we could have of figuring out how to have everything fit together literally how we could have our tile sets our pieces of space stations and installations fit together in such a way that it was easier for the aliens and your character and everyone to kind of walk around them so all throughout 2008 we were really trying to figure out how to get aliens back on track and we really were getting there like we had actually come up with a new tool system that actually would like make it more reliable on how all that stuff would work and we'd actually gotten a lot of the gun play stuff work the lighting stuff the new lighting stuff that we created in the engine was working we really kind of started to understand what that issue was and so then we took a milestone and built something that like we were like oh here you know what do you think about this and focused on the visuals people called and calm in the industry the miracle miracle milestones in which suddenly the game actually comes together and it looks and we had that right and it was like literally I was like oh my God that you know like it was so great to see that we'd put it together and then we delivered it to our publisher to Sega and I remember having a conversation with some jazz the technical director there he goes this looks amazing like why haven't we seen this before and I was just like well you know we always knew this is what it would be we just weren't focusing on delivering this you know at this point in time and kind of what we didn't know was probably starting three or four months before that they were already really down the road that they were going to cancel the game when aliens uh was terminated I was working off protocol and that was my project and that was surprising to me because I actually thought that aliens had a a better Direction I thought it was more focused I thought that was the project where we where we had a better uh plan going forward because even though I knew AP was going to be good I just thought I just couldn't understand sega's thought process on that that was probably the worst day of my career just when aliens got canceled I was working on that game for two and a half years and putting you know everything into it that I possibly could put into it and it was devastating to not only the studio but the team everyone's personal lives uh you know it was a sad moment um edit [Music] you're I mean everyone was just in shock after that and it was probably the one of the worst I mean they're all bad right because you're put in a situation of you don't have a team you can pay for anymore and but this one is particularly bad because it felt like we had a team that was elated that they had actually figured it out and it was moving forward and it was looking good and just suddenly we're not doing it anymore and on top of it it you know it meant that we couldn't keep all the people at the studio and we had to do layoffs having to let somebody go is is literally the worst thing as a as a manager because their passion their commitment the the amount of work that they put in it is literally the most disappointing thing and you always wonder what could I have done what could I have said at certain points you know how can I be there to help them well anytime we've had a termination it's been hard basically the company failed the individual and they're paying the price for it and you're the person who's delivering that news to them it's uh it's heartbreaking the worst days of my life are either like the death of family members and days when I've had to do layoffs I don't really like to talk about how I feel during layoffs as a Founder because like it's not how I feel is irrelevant you know it's it's I'm not the one that you know is being personally affected in that way my life's not getting turned upside down you know it's it's all the people who are getting let go and and so you know I kind of don't feel how I feel during that time matters you know it's it's it's you know what can I do for the people being laid off you know the game industry is ultimately pretty small and um you know you got to do right by people that's that's ultimately it you have to do right by people and you know we're all trying to make video games and that's what better job is there in the world you know [Music]

Channel: Obsidian Entertainment

Views: 37,030

Keywords: Obsidian, Documentary, Star Wars, kotor, neverwinter, ap, alpha protocol, avowed, grounded, pentiment

Id: 9VoPWGTlwxc

Length: 26min 38sec (1598 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2023