RPG Codex Interview: Chris Avellone on Pillars Cut Content, Game Development Hierarchies and More

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

I can understand Eric response to MCA and I can also understand Chris frustrations. I work on IT projects since 2005 and looks like its the same with game development: a lot of developers working with deadlines and budjets, and A LOT of bad communications. This happens all the time.

You can't compare IT with game development, sorry. You don't have celebrity programmers causing jealousy on their co-workers. It's an entirely different matter.

Of course "t. guy who tried to screw Chris out of the money he already owed him by threatening to withhold it unless he signed a NDA"

That's gold, Roguey. Pure gold. Remember that time, whe we used to think Obsidian were the poor good guys screwed by evil publishers? It seems like a million years ago.

For me it's the question of merit and character. Do I believe a very nice guy, who gave me the most beloved game of my life, and who is (or at least was) a masterful writer?

Emphasis on the nice guy part. The non-confrontational types tend to be pushed around a lot. If you consider that and envy, that's a recipe for disaster.

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Junta wants to start a new thread by the looks anyway. Obsidian is stealing hype from the Reds.

It'll be a while before the comrades in Tallinn and London release their masterpiece. I doubt it'd be possible to maintain this level of hype about it that long, so no. Let's all get excited about Deadfire and get it over with so we can charge our hype batteries for when we really need them.

If your Disco Elysium hype lasts for longer than four hours, ask your doctor if Deadfire is right for you!

 

[Sensuki]

You can't compare IT with game development, sorry. You don't have celebrity programmers causing jealousy on their co-workers. It's an entirely different matter.

Not true because the issue is, using your hypothesis, not the fact that there are celebrity developers, but the problems (communication breakdown etc) caused by it. Such problems can be caused by any animosity between co-workers in other fields that can contribute to the failure of projects.

 

[Infinitron]

I'm going to make an educated guess, and we'll see what comes back.

It is clear that one or more Obsidian devs have badmouthed Chris to you in confidence, and there have been a few times where it seems you are relaying their accusations. One of those I recall was something about the reason for communication breakdown due to internal grudges/mistrust.

In Eric's PM/email he also admitted he gave Chris little oversight.

Throughout the entire development there were hints in interviews, videos etc that there was a rift between Chris and (some of) the others. It seems like there may have been some passive aggressive animosity that caused a communication rift between them. On the one hand you have Chris' work which more closely resembles what we (the informed 'fans') expected from the Pillars companions, based on the Kickstarter pitch and earlier media. Chris wrote the companion guidelines for the project from memory and his design fits what he was telling us in his earlier narrative updates. You then have the rest of them which feel far more 'produced' and formulaic, more closely resembling Baldur's Gate style companions.

From what I recall, Chris may have started working on his companions earlier in development than everyone else, and his role was basically reduced to 'write these two companions' down from a bit more. The other narrative designers all had other jobs to do such as area design and writing for quests etc, and it appears Chris did not, despite having a lot of OTHER things to do. Chris is also the most experienced Narrative Designer there, and seems to be more productive at producing (quality) content.

I don't think it's too difficult to image how Chris ended up coming up with a lot more words than everyone else, and a different tone to everyone else, if he wasn't talking to the others very much and they also weren't talking to him and the manager(s) on the project weren't managing him properly.

A reasonable explanation, but you didn't have to add the little Infinitron conspiracy theory.

Anyway, it comes down to the expectations one might have of a studio co-owner and 20 year RPG veteran. I know what it's like to be a clueless newbie intern who isn't connected to what's going on in the office, does the wrong work for the wrong job, and ends up feeling like he was mismanaged and taken advantage of. I would hope that Chris Avellone wasn't in a similar position.

 

[Prime Junta]

You don't have celebrity programmers causing jealousy on their co-workers.

oh you sweet summer child

 

[Junmarko]

If your Disco Elysium hype lasts for longer than four hours, ask your doctor if Deadfire is right for you!

...it doesn't, and it's amusement for the wrong reasons.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

Not true because the issue is, using your hypothesis, not the fact that there are celebrity developers, but the problems (communication breakdown etc) caused by it. Such problems can be caused by any animosity between co-workers in other fields that can contribute to the failure of projects.

He said that communication breakdown is part of the job and I'm saying that is not. If there was poor communication motivated by other reasons that still doesn't make it part of the job. Get it?

A reasonable explanation, but you didn't have to add the little Infinitron conspiracy theory.

Read "Don't drag me into this by revealing the gossip in public, dude."

 

[Once more unto the Codex]

The difference in magnanimity between Chris’ interview and Eric’s response is seismic. I’m not sure how telling it is in this particular instance but, in real life, when I have inside knowledge of competing points of views or accounts between coworkers/friends/family members, the more magnanimous person’s account tends to be more consistent with reality than that of the person spewing bloody butthurt all over the furniture.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

The difference in magnanimity between Chris’ interview and Eric’s response is seismic. I’m not sure how telling it is in this particular instance but, in real life, when I have inside knowledge of competing points of views or accounts between coworkers/friends/family members, the more magnanimous person’s account tends to be more consistent with reality than that of the person spewing bloody butthurt all over the furniture.

Magnanimity? Maybe you mean the hypocritical diplomatic tone of all public statements that involving covering your ass. If I was ever accused of playig favorites and being unprofessional, I would use the same "this is just part of the job" narrative. It's not one excuse, it's the only excuse that has any chance to stick.

 

[Once more unto the Codex]

The difference in magnanimity between Chris’ interview and Eric’s response is seismic. I’m not sure how telling it is in this particular instance but, in real life, when I have inside knowledge of competing points of views or accounts between coworkers/friends/family members, the more magnanimous person’s account tends to be more consistent with reality than that of the person spewing bloody butthurt all over the furniture.

Magnanimity? Maybe you mean the hypocritical diplomatic tone of all public statements that involving covering your ass. If I was ever accused of playig favorites and being unprofessional, I would use the same "this is just part of the job" narrative. It's not one excuse, it's the only excuse that has any chance to stick.

The problem is that, more often than not, that “narrative” is the truth. Most of the time when someone accuses their supervisors (as a general descriptor) of “playing favorites,” they’re simply describing the reality that difficult choices have to be made between competing priorities/proposal and they’re hurt that their pet priority/proposal was not chosen. This says nothing about whether or not “favorites” was played in the making of these decisions in any specific situation but, without deep insider knowledge of the decision-making process of any specific situation, no one can say.

 

[2house2fly]

Spoiler

A match made in heaven, both lovers of town bikes

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

It's Rashomon 2: Obsidian Entertainment.

I agree with Infinitron. There's really no reason why MCA's story and Fenstermaker's can't both be true.

When Eric talks about personality disorders, do you guys think he means the Parker family?

He said that communication breakdown is part of the job and I'm saying that is not. If there was poor communication motivated by other reasons that still doesn't make it part of the job. Get it?

Communication breakdowns happen in every organization for tons of reasons, but they always happen. People are inherently not very good at expressing themselves or their ideas and they make lots of erroneous assumptions about what their colleagues are doing. Modern armies still accidentally shoot at their own men fairly often and I guarantee you they're better organized than any game developer.

As the narrative lead, Fenstermaker should've been supervising MCA's work, but he figured MCA was so good that supervision was unnecessary. That's a mistake motivated by respect and admiration, not jealousy.

You could argue that Obsidian should've just let Chris do his thing. However, that would seem to go against his entire management philosophy. He didn't want to just do his thing, he wanted more responsiveness from his alleged supervisors.

 

[MuscleSpark]

Apparently Black Isle/Obsidian is Codex's version of Dynasty. Can't stop watching that shit.

Is that the one with the ducks?

 

[2house2fly]

Literally who cares about this shit. It sold tons of copies and is considered by many to be among the best RPGs of all time.

Obsidian cares because they burned their reputation in the process and now they can't get a big contract. You can't act like a player when you run a business. Grow up.

No publisher would care about the slightly below 85 Metascore the game got because of the bugs it had at launch. What they would care about is the 10+ million copies it sold.

If publishers didn't care about metacritic scores then it wouldn't be part of the contract. Sales of a franchise entry probably don't matter that much to prospective publishers since New Vegas sold a certain amount just from being a Fallout game; they'd probably care a lot more about things like DLC attach rates, ie how many people bought the game and liked it enough to want to pay for more of it

 

[2house2fly]

Heads up - I just received this from Eric Fenstermaker:

• I don’t like discussing anything remotely negative about coworkers in the press. No one comes out looking worse than you when you do that. But here, I think I need to get more detailed than I would want to in order to clear something up.
  
  To the suggestion that Josh “interfered” in the process involving cutting down Durance and the Grieving Mother, everything he did was professional and warranted by the circumstances. The budget on those companions was blown, not just a little but a lot. Very late in development. They were unimplementable in the time we had, and the company had promised them to the Kickstarter backers. So while I’d have preferred to have just worked it out between myself and Chris, at that point in production it was unfortunately not what the situation called for. A high-level decision needed to be made, so more people had to be looped in.
  
  The interview characterizes ownership as having gotten worked up over something they didn’t know the specifics of, and I won’t speak for them, but if I were in their shoes, faced with this development, I would have been concerned. None of the potential outcomes looked rosy.
  
  It’s been thrown around that objectionable subject matter was the reason behind the cuts. Sexual violence is dealt with elsewhere in the game, and there is swearing all over the place. So there was no looming censor. I don’t want to get into criticism here, but there were some choices that Chris made later in the writing that I thought bore more consideration, and in better circumstances if we’d been able to keep the thread, I’d have liked to discuss a different approach in some specific places. I believe it would have been possible without altering their story or defanging the material. It ended up being beside the point – the easiest cuts to make by far involved that story thread, and so it was left on the cutting room floor.
  
  I did have a role in things turning out this way and I did apologize to Chris for it. I gave far too little oversight, thinking that a set of constraints and approval of an initial design, with periodic email check-ins would be sufficient. Chris was often offsite, I was swamped, and it was all too easy to backburner communication. I thought more regular feedback would only have been a hindrance to someone who’d made a lot of his reputation off of so many well-liked companions. If I had caught the issue sooner, we could have made the cuts sooner, in a much better context, and in that regard I should have done better. He did put genuine effort into the creative aspect, and that made the outcome that much more regrettable. I don’t know what Chris thinks about his own responsibilities and missteps in the matter, but I hope he recognizes them.
  
  
• The PoE story was approved by management not because of poor judgment but because it was time to say “good enough” and hope for the best. We had something that was a completed draft that incorporated many of the best elements from previous pitches. As a place to start, it was workable. An independent developer can only pay its employees to spin their wheels with nothing to work on for so long. I suspect that the story wasn’t far off from something that was more deeply satisfying, so I don’t think it was a bad bet to make, even if the end result was flawed. Sometimes in development, we get the story figured out well in advance, sometimes it doesn’t work out that way. Here, it didn’t.
  
  
• There’s kind of a strange insinuation in the interview that maybe I got a bad employee review because of the PoE story (?), and the phrasing almost seems to imply that this might have been related to my departure. I didn’t and it wasn’t. I always found Obsidian to be forgiving of mistakes as long as you were earnest in your efforts to learn from them, and I tried to be that. I appreciate the owners and my managers bearing with me.
  
  Chris’s experience with Obsidian is his own. But it’s just that, one experience, filtered through a particular point of view, selective in its memory, and biased by its nature. So is mine. No one perspective should be taken for gospel. Me, I liked it there, enough to stay for more than a decade, and I wasn’t without more lucrative options. Good people ran the place. Good people (besides a few genuine personality disorder sufferers) worked there when I was there. Josh was a good director, the owners were good owners. I strongly disagreed with them many times, but it was never because they were coming from a place of bad intentions. Everyone’s just trying to navigate an insanely difficult and stressful business, and for that alone I think you have to approach the profession with a lot of forgiveness in your heart.

• There were a lot of other corrections I wanted to make or explanations I wanted to give about this or that, but looking at it now, I don’t think they’re important in the scheme of things.

Was this like a private message or an email or what?

 

[Nano]

If publishers didn't care about metacritic scores then it wouldn't be part of the contract.

Publishers put MC scores in the contract to pressure the developer to do the best job they can. It's a win-win for the publisher because if they don't meet the threshold then they don't have to give the developer any additional money.

Sales of a franchise entry probably don't matter that much to prospective publishers since New Vegas sold a certain amount just from being a Fallout game; they'd probably care a lot more about things like DLC attach rates, ie how many people bought the game and liked it enough to want to pay for more of it

The Ultimate Edition was released five months after the last DLC, so I'm not sure how conclusive sales numbers would be just for the DLCs.

 

[Blakemoreland Hybrid Boss]

I agree with Infinitron. There's really no reason why MCA's story and Fenstermaker's can't both be true.

Of course you do.

Communication breakdowns happen in every organization for tons of reasons, but they always happen. People are inherently not very good at expressing themselves or their ideas and they make lots of erroneous assumptions about what their colleagues are doing. Modern armies still accidentally shoot at their own men fairly often and I guarantee you they're better organized than any game developer.

What does that have to do with the most talented and qualified person for the job not being chosen as a lead designer and lead narrative? What does have to do with the absurd notion that mediocrities like Eric and Sawyer are entitled to oversee Avelone’s work? Why are you so eager to redirect all the attention to a red herring used by Eric in this discussion?

As the narrative lead, Fenstermaker should've been supervising MCA's work, but he figured MCA was so good that supervision was unnecessary. That's a mistake motivated by respect and admiration, not jealousy.

Why you are not seeing any problem with Fenstermaker being the lead instead of Avellone? Why are you not bothered by the fact that the best characters were Avellone’s and that his characters' quests suggested were cut? Why are you not bothered that they didn’t want to invest time and resources in Avellone’s quests, but saw no problem in investing time and resources in content that was much inferior by any reasonable standard such as the quests made by inexperienced developers, such as Carrie Patel and Olivia Veras?

You could argue that Obsidian should've just let Chris do his thing.

I would argue that Avellone’s past work speaks for itself and it signals that he was more than qualified to be the lead in the cRPG of his own studio and that any content that he suggested should be promptly implemented because it would much better than the alternatives offered by non-entities such as Fenstermaker, Patel and Veras. I would argue that the fatc that he was not a lead is self-evidently absurd by anyone who is paying attention and it was probably motivated by jealousy and envy, but that’s just me.

 

[Starwars]

Oh Codex... why did you have to turn into a gossip rag?

 

[Glaucon]

Was this like a private message or an email or what?

It is clear that one or more Obsidian devs have badmouthed Chris to you in confidence, and there have been a few times where it seems you are relaying their accusations.

...you didn't have to add the little Infinitron conspiracy theory.

 

[Glaucon]

Oh Codex... why did you have to turn into a gossip rag?

Obsidian's office politics are infinitely more entertaining than their games.

 

[Infinitron]

What does that have to do with the most talented and qualified person for the job not being chosen as a lead designer and lead narrative?

I would argue that the fatc that he was not a lead is self-evidently absurd by anyone who is paying attention and it was probably motivated by jealousy and envy, but that’s just me.

He wasn't the lead of Pillars of Eternity for the same reason he's not the lead of anything now, because he doesn't want to be one. I realize that to you it seems like a blatant absurdity screaming to the heavens and you feel like you're the only sane man, but the idea that "Chris Avellone was begging to be in charge and the evil jealous people didn't let him" is just not true. It's something that everybody accepted long before PoE was even released. That's why nobody is talking about it.

 

[I ASK INANE QUESTIONS]

>Infinitron, the fucking black hole singularity of autism rating somebody else as autistic

 

[Prime Junta]

I can relate to wanting everybody to do as you say but not wanting the responsibility or drudgery that comes with actually being a boss

 

[Cross]

I'm interested in why Durance and Grieving Mother grew to the size that they had to be cut in the first place, and to what degree they could have been salvaged. Chris, I'm sorry, is mostly tip-toeing around that by focusing on all the process issues surrounding how he was informed that they had to be cut. It's an inside baseball spat that doesn't tell us who was ultimately responsible for screwing them up by turning them into text wall dispensers.

I'd sooner question why the non-Avellone designers decided to make their companions, i.e. the face of their flagship franchise, so forgettable and lacking in content. It's like they learned nothing from NWN2.

 

[Prime Junta]

I'd sooner question why the non-Avellone designers decided to make their companions, i.e. the face of their flagship franchise, so forgettable and lacking in content. It's like they learned nothing from NWN2.

"Forgettable" is debatable, lots of blushing maidens consider Edér husbando material at least. I thought most of them were pretty good and a few were very good (Zahua, for example.)

"Lacking in content" is a known quantity: they were given a max word count they had to stick to. The reason for that was simple scope control. Pillars was already over-scoped from the chaotic Kickstarter with all those improvised stretch goals, so restricting the scope of everything was clearly a must if they wanted to finish it at all.