But wait, there is more!
Feargus Urquhart requires no introduction but I'm going to introduce him anyway. He's been managing Obsidian Entertainment for the last 15 years and he's the reason the company is still around, which is a no small feat. Under his stewardship, Obsidian prevailed where so many other studios either have failed or were absorbed by various gelatinous cubes preying on the weak, so I have nothing but the highest respect for the man and his uncanny ability to manage business.
Anyway, he did like the article and was kind enough to answer a few questions relevant to to the topic at hand:
1. What's your take on sequels and expansions? Obviously, Pillars of Eternity 2 and three planned DLCs suggest you're a strong believer. At the same time, its new 'nautical-leaning setting' and ship combat offer something very different to entice players to come back and try something new. Is this the best way to go then?
I’m a big believer in sequels, but I’m both a maker and player of RPGs. I think RPGs are great to sequelize due to their focus on story, characters, and growth. When I finish a RPG, I usually want to play with that character again, or play in that world again. Now, not everyone is like me, but I think there are quite a few of us. For all games, but particularly, for RPGs, we create these complex engines and design methods, and we can give players an even grander experience when we can use as much of that as possible from game to game. Of course, we can’t just make the same game again, and sequels need to be more than a big expansion pack. But, so much of our time goes into what players play (quests, areas, companions, dialogs), and when we create all of those again for a sequel with a different, or continuing, story - that’s a new game.
The challenge sequels are fighting with non-sequels is for attention. It is easier to get someone’s attention with things that feel new, so a sequel does need something new and interesting. This could be a big feature like the world map and ship combat in Pillars 2, but it could also be an incredible story; the core of which grabs your attention, and anyone else’s when they hear about it. I don’t know where the line is, but I think we all get a feeling for it. One of the things we did on Icewind Dale 2 at Black Isle Studios was to re-do the HUD. It looks and feels entirely different than all the other Infinity Engine games, and allowed us to also add in some tweaks, but it was not an entire re-write. One could argue that what we did was “skin” the UI, which isn’t really a benefit to players. I think it gave the game a fresh look, gave players more of the world to see, and created an easier way to interact with the characters and game controls at the same time. Either way IWD2 felt new and different because of it.
2. Pillars of Eternity sold more than Wasteland 2 and new Torment combined. At the same time Tyranny sold about a quarter of what PoE did, despite being a unique and innovative RPG. What made one game a hit and the other "a largely underappreciated gem", as Paradox put it?
I don’t know.
After 27 years in the industry, you would think that I would have a better answer. It probably seems odd for me to say that, however what we do is creative and can have a lot to do with timing – sometimes that means ideas catch on, and sometimes they don’t. It is very possible that the idea of Tyranny was interesting to people, and made them stop and take a look, but at a deeper level it just wasn’t interesting or compelling. While Planescape: Torment (the original) is now a very successful game, it was not as successful and Baldur’s Gate, or Icewind Dale, early on. That doesn’t meant it wasn’t successful, I think there are some urban myths about how Torment wasn’t a financial success early on. It was.
3. What business advice would you give to indie developers?
Funnily enough I was part of a panel talking about game funding yesterday, and I was the person there to talk from the perspective of independent developers. Not that your question, I’m guessing, is entirely about funding. To answer, I’m probably going to throw out a bunch of random advice.
- Get known for making a type of game. Some developers, including us, try to be a one sized fits all developer. They can make any kind of genre of game. By doing that they don’t grow an audience, and publishers (if they want to go that route) just put them in a pile with every other developer. They become a commodity, and not a specialty tool. After our first couple years, we focused entirely on being an RPG maker, and didn’t try to sell ourselves as something else. That means we turned down products that might have made us some money, or even helped us keep people rather than laying them off – but it would have been the wrong decision to take a game that diluted who we were.
- Find, then protect, your fans. Everyone needs people who love their games, want to play them, and want to talk about them. They are also the people who we learn from when it comes to whether our new ideas are fun, or not. Having a great relationship with your fans means engaging with them, being honest with them, and truly considering their feedback. We luckily have fans who have been with us for over twenty years – if we didn’t do the above most of the time, they probably wouldn’t still be with us.
- Play your game more than most of your players. We even have a hard time with this sometimes, but the more we play our games, and play them early, the better decisions we make about what to add, what to take out, what to tweak, and what to re-design.
- Understand your costs. I was asked what our man-month rate was in the panel, and I could answer it. By knowing that number, I can always be going calculations in my head as to what it takes to make a game, if we’ll have enough money in two months, or is a feature worth it. 9 man-months for a throw away NPC that’s not interesting to players is probably not worth $117K. Not saying our NPCs take 9 months, but just an example.
- When talking to anyone about your game, be able to convey the concept in a few words – no more than a sentence. This helps core your game down for yourself to what it really is at a high level, and it helps you grab someone’s attention so that they will stay to listen to your more detailed information.
- Video and GIFs are better than screenshots, which are better than text. However, 30 screenshots of the same level, showing the same stuff, with everyone in the shot standing around – probably not better than text.
- Figure out which hats you can wear, and which ones you can’t. Running a developer means having to be involved in HR, Legal, Accounting, Business Development, and Operations. When we are small, someone has to probably wear almost every one of those hats. But, as humans, there are things we are individually not good at. Be honest about identifying those, and then finding people, or even contractors, that can do those things.
- Don’t dwell or hold grudges. I see developers at all ends of the spectrum start making bad decisions (me included) and get burned out. This, of course, can be due to long hours and too much crunch time. But, it can also be due the bad decisions or mistakes they have made, or that they have been subject to. If I dwelled on every bad decision I’ve made, I would probably be in the corner whimpering right now. I screwed up, I’m going to screw up again. The thing to focus on is how to do what I do better and let the milk that has been spilled be forgotten. However, it is not to have the attitude “I’m going to show them, and not let them screw me again”. That leads to decisions made for the wrong reasons.
- Love games, and love making them. If you don’t have both, don’t do this – it’s hard. When you love what you do it is infectious. When you love games, you want to talk about them. When you love making games, you are always thinking about how to make them better. If you can’t love what you do, and what you’ve done, why will anyone else?