What makes an Obsidian game? Playing tonnes of old Obsidian (and BioWare) games
Obsidian Entertainment was founded in 2003 by several employees of the soon-to-be-shuttered Black Isles Studios (best-known for Fallout 1 & 2 and Planescape: Torment). Obsidian's early years were spent working on sequels to other company's games, often with spectacular results like Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords and Neverwinter Nights 2, before it moved onto original titles like Alpha Protocol, Pillars of Eternity, and the very successful Outer Worlds.
Ask any fan of the studio's work and they'll tell you there's a common thread between these games, a hard-to-grasp quality that makes it feel like an Obsidian joint: Some just put it down to the consistently excellent writing, of course, but it's much more than that. Following the announcement of the studio's next project, the excellent-looking Avowed, we sat down with Obsidian co-founder Feargus Urquhart to talk turkey and, towards the end of the chat, thoughts turned to what he made of this thread. After all, Obsidian's been around for 20 years now, it's a big studio, talent comes and goes, and you have the game development equivalent of the Ship of Theseus problem: What makes an Obsidian game an Obsidian game?
«I just bluntly say it's hard,» said Urquhart. «I've been doing this now for 32 years. It's crazy, and so we're more than one generation from developers that are starting today. We're more generations, you know, and I have people that work here that were not born when I started.»
One part of the process is making everyone do their homework. «When we're starting up a product we basically say, all right, go play all these games, and even play our own games,» said Urquhart. «It sounds silly, like why should we have our people play our own games? But
Read more on pcgamer.com
