History: Obsidian Entertainment
Hello there! Today I want to talk about a studio which is pretty close to my heart, and that is, of course, Obsidian Entertainment.
The Inception
The studio was founded in 2003 by ex-Black Isle(of Fallout notoriety) a short while before it got closed down. Funnily enough, you can kinda call Obsidian Entertainment half of Black Isle, the other half being Troika Games, which also suffered a really bad fate. Obsidian started by making sequels to BioWare games, namely KOTOR 2 in 2004 and Neverwinter Nights 2 in 2006(which improve quite a bit over the originals).
The Bad Times
The studio carried on, through a few cancellations like Dwarfs, an RPG which was to be a prequel to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Aliens: Crucible(2009), a survival RPG which was cancelled by Sega instead of Aliens: Colonial Marines, believeing that a firstperson shooter would bring more money than a role-playing game(nice foresight there, guys). The team which worked on Dwarves got moved on to work on Alpha Protocol(2010), a third person shooter with stealth and RPG elements, which is really well written, but it has huge gameplay flaws, as noted in my joke review of it.
The Eventual Comeback
Now, we move on to the 2010s, when Obsidian really started to blossom, in a way, but also started having financial troubles. The first project released by the studio in this period was Fallout: New Vegas, a game which blends gameplay aspects of Fallout 3 with the world and some characters and ideas from Fallout: Van Buren, the early version of Fallout 3 made by Black Isle. The game had a short development cycle, namely 18 months, mandated by Bethesda, in order for this game to not interfere with The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. The game was launched unfinished, and it is a miracle it was shipped at all, since the team literally had to cobble together a sprawling open world RPG with dozens of quests and locations, hundreds of NPCs and many other neat things. The game got a patch a week after launch, addressing over 200 bugs, but the game is still broken and shall remain broken, especially on PlayStation 3, where the GameBryo engine simply doesn't work and the performance of the game deteriorates the more hours you put into the game, which is really bad for games which take hundreds of hours to thoroughly enjoy. The Fallout: New Vegas problems started to worsen after launch for Obsidian, because of behind the scenes bonus payment deals. Bethesda promised Obsidian an undisclosed sum if the game got at least an 85 average on Metacritic, which it missed by...one point.
Movin on in the decade, the next project released by the studio was Dungeon Siege III(2011), which was an underwhelming sequel for the series, mainly because it didn't let you lead an army of followers behind you. Another game got cancelled in 2012, an RPG by the name of Stormlands(2012), which would have been an Xbox One launch game. They kept hanging on and in 2014 they developed South Park: The Stick of Truth(2014) for Ubisoft, which was a success. It was a sidescrolling open world-ish RPG featuring a fantasy LARP of the South Park cast, filled with raunchy humor and generally good writing. The hits kept on coming, Obisidian releasing Pillars of Eternity in 2015, a love letter to the Infinity Engine games like Icewind Dale and Baldur's Gate.
Then came Skyforge(2015), not to be confused with the dumpster fire that was StarForge, a free 2 play fantasy MMO, which I can't really talk about, because I don't really dabble in the MMO genre. In 2016 they released Pathfinder Adventures, a card game, on mobile platforms, which also came to PC in 2017.
The year 2016 also brought us Tyranny. Another Infinity-like RPG which had you play as a lieutenant of an evil overlord who already conquered the world. In this game, your job is to keep the regions of the empire in check, choosing to side with either chaotic evil or lawful evil along the way.
The first Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny were both published by Paradox, but then, in 2018 came Pillars of Eternity II:Deadfire which was published by Versus Evil. Although this game reviewed well, the sales were underwhelming. Still, they brought their biggest hit the very next year, The Outer Worlds. This game benefited from the hate Bethesda had garnered with review embargos, cancellations and the massacre of the Fallout franchise. In the trailer for the game, there is a line: From the creators of Fallout: New Vegas. This was enough to get people pumped for the game, and it was just what people expected it to be: a retro-futuristic first person shooter-RPG combo eith pretty great writing.
Nowadays, the studio has been bought by Microsoft, which secured their financial future, at least for now, and started developing an early acces survival game about kinds, going by the name of Grounded.
All in all, the studio really weathered some hard times, but they managed to pull off some great games while also staying afloat and maybe, with the Microsoft funding, they may make more ambitious games with greater scopes, or even more concentrated games with crazy details like Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity. God knows we need more good RPGs.
Images: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
Archdruid Discord: https://discord.gg/cw3z74s
GamingHD Discord: https://discord.gg/CZSXJwy