Obsidian Entertainment Interview
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GB: With BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG on the horizon, do you personally think there will ever be a "true" Star Wars: KotOR III? Why or why not? Feargus: I don't really know. A part of me hopes that there will be, because I think we can do things in the more single player story based RPGs that you just can't do in an MMORPG. Like I said, I really hope that there is one, with BioWare busy on the MMO; I hope LucasArts gives us a shot at making KotOR III.
GB: The second title you released under Obsidian Entertainment was Neverwinter Nights 2. Can you give us a brief overview of how you secured the rights to work on the game, and what challenges you faced during its development?
Feargus: Securing the rights to create it is probably more than what we really did. Atari was looking to have NWN2 made and Bioware wasn't in the position to make it at the time. So, we talked to Atari about doing it and due to our relationship with Bioware, knowledge of their technology ,tools and our familiarity with D&D and Neverwinter itself (I worked on the cored game idea with Ray, Greg and Trent when we were first thinking of the title) it just made sense for Atari to go with us.
The challenges that we had while working on the game were a number of things and many of them come down to next-gen games and us growing our studio. The first of those - "next-gen games", caused a lot of issues. When we started working on it 2004, there were already amazing screen shots of what every next-gen game was going to look like. Originally, NWN2 was going to be on both the PC and Xbox360. So, we moved forward on creating a next-gen game, however the budget was higher than what our publisher was used to at the time and so we were both making mistakes. To reduce risk, they asked us to put a prototype together very quickly so, we hacked something together. Unfortunately, it was so much of a hack that it really didn't help us get ready for production. We were still trying to put our tools together and un-hack everything while we were supposed to be making final levels. The responsibility for that all happening really lies on both Obsidian and Atari. Atari shouldn't have pushed us to create a prototype so quickly and we shouldn't have agreed to do it. I put it that way, because I think it's important that developers take responsibility for things that happen in our industry and that it's not just the "big bad" publishers that have done everything wrong. What is also important is to look at this as mistakes that were made not that people were dumb or evil. Both Atari and Obsidian were figuring out, like everyone else in the industry, how to make big next-gen games and mistakes were inevitable.
GB: Do you think we'll ever see a third PC-only, non-MMO Neverwinter Nights? Why or why not? Would Obsidian be interested in tackling another sequel?
Feargus: We'd be jazzed about tackling a sequel. We learned so much from making NWN2 and would love to make another one. As for there actually being another one, personally, I would be surprised. If there was, there would be a lot of brand confusion between what Cryptic is doing and what we are doing. What we'd love to do instead is tackle something like Baldur's Gate 3 or create our own new fantasy world - or have we already been doing that? :)
GB: As someone who has been directly involved with the Fallout franchise over the years, what is your honest opinion of Bethesda's version of Fallout 3? Given the game's design and the success it has enjoyed, do you think it will affect the way your team approaches Fallout: New Vegas?
Feargus: My honest opinion is that they chose the right direction. I could nitpick some of the game systems and how they did certain things, but they would really be nitpicks - and you would probably get a very similar list out of Todd Howard. I can say that I've really enjoyed playing Fallout 3 and the thing they absolutely NAILED was the feeling of actually being in the Wasteland. Ultimately, that is what Fallout is all about; it's about being in that world and running around in it and that's what Bethesda did with Fallout 3.
GB: Aside from the Aliens RPG, Alpha Protocol, and Fallout: New Vegas, do you have any other unannounced titles in development? If so, how long have you been actively developing the title(s)?
Feargus: We have been working on another title for the last four months that we can't talk about yet. It's going really well though and the team is really excited. It's using our own internal engine so we are really able to do things our way based upon everything we've learned about making RPGs in the past ten to fifteen years. Don't take that as a silent slam on Unreal - it's not. Our engine, like Unreal, is a tool and different jobs can be done better with tools that are made for them. There are things that our engine may never do as well as Unreal, but likewise there are things that our engine will do that will be better than Unreal.
