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Obsidian games5/28/2023 ![]() Treading the familiar and battered ground of settings and franchises they did not own to build something lasting but also revealing a kind of depth and humanity that most games lack. That creative flair would be the animating spirit of Obsidian’s games for a long time. Promo poster of the dark side of the Force. What it lacked in technical innovation and polish it made up for with sheer creative flair. Once its bugs and glitches had been ironed out, it was praised as a deep and morally complex RPG with higher consistency in its plot and writing. In a similar way, the Star Wars setting, its morality system, and its characters fit each other organically in The Sith Lords. Chris Avellone, the lead designer, was also the lead designer of Planescape: Torment, which in many ways was a groundbreaking approach to how an established setting could be explored in a computer game. From the player perspective, the very beginning of The Sith Lords instills a sense of a deeper commitment to the setting. There is nothing wrong with that.” What those things were and how differently Obsidian does them wasn’t quite touched on in that Q&A. “While we and BioWare do things similarly, we also do some of the same things very differently. ![]() In August 2004 there was another Gamespot Q&A where Feargus talked about the rapid growth Obsidian experienced in less than a year, snatching not only the KOTOR II deal, but also their second game, Neverwinter Nights 2, another sequel to a BioWare game. Yet with concomitant PC-console development came new development issues that Obsidian was inexperienced with, and it showed in the launch of The Sith Lords. BioWare’s KOTOR was a critical and commercial success on PC and Xbox, becoming a role model for PC RPGs to thrive in a console-centric market while retaining their roots, which was also in line with the founding philosophy that Feargus talked about in the Gamespot Q&A. The Sith Lords was Obsidian’s first official game and also their first in a series of sequels that tried to live up to the original games while being plagued by bugs and a general lack of technical polish at launch, due to time constraints in development. And so when LucasArts approached them, offering the opportunity to develop a sequel to BioWare’s Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic ( KOTOR ), they accepted. While at first there were attempts to develop their own original IPs, such as Futureblight, which would have been a Fallout -style game using the Neverwinter Nights Aurora engine, it never progressed beyond the pitch phase. In a February 2004 Q&A with Gamespot ( Part 1 & Part 2 ), Feargus Urquhart talked about the demise of Black Isle Studios and its most hyped to-be-canceled game, Fallout 3, as well as Obsidian’s first game, at the time still under wraps.Īs an independent studio struggling to survive as much as to assert its identity, Obsidian had to, once again, live in the shadow of BioWare, just as Black Isle Studios had struggled to distinguish itself from the influential Canadian studio. Even before Black Isle was officially gone, Obsidian Entertainment was founded on Jby CEO Feargus Urquhart, CIO Darren Monahan, CTO Chris Jones, CDO Chris Parker, and CCO Chris Avellone, all of them Black Isle veterans. And people move on and live on long after the studios they worked in are gone. ![]() It is, above all, the people who develop the games. "Ī studio isn’t just the sum of its games and projects. One of the best profiles of the studio at its heyday was published by Gamespy in the beginning of 2001, shortly before the release of Icewind Dale expansion Heart of Winter, " We are not BioWare. Interplay Entertainment, the parent company, had already been struggling with bankruptcy for years when Hervé Caen, the new CEO after the takeover by French company Titus Software, sold several game properties and shut down Black Isle Studios on December 8, 2003. ![]() Black Isle Studios floundered and submerged as great game development studios often do, in quiet helplessness as painstakingly crafted projects were consigned to oblivion- Fallout 3, codename Van Buren Fallout Online, codename Project V13 Baldur’s Gate III: The Black Hound, codenames FR6 or Jefferson. ![]()
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