Chris Avellone On Interplay, Obsidian, KOTOR2

Thanks to Winterwind Productions for its two-part interview with Chris Avellone, former RPG designer for Interplay's Black Isle division, discussing the continued turmoil at that company ("Projects getting cancelled just happens, but the reasons that projects were getting cancelled at Interplay never felt like good reasons"), his new home at Obsidian Entertainment ("I think our starting line of titles are going to be a good foundation to build Obsidian on... and should help when pitching new ideas to publishers"), and his work on Star Wars: Knights Of The Old Republic 2, including more specific endings compared to KOTOR ("The current game mechanic we're playing around for the endings with is something similar to Fallout, but it will be presented a little differently.")

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Re:Development Blues

[tprime]

I followed along with the whole Fallout3 thing and here is how things seemed to happen.

1. Fallout3 is a PC game and PC Games do not currently sell as well as most of the new console games do.
2. BlackIsle is having serious financial problems. Due to the in-depth nature of an epic game like a Fallout3 and the development costs associated with it, staff gets cut and Interplay CEO and SuperGenius Herve Caen believes that the ActionRPG genre (Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance, Champions of Norrath, etc.) can earn his company (and his stock options) a quick buck.
3. Lower development costs, support costs and distribution costs spawn the blasphemous Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel (FOBOS) game for the xbox and PS2. All remaining staff are given the option to work on FOBOS or pound the concrete.
4. FOBOS is rushed out the door and does VERY poorly due to generic gameplay and bad controls.

Basically, Interplay made some bad decisions based upon flawed logic to try and stay in business. The only logical conclusion they came to throughout the whole thing is regarding the console vs. PC profit structure.
a. PC games cost more to develop and support because of the meriad of hardware configurations that need to be considered.
b. A full Fallout3 game takes MUCH more time to write from a story side as well.
c. Console games are much more difficult to pirate.
d. This might surprise some people, but console games SELL much better. The original Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance (although Snowblind wrote it, it is another Interplay title) sold more than Fallout and Fallout2 combined.

Do any of these reasons make ActionRPGs better than a Fallout3? In my opinion, Hell NO! I played Dark Alliance through once and sold it back to GameStop. After all of these years I still pick my Fallout2 off my shelf and play. Great game.

This rambles on a lot, but after sitting around in the BlackIsle forums (Before they closed them) for about a year and talking to the developers, this is the impression that they were given by management.