Chris Avellone Interview

RPGamer has a new interview with Obsidian’s co-owner and co-founder Chris Avellone, who talks a bit about his dream RPGs (two of which he already worked on), the defunct Van Buren (Interplay’s Fallout 3), Alpha Protocol and Planescape: Torment, among other things. Here’s a snippet:

JS: Alpha Protocol, similar as to what happened with Planescape: Torment, seemed to suffer from some initial poor sales and critical reception. However, it has recently been building steam as another cult classic. Critics often pointed to the many technical bugs and a flawed combat system as negatives. Was this game too ambitious? And could you comment on this perception?

CA: Well, I think Torment had an advantage in that it at least did one thing very, very well. I think the narrative reactivity, and the companions, and all that, became a strong spine for that title that people could point to and say: “Hey, you know what? That game did that really, really, really well.” When it came to Alpha Protocol, I don’t think there was necessarily anything that really stood out quite so strongly. I think the storyline had a lot of reactivity to it but, in a lot of ways, it was much more traditional espionage approaches to stories. So, I don’t know if that really stood out quite so much. And in addition, there were many other games out around the time of the game’s release that did a lot of the mechanics in that game a lot better than Alpha Protocol did. Like with Splinter Cell, in terms of stealth mechanics and such, you know, Splinter Cell totally blew us out of the water because they specialize in that, and they know how to do it, and do a great job. Then Mass Effect 2, they have the whole cinematic, dialogue narrative system all down to a T. So, any attempt that we do to try and do similar sequences, they just aren’t going to shine as well as Mass Effect 2, because you know guess what, BioWare has been doing that a long time. They know the pipelines, they know the process, and it shows throughout the BioWare titles. So, when it comes to things like that, Alpha Protocol couldn’t stand out.

It also had a lot of design issues that occurred over the course of the project right from the outset. You don’t want to put the cart before the horse when it comes to design. And what I mean by that is, Alpha Protocol was a clear example of wanting to make sure you have the player’s movement set, and all of the system mechanics very clearly defined before you do any level design, and even before you do a lot of narrative design. You need to know how the player moves in the environment, and how the stealth mechanics work, because any time you are trying to develop levels based on a changing system mechanic, you are going to waste a lot of time, and do a lot of iteration. There was a lot of feedback, both internally and externally, for how those systems should work, and that just ended up prolonging the length of the title to a point I don’t think it quite stood out so well compared to other titles.

JS: Why did Obsidian decide to use Kickstarter to fund Project Eternity?

CA: Pitching an isometric, old-school RPG has two adjectives, no three adjectives associated with it when you add PC only, or Windows-focused, to the front of RPG that publishers don’t want to hear. They don’t see a lot of profit to be made in a game like that, nor is it worth investing the resources to create a game like that. So, we recognized there was probably an audience for a game like that out there, and Kickstarter just provided the means to contact that audience, and ask them directly for support. The backers came back with an insane level of support, which made us all very, very happy.

JS: Would you say this is the future for these old-school style, PC RPGs, and the only way to get them developed?

CA: I used to think yes, but, recently I think publishers have seen how well these games are attracting an audience on Kickstarter and how much financial support they are getting. Now, I think publishers in the future would be more willing on having a conversation about making these types of games.