Obsidian Entertainment Q&A

Obsidian Entertainment’s Chris Avellone has updated his blog with a two-part Q&A featuring questions about how the company handles various day-to-day activities.

Q: How is the bulk of your studio laid out? Private cubes or shared offices? Is there an advantage to the way it is? (Less distraction in a cube as opposed to more communication in a shared office.)

A: We typically have 2 people to an office (unless the person is a lead or producer, because those offices tend to have a lot of traffic and sometimes those folks need to have private calls or private meetings with other people), but game studios are laid out both in the office format and in cubeland format… Pandemic, for example, probably has one of the best cubeland set-ups I’ve seen in a game studio. There are advantages and disadvantages to both office format allows people to concentrate easier and get more work done, while cube format allows more constant communication between team members, which can prevent wasted work.

Anyway, that’s a brief slice of what life’s like inside Obsidian-land. This was only a few of the questions, I’ll try to post more as the weeks go on.