Chris Avellone: A Chat with Obsidian's Chief RPG DesignerChris Avellone has been writing and designing RPGs for over 20 years, starting with paper-and-pencil RPGs and then moving to electronic games. While working at Interplay Chris was a designer on a number of RPGs, including Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment and the Icewind Dale series. He helped found Obsidian Entertainment, where he's designed and contributed to one best-selling RPG after another, including Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Nights 2, Alpha Protocol, and most recently Fallout: New Vegas.
IndustryGamers sat down with Chris in his secret lair, which was cleverly disguised as the offices of a game development studio. Somehow, we never got around to his plans for world domination, but we discussed a number of other interesting topics concerning game design and the daily life of a Chief Creative Officer at a development studio.
IndustryGamers: Are you looking forward to a new generation of consoles, or dreading it? (As in, a whole new set of tools and bugs to wrestle with...)
Chris Avellone: I'm looking forward to it. While there's conveniences in developing for a consistent platform, at the same time, it's part of the industry that developers have to adapt to new console generations, and it's not so much a chore as one might expect. It's happening, so prepare and embrace, I say - we've done it before, we survived, and we can do it again.
IG: What's your role as chief creative officer mean in terms of how you spend your day?
CA: It keeps me busy. I attend all design meetings, for one thing. I find designers, manage designers, and I actively participate in the game design process, which means I look at all the design documents. It also means I'm playing all the builds and supplying feedback to the designer. I also contribute content, flesh out characters, and do things like create an area for DLC. If I didn't get to do some hands-on work like that I'd go crazy.
IG: What's the most important advances in RPG design in the last few years?
CA: That's tough. I'll say the "advances" have been more for player convenience, sometimes good, sometimes bad, in my opinion. Journals, quest compasses that point directly to the goal and show you the route, auto-maps, etc. are helpful; at the same time, I think it undermines the thrill of victory and discovery and a lot of what makes an RPG an RPG (exploration, notably). In terms of non-interface elements, I feel the idea of morally gray choices and more focus on actions and consequences has been great for RPGs across the board. Lastly, fully voice-acted characters has been something to adapt to since Knights of the Old Republic 1, and the amount of localization, recording and audio work that requires is substantial, but I feel it's a net positive for the player.
IG: Any chance you'll ever do your own IP instead of working on someone else's?
CA: Yep, we did one already (Alpha Protocol), and I'm sure others will become available in the future. Sometimes, a publisher will want a specific franchise developed into an RPG, and at other times (like with Alpha Protocol), the publisher just wanted an RPG to fill out their portfolio and left the actual IP to us. As for owning the IP – that's different, and rarely do publishers cave to that request in a contract or otherwise.
IG: What do you enjoy most these days about the game industry, and what annoys you the most?
CA: I enjoy the fact that role-playing game mechanics are bleeding into other genres, and the "genres" aren't as clear-cut anymore – developers are seeing the worth in customization, leveling, dialogue, choice and reactivity and other elements that would normally be considered RPG mechanics and introducing them into multiple titles. As for challenges in our line of work - I do get concerned sometimes that for the majority of my job, it's difficult to iterate on voice acting once it's recorded and localized, so there's some stress there in fixing bugs or fixing level flow when you absolutely have to get it right the first time. Still, there are ways of planning ahead to prevent the larger obstacles (recording generic lines, making sure journal and quest objectives are never voiced text, etc.), so it's not a big deal. You just adapt and move on.
IG: Do you think the rise of mobile and social games is going to affect the RPGs on PCs or consoles? How?
CA: There's going to be a lot more interactivity between the two, notably because people want to access their game (or elements of their game) on the go, and mobile devices are the way to do it. Most publishers we speak to are encouraging us (or requesting) such interconnectivity between devices.
IG: What's your favorite RPG lately (not from Obsidian), and why?
CA: I've been enjoying Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Bastion (love the narration), but I've been gravitating back to Dead Island more than is healthy, mostly because the progression is easy, I like the exploration, the environment choice they made and upgrades, and I find the gameplay more addictive (except for driving, which is a comedy of errors when I'm behind the wheel - you can almost hear the Benny Hill music playing). I usually find that with Deus Ex, while I love it, I wince and feel bad more when I mess up (whoops, sorry hostages), so I have to be in a very quiet, focused frame of mind when I play and be ready to replay it to see how things pan out.
IG: What issues do new development studios face?
CA: One of the problems with a studio formed by people from a big company can be that they inherit a methodology from the big company that just doesn't work at a small scale. They end up spending too much money up front doing things like buying furniture and equipment and then don't have enough towards the end to finish the project.
It's definitely an issue to keep the contracts coming in a timely fashion. It can take six months of business development to land a contract, so you have to make sure you've started far enough in advance so that there's still plenty of work lined up. It's also important to leapfrog projects by working with different publishers. You don't want to have two projects with one publisher at the same time, because then it's too easy for the publisher to think “Hey, they've got two projects, I can kill one and they'll still be OK.”
IG: Is it easier or harder to be an independent RPG developer these days?
CA: With a core competency like RPGs it's been easier for us. BioWare got purchased by Electronic Arts, so now if a publisher wants an RPG developed out of house there are fewer choices of developers with experience in RPGs. Obsidian has a great track record with RPGs, so we're an obvious choice when you want to have an RPG created.
IG: What do you think of digital distribution? How is it affecting the industry in your view?
CA: I love digital distribution. For one thing, being environmentally conscious, I really appreciate that we're not making more boxes and shipping them and creating all that waste. It's better just to download the game through Steam and not have to have all that packaging. One of the things I enjoyed with Fallout: New Vegas was that digital distribution of the DLC made things more flexible in terms of getting the content done. You didn't have to worry about production times for discs, and so you could take an extra week if you needed that to get things right. Of course, one of the greatest things about digital distribution is what it does to reduce the used game market. I hope digital distribution stabs the used game market in the heart.
IG: Will game budgets keep rising?
CA: I think for a $60, triple-A game the development costs will continue to rise. Triple-A games set certain expectations, and those are difficult to meet under a budget. These days, though, everybody is looking for that level of quality. Publishers realize that they have to have a certain level of quality to compete at the triple-A level, so they will throw resources at a project to make sure it's excellent. Not just budget, they'll devote some of their employees to helping out with code and art and whatever you need.
IG: Will we see Obsidian produce and distribute its own games someday?
CA: Our eventual hope is that we can stockpile enough resources to release our own titles digitally. Smaller games can be very satisfying projects to work on, and it would be great to do that. But it's going to take time for us to get there; we want to make sure we do it right.
