Posted November 13, 2018
Chris Avellone was upper management at Obsidian though.
Plus it has to be remembered that one of his big stories was about how publishers like MS would not work with Feargus again because he yelled at and was mean to them when they were doing Stormlands together and MS wanted to turn it into some sort of MMO hybrid (which would have been a disaster as that sort of game was not OEI's focus, at all); now MS has bought OEI and Feargus is staying. Whatever the issue was- probably just a disconnect between what MS now wanted and what OEI could realistically deliver- it cannot have been as serious as Chris made out.
Indeed, a lot of Avellone's expose was distinctly questionable. Saying that people were going to leave after Deadfire shipped is obvious and happens all the time. Indeed, for even a company with only 120 employees and an average employment time of 5 years at the same place- pretty high, I'd suspect- an average of 2 employees will leave, every single month. The fundamental problem with a medium sized company like Obsidian is that employee advancement is very limited since if they have maybe 2 full scale projects then they can only ever have 2 project leads, 2 head writers etc etc, and project length is probably around 3-4 years on average. If you want advancement you either have to be very patient or move jobs.
I'd suspect most of his info was technically correct- people have left OEI in the 6 months after Deadfire and Chris's May of Rage, after all, and I can easily believe there were heated discussions over Stormlands- it's just not as damning or surprising as people made out and a lot of it is revisionism where management was damned if they do, damned if they don't (how do you hold onto talented writers who want promotions when you don't the positions for them? Do you shift Stormlands' focus to MMO like because that is what MS wants even if you have no experience there and think any release would be a disastrous mess if you do? If you had idle head writers and a disastrous Stormlands launch would Chris Avellone use those instead to show how bad management was?).
Plus it has to be remembered that one of his big stories was about how publishers like MS would not work with Feargus again because he yelled at and was mean to them when they were doing Stormlands together and MS wanted to turn it into some sort of MMO hybrid (which would have been a disaster as that sort of game was not OEI's focus, at all); now MS has bought OEI and Feargus is staying. Whatever the issue was- probably just a disconnect between what MS now wanted and what OEI could realistically deliver- it cannot have been as serious as Chris made out.
Indeed, a lot of Avellone's expose was distinctly questionable. Saying that people were going to leave after Deadfire shipped is obvious and happens all the time. Indeed, for even a company with only 120 employees and an average employment time of 5 years at the same place- pretty high, I'd suspect- an average of 2 employees will leave, every single month. The fundamental problem with a medium sized company like Obsidian is that employee advancement is very limited since if they have maybe 2 full scale projects then they can only ever have 2 project leads, 2 head writers etc etc, and project length is probably around 3-4 years on average. If you want advancement you either have to be very patient or move jobs.
I'd suspect most of his info was technically correct- people have left OEI in the 6 months after Deadfire and Chris's May of Rage, after all, and I can easily believe there were heated discussions over Stormlands- it's just not as damning or surprising as people made out and a lot of it is revisionism where management was damned if they do, damned if they don't (how do you hold onto talented writers who want promotions when you don't the positions for them? Do you shift Stormlands' focus to MMO like because that is what MS wants even if you have no experience there and think any release would be a disastrous mess if you do? If you had idle head writers and a disastrous Stormlands launch would Chris Avellone use those instead to show how bad management was?).
