Because they're huge sycophants that always goad him into taking potshots at Obsidian every chance they get in his forum posts?What fucking difference does it make what site this came from.
Because they're huge sycophants that always goad him into taking potshots at Obsidian every chance they get in his forum posts?What fucking difference does it make what site this came from.
What fucking difference does it make what site this came from.
California is much quicker to void non-competes than other states (in most cases they are outright void). That's one of the reasons employment in Silicon Valley is so fluid.
Frankly, a bunch of his story makes little sense. Can anyone with any knowledge of business law comment on the "de-owner" thing? Your ownership of part of a company can't just be removed without some form of compensation. The fact that he's airing this stuff to sycophantic white supremacists instead of any actual reporters like Jason Schrier does not increase his credibility.
A fair chunk of the community have hate boners for Obsidian too. I still remember all the people referring to Tyranny as "Tranny" and the number of people whining about sjw-this-or-that is quite high.
Of course on the Codex they won't give a shit, Avellone is a living God over there, not to mention in the same thread they're actively trashing on a Trans Dev from Harebrained Schemes just cause that's what the Codex do, but at least some people on Era might actually take a measured approach to this.I mean, there is a reason he opens with 'This might be pointless here at the Codex'. As i described before.
Larian handles codex the best. They acknowledge their existence and maintain its a very scary place and they dont want to anger them with bad games.Of course on the Codex they won't give a shit, Avellone is a living God over there, not to mention in the same thread they're actively trashing on a Trans Dev from Harebrained Schemes just cause that's what the Codex do, but at least some people on Era might actually take a measured approach to this.
I don't doubt some fuckery went down with Obsidian management and he probably got screwed over to some degree and pushed out, but at the same time I don't exactly think Avellone is a completely reliable source or wholly innocent. He's throwing a ton of mud around and yeah sticking with the Codex forever now doesn't exactly speak to his character.
It would be helpful if you included responses from others at Obsidian like Eric Fenstermaker who was Narrative Lead on PoE, now a freelance writer himself:
As well a response from Anthony Davis, Lead Programmer at Obsidian:
Yes, there's a reason why this came to light now. Follow the money.You know, knowing that it's from Codex, I'm feeling some doubt on Chris's account. Especially this close to Deadfire's release.
This reads like a series of bad decisions that lost him all of his leverage in a time where he really couldn't afford to take a stand. He said he was being de-ownered, but admits he quit of his own accord which can screw up your healthcare and 401k etc so he didn't sign anything before he quit then came to the table afterwards.
Lol, that makes me smile. I know nothing about RPG codex. But I just find that funny.Larian handles codex the best. They acknowledge their existence and maintain its a very scary place and they dont want to anger them with bad games.
The truth almost always lies somewhere in the middle. So it definitely wouldn't surprise me if you were near spot on.My best, mostly baseless, speculation is that it went something like:
But who knows.
- Chris Avellone and other owners develop some personal animosity. God knows why or whose fault it is.
- Avellone gets increasingly side-lined in the company due to a combination of said animosity and personal issues -- at other points I think he's mentioned major ongoing family health issues.
- Said side-linery culminates in most of his work on Pillars getting cut, as described by Eric Fenstermaker.
- Avellone quits in a huff, without reading his contract. Turns out by doing so, he forfeits a bunch of shit he would/should otherwise have gotten.
- He tries to get some of that shit back but the remaining owners hate him at this point and dick him around a lot at the negotiating table, and he walks.
When did Chris Avellone himself under his own name and being quoted directly become a disreputable source and what does it have to do with RPGCodex exactly? If you're going to shoot the messenger because you don't like the message board Avellone is posting on that's pretty shallow.
Eric Fenstermakter said:
- I don't like discussing anything remotely negative about coworkers in the press. No one comes out looking worse than you when you do that. But here, I think I need to get more detailed than I would want to in order to clear something up.
To the suggestion that Josh "interfered" in the process involving cutting down Durance and the Grieving Mother, everything he did was professional and warranted by the circumstances. The budget on those companions was blown, not just a little but a lot. Very late in development. They were unimplementable in the time we had, and the company had promised them to the Kickstarter backers. So while I'd have preferred to have just worked it out between myself and Chris, at that point in production it was unfortunately not what the situation called for. A high-level decision needed to be made, so more people had to be looped in.
The interview characterizes ownership as having gotten worked up over something they didn't know the specifics of, and I won't speak for them, but if I were in their shoes, faced with this development, I would have been concerned. None of the potential outcomes looked rosy.
It's been thrown around that objectionable subject matter was the reason behind the cuts. Sexual violence is dealt with elsewhere in the game, and there is swearing all over the place. So there was no looming censor. I don't want to get into criticism here, but there were some choices that Chris made later in the writing that I thought bore more consideration, and in better circumstances if we'd been able to keep the thread, I'd have liked to discuss a different approach in some specific places. I believe it would have been possible without altering their story or defanging the material. It ended up being beside the point – the easiest cuts to make by far involved that story thread, and so it was left on the cutting room floor.
I did have a role in things turning out this way and I did apologize to Chris for it. I gave far too little oversight, thinking that a set of constraints and approval of an initial design, with periodic email check-ins would be sufficient. Chris was often offsite, I was swamped, and it was all too easy to backburner communication. I thought more regular feedback would only have been a hindrance to someone who'd made a lot of his reputation off of so many well-liked companions. If I had caught the issue sooner, we could have made the cuts sooner, in a much better context, and in that regard I should have done better. He did put genuine effort into the creative aspect, and that made the outcome that much more regrettable. I don't know what Chris thinks about his own responsibilities and missteps in the matter, but I hope he recognizes them.
- The PoE story was approved by management not because of poor judgment but because it was time to say "good enough" and hope for the best. We had something that was a completed draft that incorporated many of the best elements from previous pitches. As a place to start, it was workable. An independent developer can only pay its employees to spin their wheels with nothing to work on for so long. I suspect that the story wasn't far off from something that was more deeply satisfying, so I don't think it was a bad bet to make, even if the end result was flawed. Sometimes in development, we get the story figured out well in advance, sometimes it doesn't work out that way. Here, it didn't.
- There's kind of a strange insinuation in the interview that maybe I got a bad employee review because of the PoE story (?), and the phrasing almost seems to imply that this might have been related to my departure. I didn't and it wasn't. I always found Obsidian to be forgiving of mistakes as long as you were earnest in your efforts to learn from them, and I tried to be that. I appreciate the owners and my managers bearing with me.
Chris's experience with Obsidian is his own. But it's just that, one experience, filtered through a particular point of view, selective in its memory, and biased by its nature. So is mine. No one perspective should be taken for gospel. Me, I liked it there, enough to stay for more than a decade, and I wasn't without more lucrative options. Good people ran the place. Good people (besides a few genuine personality disorder sufferers) worked there when I was there. Josh was a good director, the owners were good owners. I strongly disagreed with them many times, but it was never because they were coming from a place of bad intentions. Everyone's just trying to navigate an insanely difficult and stressful business, and for that alone I think you have to approach the profession with a lot of forgiveness in your heart.
- There were a lot of other corrections I wanted to make or explanations I wanted to give about this or that, but looking at it now, I don't think they're important in the scheme of things.
Yeah that all is just... either he screwed himself horribly, in which case, sorry dude, or Obsidian literally stole from him, in which case he should get a lawyer and not post shit about it on message boards until the legal proceedings are settled.
Can someone explain how you can be a co-owner and lose all of your shares in a company without compensation?
I like the disclaimer, especially as it sheds more light into the situation from Eric's view.
Can someone explain how you can be a co-owner and lose all of your shares in a company without compensation?
Wut? Pillars was one of the most successful Kickstarter games ever and sold very well for them giving Obsidian their first major fully owned IP to exploit. Tyranny despite issues and so so sales, in large part due to Paradox's poor marketing of the game, was another great game far better than many of the other cRPGs that have come out lately. Now they're less than 5 days away from releasing what looks to be a massively improved sequel with Deadfire, which was the most successful Fig campaign and even more successful than the PoE Kickstarter. And by all accounts they have something pretty big cooking with the Cain/Boyarsky game. I'd hardly call that a shell. They may not be in the big budget AAA space anymore, but that's probably a good thing.I didn't know any of this stuff obviously but the way Avellone was tossed out by Feargus always rubbed me the wrong way. I had already felt like he was harming the company with some of his decisions but then he chases away their strongest asset and now we know why. Feargus needs to go. They still have some talent there but Obsidian's been a shell of themselves for a long time now (New Vegas/AP was 8 years ago!) and it's clear that management is only making things worse.
He doesn't pander to the codex dwellers however and often goes against their views. In an old interview for another site one of his st atements about a Fallout MMO which he thought could do well was matched with a provocation for the site users to light their torches or whatever. I'll agree the site's forums are a pretty awful place but I still check the website daily alongside all the other gaming news sites and it doesn't seem to be reflected on the site content. But, again, all this makes no difference unless Avellone comes out and says this interview never happened and it's all a lie, otherwise this thread is about Avellone speaking of shady/shitty shenanigans at Obsidian, not the site or any derailing conspiracy theories of yours. Also, none of this will even begin to make a dent to any upcoming game's sales, if anything it will be forgotten by next week by most, if they wanted to affect that game's sales they sure aren't being effective, lol.The site is full of white supremacists and adores Avellone. In the same thread he has also spent a fair amount of times bad-mouthing former co-workers, one of whom has rejected his account. It's entirely possible some shady shit went down, but frankly I don't find Avellone's one-sided accounts to a sycophantic audience of alt-righters a credible basis for any kind of conclusion.
And the fact that he is doing this the week before a new Obsidian game gets released, even though this all actually went down years ago, suggests spite as a motivating factor.
Can someone explain how you can be a co-owner and lose all of your shares in a company without compensation?
Yeah we've gotta have some business law people here. Seems literally impossible, or if it happened wildly illegal.
Wut? Pillars was one of the most successful Kickstarter games ever and sold very well for them giving Obsidian their first major fully owned IP to exploit. Tyranny despite issues and so so sales, in large part due to Paradox's poor marketing of the game, was another great game far better than many of the other cRPGs that have come out lately. Now they're less than 5 days away from releasing what looks to be a massively improved sequel with Deadfire, which was the most successful Fig campaign and even more successful than the PoE Kickstarter. And by all accounts they have something pretty big cooking with the Cain/Boyarsky game. I'd hardly call that a shell. They may not be in the big budget AAA space anymore, but that's probably a good thing.