Obsidian Director Slams People "Running Their Mouths" About How The Studio Has Changed
Previously, he's interviewed breakout indie developers, broken big news stories, reviewed massive releases and recounted his time living as a humble woodsman in Oblivion.
A lifelong gamer, Jack is primarily interested in RPGs and narrative experiences. He's also been playing League of Legends for a decade, unfortunately.
Obsidian Entertainment was one of many studios affected in Xbox's recent mass layoffs, with the California-based studio reportedly losing over 50 employees in this purge. In addition, according to Bloomberg, Obsidian has now been tasked with creating a new Fallout game, with the project supposedly led by studio veteran Josh Sawyer.
The elimination of approximately a quarter of Obsidian's workforce has prompted a lot of online chatter about the studio's history, trajectory and its recent projects such as Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2. Everyone has an opinion, and game director Brandon Adler is frankly sick of hearing them (nice spot, Eurogamer)
Commenters Don't Have A Clue
"Another difficult aspect is having to see a bunch of cold take artists coming out of the woodwork to talk about what Obsidian is or what it isn't," writes The Outer Worlds 2 director in a LinkedIn post. "The number of times I've seen people, with no understanding of who has worked on our previous games or what they contributed, talk about how Obsidian just isn't who they used to be... is staggering. Most of the time they are not just wrong, but spreading an enormous amount of misinformation."
A similar situation recently arose with Bungie, where online chatter suggested no one who worked on Halo was still at Bungie, only for a developer to come out and list dozens of people from the Halo days who remained at the studio.
"The people in lead or directorial roles are the same people that worked on games like The Outer Worlds, Pillars of Eternity, and New Vegas," Adler continued. "Like, literally the same people. The through line from [Knights of the Old Republic 2] to our current games is pretty clear."
Obsidian began by creating licensed games for publishers, like KOTOR 2, Neverwinter Nights and, eventually, Fallout New Vegas. The studio then went through a period of financial hardship and turned to crowdfunding, which birthed Pillars of Eternity and Tyranny. Obsidian was acquired by Xbox in 2018 and has shown its prolificity by releasing six games in the last eight years.
"Is Obsidian the same as it was 20 years ago? No, of course not. Nothing stays the same. But the DNA at Obsidian is the same as it always was. The same DNA that created KOTOR, New Vegas, Neverwinter Nights 2 and Stick of Truth. I'm extremely proud of our history, and I am also excited for who we have become," Adler writes.
He finished by reminding onlookers that people "spouting off about Obsidian, running their mouths about who we are now versus what we were then," actually have "zero insight into how a game is made and who contributed to our previous games."
- Date Founded
- June 12, 2003
- Parent Company
- Microsoft, Xbox Game Studios
- Headquarters
- Irvine, California, United States
- Known For
- Fallout
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