Soulban was never working on Avowed, so him leaving doesn’t have much bearing on the state of the game. He only worked at Obsidian for a year anyway. Sometimes you just don’t mesh well with a company. Slightly off-topic, but I wish we as a community didn’t obsess so much over every hire or every guy that quits at one of Microsoft’s first party studios. The industry has a high turnover rate due to a plethora of reasons including money, interesting projects at other studios or more mundane reasons like not liking a companies culture or the city a company is located at. People keep yo-yoing between excitement for a hire to doom for a guy leaving the studios. It’s not a healthy attitude.
People do leave, that’s true, but he’s mentioning some seemingly important roles and that reminds me of Bioware and how they lost important people in the middle of Anthem development and of course 343 with Halo Infinite.
But he ends it with “I think” , dude wtf is that.
Grubb too? This was before E3 then, before the rumors of it showing up at E3? Because I only recall Grubb saying he didn’t believe Avowed would be there at all.
And Urquhart is at Obsidian? Incredibly childish and petty for him to do this, sounds like someone that just needs to move on and accept things. Why ruin excitement for people?
And this was in the middle of development? Hmmm. But there have been things like this before with other games, they may have gotten a better opportunity somewhere else.
It is worth mentioning that the lead area designer had been at Obsidian since 2003 so definite loss there. The narrative designer had only been on team a year.
They are still hiring for area. Never did for Narrative. I think Megan Starks or Carrie Patel may have joined for Narrative which would be amazing.
As for Josh, the reason he turned down is pretty well documented. He was burnt out on AAA development after the lengthy process on POE2 and he wanted to focus on his own project and serve as more of an advisor for the others. He’s doing Missouri with his small team and seems super passionate about it, which is awesome. I’m glad he was granted that creative outlet and I want to see more first party studios adopt the Dreadnaught format used at Ninja Theory and Obsidian.
Guys, I always find useless to search into linkedin profiles, we all know game development is fluid, people come and go, until there is some substantial news/facts is completely useless and also unhealty being concerned about a game.
Hear! Hear! I wouldn’t waste your time on what Avellone has said until someone else corroborates it since the guy is well known to have a genuine dislike for some of the people at the studio.
If we were still back in the Xbox or Xbox 360 era we would have had no idea how development for Halo was going or for Gears of War. We wouldn’t see on websites that a certain employee had left the studio, and that was a good thing.
Now each time there’s a new hire or someone leaving we read about it, videos are being made about it and also being blown up and what not.
That being said, I wouldn’t mind hearing from Klobrille, NateDrake, Sponger or Jeff Grubb if they have a update on this.
All of this. We’re not talking about some local business losing their best talent and then pawning off an important position to their cousin’s nephew and the whole business goes to shit. When somebody leaves they get replaced by somebody who is also a top tier talent within the industry.
it just sounds like he is going out on a limb to say hey obsidian who has a proven track record of releasing alot of quality games within their expected release times are having a huge problem with their biggest project suddenly. Yup I dont buy any of it.
By the way, found the new Lead Narrative Designer for Avowed.
She worked on POE 2, Outer Worlds and co-lead the narrative and writing for Peril on Gorgon which had a great story. She also has experience in Eora which is amazing.
It’s when creative directors (like with ME Andromeda and Anthem) start leaving that it becomes a valid reason for concern, correct? Thankfully we’re not dealing with that at all.
Not really. This information totally lacks all the context. Why did this person leave? Was it personal/family releated? Was it a career move because some awesome once in a lifetime opportunity arose? Had they creative differences? …
And with all these concerns bordering on personality cults (of persons you didn’t knew before) you always have to question if nobody of his/her team could fulfill these roles instead after years of working together. If not these projects are probably at risk or mismanaged anyway. Now that should be a valid concern
Obsidian is a studio you can depend on, but now that they are under Xbox things are going wrong all of a sudden? This while several other reputable sources with a good track record stated the exact opposite back in June. Nope!
If Chris doesn’t know, he should simply say he doesn’t know, what he’s doing here is very petty. A grown up person should just accept things and not do things out of spite.
But I meant it for if this were to happen, which really isn’t the case. For The two BioWare games it turned out to be not exactly great news. Like you said, it could be for so many reasons that people leave a studio. Wish we could go back to the old days where we just had no idea who came onboard and who left a studio.
Yeah, this.
Obsidian is a studio you can depend on, but now that they are under Xbox things are going wrong all of a sudden? This while several other reputable sources with a good track record stated the exact opposite back in June. Nope!
If Chris doesn’t know, he should simply say he doesn’t know, what he’s doing here is very petty. A grown up person should just accept things and not do things out of spite.
But I meant it for if this were to happen, which really isn’t the case. For The two BioWare games it turned out to be not exactly great news. Like you said, it could be for so many reasons that people leave a studio. Wish we could go back to the old days where we just had no idea who came onboard and who left a studio.
This doesn’t go in line with what Sponger, and I think also Klobrille said about how far along the development was last year already. Of course covid has changed a lot of things for all studios, but 4 years, I don’t see that.
We don’t know how far along they are now but according to several sources things were going very well and they were on schedule, and also the fact that the dev itself talked back in June about they had something for the fans the team was working on, to be shown soon.
If a project ends like the Bioware games there are a lot of reasons for the failure (and I wouldn’t even consider Andromeda a failure). Modern AAA games are just incredible difficult and complex software development projects. For the Bioware departures, were they the cause or the consequence of the problems? Lets say Awoved has development problems (we don’t really know), what if these key people are the problem and now they are gone? Could be a good thing, could be a bad thing, could be a nothingburger. But if you a have a youtube channel to farm click from drama its probably a good thing, lol.
Nobody is stopping you Btw in the old days with 1-5 people on a game a departure would be a real problem. Just imagine Ian Bell leaving Elite’s development.
Guys, it’s Chris Avellone we are talking about… he never had anything good to say about Obsidian since his departure and always said there was a bad culture or whatever at Obsidian ( already in 2018 he had a temper tantrum and “warned” MS about the acquisition ). Also, wasn’t he accused of sexual harrasment or something last year ?
Btw in the old days with 1-5 people on a game a departure would be a real problem. Just imagine Ian Bell leaving Elite’s development.