Chris Avellone - Interview @ One Angry Gamer

Billy: The first thing I have to ask about is something mentioned back in September of 2012: that publishers came to Obsidian asking for the studio to host a Kickstarter while they retain the rights of the project and work as distributors. Have publishers continued to ask Obsidian to host a Kickstarter while they request to retain the rights to the IP and take a cut of the profits from distribution, or was that just a one time deal?

Chris: If I recall correctly (I wasn’t part of that discussion), that was a one-time thing, and it hasn’t been repeated. Our KS’s were our KS’s first, and if we do work with a publisher down the road on that KS, it doesn’t affect the content, it just assists in distributing it. Often doing a KS first guarantees easier means to own your IP even with publisher help: writers do it all the time by releasing graphic novels first to stake their claim on the idea.

Billy: Regarding Metacritic… most gamers know the story behind Obsidian and Fallout: New Vegas being one point off from the Metacritic bonus. To your knowledge, excluding the bugs and glitches, were any parts of the game purposefully altered or modified based on feedback from mock reviews, if a mock review was used?

Chris: I don’t recall any mock reviews from FNV, although we did get some for Alpha Protocol (many of the problems we knew) and even one for Pillars of Eternity (which we did take action on – see below). When getting a mock review, we do treat it as feedback, and assess if we feel the review is making a good point, just as we would with any Backer or Beta tester. I don’t recall the review score in either of the mock reviews above, unfortunately, I mostly focused on the pros and cons. Mock reviews, like most feedback, are generally best when you can actually implement fixes based on the feedback, otherwise they’re just noise.