Feargus Urquhart - Interview @ Ausgamers

Feargus Urquhart is interviewed on Ausgamers to talk about Pillars of Eternity, the F2P MMO Armored Warfare, and his studio’s involvement in  Skyforge.

AusGamers: The recently announced Armoured Warfare seems like quite a big departure for Obsidian. Is that still your core of largely RPG-experienced developers that are working on that project, or more of a new team?

Feargus: It’s a little bit of both. We have a lot of people that have worked here for many years, and like anywhere, there’s lots of fans of League of Legends and World of Tanks and DotA 2 and DotA and all that sort of stuff. So in particular: someone who has worked for us since we started the company, is a guy named Rich Taylor; this is the stuff he loves. He’s even been programming these style of games since I think before he could drink, or drive.

As an example, he has 8000 games of World of Tanks under his belt, and he has contributed to every single game that Obsidian has shipped. So when this opportunity came up, he seemed like a great guy to put on it. We kind of moved people over onto it who were interested in working on it, then we fleshed out the rest of the team with other people that were interested in coming to work at Obsidian on it.

So what’s been really good is that we’ve been able, over the course of about 18 months, 19 months, something like that… sorry 21 months [laughs], we’ve been able to really take our time at building a team of people who understand free-to-play, and understand making big maps for super-fast tanks to run around and shoot far at, and it’s worked out pretty well.

AusGamers: And that’s with the same Russian publisher [My.com] that you guys are involved with for the Skyforge MMO, is that correct?

Feargus: That is correct, yes.

AusGamers: Are you able to elaborate on Obsidian’s involvement on Skyforge at all?

Feargus: Yeah, the thing is since we were already working together as two companies, and they’re kind of starting to set up their presence in America, and what they just wanted help with is, they said: ‘well, you already have all of the development infrastructure setup and all that kind of stuff, could we work on having you have a small team there, that in essence does sort of the Westernisation, and some work on the actual game itself there?’

They very much work very directly with that team, because it’s a team [at Obsidian] that’s never going to grow more than like 10 or 12 people, and there’s more than 200 people [at developer Allods Team] working on the game in Russia, and they’re the lead on the game. So really, a lot of it is us sort of helping them out. Also, for me it’s great learning a little more about that world of games.