General News - Chris Avellone Interview

Chris Avellone was interviewed recently at RPGamer about what he has been up to.

Johnathan Stringer (RPGamer): You left Obsidian around two years ago now, could you catch readers up on what you have been up to since then?

Chris Avellone: Sure - also, wow, two years - so I've been doing a lot of things, a good amount which got announced this year all at once, even though I'd been working on them for a while.

I helped Arkane Studios with Prey - although to clarify, I didn't write the story, I helped with the supporting cast, lore, history, and other parts - Ricardo Bare was the lead writer and lead designer, and he's a great designer to work with. Also, the FTL folks (Subset Games) reached out to me to ask if I'd help with world lore and pilot personality design/voices for their new title, Into the Breach, which is promising to be at least as fun as FTL, even at an early stage.

I worked with Larian on Divinity: Original Sin 2. My work with them is largely done, but I'd definitely work with Swen again, he's very driven, and his energy is contagious. In addition, Beamdog reached out to me to help with the Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition, and they gave me a chance to fix a lot of my stupid errors I couldn't when the title first came out many years ago, so that was both a nostalgic and humiliating trip down memory lane.

There's been other projects as well - I still work with inXile, I also got to work on a WW2 title, Burden of Command, I've done lore and world design for Alaloth, and the System Shock Reboot (this isn't Warren Spector's SS3, it's Night Dive Studios) - and they let me get to write SHODAN, so I'm happy about that. Also, I get to work with a lot of ex-Obsidian folks, some who left years ago and went cross-country and others who were hit during one of the rounds of layoffs. Being able to work with them again is nice - it's like getting the gang back together.

I did - and am still - working on other unannounced projects, some big, some small, but all of them interesting. We recently finished the Kickstarter campaign for Pathfinder: Kingmaker, which was a success, and how that came about was a surprise - Owlcat reached out to me to ask if I'd want to work on a Pathfinder RPG, which was something I'd been interested in doing for a while. It's really surprising no one's tried to make a single-player Pathfinder CRPG before, it's a great franchise.

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