Obsidian Entertainment - Interview @ CVG

CVG interviews Feargus Urquhart of Obsidian Entertainment to talk about the developers future after the release of South Park: The Stick of Truth.

Does Obsidian still define itself as a role-playing games studio?

Yeah, I think so. I always feel a little weird saying that, because some people go, "how does that have anything to do with an armored vehicle game?" Like I said, there's probably more similarities than you would think. But ultimately, we're the guys that do characters, and story, and factions, and open world, and player choice.

Those are the things that have really intrigued me about making role-playing games. Even though something like Eternity is very different presentation-wise from Fallout: New Vegas, we're absolutely evolving our systems and our tools to move things forward: how do factions work, how do factions intermingle, and your reputation and your karma with different factions, and how do companions work, and making our companions even more realistic and complex compared to our previous versions. We're always moving that forward. I'll selfishly go back to me, that's the stuff that I find really intriguing.

Now that Stick of Truth is finally released and you have several other projects going, do you see Obsidian doing more traditional triple-A partnerships?

Yeah, I think so. I would love to say that I could go up on Kickstarter and raise $15, $20, $30 million dollars to do our own big triple-A console game. But the reality is - minus Star Citizen - that's probably a little bit of a pipe dream. When it comes to making bigger console RPGs, us working with publishers makes sense.

We hooked up with Paradox to do PR, marketing, and distribution for Pillars of Eternity. If we really had to do it ourselves we could have, but if we were to say, "okay, we're going to get funding to do a triple-A RPG and then we're going to be the people who publish it", we'd have to bring on all these people.

It's a big apparatus to try to ship these big console RPGs. I think we'll always continue to talk to publishers, not just because of funding - although obviously that's a big part of it - but also just because of the realities of publishing big console projects.

And he briefly talked about the next kickstarter project.

You mentioned in December that you might have another Kickstarter to reveal around now...

We are working on what that is. I think we've come up with what it's going to be. We have to still firm up some details, but my hope is that we'll get one going before the end of the year.

I think we've got a good idea. I'm not going to share anything, but a few times in my career I have these things where I say, "hey, that's a cool idea!" and I've generally been right. So I think this one's going to be a cool thing.