Под беззвёздными небесами. Глава двадцатая: Поднять паруса!

“We had a reputation for buggy games, and I knew how many open bugs we still had, so I was fairly disappointed with the state of the game when we launched,” Brennecke admitted. “It reflected poorly on the programming team. It's not our fault, per se, it's just something you have to deal with as a developer: Having a game go out, and still having open bugs.”

“Usually it's a few programmers and a producer, just to manage the build process and uploading builds to various distribution platforms like Steam, GOG, and Origin. Occasionally we'll pull people from other teams to look at bugs and help fix issues,” Brennecke said.

“The schedule toward the end of a project is often fairly hectic,” said Carrie Patel. “You've got people who are working a fair bit of overtime. It's always nice to get a little bit of creative and personal downtime.”

“There have been some short periods of crunch at Obsidian. Some departments have asked to put in some time over a month or six weeks. That's happened a few times, just to be clear,” said Feargus Urquhart, CEO and co-founder. “That was for some very specific reasons, things that needed to get handled. But from the start, even back at Black Isle, I never wanted to force someone to work extra because I want them to have a life.”

“Crunch is destructive. It is not necessary (with good planning), and should not be forced on people. It is also seductive to certain types,” he wrote in an author’s note that preceded an excerpt of his book. “For whatever reason, I'm broken in certain ways. Destroying myself to make something fills an emptiness that I can't shake. That's bad. The excerpt is from a moment in my life when I was at my lowest and giving in to my most self-destructive tendencies.”

“It is a constant fight for me,” Williams continued, stating that his choices led to a mental and physical breakdown, but that he still craved crunch. “As an industry, we need to talk about crunch—how we define it, and especially how exploitative it can be. I didn't go into that, because I didn't want it to seem like I was forced to work this way. I did this to myself. Still do, to be honest. And, if I'm being just really open about it, I wasn't sure I could do that discussion justice because I have a hard time seeing it clearly.”

“We all worked a lot, and it wasn't because we were forced to,” Brennecke said, recalling his schedule on early projects at Obsidian. “It was because we loved the projects and wanted to make the best games possible. Some of my fondest memories are working until one in the morning and seeing the entire team [beside me].”

“There was some crazy guy harassing us at Denny's, so the police department had to come,” Brennecke remembered, laughing.

“There was a wave of young guys, basically, which was strange for me. I came to Black Isle when I was twenty-three, and I would say most of the people there were older than me. Then I'm coming to Obsidian several years later and thinking, Whoa, who are these kids? Adam Brennecke came to Obsidian right out of DigiPen. Eric Fenstermaker, I think, had just graduated from college.”

“They were so passionate that they were driving themselves into the ground. It did feel like, when we were at Black Isle, we were part of Interplay, but at Obsidian, we were on our own. We sink or swim based on how we do. If we don't execute, it's going to be really rough for us—which, to be honest, for the first few projects, it was pretty rough.”

“I'm on Pillars of Eternity II now, and I've never worked this much overtime at Obsidian, ever, but it was purely my choice,” said Dimitri Berman. “A lot of people here really love what they're doing and want to make it better. I think our games show that. People will stay extra and put in a lot more effort just to put stuff in that's not necessary for the game, but it makes the experience a tiny bit better for players. People who work really late end up coming in later so they can sleep in, or if you come in early, you can leave early. It's up to us.”

“I can put in a month of crunch, and I actually am energized and get a lot of stuff done, but then I've got to stop,” Urquhart admitted. “A short crunch can see great results, but after that, crunching is almost like alcohol. It's awesome for a few hours, but then you've got a day-long hangover.”

“If you're staying late all the time, some people will feel pressure to do the same,” Patel said. “If you're making sure to go home on time and set some boundaries with your work, and speak up when things are snowballing, other people are going to feel emboldened to do the same.”

“As Obsidian has gotten older over the years, I think we're trying to do things better: more processes, taking fewer risks in our projects, making sure we're not all being cowboys and cowgirls,” Brennecke added. “A lot of it back then was just, 'Let's figure it out and work as hard as possible. We'll get the game out the door.' Now it's, 'Let's take a step back and not kill ourselves. Let's see if we can make games with proper processes' and stuff like that.”

“I've been around since the very beginning, and one thing I really like about Obsidian that I don't think I could find anywhere else is really open communication with the leadership,” Brennecke said. “We have four owners at Obsidian, and they're always here working every day. Just this morning I had a discussion with the majority of the ownership about something. Their doors are always open.”

“I think that's an easy thing for a lot of companies to say, but we try to live it every day,” he said. “If you ask me a question, I'll answer practically everything. If I don't want to answer it, I'll just say I don't want to answer it.”

“In some ways, The White March was sort of a nice transition,” said Carrie Patel. “It was obviously smaller than Pillars, but it also gave us a chance to put into use a lot of the lessons we'd learned, and to take a few more risks with some of the content and the storytelling we were doing, to make something a little bit more unique and different. That was nice, to transition onto something that was going to be a slight change of pace from what we'd just made.”

“We worked out what I think was a much stronger compromise,” Eric Fenstermaker explained. “Narrative designers would review area design documents and attend the area design review meetings of the areas they were responsible for, so there would be a collaboration from the start. That all went very well. It got investment from everybody, and team chemistry at that point was such that I don’t think people felt much of a loss of ownership.”

“It's important for us, in anything we do with Pillars of Eternity, that the IP is received in such a way that when someone thinks of it, they think in terms of quality; they know it's going to be a good roleplaying experience,” Brennecke explained. “It's important to us that because we own this thing, the brand and the IP stay strong. We don't want to tarnish it with a bad product.”

“I really liked the name Deadfire,” Brennecke recalled. “It was a region Josh defined early on in the worldbuilding of Pillars 1. I thought that would be a cool name for a sequel.”

“I thought that would be a good way of setting the Pillars of Eternity world in a more exotic and different-looking setting right off the bat: Island environments, jungles, a desert, different types of architecture, maybe integrating Polynesian architecture and costumes,” Brennecke continued.

“On the first title, there was so little time to put extra care into all the stuff we were cranking out,” explained Kaz Aruga, concept and UI artist. “We knew we wanted to polish assets, pay more attention, give more love and care to the renders. We also figured it was going to be a huge game—again—and that we'd have more resources, but not a night-and-day [difference in resources]. So, we had to figure out ways to make the art team more efficient so that we can spend all of our time on art and less time resolving technical issues.”

“With Deadfire, we had a little more time to iterate on those ideas, which was nice,” Sawyer said. “We had a lot more time to iterate on outfits and clothing. We had more time to iterate on the look and feel of the individual companions. All of that really made a big difference.”

“You'd think that, on your second [franchise installment], you'd be past all that,” added art director Rob Nesler. “But the truth is that you did one, and now the consumer expectation is that the next product has got to be better visually, and in terms of the experience, and in terms of features, and be more polished and improved in ways that satisfy existing [fans] and attract new ones. The truth is we are not always 100 percent certain how we're going to make what we're going to make.”

“I thought it was more important for us to say, ‘These are things that worked for Pillars 1, and we think they can be better in Pillars II if we take a step away from [convention].’ I think now we're iterating on Pillars as opposed to iterating on the Infinity Engine games,” Sawyer continued.

“Take Pillars 1, which is a very traditional, western-European fantasy setting,” Patel said. “On the one hand, everybody has a fairly common understanding of what that means. That can make generating content and flavor easier, but it's also familiar, which can be a good thing and a bad thing. With a place like Deadfire, where you're having to define something you haven't seen before, or haven't seen as much of before, everybody has a lot of room to play around and say, ‘This would be cool. Let's do this.’”

“Not that I didn’t find the setting of the first game interesting, but Deadfire’s setting felt a lot fresher to me,” Fenstermaker added. “There just aren’t many pirate-y RPGs out there.”

“If you make it less hardcore, does that alienate some hardcore fans? I'm sure,” said Bobby Null, senior designer. “How big of a market does this type of game have? Could it sell ten million units? Probably not. You want to be careful about going after too big a market for a product that's not there, and then alienating the core audience you have. We're always looking at feedback, but I want to make sure that fans of this type of game are happy with the content we're making.”

“In one of the easiest decisions I ever had to make, we brought in the tooltip system that had been built for explaining gameplay systems and then later used in the dialogues in Tyranny to help remind people about key parts of the lore they might be fuzzy on,” said Fenstermaker.

“A lot of the verbiage and name-dropping is less daunting for newcomers,” Brennecke agreed of the tooltip system, “just because they can read about, ‘Oh, who's Eothas? What's the Dyrwood? What's an animancer?’ They can read that stuff in the game and on their own time.”

“The dynamic weather system is one thing that Josh really pushed for,” Brennecke said.

“The game was taking place in a largely tropical area, I felt weather should be more volatile and present in everybody's lives,” Sawyer said. “Also, one of the things people criticized in the first game was that environments felt very static. I believed the addition of rolling clouds on a landscape, rain, lightning, wind that affects foliage—all of those things would make levels much less static.”

“I wanted a smaller game. Or at least, one that was no larger than Pillars. Mostly I’d been hoping to squirrel away some resources for polish time and added depth. We did manage to get the companion count down, however, which was at least one small part of my dream. That let us do a lot more with intra-party interactions and relationships and world reactivity.”

“Eric and I worked over the months of preproduction to flesh out specific story beats,” Patel said, “how the player encounters factions, how the player encounters Eothas, how we keep this off-screen antagonist—or is he not an antagonist?—present in the player's story, but also tie in things the player is doing to the factions of Deadfire and things that are happening locally.”

“I remember, for example, that for one plot point we needed a big event in the midgame that would involve gaining faction support and using your boat, and we needed a way for the player to force a connection with Eothas and obtain the next clue as to his intentions,” he said. So we kicked that around for a while and settled on having a big Moby-Dick-style whaling chase where you’d try to lance Eothas with a soul-draining harpoon to force a connection with him and gain the next piece of the puzzle. In retrospect, I don’t think it would have lined up well with where the rest of the story ended up, but it was a fun idea.”

“Imagine if the US government told Comcast they could build fortresses in distant lands and annex territory on their sovereign’s behalf,” Fenstermaker said. “As much as they wanted. And government would also look the other way in terms of any atrocities and war crimes. You know Comcast would be down.”

“If you violated a company law, they might blast your hand off with gunpowder. I’d never seen that setting in a game, at least not examined in such a way that it didn’t gloss over all of the insanity. It was something I thought would be great to explore and drop the player in the middle of.”

“White March benefited from many such lessons about writing style, lore distribution, design and writing process, collaboration, et cetera. I was excited to see what we could do with a full-sized game after all that. And then of course I totally bailed on my team. Sorry, dudes,” Fenstermaker said. “By the time I handed off my duties to Josh, I think we'd laid out the places you'd visit, the basic sequence of events, and the role the major factions would play. Call it a first draft. It had holes in it, and a lot of the details had yet to be added or continued to evolve afterward.”

“We were able to go and make Eternity II whatever we wanted it to be,” said Urquhart. “That's what that success of Eternity 1 did: I don't have to be on the road right now selling games, and selling games that, while we're proud of and enjoy every game we've made, a lot of times, we're a business, and if we want to keep people employed, we have to sell a game to a publisher so they will hire us and so we can pay people.”

“The thing that was important about the Fig campaign for me was showing off something that looked brand-new. The first time you saw Pillars II, I wanted you to say, ‘Wow, that looks really good.’ That definitely was our focus for the Fig campaign.”

“We decided that going with the same amount as the first campaign would be fine,” said Brennecke. “People would have questions if we had tried to raise more or less, so we went with the same amount.”

“The things we tried to address were things that could be better,” Brennecke remembered. “Like, if this was our second chance at Pillars, how could we improve combat? How could we offer more player choice to improve customization? How could we improve issues with making the narrative offer more player choice?”