Yep, super short and dry. The usual minimum is to say a few generic sentences (that maybe be truth or not) complimenting how good job did in the company and how great was to work with him, and in the case of someone like him that was a “heavy weight” and one of the founders to mention how a age closes with his leave, etc etc.
I had the same reaction when reading that.
I was looking at Obsidian’s titles and realized that Avellone, though listed as the company’s Chief Creative Officer, was never project lead on anything but KOTOR II and three of the New Vegas expansions. Sawyer was the project director of both New Vegas and Pillars, and Chris Parker did Alpha Protocol. So while Avellone has been a contributor, he hasn’t been given creative control of a title for quite a long time.
The Obsidian forums seem to think he’ll end up at inXile, which of course he is still attached to with Torment. Recent comments by Fargo seem to suggest Avellone will have a role in whatever they do with the “Van Buren” rights they acquired as well. Makes me wonder if Avellone was pitching a project at Obsidian that got turned down (thus the Facebook post a few weeks back) and he decided after that to take an offer from Fargo to jump ship.
Yeah for sure. Definitely not a happy separation.
PCI: You’ve spoke a bit about crowd funding, would you ever consider heading up a Kickstarter?
CA: I’m going to hold off on answering that for now.
PCI: Beyond Numenera is there anything you can talk about that you’re working on in the future?
CA: Nothing that I can talk about right now. I will say that the work on Numenera, I’m really enjoying it. There’s a lot of stuff still to do so I’m looking forward to getting my hands back in there. I really enjoy writing the character that’s going to be in the game, in many respects he’s very planescapey so I’m looking forward to that. Also, I’m working with a lot of the guys that I worked with on NWN 2, and also the original Planescape, so being able to work with all those guys again has been a huge joy.
The future beyond that… I guess there’s a lot of gleams in people’s eyes for these really cool ideas they would like to bring to the game arena and those ideas are pretty awesome. So I’m looking forward to seeing where that goes and hopefully being a part of that.
I can confirm that the facebook post of Avellone’s is real, but I’ve been out of the loop with the goings on down in Irvine for a long time, so I don’t know anything beyond that.
I wish him the best, it sounds like he’s really enjoying his other projects outside of Obsidian, and Obsidian has lots of great designers, so I’m not super worried about them either.
Bump
Been reading a bit about Avellone, it’s hard to get a handle on what went down at Obsidian. He seems a strong personality, and I can see him butting heads with Sawyer - who very much strikes me as corporate and reserved.
It seems a shame - a strong director could probably have utilized both talents. Brought some of Chris’ worst instincts to heel, and utilized the visionary flair.
They really should have been complementary. Some of Chris’ work on the NV dlc was clearly in dire need of the editors scissors or being jettisoned altogether, and Sawyer has that capability.
But you look at his commentary on the NV world having become ‘too civilised’, which is an incisive view. Look at PoE, which was dull and safe. For any writer, the greatest crime is to be dull, and I think Chris is very much aware of that.
As a co-founder, it was probably never going to work without success. AP was a bit of a debacle, and I expect it would have been tough going from there. Funnily enough, Chris’ comments on that title yearned for someone to exert control over the development.
Due to the company structure, it appears the only way they could get that was for Chris to leave. He really had no option to, if he wanted to write. I think he gets a bit of bad wrap. With a slight change of the winds, it could easily have been Sawyer who had to go.
Wow, Chris Avellone isn’t holding back when discussing his departure from Obsidian over on the RPG Codex:
I didn’t get anything when I left Obsidian. There were no share payouts, no equity, and this was in addition to the other logistical problems around the departure – the sudden cancellation of my health insurance, problems with my 401K, errors in Obsidian’s accounting, and several existing independent contracts they refused to uphold.
Realizing my family issues and the debts therein, however, they did make an attempt to leverage that into a far more confining separation agreement that would remove my right to work on RPGs, and my silence on all issues that could pertain to Obsidian or any other company they were involved with or the CEO had a % in (Fig, Zero Radius, Dark Rock Industries, etc.). This included an inability to critique games I’d worked on – much of my critiques on my own games tend to be blunt, and not being able to speak to them felt unnatural to me.
The company involvement silence worried me more, however, as it meant that if anything illegal happened with any of those companies (these could include serious charges like accounting issues, silence on harassment issues with regards to employees, perjury related to company documents and payments), I couldn’t speak about the issue, even if I felt strongly against what was being revealed.
While all this is good for Obsidian’s upper management and is what is sometimes considered “good business,” I did feel it showed a lack of ethics.
When they made me an offer to contract me to write for Tyranny (which might seem to be an olive branch, but it turned out to be something they needed for contractual reasons with Paradox, but no one had ever communicated it to me), these were the reasons I refused – I didn’t wish to be part of Obsidian’s upper level development process and their pipelines any longer, as these processes were coming from a bad place, and it showed.
Also, realizing there was no restitution for the issues mentioned, I made a promise to myself that nothing I would do would ever cause Feargus and the owners any further financial gain. If my silence was that important to them, then there’s no need to be silent because that right hadn’t been signed away. Simply put, I like the developers at Obsidian very much, I work and correspond with many of those who are there or have left, and I would work with the developers again. I do feel upper management at Obsidian has serious flaws that need to be addressed, and I stand by that statement.
I feel kinda weird about potentially buying POE2.
Ugh I wish big name developers wouldn’t legitimize RPGCodex, truly a place full of racist bullshit.
He left/quit/was fired from Obsidian three years ago, and we only have part of his side of the story. We still don’t know, for example, why he left/quit/was fired. Not even his side of that.
If Rashomon has taught me anything, it’s that I should believe whatever I want to believe, and adopt orphaned babies. At least I think that’s where I landed, it’s been a while.
Something else I find strange is how upset he is about not having an extra month of benefits. Whenever I’ve left someplace my benefits only last through the next pay period, which in his case may well have only been a few days. Yeah, it sucks, because then you have no job and have to pay COBRA or whatever to keep your insurance, and they are just as evil as the namesake GI Joe fights, but that’s how it is. At least some of what I read here reads just a bit petulant, from the perspective of someone who has been through what he describes and been on the other side of it.
The timing of this interview is a little suspicious as well, right on the precipice of Pillars of Eternity 2’s release date and already I’ve seen a few “I’m cancelling my pre-order” type posts, so this interview is perhaps accomplishing some strange goal?
He’s clearly holding a grudge, and that may well be justified. We just don’t know, one way or the other. Obsidian is being professional and not talking, and Avellone is talking about everything except why he left.
Also remember that just because a dude is tremendously talented, that doesn’t mean he’s right, or not an asshole. People can be more than one thing.
Many places pay health care in such a way that you’re automatically covered through the end of the month. If let go on the 2nd, you’re still covered through the last day no matter what else. I’m pretty sure a former employer of mine paid to allow employs to qualify for some form of COBRA relief when we got laid off (I’m sure they got some sort of tax benefit out of it) and I only had to pay 50% of the normal costs while on COBRA at that time (2010, not that it matters).
But all of those things are also irrelevant next to (1) things a company may have done in the past and (2) personal relationships. Anyone feeling “hard done” may feel that way because of other factors like that. We’ll never know in this case, I’m sure.
I just want to say that I enjoy that people get health care benefits through the ancient foe of G.I. Joe.
You might change your mind if you had to pay for it. Shit’s expensive.
Yeah, but it would still be expensive if it was called something less Saturday morning cartoon. And much less entertaining.
It could be worse. It could be called CORBA (rest in pieces, where you belong).