Interview de Leonard BOYARSKY :
Was it a shame to leave when you did then? It sounds like you weren't enjoying yourself massively for the middle part of your stint at Blizzard but by the end you had found your groove - and then headed off to Obsidian. Was it a difficult decision?
No, it wasn't a difficult decision at all [laughs]. It had nothing to do with Blizzard. When I started talking to Chris Jones and Fergus [Urquhart, co-owner at Obsidian] and Tim [Cain, now co-Game Director at Obsidian] about doing this it was basically like 'hey, come make another game that you create from scratch, a hardcore RPG in the Obsidian/Troika style’. How can you pass that up? It wasn't really even a question.
We had a few different conversations talking about the possibility of it. I think you'd have to ask Fergus and Chris, but I feel like they had decided it was going to happen before I even realised the decision had been made. We slowly drifted into talking about when I was gonna come over and it's almost like the decision was never actually made between us. I started talking to them and it was like 'oh yeah, this is gonna happen’.
They're like 'Leonard's a sure thing, we'll plan on him being here, we'll work everything else out and then we'll go talk to him’.
Kind of, and the thing about Blizzard, as much fun as I was having doing that stuff, I had been working on Diablo for ten years. I think I worked there ten years and two months. I just don't know I could have done any more Diablo, as much fun as I was having. Another two, three years on a project based around Diablo - if we had been able to take it a completely different direction, possibly.
But then it isn't Diablo, right?
That's not Diablo. That's in the column of ideas that goes right next to 'let's make Diablo more of a hardcore RPG’ [laughs] . There's a lot of great stuff about that game that people love and you don't mess with that, you find ways to make that better. But if you look at the other games I've made in my career, it's pretty obvious I'm insane and dedicated to making very, very difficult games that have a lot of choice and consequence.
What's it like being back at Obsidian, is it everything you'd hoped for in that manner, and are you enjoying whatever it is that you're working on now?
Yeah, very much so. There are basic similarities anywhere you go when you're making games but everybody has their own little quirks and ways of doing things. The day I started and began talking to Tim about this, it was like this is my style of game making, this is how I learned how to make games. Because literally it's like we made games a certain way at Interplay, we brought that over to Troika, Obsidian did the same thing after Black Isle, they had the same practices and same mindset about the games they were making. So to go from some place that was completely different back to a place where it's exactly how I remember doing these things, it was really refreshing and it was like coming home in a lot of ways.
It's been great. I love what we're working on, I'm really happy about it, I'm really glad I got this opportunity to do this one more time.
You're at Obsidian but you're also back with the people you worked with before - but there was a ten year gap in there. Was it like going back to the way things used to be or is there stuff that has changed for the better?
Yeah. Obsidian has this fantastic dialogue writing tool that is just great. We were writing dialogues in Excel, literally, on Arcanum and Vampire. They have processes that have been in place for years and years and years that we never got a chance to do at Troika. It's not to say that I didn't learn a lot of valuable stuff at Blizzard. Working with a whole different set of people.
At Troika, and when we were working on Fallout at Interplay, and probably at the beginning of Obsidian, they would have said the same thing, we were maybe a bit myopically focused on hardcore RPGs. Over the course of the past ten years or so, working with other people and talking with people who are passionate about games but maybe not the same games that I'm passionate about, really gives you a different insight into things and you learn different ways of looking at games, and different ways to accomplish the same goals.
Some things you look at you're like 'yeah, I wouldn't do it that way' and some things you're like 'I never would have thought of that, that's a really good idea’. So, in a way, when I say it's like coming home it's not like nothing has changed, but the big thing is working on another game that's really, really focused on the story and the way you play the story. [That's] the thing I love and the thing that felt like coming home more than anything.
Finally - does Divinity: Original Sin 2 terrify you?
In what way?
That it's what you're competing with now and how far the genre has come while you were working on other things.
I haven't played the second one, I played the first one a little bit, I didn't get too far into it. I've talked to people who've played it and I've read up on it, I will play it one of these days when I get a chance.
When you get the spare 300 hours or whatever it is.
Yeaaah, I tend to like to work. Even if I'm not here, I'm doing research or thinking about the game we're working on.
I wouldn't say it terrifies me, I think it's great that they're doing it. When we were working on Arcanum, Planescape came out. In a way we were just like 'oh, we better up our game now’. That's obviously a new benchmark.
I think it's more like if people are doing this kind of game it pushes you to try to make yours better, in a healthy way. I'm glad there are people out there making this style of game still, because even before we made Fallout people were trying to say that style of game is dead. So the more people that make it the better.
RPGs are kind of a unique animal in the industry. First-person shooters, massively multiplayer games, people tend to gravitate their favourite. This is my game, I play it every time it comes out, I don't want to play any other shooter. This is my MMO, I'm not going to play any other MMOs - which is understandable since that's basically a full-time job.
I feel like RPG fans just want to play great RPGs. Obviously there are people who just love the different series and would love to see more of those specific series. But I feel like if you come up with a great RPG, the RPG people are gonna play it. That's been my experience my whole career. I feel like it's all based around the core of what an RPG is, if you can evoke that.
If there were a hundred games coming out a year that had that, like [there is] for shooters or games that [have] light RPG elements, it might be a different story if the field was really crowded. But maybe five, if even, that's a big number for games of this nature that come out on a yearly basis. Or you might have a year like this one where a couple come out, then you might have two or three years where no games that are in what I would consider that genre come out.
I feel like at least right now there's enough room in the marketplace for all the games. We definitely would look at a game like that and go we have to make a game that's at least as good or better than that. That to me isn't terrifying, it makes me more passionate in a way. It's something to aspire to, there's a new bar being set - same thing on Arcanum with Planescape, 'we better make sure that our stuff is gonna compare favourably to this’.
I'm not sure it did, but it made us try.
Pas de micro-transactions !
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Greetings Obsidian Fans !
We’re extremely excited about our upcoming RPG, and we know you are too. We wish we could tell you all about it right now… but we’re going to hold off until the time is right. What we did want to talk about was a question a lot of you have been raising: “Will this upcoming game feature any lootboxes or other microtransactions?”
The answer is simply: “no.” No microtransactions, of any kind, in our game.
We also wanted to say a word about our partnership with Private Division, our publisher on this title. Far from “pushing” us to put anything -- microtransactions or otherwise -- into our game, Private Division has been incredibly supportive of our vision, our creative freedom, and the process by which we work to make RPGs. They have been fantastic partners, and we are extremely excited to work with them through release, to put what we know is going to be an amazing game into as many hands as possible.
As always, thank you so much for your support. We know we couldn’t do what we do without our fans, and we want you to know that we put you guys first in every decision we make.
Obsidian