Obsidian's Cain/Boyarsky project gets a publisher

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Take-Two has announced a new publishing label called Private Division, which specializes in releases from larger independent studios, one of which is Obsidian and their project helmed by Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky.

The announcement also came with a video introducing the various studios and projects this label works with. The Obsidian part starts at 1:34 and features the lead designers Tim and Leonard and level designer / world builder Dini McMurry, who worked on New Vegas.

Game Informer also has a feature up about the label, which is an interesting read, though it does not have much about Obsidian or the project except for this little sidebar:
Studio Partner:
Obsidian Entertainment
Game: Unannounced RPG

The role-playing veterans at Obsidian are using their Private Division partnership to reunite original Fallout creators Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky for a new game set in a new universe.

“It was the opportunity to work with Tim on a new IP that we were creating from scratch again, because we did it on Fallout and Arcanum and those were great experiences and I just missed doing that, says Boyarsky, who most recently worked on Diablo III for Blizzard. “I missed working on single-player, in-depth RPGs with a lot of choice, consequence, and reactivity. I like making other types of games, but there is something special about the kind of games we started with Fallout that really appeals to us and speaks to us creatively.”

The duo plans to reveal more about the project at a later date, but Cain says “If people have liked our previous RPGs they're going to like this one in terms of how we make reactive worlds and especially our style of humor.”
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There is also some information about the practices of this new label, which apparently will let Obsidian keep the new IP that they have created for this project:
"…. What that means practically is no one on the Take-Two management team will ever opine on how a game should look, feel, or play. No one's ever going to tell the people in the studios that we've partnered with what a game should look like. That's for the team on the ground working on that game every day.”

Worosz understood that by offering the game development Holy Grail no other publisher was even willing to discuss, let alone surrender, Private Division had a great opportunity for attracting top talent to its label. All the developers we spoke with at Panache, Obsidian, V1 Interactive, and The Outsiders said retaining their IP was the most significant factor in signing with Private Division.
...
“I think it has all the strengths of the traditional publisher relationship but because we get to retain ownership of the IP, it's one of the things where I don't think we're worried about our goals aligning with the publisher goals,” says Obsidian Entertainment’s Tim Cain, who has reunited with fellow Fallout co-creator Leonard Boyarsky to develop a new RPG under the Private Division label. “We both want to see the IP be very successful because we are both vested in it.”
...
All the games will launch digitally first, but should there prove to be demand, Private Division has the means to bring the games to traditional retail channels as well.
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Sounds like a good attempt to fill the gap between the tiny-team indies and the huge AAA games. Publisher gets a decent revenue stream, developers get their game funded and keep the IP, while the players get something less bland and lootbox-filled with more room to experiment than what the large publishers churn out. Everybody wins!

Unfortunately, the Obsidian project is probably not coming out any time soon, as stated in the press release:
*With the exception of the Kerbal Space Program: Making History Expansion that is slated for release in the winter of 2018, there are no titles from Private Division currently planned for release during Take-Two’s fiscal years ending March 31, 2018 and 2019.
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But that shouldn't be too surprising given that nothing has been announced about this project so far.

Press release: https://www.privatedivision.com/2017/12/14/take-two-announces-private-division/
Game Informer feature: http://www.gameinformer.com/b/featu...es-new-publishing-label-private-division.aspx
 
Well, now we know all that Obsidian is doing but for the "small idea" project. I like this, it's going to bear fruit some nice looking AA projects, aside of Obsidian's, too. Take-Two, bar the fuckup with GTAV Online, seems like a good pimp. Their published games get a surprisingly big amount of time in the oven, at least in comparison.
 
I missed working on single-player, in-depth RPGs with a lot of choice, consequence, and reactivity
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giphy.gif
 
Seems almost too good to be true. If this was a Kickstarter promising this like that Apocalypse Now thing eariler this year I'd be extremely skeptical of ever seeing this thing.

But Take-Two ain't no saint either; they've said they want to have things like lootboxes or whatever in their titles to get that "recurring customer spending". Maybe this project will be small enough that they'll be able to just let it be.

Also Obsidian hasn't really done a project on the scale of AAA since New Vegas. They had that exclusive deal with Microsoft to make an exclusive RPG for Xbox One that just failed. I guess we'll just have to see, but I know I don't want it to be three or four years from now and the damn thing still isn't out and they ain't saying peep.
 

*With the exception of the Kerbal Space Program: Making History Expansion that is slated for release in the winter of 2018, there are no titles from Private Division currently planned for release during Take-Two’s fiscal years ending March 31, 2018 and 2019.
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Hopefully they’ll get more time than these two years. Brand new IP, with all the assets being build from scratch, aiming for lots of C&C, reactivity, and RPG mechanics on par with old BIS/Troika games.. Tim and Leonard are such dinosaurs, they cannot work 24/7 just as they did two decades back. Well, good luck!
 
https://forums.obsidian.net/blog/9/entry-207-a-note-about-microtransactions-in-our-upcoming-rpg

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
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https://twitter.com/Obsidian/status/941788129303728128
 
Yeah, the Take-Two announcement about putting microtransactions in everything would seem to only apply to their in-house stuff, and given the recent backlash towards these sort of things, they might backpedal on that too.
 
If this is gonna be anything like Fallout or what Troika used to make but with more polish then this is gonna be a buy.
But if it's another Baldur's Gate clone with more reading and less gameplay then let it die.
 
valcik said:
In terms of mechanics, perhaps. I do expect V:TMB-esque gameplay though, much more action packed than Fallout or Arcanum. Quick reminder of Tim's recent speech on how to make modern RPG properly in order to be accessible to broader audience too:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-a-better-rpg-seven-mistakes-to-avoid.114809/
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from this link

  • Mistake #1 - Steep Learning Curves: Tim thinks character creation in Fallout, Arcanum and other RPGs was too complex. He's experimenting with creating a completely numberless character system that uses geometric shapes to visualize attributes.
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ffs, how the hell is this easier

super-training.jpg


than this?

pokemon-stats-for-IV-EV-pic.png
 
I believe he clarified that both would be included, so people could use whichever they liked more, and they could still retain the people who are intimidated by numbers.
 
Either announce it when your games is finished or just shut the hell up about it. I hate waiting for a game for years, which will eventually turn out to be shitty. Why can't these people adopt open-development like many KS projects do?

I hope Cain tries to make things less "obscure" in his game with the CC system. I love exploration but if you'll have to refer to someone else's guide/walkthrough in order to figure out how to do things then I'd call that a badly designed game.
 
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Cobra Commander said:
from this link



ffs, how the hell is this easier

super-training.jpg


than this?

pokemon-stats-for-IV-EV-pic.png
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It's Pokemon, behind its casual looking single player is a really strong multiplayer with lots of depth.

Anyways, Fallout and Arcanum had pretty straightforward character creations. It was Baldur's Gate that had this non-sensical complexity; it had a character biography that didnt affect anything, useless spells, shit alignment system, and other stuff.
 
SomeDudeandHisDog said:
Anyways, Fallout and Arcanum had pretty straightforward character creations. It was Baldur's Gate that had this non-sensical complexity; it had a character biography that didnt affect anything, useless spells, shit alignment system, and other stuff.
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The character creation of Baldur's Gate is as complex as Arcanum or Fallout for anyone that isn't used to play those games and it is as easy for anyone used to play them. I don't understand what you mean by non-sensical complexity. :confused: After all, the same character creation was used in BG1, BG2, IWD1 and PS:T (not counting anyone that actually played or plays AD&D), so chances are that character creation has more people used to it than the ones from Arcanum or Classic Fallout.
The alignment system in BG also wasn't shit. NPCs (including companions) react differently to the PC depending on the alignment (companions even bicker with each other and might even try to kill one-another if they have opposing alignment), iconic D&D spells like "Protection from Evil" work fine in Baldur's Gate, it affects the familiar the PC can summon, it affects the Bhaalspawn abilities the PC gets when having the dreams (BGII), etc.

And now that I think about it, Fallout also was quite shitty if we compare it like you did. Character creation is still quite complex (every year we have tons of people around internet fallout communities asking how to make characters and saying stuff like "I made my character bad because I didn't know better"), it has useless skills and skills that you won't be able to use until late in the game, speech is a "win the game" skill, it has useless perks, it has a character biography that does nothing (in terms of pre-made characters), etc.

Arcanum also is shitty. Large and small races have no playable female option, Beauty is pretty much a useless stat, useless spells (and even entire spell schools like divination), etc.

I ran out of time to rant some more :lmao:.
 
Risewild said:
The character creation of Baldur's Gate is as complex as Arcanum or Fallout for anyone that isn't used to play those games and it is as easy for anyone used to play them. I don't understand what you mean by non-sensical complexity. :confused: After all, the same character creation was used in BG1, BG2, IWD1 and PS:T (not counting anyone that actually played or plays AD&D), so chances are that character creation has more people used to it than the ones from Arcanum or Classic Fallout.
The alignment system in BG also wasn't shit. NPCs (including companions) react differently to the PC depending on the alignment (companions even bicker with each other and might even try to kill one-another if they have opposing alignment), iconic D&D spells like "Protection from Evil" work fine in Baldur's Gate, it affects the familiar the PC can summon, it affects the Bhaalspawn abilities the PC gets when having the dreams (BGII), etc.

And now that I think about it, Fallout also was quite shitty if we compare it like you did. Character creation is still quite complex (every year we have tons of people around internet fallout communities asking how to make characters and saying stuff like "I made my character bad because I didn't know better"), it has useless skills and skills that you won't be able to use until late in the game, speech is a "win the game" skill, it has useless perks, it has a character biography that does nothing (in terms of pre-made characters), etc.

Arcanum also is shitty. Large and small races have no playable female option, Beauty is pretty much a useless stat, useless spells (and even entire spell schools like divination), etc.

I ran out of time to rant some more :lmao:.
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I'm a Fallout/Troika fanboy so expect me trying to say Infinity Engine RPGs suck.
 
SomeDudeandHisDog said:
I'm a Fallout/Troika fanboy so expect me trying to say Infinity Engine RPGs suck.
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So am I, but I still don't understand why I would have to be blind to the good things in Infinity games and bad things in Fallout and Troika games :postviper:.

What do you think of The Temple of Elemental Evil?
 
Cobra Commander said:
ffs, how the hell is this easier ..
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IDK man, according to Tim himself people are asking for it:
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/.114809/page-21#post-5078089
Tim Cain said:
.. I don't like the presentation of so much complexity in the first few minutes of the game, like in character creation. We lost a lot of potential players to that. That isn't hypothetical. I have emails and reviews to back me up.
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Apparently the times have changed, and so did the target audience. Interwebz are much more accessible nowadays, elderly numbers-loving nerds and highly educated professionals from various fields are vastly outnumbered now, being replaced with young and impatient folks asking for easy ways in their lives.
Vox populi, vox Dei..

SomeDudeandHisDog said:
I'm a Fallout/Troika fanboy so expect me trying to say Infinity Engine RPGs suck.
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Planescape: Torment or Icewind Dale are both beautiful games, each in its own way. I can see why many folks used to PnP games and systems such as D&D of GURPS are being disgusted by frenetic real-time combat system though.
 
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