What’s Obsidian’s next big thing? We have no idea, but Tim Cain, the creator of Fallout, is involved in it!

We asked Feargus Urquhart and Josh Sawyer a few questions about the current condition of Obsidian Entertainment, Pillars of Eternity: The White March – Part II, and a new mysterious project.

Obsidian Entertainment is one of the best developers in the world when it comes to RPG games and no wonder that fans of the genre wait for the studio’s new project with their eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. One thing is certain – Obsidian is working on a new RPG game and most probably it’s not Pillars of Eternity 2. While celebrating half a million copies of PoE, we decided to ask Feargus Urquhart and Josh Sawyer few questions about what’s going on in the developer’s studio in California.

Congratulations for selling half a million copies of Pillars of Eternity! Do you consider it to be a lot or not really, keeping in mind that you are a rather large studio based in the US where it’s not cheap to develop games?

Feargus Urquhart: While we are a big studio, success is all relative to the size of the team and the budget. If Call of Duty sold 10 000 000 units it would be considered a failure. For us having sold over 600 000 units now, we are ecstatic.

What are you the most proud of when it comes to Pillars of Eternity and what would you do differently from today’s perspective?

Josh Sawyer: I don’t think there’s one specific thing, but the game as a whole. Our goal was to make a spiritual successor to the Infinity Engine games and I feel that, for the most part, we accomplished that. In retrospect, we should have had more stronghold content and the mega-dungeon (Od Nua) wore thin after a while. Would have preferred to have more content in the stronghold and to spread those dungeon levels around to make existing dungeons feel more substantial.

Od Nua in Pillars of Eternity.

How is your work on The White March - Part II going? Will the game be comparable to the first part in terms of size?

Josh Sawyer: It’s going well and it should be comparable in overall size and gameplay length. We learned a lot from working on the base game and Part I, so we’re trying to apply all of that to Part II. The scale of things kicks up after you relight the White Forge and we hope people will enjoy the progression from the relatively modest problems of Stalwart to the wild ‘n crazy ending.

Is the release planned for the end of the first quarter of 2016 still valid?

Feargus Urquhart: The second part of the White March is looking great and will be out in late January 2016.

I assume that you won’t be able to tell me anything about what you’re currently working on, but there are lots of possibilities on the horizon. Pillars of Eternity 2, full-fledged RPG in Pathfinder universe that you were considering. Paradox acquired rights to the universe of the World of Darkness, I’m sure a lot of gamers would be really excited to hear that you’re making an RPG in this rich world. When can we expect any official announcements?

Feargus Urquhart: Not to tease, but we will have news in the next two or three months. We absolutely are looking at crowdfunding one of our next titles as well, so we’ll have news on that soon. I can say it’s been fun to sit around and talk with Tim Cain, Game Director of the original Fallout, about ideas for our next thing. I wish I could talk about it more.

Tim Cain, the creator of Fallout, is working in Obsidian since 2011. We would have sold our souls to the devil to play the spiritual successor of the classic Fallout on Pillars of Eternity's engine. Dreams...

What’s happening regarding the mysterious Kickstarter campaign that was supposed to launch by the end of 2014 (according to the interview you had with CVG)? I asked you about this in April and you said that it’s only a matter of weeks.

Feargus Urquhart: We thought about that a lot and decided that we should completely finish Pillars of Eternity before we went back to crowdfunding. Part of that was just because of how busy we were, and part of it was that it felt a bit strange to ask everyone for more money before we had delivered on our first crowdfunded game.

In the meantime, during the GI Show, a few new facts surfaced and - as far as we know - in about 2 or 3 months Obsidian Entertainment will announce a new incarnation of project Stormlands (codename North Carolina). It was supposed to be a Xbox One exclusive released sometime around the console launch, but Microsoft backed away. Now project is redesigned, probably will be a multiplatform title, already has a publisher and will be additionally crowdfunded.

You mentioned in one of the interviews that thanks to your work with My.com on Armored Warfare you were able to avoid firing people and it helped with stabilizing the company’s financial situation. What does it look like now, didn’t Armored Warfare drag you away from your RPG roots?

Feargus Urquhart: Obsidian is doing great. More importantly, we are getting to take a bit of a breath and really look at what cool things we can create in the world of RPGs. There have been so many great RPGs that have come out, it’s really been making us think about what the next thing should, or even needs to be. If there’s a setting out there you can think of, we’ve been talking about it. As for Armored Warfare, it’s not just been a great game to make, but it’s been great for our development process. Having to make a game that has something like five or six active builds at any time (Development has a different build than QA, which is different then what is being tested by outside QA teams, different from the public test server, etc.) has really taught us a lot of things I think is helping us make all our games.

Developing Armored Warfare was a valuable lesson for Obsidian.

The marketplace for mainstream RPG is pretty crowded, especially with CD Projekt RED joining BioWare and Bethesda; on the other hand, there is still place for developers of more classic RPGs where we see you, inXile Entertainment and Larian Studios. Do you think that the situation will stay as it is and the market will stay divided in a similar way?

Josh Sawyer: I wouldn’t say the mainstream RPG market is all that crowded. The big studios still take quite a while to release new games, so it’s not that often that we’re stepping on each other’s toes. That said, I gave up trying to predict where the industry and markets are going to go. If you asked me in 2007 if Obsidian would ever make a Fallout game, I would have said no. If you asked me in 2011 if we would ever make a tank MMO or a new isometric 2D RPG, I would have said no. The forces that push and pull on the gaming industry are capricious and strange. It’s still chaotic and unstable. After 16 years in the industry, I’m lucky I still have a job.

Finish the sentence: If Obsidian was making Fallout 4...

Feargus Urquhart: I would be on vacation right now next to a pool having a drink with an umbrella in it. :)