"Tabletop D&D Has Lost Its Way" Says Pathfinder Video Game Exec

Feargus Urquhart, one of the execs from Obsidian Entertainment, which is behind an upcoming Pathfinder-themed video game, told Polygon why the company chose to go with Paizo rather than WotC for tabletop fantasy inspired games. "One of the reasons we actually went with Pathfinder was ... how do you say it? I'll just say it: We were having a hard time figuring out how to move forward with Dungeons and Dragons." The issue, he says, is that "D&D is a part of Wizards of the Coast and WotC is a part of Hasbro" and that he would "love to see D&D be bought by someone and become what it was before... Become TSR again."

Of course, TSR went bankrupt, so I'm not sure wishing that on somebody is a kindness.

Urquhart is a long-time D&D video game exec, having worked on games like Neverwinter Nights 2; he points out that "I'm probably one of the people who has one of the most electronic D&D games that they've worked on". Now, of course, his company has moved on to Paizo's Pathfinder.

The upcoming Obsidian video games will be based on the Pathfinder games - specifically a tablet game based on the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, due in the next few months. The studio is, of course, known to tabletop RPG fans for D&D games like Neverwinter Nights 2. Urquhart did hint at non-card-game based projects, saying that "We're thinking about how can we take traditional RPG stuff and put it on the tablet. No one has solved it really."

You can read the short interview here.

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[dd.stevenson]

This article reads almost exactly as if written by Ryan Dancey.

I agree with all of it, I'm afraid.

 

[SirAntoine]

The die has been cast. 5th Edition just doesn't offer enough continuity or vision for the future. For Pathfinder, they know what they're doing and that's what Wizards of the Coast should clearly have been doing.

 

[Parmandur]

But in this case Big is bad.



TSR had a lot of problems, but if it was run correctly then it would have done perfectly fine. Hasbro is not a good company for D&D, due to reasons that have already been discussed. D&D is the type of niche hobby that really needs to stay with a smallish company that just wants to make a table top RPG and make a little money on the side. The moment Hasbro sees the brand as being worth more than the actual RPG then the game will most likely be pushed and pushed until it fades away, or becomes a tiny little game that might get a little support every few years.

The opening sentence here is begging the question. Being part of a large, stable organization has certain advantages over being part of a smaller business. Certain mi uses, possibly, but it is not black and white, and compared to the monstrous incompetence of TSR, we can say with greater certainty that smaller was not good in the case of D&D.

 

[Shasarak]

A number of those D&D products people are nostalgic for were created under the "leadership" of Lorraine Williams. Just saying.

We certainly saw a lot more Buck Rogers under her "leadership"

 

[trancejeremy]

I really don't think it's the cost of the license, given that Cryptic/Perfect world and Turbine have D&D licenses. I think he means that with Hasbro, D&D is just one IP among many 100s. It doesn't get their primary focus.

When it was just WOTC, while D&D wasn't their cash cow, it was something of a prestige thing, I think. It was more of a focus than perhaps the profits justified, but gamers were the better off for it.

Same with TSR. Maybe putting out mountains of product led to their downfall (or maybe it was other things, like Dragon Dice or a flood of novels, or pushing bad Buck Rogers products to make money for the license owners...which happened to include TSR executives), but it's hard to say that it was bad from a gamer's point of view, getting a diverse amount of games and game settings.

 

[Eirikrautha]

It's kind of funny that I can look at the substance of a comment and generally predict who posted it before even glancing at the poster's name. The internet is the greatest force for confirmation bias that ever existed. Those dissatisfied with WotC or 5e will immediately find someone to "support" their doom and gloom, while those who enjoy 5e will quickly find reasons why WotC are geniuses. And pretty much nobody knows what they are talking about (when it comes to the internal motivations of any of the principals).

The average TTRPGer, who doesn't follow message boards or internet kerfluffles, simply buys a game that sounds good and plays it. And that will be what determines 5e's (and by extension, WotC's) success. Not anything said on the internet, by you, me, or game designers working for the competition.

Personally, I'm enjoying D&D like I haven't since late 1e/early 2e. So I could care less if D&D is an afterthought for Habsro or is tattooed on the CEO's forehead. Because I have a solid, fun ruleset that I can play (and expand) for as long as I want, or until something better comes along. I don't need Mike Mearls to write an adventure for me, but I certainly will buy some published ones (got ToD and will get ToEE) for the short-cuts and/or inspiration. And if WotC never publishes another thing, it won't stop me playing (and it won't send me back to the mess that is Pathfinder... just because WotC might fail doesn't automatically mean Paizo will succeed. Crappy mechanics are crappy mechanics).

I just know that, if I hated a game system, I wouldn't spend tons of time on message boards discussing it. I'd probably spend my time on the boards of the things I did like. But I guess I'm just weird (and don't need the herd of free-thinking minds to validate my opinions)...

 

[DaveDash]

Since when did making awesome CRPGs have anything to do with product support?

Take a look at NWN. It's filled with so much broken and 'made up' stuff it isn't funny. But it was an awesome game for its toolset, DM game mode, and community made persistent worlds, mods, and modules. NWN2 on the other hand was absolute garbage.

Both "D&D" games, worlds apart.

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

Game development is hard. I've been there and done that. There is a 0% chance that an amateur coder could keep up with the least skilled programmer on their team.

Given the least skilled programmer on their team is an amateur coder and that's standard for the entire video game development industry, this is not even remotely close to factually correct.

Their games do unfortunately tend to be buggy, but very few other development studios even attempt to make games that react to the player's decisions the way that Obsidian tries to -- much like Troika Games before them (Arcanum, Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, and The Temple of Elemental Evil). Both studios were founded by people who worked on the original Fallout game, and their games are heavily inspired by those design sensibilities. Knights of the Old Republic II was buggy and unfinished, with an abrupt endgame that could barely be called an "ending," but it was also a more ambitious and complex game than was the original.

The companies that are in the same category related to player choice include Natsume, Nintendo, and EA. It's not exactly uncommon.

It's not exactly uncommon. We have entire genres of video games devoted to responding to player choice. That one company screwed it up in an RPG doesn't mean much when there's several other RPGs that do it, and do it well, on a regular basis. It just means one company screwed up.

Fallout: New Vegas attempted to portray a more reactive world than did Fallout 3, which is one reason why it was a buggier game. Also, as with KOTOR2, it had a much shorter development cycle (18 months for F:NV), which inevitably means that there is less time for QA. The publisher is responsible for the bulk of the QA, by the way. Developers will typically have a small team of testers who work alongside the designers and programmers, but the large-scale QA is handled by the publisher. In many cases, the publisher will sign off on a game and release it, despite the developers telling them that there are still severe bugs present.

And Obsidian has produced the same results over multiple publishers, including using the same excuses about it being problems in coding that simply can't be fixed. KOTOR2 was published by an entirely different company than F:NV, yet the results are pretty much the same. When you produce the same results under multiple publishers, it becomes pretty obvious where the problem really lies.

 

[Nergal Pendragon]

Well, no. The opposite really. They called out D&D as making more money and helping offset losses in Q3, but the brands that performed better didn't make enough to make up for the brands doing poorly in 2014.

And in the most recent report:
http://icv2.com/articles/news/view/30836/hasbro-reports-profitable-q4-year
They don't even mention D&D at all, despite the holidays and the release of the DMG (and the MM to big box stores).

How does replying with my post with a rewording of what you bolded disproving what I said?

Edit: Also! This topic was already discussed. The info I have is accurate.

 

[SirAntoine]

Obsidian would not have decided this lightly. I couldn't imagine more shocking news.