The Big Interview: Chris Avellone on how to write an RPG
Chris Avellone leans into his desk, scribbling furiously. Occasionally he curses under his breath, screws up a draft and casts it into the waste paper bin, to be retrieved by Obsidian lackeys and later developed into a critically-lauded new RPG. At night, an attentive intern sits by his bed recording his unconscious inventions. “Nice Sith... demon thief... morgue resurrection.”
That’s the perception, anyway. That as Obsidian’s creative director, Avellone has been single-handedly responsible for all of his company’s best-written games.
“That’s certainly not true,” he points out as soon as the dictaphone’s turned on.
Decamped to the UK for Nottingham’s GameCity festival and sporting a backpack that has him looking more Dora the Explorer than the bard of an adventuring party, Avellone is keen to demythologise the RPG writing process.
Sometimes an Obsidian project begins with Chris Avellone. Sometimes it doesn’t. Either way, it begins with the product director - and if they ask for something, it’s everyone else’s job to figure out how to make it happen.
They’ll be joined early on by a creative lead - and together these two overseers will conjure up the broad sweep of a story. Something that will feed nicely into the game they’re planning on making.
Most of the time, Avellone’s role is simply to give advice on the story points he thinks work, and those he thinks don’t.
“I’m just there for counsel,” he said. “I’m going to trust them to come up with the ideas. If they want to heed my advice, that’s fine and if they don’t that’s also fine, because it’s their vision. The most important thing is that whatever they do is consistent.”
As the work filters down, individual writers are made responsible for specific areas, characters and quests - and tone control becomes the paramount concern. Usually, project leads will draw up a 90-page document of design standards for their colleagues to follow.
For writers, that means a set of boring conventions on acceptable terminology, the titling of quests and the formatting of descriptions. And then bi-weekly area reviews, to ensure any necessary course-correction happens early on.
But it’s important work. For what happens when documents like these aren’t adhered to, look at the way Fallout 1’s desert-dry humour gave way to the ‘wacky’ Boogie Nights references of its sequel.
“I think Fallout 2 suffered from not having a creative lead,” nodded Avellone. “Someone to enforce that.”
As it happens, Avellone is currently the creative lead on a new project. The precise makeup of his workday changes from month to month, but lately he’s designed lore and background material for a new fantasy world - conceiving environments and coming up with companions.
The other half of his time has been eaten up by Kickstarter responsibilities - writing his Pillars of Eternity novella and drawing custom avatars for crowdfunders.
Avellone and Kickstarter have fused in the public perception over the last year, such that he’s now viewed as a sort of human stretch goal - writing a pen-and-paper sourcebook for Accursed, a treatment for a Legend of Grimrock film, and dialogue for Wasteland 2, FTL and Torment: Tides of Numenera.
For the most part, they’ve been “quick” projects - a few months or weekends, rather than years of development - and Avellone has enjoyed dabbling in other fields.
“I’ve found it much the same experience as working at Obsidian in the sense that there's been a freedom to explore different types of writing and design,” he said, “and as a bonus, do so outside RPG development.”
Avellone has weathered cataclysmic changes in the ways RPGs are made - his is one of very few names to appear in the credits of Fallout games on both sides of the millenium. But his own tastes remain resolutely old-school.
While prescribed avatars like Commander Shepard and Adam Jensen are in vogue and allow some wiggle room for self-expression, Avellone is a firm exponent of traditional character creation - letting the player choose exactly who they want to be.
“My belief is that you should not guide them down a role that’s like, ‘I see your destination, here’s where you’re going’,” said Avellone.
“I think players should have the freedom to create their own destiny because at the end of the day, their story is the one that’s the most important - despite what you intended. What you should be giving them is a playground for them to roleplay their opportunities.”
It’s been “kind of a relief”, too, to return to the prosier style of Black Isle’s games with Pillars of Eternity. The more cinematic writing of Knights of the Old Republic and Alpha Protocol has proven to be a slightly different discipline - requiring Avellone and colleagues to pay attention to camera angles, the backdrops characters are speaking against, and above all their tone of voice.
It’s provided Obsidian’s writers with the odd “huge advantage” - being able to have an actor convey in tone something that might otherwise have required lines of exposition, for instance - and tends to wind up more accessible, which is “everything the publishers want to hear”.
But of course, it doesn’t altogether matter what the publishers want to hear when Obsidian are working on what was, for a short while, the most-funded video game on Kickstarter.
It should be able to be interrupted at any time,” he said. “So maybe you shouldn't fuck around examining someone’s backstory when you should be watching out for aliens.
I always thought it was weird how everything around you freezes whenever you talk to someone. A few games have NPCs walking around during conversations but it's not something that happens often.
To be fair this made some moments memorable in Oblivion
Or getting killed in Skyrim because some automatic conversation starts while an enemy is attacking you?
Here is something that happened to me in Skyrim.
I was exploring some lake near the mountains, and I was going deep into it because I thought I saw a chest at the bottom, then out of nowhere some thief interrups me in the middle of the lake, while holding my breath, with the whole "hold this thing for me or I will cut you down even though you are wearing Daedric armor" request, to make it worst, the guy gives me the heaviest boots on the fucking game. It was probably the second most embarrassing death I had in the game, right after that time I was chasing a lunar moth and fell down the pit with spikes near the tundra.
This is wonderful - thanks for sharing. You probably shouldn't feel safe during a conversation, but they probably shouldn't actively drown you either.
“I think players should have the freedom to create their own destiny because at the end of the day, their story is the one that’s the most important - despite what you intended. What you should be giving them is a playground for them to roleplay their opportunities.”
This! For some reason Inquisition makes me wanna do exactly the opposite that the game lets me do. I'd just wanna murder Cassandra while she sleeps and save my own skin but no "Be all you can be and join the Inquisition" :P
All the bacstories I saw in character creation were also way different than I imagined for my character.