Chris Avellone said:

I may post a longer critique to this in the Eternity Codex forums, since this is an Eternity thing, including how to approach narrative management in general.



For the rest of this, though, it’s indicative of the overall process and pipelines in place, some of which Eric is not responsible for or even knew about.



Get ready for a lot of carriage returns. Also tldr; this is an example of a flawed process in place.



Based on the fragment quoted in your post, I’ll take that as a, “yes, I agree with the points the fragment is referencing.”



As for the rest of your response, I can sense the frustration. I’m trying to feel bad for your sacrifice and overtime – and under different circumstances, I would.



But if you scripted and implemented something you didn’t even review (especially when it’s 10x easier and faster to make comments and edits before implementing, let alone fixing those same errors, not to mention it’s part of a Creative Lead’s job), well, that’s on you.



It’s not what I would have done – and if I had, I would accept the responsibility for reworking the elements. That's not even a game industry lesson, it's a life lesson.



If it’s easier to blame me for putting the cart before the horse, all right, but I don’t know what else to tell you except that sympathy wasn’t the emotion I felt reading this, only confusion (“well… why did you do it that way then?”).



I’ll be blunt and say sympathy certainly wasn’t the emotion the other people doing overtime and sacrifices for the narrative felt, and I’m not even talking about the Tyranny team - but the sub-leads on Eternity who weren’t in support of it, either.



In those cases, however, I told them they should bring it up with you and give you a chance to address it before escalating it to me (which I consider bad form, as it was sometimes clear they just wanted an excuse to tell you “an owner said you were wrong”).



But even if that didn’t work out, they shouldn’t take it to me – it should go to the Lead Designer next and get his take, and so on and so forth. Some had, but not all.



Other Thoughts!



Although you’ve blamed me for this in the past, it certainly wasn’t my decision not to give you additional support or personnel to get things done in a timely manner – but one issue with being an owner of a multi-owner company is you get to share the blame for all owner decisions, even ones you have no idea have been made.



If it were up to me, I’d have look for ways to downscope (like with the intermittent VO) and if that failed, sacrificed funds to get the team to a proper size to do the game properly, and I’ve said as much about sacrifice in the past – it’s an investment for the future, and it reduces bugs and overtime.



I don’t think any developer should be working more than 40 hours a week, and if they are, the pipeline is likely mismanaged, overly ambitious, has feature-itis or tweak-itis, or is broken in some other respect. It may also be the fault of the actual developer to put more content in than intended, or doing work outside their discipline and/or that's clearly too much for them.



It’s unfortunate the PoE editor can’t handle chunk deletions well if it wasted that much time – the edits I provided were chunked accordingly. I doubt that’s a programmer oversight as the programmer who worked on the dialogue editor while I was at Obsidian I’ve always thought was exceptional and did a great job (I’ll leave him nameless to keep him out of this, but he knows who he is).



As mentioned in this thread ("MF", I believe, I don't know how to mark his user name because I am old), it seems odd for a pipeline to be unable to do that – but I’m not familiar with how exactly you did it or what process you used except that you specifically promised you would handle all the scripting so I could return to Tyranny. I took you at your word.



I do feel in light of PoE1, being able to do chunk deletions easily might have benefited the narrative presentation.



But before you think I’m blaming you for PoE1’s overall word count with that last sentence, I’m not. The over-abundance of text in general is a larger issue. Sure, I can edit my text, but for the rest, something else is going on. So let’s get to word count in general.



For example, according to localizers, PoE2’s word count alone ended up double the word count expected and double the amount Obsidian budgeted for. This has nothing to do with VO, this is word count. This also seemed to be a surprise to some.



So to be clear, it’s not all on you for too much wordage for PoE1 or even PoE2. You did a companion for PoE2. I didn’t work on PoE2. It is a larger problem across both games that was unaddressed. I suspect the lead/project lead for PoE2 was lectured for going over the word count budget, but I could be wrong.



If those figures are accurate – and they may not be - the word count bloat would have become worse when VO entered the picture, which was hinted by the team as not being their decision, but instead dictated by upper management close to the game’s end date. If it was upper management, ideally, they’d be ready to accept the budget costs involved with that decision vs. blaming someone else. I’ve already made my thoughts on VO budgeting known, but it’s expensive and it can be wasteful.



Still, to be fair, even with regards to the word bloat, they may have been able to do cuts to PoE2 word count at the end, I hope (brevity helps as well as being open to large edits). If so, I strongly suspect PoE2’s lead would take responsibility for going over budget vs. blaming someone who edited his work as soon as he was aware of his boss’s requests, especially if that person editing his own work was an owner and technically their superior.



Overall, I’d take all these examples as a lesson of overall pipeline dysfunction and poor communication up and down management through the sub-leads and back again – this is just a symptom of a much larger problem that’s either dictated, done as a de facto routine by senior employees or leads, or never discussed at all, like it was in this case.



The only thing I feel wrong with this is supporting it and saying it’s okay. That it’s good enough. That it’s acceptable. That it’s forgivable. People can be forgiven, but surrendering to the process can’t be. If the process is a problem, it’s something that should be fixed. If not, it becomes disheartening and damaging.



Subscribers to a broken system don’t elicit any sympathy from me – it’s their choice. If you’re supporting a flawed pipeline and flawed process – including one that may include several problems of your own making – and if you can do nothing to change it, then it’s best to remove yourself from that pipeline.