Obsidian Entertainment: The RPG-Sequel Masters and Narrative Torchbearers

When Interplay shuttered Black Isle Studios in 2003, the people who had built Fallout and Planescape: Torment did not scatter. They regrouped as Obsidian Entertainment and spent the next two decades doing something the industry rarely trusts anyone to do: taking a beloved role-playing game and writing a sequel that outclassed it. Knights of the Old Republic II, Fallout: New Vegas, Neverwinter Nights 2. And when they finally built worlds of their own, from Pillars of Eternity to the strange, beautiful Pentiment, they proved the writing was never a bonus. It was the whole game.

This is the Obsidian story: the sequels they were trusted with, the worlds they invented, and the modern studio Microsoft bought to keep the role-playing game honest.

The worlds they built themselves

For years Obsidian was the studio you hired to finish someone else's franchise, and it wore on them. So in 2012 they took Pillars of Eternity to Kickstarter, raised nearly four million dollars from players hungry for the old isometric, party-based role-playing game, and proved they could carry a whole world alone. Josh Sawyer, who had directed New Vegas, built a dense and literate fantasy with real moral weight. Tyranny followed with a wicked premise: you play an agent of the empire in a world where evil has already won. And Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire pushed the same engine out across a gorgeous pirate archipelago. Chris Avellone's fingerprints are on much of the studio's early writing before he moved on. These were not work for hire. This was Obsidian, at last, saying it out loud: these are ours.