Chris Avellone Interview

Chris Avellone has been working on a lot of games lately, both at Obsidian and at inXile. How does the near-legendary RPG writer handle all these tasks at once? GamesIndustry.biz sat down with Chris to ask him just that. As usual, his responses are lengthy, detailed and honest, so even though Chris doesn’t talk much about the games themselves, there’s some interesting insight into how development on them is going and what his responsibilities are.

Q: Are you going to be involved as a writer on Planescape now you’ve cleared your own stretch goal?

Chris Avellone: Yes, the duties they have me doing are that I’m going to do overall design documentation – kind of like I did with Obsidian. I’m going to look over the storyline I’ll look over the systems and I’ll offer feedback and thoughts on that. Me and Colin have worked together for a number of years so that should be pretty copacetic, and me and Kevin too. Kevin Saunders is the project lead, Colin is the lead designer. Colin was the second designer who came onto Torment back at Interplay, and he was with the project all the way through up until that point.

So I’m going to review the design documentation, offer feedback on that, and also they have me writing the eighth companion for the game; that’s currently the sum total of my duties.

Q: Is it difficult to make sure there’s no bleed between projects when you’re working across so many?

Chris Avellone: Yeah, I think that’s a good question to ask. I think it’s because the settings in Wasteland and Eternity and Numenera are all so different…I think that kind of makes it safe. Because ideas that fit really well into the new Torment game, like it’s crazy how similar the locations can be, they wouldn’t fit quite as well into Eternity. Eternity has more elements that, while not being like D&D, Forgotten Realms definitely has hallmark D&D bits about it. Numenera is much more free flowing, much more story focused, and Eternity is stuff like dungeon exploration, party team, how do you approach a problem, how do you approach an encounter. And then the games just feel a lot different in terms of aesthetics. I think prevents a lot of design bleed between the two.

One of the designers was talking about one of the areas for Torment and it’s basically this big living dungeon that communities live in, and also monsters, and depending on what you feed the dungeon it opens up new portals to other dimensions and it moves around. If anyone attempts to ever quantify the dungeon, and say ‘I’m going to try and measure how big it is’ or what intelligence level it is they’re mysteriously destroyed. And I’m like: this is the craziest and most awesome fucking dungeon ever, but that’s not something we would do for Eternity. Eternity would be much more like: here’s the architecture for a dungeon that was exploring soul mechanics. So I think the two aesthetics between them sort of help.

It’s also good from the writer’s block standpoint where I can go: this idea will work really well in Torment so I can really roll with that, but when I get writer’s block there then I can switch over to Eternity and do something else. It actually works out pretty well.