GLASS CANNON

How Obsidian built its reputation for masterful, yet buggy, RPGs

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The irradiated toilet bowl offers one of the bleakest dilemmas in Fallout: New Vegas. In hardcore mode, you have to stay hydrated in the desert or face dwindling stats and, ultimately, death. In a pinch, a gulp of 200-year-old piss water might just save your life. Temporarily, at least: In an interestingly ironic twist, the effects of radiation poisoning in Fallout are much the same as dehydration.

It’s a literal poisoned chalice, the ultimate bad deal. Yet most players took it, glugging down the brown stuff at one point or another in order to survive.

It’s the same dilemma faced by the large independent developer. Where small indies can keep costs low, and publisher-owned studios enjoy corporate security, outfits like Obsidian exist for many years in a mode of terrifying fragility. With hundreds of employees on payroll who need a cheque at the end of every month, these developers rarely have the option of turning publishers down. They need to sign the next project, balancing creative integrity with practical compromises. For a decade and a half, it was Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart’s job to circle that toilet bowl without ever resorting to slurping the cursed liquid within.

“There is a seedy underbelly to game publishing and development, in which there are a lot of developers that have to make games they wouldn’t choose at all to do, to keep the doors open,” Urquhart told IGN Unfiltered a few years ago. “It’s a really hard decision to make, particularly when the deal you’re getting is maybe not even one that covers your cost. We’ve been offered a lot of that stuff, and we’ve made the conscious decision to turn it down.”