Fallout: New Vegas designer departs Obsidian
Fallout: New Vegas and Planescape: Torment designer Chris Avellone has bid farewell to Obsidian Entertainment.
Avellone co-founded Obsidian, making his departure something of a surprise. He has not yet revealed his plans for the future.
Avellone's pre-Obsidian credits include games produced by Interplay, Reflexive and Snowblind. So: where do you think he's off to now? Let's speculate.
A designer with a marked flair for narrative RPGs, Avellone worked on Fallout 2, the cancelled Interplay Fallout 3 (Van Buren) and Fallout: New Vegas. It'd be cool to see him turn up at Bethesda and be reunited with the property, as well as bringing his RPG chops to The Elder Scrolls, although the timing suggests that if that were the case he'd be doing early pre-production on Bethesda's next project rather than working on Fallout 4 - or perhaps leading a new team.
In recent years Avellone has had the chance to go back to his old school RPG roots. As well as working on Pillars of Eternity at Obisidian, he helped out with Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera, a spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment, at inXile Entertainment. Could inXile be his destination now? The indie seems to have worked out a pretty good strategy of successive, overlapping crowdfunded old school RPGs, whereas Obsidian has diversified into MMOs with Armored Warfare.
Or maybe he's joined forces with BioWare at last? Or maybe he's decided to focus on non-games writing and contribute to more comics? Or maybe - well, to be honest, there are dozens of places we'd love to see Avellone end up, and we'd also be interested in seeing him work on more focused, personal projects at a smaller indie. We await developments with interest.