Obsidian: A studio where fun, fantasy and dedication to role-playing games reign supreme

"None of these people know they're in a comedy. They all think they're in a serious, dramatic tragedy," says Boyarsky.

"Exploring those factions has been some of the most fun. Of the three, the Order of the Ascendant is probably my favorite to write for," Fielder says. "I have friends and family who are academics and scientists, and I have a real affection for how they sometimes get so focused on research, they become a bit out of touch."

Fielder took inspiration from the first The Outer Worlds while working on Auntie's Choice, which is a "cutthroat meritocracy." He admits that he drew from his own experience as "a pretty ineffective middle manager" and the strife between management levels.

The key, Fielder says, is to write characters who have "zero awareness" or who "engage in backflips of logic to justify their point of view."

"I think both of these character types are pretty evergreen," Fielder says. "People like that have always existed."

"The narrative designers on our game not only write dialogue, we design branching conversations that the player can navigate using strategy, unique opportunities based on the background they've chosen for their character, and/or random whimsy," Fielder says. "We call it 'conversation gameplay.' They, hopefully, call it fun."

He is also, like a lot of the people who work at Obsidian, a multi-tasker. He's been a producer, a designer and a director in his career. For The Outer Worlds 2, he focused on character dialogue and narrative design.

"Obsidian is really scrappy," Adler says. "The devs that work here have a lot of hats, and that is born out of our independent developer mentality that we had for so many years before being purchased by Microsoft. That's still something that's very core to who we are."

"One of the biggest benefits to the studios is they have access to go call up any of the other studios and say, hey, we're struggling with this one thing. Seems like you guys figured it out in your game. Can you help us?" McGuane says.

McGuane, who's been at Microsoft and with Xbox since 2001, was already familiar with Obsidian before they joined the collective and has continued to be impressed by their ambition and the deepening of their craft.

And their sense of humor? She says that they've got down.

"Humor is really hard and they're able to infuse it in their games in a way that is unexpected," she says. "They're passionate, they're ambitious, but they're also fun and funny people you want to spend time around."

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