Blood, Sweat, and Pixels Read online

  “Even more districts of the one big city probably would’ve been easier,” said Josh Sawyer. “And pacingwise, you go through all of Defiance Bay, then you do a bunch of wilderness areas and here’s another city. It’s like, ‘Dude, this is act three, please get me the fuck out of here.’” Still, they’d made the commitment. The second city had to be there, and so they built Twin Elms, knowing that if they didn’t deliver on every feature they’d promised in the Kickstarter, fans would feel betrayed.

  In May 2014, Obsidian had to switch its focus again. It had struck a deal with the game publisher Paradox to help out with PR and marketing, and as part of that deal, the team had to go to E3, an annual video game trade show where developers converge to show off their hot new projects. Having a presence at gaming’s annual mecca would be huge for Pillars of Eternity, but it also meant the team would have to spend weeks working on a demo that was functional and polished enough to pass for the final game.

  The team’s leaders decided to limit their E3 demo to closed-door sessions, with Obsidian’s developers controlling the mouse, rather than put it on the show floor for everyone to play. This way, there’d be no risk of players running into bugs or crashes if they clicked on the wrong thing. Adam Brennecke also decided that the demo would comprise a chunk of the game that they needed to work on anyway. “My policy for E3 and for vertical slice is, it has to be something that’s going to ship in the game, so the work is not wasted,” said Brennecke. “I’ve been on a lot of projects where you do an E3 demo that has nothing to do with the game. [We think], ‘Why are we doing this? It’s such a waste of time.’”

  Brennecke determined that they’d show off the first half hour of the game, in which the main character of Pillars of Eternity is traveling through a forest with a caravan of strangers. Enemies ambush the caravan, and the protagonist is sent fleeing through a nearby maze of caves, where he or she defeats monsters, darts through traps, and stumbles upon a group of cultists performing a disturbing ritual. The section had some story, some combat, and a cliffhanger ending—in other words, it was the perfect demo. “I [said], ‘Let’s just polish the shit out of it,’” Brennecke said. “None of this time is going to be wasted at all. It’s the beginning of the game that needs the most polish, so let’s polish the crap out of it.”*

  When E3 rolled around, Brennecke and crew spent three straight days in a small, hot booth, repeating a series of scripted talking points every half hour to groups of journalists. The monotony paid off with great press coverage. Reporters—especially those who had played and loved the likes of Baldur’s Gate—were immediately sold on Pillars of Eternity’s potential. Wrote one previewer, on the website PCWorld, “I have no doubt this game will be great, provided Obsidian can avoid its typical pitfalls—bugs, terminated questlines, et cetera.”

  After E3 the Pillars team had to build yet another big public version of the game: the backer beta. Brennecke and Sawyer wanted to make Pillars of Eternity playable to the public at Gamescom, a German trade show where tens of thousands of European gamers gathered every year. They thought it might be unfair to let Gamescom attendees play the game before the people who had funded it, so the Pillars team decided they’d give the demo to their Kickstarter backers at the same time. That meant they had a hard deadline: August 18, 2014.

  The two months after E3 were a haze of long hours—crunch time—as the team spent evening after evening at the office, trying to finish up everything they needed for the backer beta. As August 18 drew closer, Adam Brennecke realized that the game wasn’t in great shape, and sure enough, when Obsidian released the Pillars beta to Kickstarter backers, there was immediate criticism. “We got a lot of negative first impressions because it was so buggy, unfortunately,” Brennecke said. “I think [the beta] needed another month to bake before we shipped it.” Item descriptions were missing. Combat balance felt off. Character models would disappear when a player moved his party into a dungeon. Players were happy with the general themes and core mechanics, but the beta was so unstable, it left a sour first taste.

  By September 2014, it had dawned on most of the Pillars of Eternity team that shipping that year would be difficult. It wasn’t just the backer beta; the whole game needed more work. Obsidian needed to polish, to optimize, to spend more time zapping bugs and making sure that every area of the game felt both interesting and fun to play. “Everyone’s looking at each other: ‘No. We’re not even near this. We’re just not there yet,’” said Justin Bell, the audio director. “You have to be able to play from the beginning of the game all the way to the end and feel like it’s a total experience, and that just was not even close to being the case.”

  Adam Brennecke and Josh Sawyer asked Feargus Urquhart for a meeting. Over lunch at the Cheesecake Factory, one of Urquhart’s favorite haunts, Brennecke and Sawyer explained that trying to release the game in November would be a disaster. The team needed more time. Yes, they were out of Kickstarter money and would now have to dip into Obsidian’s own funds, but for a game like Pillars of Eternity—Obsidian’s most important game to date—the extra investment felt necessary. Urquhart argued against it, but Brennecke and Sawyer were persistent. In their minds, the choice was already made.

  “Feargus sat Josh and me down,” Brennecke said. “He said, ‘If this game does not come out in March, you guys are both gone after this project.’”

  Recalling the pressure, Brennecke could only laugh. “OK, we’ll get it done.”

  One common theme in video game development is that everything tends to come together at the last minute. There’s just something about those final hours. In the last months and weeks of a game’s development, chaos reigns supreme as team members scramble to polish, playtest, and fit in all the last-minute features they can think to add. Then, suddenly, something clicks. It might be the visual effects, or the audio cues, or the optimization that gets a game’s frame rate as stable as possible. Usually, it’s all of the above: a single holy moment when a game’s disparate parts coalesce into something that finally feels complete.

  During that final stretch, the entire Pillars of Eternity team crunched nonstop to get the game out the door. Zapping bugs was particularly difficult thanks to the sheer size of the game. Obsidian’s quality assurance testers had to play through all of Pillars, which could take upward of seventy or eighty hours, as they tried to break the game as much as possible. They knew it would be impossible to find and fix every bug. The programmers would have to do the best they could for now, then work overtime once the game had shipped and players started sending in their own reports.* Obsidian didn’t need to worry about consoles—Pillars of Eternity was solely a computer game—but optimizing the game to run on as many different types of computers as possible became a big challenge. “We were having a lot of memory issues,” said Brennecke. “The game would run out of memory a lot, so we had to figure out how to get the game stable and running on most machines.” Delaying the game to March 2015 would ultimately gobble up an extra $1.5 million of the studio’s money, according to Urquhart, but it was the right move. The extra time—combined with extended crunch for everyone on the Pillars team—led to a far more polished video game.

  On March 26, 2015, Obsidian released Pillars of Eternity. Critics loved it. “It’s the most captivating, rewarding RPG I’ve played on a PC in years,” wrote one reviewer.* Outside of their Kickstarter backers, Obsidian sold over 700,000 copies of Pillars in the game’s first year, exceeding most of their expectations and ensuring that a sequel would be possible right away. “The thing that was cool about this project is that it was a passion project for everyone,” said Justin Bell. “And it was because of that history with Stormlands. It emerged out of the ashes of this really crappy event in Obsidian’s history. And everyone was super, über-passionate about making something as special as they possibly could, through the sheer force of their own will.”

  Development on Pillars of Eternity didn’t end once the game shipped, though. In the following months, the
team would keep patching bugs and later release a two-part expansion, The White March. Sawyer kept working on balance patches for a year after launch, tweaking attributes and class abilities in response to fans’ feedback. And the team kept interacting with backers on Kickstarter, keeping them up to date on patches and other projects Obsidian was working on. “Because eighty thousand people or so said they wanted this, and they gave us a new life, we were extremely respectful of that. It was really meaningful for them to give us this much money,” said Rob Nesler. “That was sort of a purity in this whole thing that I really hope we can do again.”

  For just under $6 million, Obsidian had made one of 2015’s best RPGs, a game that would go on to win several awards and help secure Obsidian’s future as an independent studio. The company had staved off catastrophe. And it had built an intellectual property that was finally its own, with rights and royalties going to Obsidian itself rather than some big publisher. (Paradox, the publisher that helped with marketing, distribution, and localization, did not own any of the rights to Pillars of Eternity.) As the team passed around drinks during a lavish launch party at a Costa Mesa nightclub, Urquhart spoke to the crowd, telling them how proud and relieved he felt. Nearly three years ago to the day, he’d had to lay off dozens of employees, but now they could celebrate. Their gambles had paid off. They’d won. After years of uncertainty and dependence on other companies, Obsidian could finally stand on its own.

  In the summer of 2016, when I visited Obsidian’s offices for this book, its staff were preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the sequel to Pillars of Eternity. At their offices, I watched an early version of the trailer, which showcased a giant god destroying the stronghold of Caed Nua, an area that fans of the first game knew well. I listened to Obsidian’s developers argue and try to find common ground over the direction of the sequel and how they would approach a second campaign. Rather than Kickstarter, they’d decided to put this one on Fig, a crowdfunding site that Feargus Urquhart had helped create.

  Obsidian wanted to return to crowdfunding not just to supplement the profits they’d made off the first Pillars, but also to maintain the spirit of an active community. As annoying as backers could be sometimes, Pillars of Eternity’s developers had enjoyed interacting with fans and getting instant feedback to their work. For Pillars of Eternity II, they wanted to take the same approach, even if they didn’t anticipate getting the same kind of wild crowdfunding success. “While we can ask for money again,” Urquhart told me, “we don’t expect people to come out in the same levels.”

  Six months later, on January 26, 2017, Obsidian launched their Fig for Pillars of Eternity II with a goal of $1.1 million. They were funded in twenty-two hours and fifty-seven minutes. At the end of the campaign they’d raised $4,407,598, nearly half a million more than the first Pillars. This time, they didn’t promise a second city.

  Obsidian hadn’t yet solved all its money issues. Not long after launching the Fig, the studio announced that its partnership with Mail.Ru had ended on the tank game Armored Warfare and it had to lay off some staff on that team. But for Feargus Urquhart and his team of developers, figuring out how to finance their very own video game was, somehow, no longer a problem.

  2

  Uncharted 4

  Video games, like any works of art, are reflections of their creators. The Legend of Zelda spawned from Shigeru Miyamoto’s memories of childhood spelunking. Doom came out of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign in which John Romero and John Carmack allowed their fictional world to become overrun by demons. And Uncharted 4, the final entry in the Indiana Jones–style action-adventure series starring the rogueish Nathan Drake, is the story of a man who spends way too much time at work.

  Naughty Dog, the development studio behind Uncharted, shares more than a pair of initials with its stubbled protagonist. In game industry circles, Naughty Dog has two distinct reputations. One is that its staff are the best of the best, not just at telling top-notch stories, but also at making games so eye-poppingly gorgeous, competitors publicly wonder just what kind of dark magic the studio employs. The other is that they embrace crunch. To develop games like Uncharted and The Last of Us, Naughty Dog’s employees worked endless hours, staying at the office as late as 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. during extended, hellish periods of overtime that popped up before each major development milestone. All game studios crunch, but few are as known for going all-out as Naughty Dog.

  At the start of Uncharted 4, Nathan Drake has given up his life of high-octane treasure-hunting and settled into a mundane routine, spending his evenings eating noodles and playing video games with his wife, Elena. It’s quickly made clear, through a memorable scene in which you, as Drake, shoot a toy pistol at targets in the attic, that he misses the adrenaline rush of his former career. When Drake’s brother resurfaces after a many-years-long absence, it’s only a matter of time before Drake is sucked into a new treasure hunt. Then he starts lying. And gambling with his life. As Drake grapples with the reality that he’s addicted to the thrill of danger, he risks alienating Elena for good. Uncharted 4 tells the story of a secret pirate society hidden out of history’s view. But it also explores something more universal: How do you follow your dreams without destroying your relationships?

  “Your life’s passion sometimes isn’t in line with your life’s love,” Neil Druckmann, the codirector of Uncharted 4, said. “And sometimes those things are in conflict. In games, especially, a lot of people enter the game industry because of how much they love this medium, and, for us, how much we feel like we could push it and dedicate our lives to it to a large degree. But at times, if you’re not careful, it can become destructive to your personal life. So there was a lot of really personal experience to draw from.”

  You might think, after the accumulated lessons and experience of three other Uncharted games, that for Naughty Dog, Uncharted 4 would have been a walk in the park. But between a director change, a major reboot, a compressed schedule, and months of crunch, making Uncharted 4 felt more like a hike up Mount Kilimanjaro. Put another way: One of the series’ running jokes is that whenever Nathan Drake jumps onto a roof or cliff, it’s probably going to collapse. Toward the end of Uncharted 4’s development, everyone at Naughty Dog could relate.

  The first Uncharted was an unusual move for Naughty Dog. Founded in 1984 by two childhood friends, Jason Rubin and Andy Gavin, the studio spent nearly two decades making platformers like Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter, both of which turned into iconic franchises on Sony’s PlayStation.* In 2001, Sony bought Naughty Dog, and a few years later it charged the studio with making a game for the new PlayStation 3. Under the veteran director Amy Hennig, Naughty Dog started a project completely different from anything it had done before: a pulp adventure game, inspired by the globe-trotting escapades of Indiana Jones. Players, controlling Nathan Drake, would hunt treasure and solve puzzles across the world.

  It was an ambitious move. For game developers, making a new intellectual property is always more difficult than developing a sequel, because there’s no foundation to build on. And working on a brand-new platform—especially one like the PS3, with its unfamiliar “Cell” architecture—would make things even more complicated.* The studio had hired several talented new staff members who had Hollywood background but little experience developing games, which led to further hiccups as the rest of Naughty Dog tried to walk the newcomers through the nuances of making graphics run in real time.

  During particularly rough days on Uncharted, Bruce Straley, the art director, would walk over to the design department and trade complaints with his colleagues there. Straley, who had been making games since the 1990s, was frustrated with Uncharted’s development and needed an outlet. Soon he was taking regular lunches with some of the designers, including an Israeli-born twentysomething named Neil Druckmann, who had started at Naughty Dog as a programming intern just a couple of years earlier. Druckmann, a rising star at the studio with dark hair and olive skin, had a stubborn streak and a head for
storytelling. Although he was credited only as a designer on Uncharted, Druckmann wound up helping Hennig write the game’s script as well.

  Straley and Druckmann quickly became friends. They exchanged design ideas, commiserated about office politics, and analyzed the games they’d been playing, trying to figure out what made each level click. “We started playing games at home online, so we were still talking to each other and kicking around stuff even in multiplayer games,” Straley said. “That’s where the work relationship started forming.”

  Uncharted came out in 2007. Shortly afterward, Naughty Dog bumped Straley up to game director (alongside Amy Hennig, who was creative director), giving him more control over the design of Uncharted 2, which shipped in 2009. Then, as the bulk of Naughty Dog moved to Uncharted 3, Straley and Druckmann broke off from the Uncharted team to try something new. In November 2011, when Uncharted 3 hit store shelves, work was under way on Straley and Druckmann’s first project as codirectors, a postapocalyptic adventure called The Last of Us.

  It was a wild departure from the Uncharted series. Where Uncharted took after Tintin, The Last of Us would feel more like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Where the Uncharted games were breezy and funny, The Last of Us would open with a soldier shooting and killing the main character’s twelve-year-old daughter. But the goal wasn’t just to make people cry. Straley and Druckmann watched movies like No Country for Old Men and wondered why so many video games had the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Why, they thought, couldn’t their characters leave some thoughts unsaid? In The Last of Us, the disease-infected zombies and ruined roads of America would exist only to serve the story of their two main characters. Every scene and encounter would deepen the relationship between Joel, a grizzled mercenary, and Ellie, a teenage girl who becomes his proxy daughter as they travel. Where other games might have gone for the jugular—“Wow, Ellie, you sure do fill the emotional void left by my dead daughter!”—The Last of Us trusted players to fill in the blanks themselves.