Unfortunately, being assigned to Alpha Protocol also hurt chances of having a shot at doing Project Director work on New Vegas, so that was an added disappointment (although to be fair, Feargus never asked me or brought it up with discussion with the owners, instead, Josh came to him and asked for it first and Ferg agreed - this isn't a negative, as I think Josh did a good job, but I would have loved to work on it, especially after all the Van Buren work. I should have camped out outside of Ferg's office.)
Ferg was actually surprised later on when he heard I would have been interested ("You wanted to work on it?"), but it didn't matter by that point since the decision had been made. I was still happy to be able to head up most of the DLCs, although Feargus had to check with Josh first to make sure he was okay with that (Josh was, although he wanted do one of them himself - Honest Hearts, so we made sure he was given Project Director on that). [Interesting, Valve-like management strategy exhibited by Feargus Urquhart on who should be the lead of NV: just pick the first guy who asks.]
(replying to question about Nordom's dialogue
This didn't mean anything particularly insightful or rebellious - this was even before we had Creative Directors at Black Isle, I believe, if we had them at all (I don't think I ever had the title of Creative Director in the last few years at Obsidian, I was more a lead designer for Van Buren without a team).
The continual talk of useless lists in Vault City in Fallout 2, however, was a nod at BIS practices during Fallout 2 and the many, many lists that were required. (Some of which were necessary, but not all.) Feargus wasn't happy with my attitude toward the many, many lists.
The context for Feargus's complaints were Feargus.
I don't know whether he didn't like Wizard's terms or whatever or they didn't like ours, but Ferg's many attempts to get a D&D game continually failed despite the fact he really wanted to do one. He may have been asking too much, doing the wrong approach, but I honestly couldn't tell you why it kept falling apart. It didn't seem to be his decision, however.
As you point out, it apparently was possible to get the license, but not for Obsidian.
He repeats a lot of the same mistakes and never seems to learn from them – and it’s embarrassing to have to remind him of them when he brings them up in front of others and asks your opinion.
One very specific thing: Both Chris Parker and Feargus have a wonderful habit of giving you room to come to a solution, and then when you when you present the solution, they tell you “it wasn’t the solution they hoped you would choose” (they already had one in mind), and then tell you to go with their decision. Here’s the thing – I don’t even care about that, but in a company where there’s never enough time and never enough money, you can’t waste so much as a day on dithering bullshit – just tell me what you want, if I have a problem with it, I’ll tell you, but chances are, I’ll agree and find a way to make it work and we won’t spend even more time arguing about how we got to this in the first place.
Another issue was not stopping to think before launching an action. As an example, Parker and other employees spent months trying to help someone get their immigration settled. It cost a lot of time, was distracting, and was a time sensitive matter. But as we were nearing the finish line of a months-long process, Chris Parker suddenly asked, “do we even want to keep her?” I couldn’t believe what I was hearing – you’re saying this now? Didn't you think this through?
There was one telling meeting where Chris Parker told the company they were hiring someone to replace him for his position "to do what he did", and someone raised their hand and said, “but Chris, we don’t know what it is you do.”
On a related note to this issue, this wasn't the only family members who Feargus attempted to bring on. Feargus did try and have both his young children added as employees at the studio during my last year there, but the other owners fought back and made it clear that (1) not only was it illegal b/c of the age requirements, (2) there was no way to defend against someone being able to prove his two children didn't work there (obviously, Feargus's children are far below age of employment so if it was somehow proven, there would be additional problems), but most importantly, on a higher level, it was seen an unethical and wrong thing to try and do.
True story from a DS3 designer (who left for Blizzard after Stormlands) - we did one not-so-amusing test of this during Dungeon Siege 3, where we had two people tell Feargus the exact same thing, and he dismissed one out of hand, but gladly listened and agreed with the other – even though they were both telling him the exact same thing. At that point, I did break a little inside, but I added it to my manager post-mortem of what not to do as a manager.
Based on one of the bugs with the car, the trunk of the car (not the car, just the trunk) was intended to be a high Luck encounter you could find in Fallout: Van Buren. The disembodied trunk was planned to still hold some of the Chosen One's stuff from F2 that was lost when the trunk refused to reappear attached to the car.
As I can make out from the video, it seems like Chris Parker who's telling the South Park folks to get back to work. And then telling Feargus, "fuck you," and the response from Feargus sounds like, "no, fuck you." I can’t say for 100% certainty, but it sounds like Chris Parker's voice (back at Black Isle, he was famous for the same sort of well-mannered production directives and in the same tone, so I wouldn't be surprised).
Prolonged exposure to Fallout Shelter makes you click the air in front of you, hoping for the sound of caps. It's like a Vault experiment all in itself.
F2 was a managerial mishandled mess, both in general production and design-wise (inc. aesthetics). As I've said, it's clearly a case where a Creative Lead would have been a good idea. Whenever I think of "old Fallout," I only consider F1, and if F2 contradicts it, I ignore F2. [...] Theme Vaults were not my idea, they were Tim Cain's, and only revealed when F2 started production. That said, I don't disagree with them, and I think it made Vaults more interesting, so feel free to blame me anyway.
I found the Bethesda's "limitation" on character count/node to be a positive, not a negative. It taught me and other writers how to be more economical in speech.
I think the only advantage to giving guns so late in the Den in Fallout 2 was it actually made you use the spear for once, something I doubt anyone did except enemies in Fallout 1 (and it helps reinforce your tribal status).
Wolves: I hate them. They hold a light to my poor playing skills, so it's not their fault. But I hate them.
...in Fallout: Van Buren, where you could build your own "intel" files on people by studying their mannerisms with PE or Speech skills and build your own NPC dossier you could access as a pop-up in dialogue ("Goddard is more accepting of any request, even against his interests, as long as the speaker phrases the request as a question that reaffirms Goddard is in charge.") We played around with this in the pen-and-paper game, and it worked well.
[...] the way the dialogue with Mira was written with the intention that she obviously had already considered hooking up with you, which means you were already in her headspace. I tried to imply this with her critique of your fitness. (If you've read Transmetropolitan, a similar situation happens when Spider Jerusalem's two allies also discuss hooking up with him.)
I was lectured [over writing too much for PS:T], but the lecture was from Brian Fargo, and it almost resulted in the loss of the companion text in PST. While I was told by my superiors they stood up for me during the conversations before and after the Fargo lecture (and even said it was okay if there was English-only game text for the English version that wasn't localized to cut costs), that defense and the English-only was later retracted by the same superiors, so I'm never quite sure what the real story was - to be fair, I don't think they even realized they told me two different stories. [he's probably talking about Feargus here and it's probably the 'stabbed in the back' shit he talked about him that made Chris stop wiping his ass for free]
