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Obsidian has spent the past week being talked about like it is already a corpse, and one of its game directors has finally had enough.
Brandon Adler, game director on The Outer Worlds 2, took to LinkedIn to go after what he called the "cold take artists coming out of the woodwork" to explain what Obsidian is and what it isn't. His words, not ours. Most of them, he reckons, are not just wrong. They are "spreading an enormous amount of misinformation" about a studio none of them has ever set foot in.
Harsh? Maybe. Let's look at what set him off.
A brutal week in Irvine
Microsoft's latest round of cuts hit Obsidian hard. Around 50 people are gone, which Bloomberg reckons is roughly a quarter of the studio. That is not a trim around the edges. That is a big slice of the team behind Pillars of Eternity, Grounded and Avowed walking out in one go.
Then came the reports, most of them tracing back to Bloomberg: Xbox has supposedly killed off an Avowed sequel, and Obsidian is now said to be lining up a new Fallout game with Josh Sawyer in charge. Treat all of that as reporting, not gospel. Microsoft has not confirmed a word of it. But if you were wondering why the internet lost its mind this week, there it is. The studio that made New Vegas maybe heading back to the wasteland, and paying for the trip with the RPG series it only just built.
Adler's argument
His case is simple enough. The people are still the people. "The through line from KotOR2 to our current games is pretty clear," he wrote, pointing at the same crew that put together KotOR2, New Vegas, Neverwinter Nights 2 and South Park: The Stick of Truth. Studios drift, sure. But the ones actually making the calls at Obsidian have mostly been sitting in those chairs for twenty years.
And he has a point. The "Obsidian isn't really Obsidian anymore" take gets dusted off every single time one of their games underperforms, usually by people who could not name one designer in the credits.
The flip side is just as real, though. You can keep every leader you love and still lose a quarter of the hands doing the actual work. No LinkedIn post fixes that part.
What happens next
Josh Sawyer running a Fallout game is a hell of a headline, and it is still unconfirmed. The Avowed sequel, if the reports hold up, is gone. Until Xbox actually says something on the record, nobody outside that building knows what Obsidian ships next. Everything else is noise, which is sort of Adler's whole point.
So do you buy the DNA argument, or has too much changed over there? Drop it in the comments.
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