After 22 years, Mages are still being owned by Paradox

October 29, 2015 9:40 PM

Paradox Interactive, makers of complicated strategy games like Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings 2, have purchased White Wolf Publishing and all its IP from EVE Online makers Crowd Control Publishing, announcing plans to move forward with the IP Commentary and analysis are available from Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Venture Beat, and PC Gamer, and Obsidian have tweeted in response to the calls for them to be hired to make Bloodlines 2.
posted by Pope Guilty (40 comments total)

Thread title of the year right here.
posted by Palindromedary at 9:59 PM on October 29, 2015 [36 favorites]

From the RockPaperShotgun link:

Existing White Wolf licensing agreements will be re-evaluated, and only those which are working will be retained.

Huh. Wonder what this means for the Onyx Path RPG projects currently in development? They are (were?) working on a second edition of Scion....
posted by magstheaxe at 10:07 PM on October 29, 2015

Yes, it turned out very well for White Wolf the last time they were bought by a European company. AMA about that.

(Kidding, I have complete respect for Paradox and trust that they will give WoD the digital life it deserves.)
posted by susoka at 10:10 PM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

If this means someone is going to make a Vampire mod for CKII, I have absolutely no problem with this. Assassination technique- inspire a mob to storm the castle in the day, etc.
posted by Hactar at 10:45 PM on October 29, 2015 [2 favorites]

That is a marvelous post title, I agree.
posted by curious nu at 11:04 PM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Also: I want more Wraith. They already released a hack-and-slash splatbook for it (Doomslayers) so let's get into existential ghost dungeon crawling, please!
posted by curious nu at 11:05 PM on October 29, 2015 [1 favorite]

Woo hoo! I'd thought Vampire: The Masquerade was doomed to languish under CCP (video game-wise) after their failed MMO project. Really, really, really hoping this means we'll get Bloodlines 2.
posted by Spinda at 11:27 PM on October 29, 2015

I want a Bloodlines sequel too, but only if the title includes even more colons.
posted by zompist at 12:08 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

I have the steam version of the enhanced Bloodlines but I never actually played it. Maybe I should rectify that.
posted by Justinian at 2:14 AM on October 30, 2015

Mage was my favorite RPG of all time. Vampire was too goth, Werewolf had a overly simple concept of evil, and Wraith seemed like a continuous therapy session. But Mage had morally ambiguous opposing forces and powers that were infinitely flexible. If you had a group of creative wannabe DMs as players it worked well. It's probably the only RPG that would still tempt me to play despite having no free time.

Never tried Changeling, unsure of the appeal.
posted by benzenedream at 3:05 AM on October 30, 2015 [6 favorites]

Huh. Wonder what this means for the Onyx Path RPG projects currently in development? They are (were?) working on a second edition of Scion....

I think OP's probably fine and have been assuming that they're referring to By Night Studios having published one book in the three years they've had the Mind's Eye Theater license.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:31 AM on October 30, 2015

Smartphone LARP support, please.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 3:42 AM on October 30, 2015 [2 favorites]

At the risk of ruining the geniusness of the post title by explaining it.. can someone please let me in on the joke?
posted by Philby at 3:49 AM on October 30, 2015

Paradox is the force of reality telling mages in Mage: The Whatever that their magic can go fuck itself. Try to do something too showy and Paradox fucks you up.
posted by Elementary Penguin at 3:52 AM on October 30, 2015 [5 favorites]

I hope Paradox is doing better about not releasing unfinished games and letting the users report all kinds of bugs and patching them and breaking the game even further.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 3:57 AM on October 30, 2015

Reality is a rubber band around your wrist; magic is the ability to stretch that rubber band. Sometimes you stretch it too far, or you return it to its normal shape too quickly, and it stings the shit out of your wrist. That's Paradox.

Sometimes this is just straight-up physical injury appearing on the mage's body, or some minor magical effect they can't control, and sometimes people who've known you all your life start forgetting you for a sequence of days which is equal to the Fibonacci number or reality just decides you're an asshole and kicks you out.
posted by Pope Guilty at 3:59 AM on October 30, 2015 [10 favorites]

Ah! Well then, that is a Genius Level Post Title then! Thanks for the explanation. I was a Masquerade-ist rather than a Ascension-st.. the Ravnos had their Road of Paradox, which is indeed self-negating and suitably confusing.. but the Mage paradox sounds like a whole nother ballgame of Weirding!

Thanks guys- even thoroughly explained it retains its geniusness!
posted by Philby at 4:49 AM on October 30, 2015

MetaFilter: reality is a rubber band around your wrist
posted by Foosnark at 6:09 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Apparently the backers for Exalted 3rd ed got their book recently from Onyx Path? I think Exalted was definitely the craziest out of all of WW's lines, which was definitely something.
posted by curuinor at 6:47 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

I freelance for Onyx Path. The word so far is that everything is going forward as usual. Some things to note:

1) Scion and Trinity are actually owned outright by Onyx Path, so this doesn't affect those games.

2) Asking about Wraith? There's a 20th anniversary edition of the game being written now under the direction of past developer Rich Dansky. There was a Kickstarter to fund a standard print run, but a POD version will be available from DriveThruRPG for everyone. Its higher end POD offerings are pretty good.

3) You can get a new edition of Mage: The Ascension on POD from DrivethruRPG right now.

4) Onyx Path doesn't have the license for live action games. Those belong to By Night Studios.
posted by mobunited at 7:07 AM on October 30, 2015 [6 favorites]

I'm glad about the Trinity part. I want Adventure! 2nd edition.
posted by cuscutis at 7:42 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Oh, thank god.

I kept expecting CCP to just disappear the entire WoD because they didn't know what to do with it.
posted by pan at 10:03 AM on October 30, 2015

Obsidian have tweeted in response to the calls for them to be hired to make Bloodlines 2.

"Why do you want us to make the sequel? Have you not seen how badly we fucked up the first one? In fact, the vast majority of our games are badly broken and largely unfinished."
posted by shmegegge at 10:37 AM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Those are patches of love, man.
posted by Artw at 10:48 AM on October 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

Troika made Bloodlines, and the personnel from that game are kind of scattered to the winds. The only Troika person still at Obsidian that I'm aware of is Chris Avellone.

...of course, I'd like to see Brian Mitsoda brought back as head writer- no idea what he's doing now that Doublebear got Dead State out the door.


4) Onyx Path doesn't have the license for live action games. Those belong to By Night Studios.

I hear through the grapevine (no, not the Grapevine) that BNS is really close to releasing the new Werewolf: the Apocalypse book that's on their new LARP system. *fingers crossed*
posted by Pope Guilty at 11:23 AM on October 30, 2015

I always thought a Nuwisha/Corax video game would be fun. Weretricksters!
posted by Feyala at 12:51 PM on October 30, 2015

Avellone left Obsidian in June.
posted by Apocryphon at 1:58 PM on October 30, 2015

@shmegege: oh, that's a whole different kettle of fish. What they Vampire: Bloodlines was a wonderfull game. And after the fanpatches, you could see it (and I was lucky enough that the genericity of my system [I swear, that's exactly what they developed it on] meant I saw not much of the bugs it could have).

Thing is, they had to work on a moving target: they got an early Source engine, which was majorly in development (HL2 wasn't even out) and were forced to get the game working and released soon after HL2 was released, probably to capitalise on the fact that they were the first Source based game after HalfLife 2 came out.

Any sane and money-liquid publisher would have given them another half year to fix the bugs and do proper hardware compatibility testing. The game would have been received as the master piece it is (that haunted mansion level!).

Instead, it had many bugs for many people because they weren't allowed the time to fix it for an engine which was being developed as they were making the game.

Again, I was one of the lucky ones and the game generally worked very well for me. But so much content was restored and fixed by the community, afterwards. It's like Obsidian and KotOR 2: they too had a cool game which, had they not been forced to release WAY too early, the fanpatch has shown to be an AWESOME game with a story complex, compelling, unique and revealing. But only when you saw the missing bits the devs didn't have time to complete.

Read the post-mortems. They're around. Gamasutra.com has some, iirc.
posted by MacD at 2:10 PM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

"In fact, the vast majority of our games are badly broken and largely unfinished."

And yet they are beloved cult classics. If bugginess is the price to pay for great game design and unforgettable writing, then by all means let us pay the admission.

But it isn't. Obsidian has a tragic history of being screwed over by publishers. Just look at what happened with Fallout: New Vegas - Bethesda as publisher did not adequately QA the game, leading to a lower score on Metacritic, Bethesda withholding a bonus, a cancelled Microsoft project, and 30 people being laid off from Obsidian. Not to mention that the game used Bethesda's own Gambryo engine, and was supposedly rushed by Bethesda (either to compete with Fable 3, or so it would not compete with Bethesda's own Skyrim.) This is the most egregious example, but the development of Alpha Protocol was similarly troubled by publisher pressure from SEGA.

Given the success of Pillars of Eternity, perhaps the Swedes are Obsidian's chance to finally work with a publisher that will treat them with respect and resources.
posted by Apocryphon at 2:41 PM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

> "Never tried Changeling, unsure of the appeal."

Changeling was amazing. Characters with wild, bizarre abilities who die if things get boring, and flaws like the literal inability to say anything true. It worked best if you didn't try to work it into a traditional role-playing game format and just took the truly odd rules at face value. For example, there was an ability that let a player make a prophecy. It didn't work by the GM giving the player information. The player said WHATEVER THEY FELT LIKE and then the GM HAD TO MAKE IT COME TRUE SOMEHOW. Awesome.

Satyrs had an ability to remove people's inhibitions. I was explaining to another GM once how a player had very cleverly used this to turn a combat into a party, and he sort of frowned and said, "Oh, we didn't allow that power to be used during combat. We thought that didn't make sense."

All I could think was, I do not think you understand Changeling.
posted by kyrademon at 2:57 PM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

You must have been lucky, kyrademon, as every Changeling game I experienced had at least one "tee hee I so sweet" pooka Steve Urkeling it up. This was across multiple games and player groups. My poor Nockers.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 3:31 PM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Huh. Our first pooka was played as a genderqueer BDSM aficionado. I mean, a prankster, yes, as pookas are, but really, really not "tee hee I so sweet" -- put a lot of energy into making anti-gay politicians look like idiots. Our second, a visiting friend who joined the game for a couple of months, was even less of a "tee hee sweet" type, being an FBI agent character who had the great idea to fulfill the "must never tell the truth" flaw by saying everything as WITHERING DEADPAN SARCASM. ("That is a brilliant idea." "This will definitely not get us all killed." "I am so happy that all of you are helping me out with this.")
posted by kyrademon at 3:51 PM on October 30, 2015 [3 favorites]

Thing is, they had to work on a moving target: they got an early Source engine, which was majorly in development (HL2 wasn't even out) and were forced to get the game working and released soon after HL2 was released, probably to capitalise on the fact that they were the first Source based game after HalfLife 2 came out.

and

Obsidian has a tragic history of being screwed over by publishers.

Look, Vampire: Bloodlines was a bold vision, and the parts of it that worked and were finished were really great. I'll never deny that Obsidian's games have good aspects, nor that they had great vision.

But these guys, both as obsidian and as Troika, repeatedly and predictably released unfinished broken games that had great scripts and cool ideas.

There comes a point where it's not everyone else any more. There comes a point where it's pretty clear that someone there can write well, and some other really crucial part of the team is or was so bad at this that they're preventing good games from being competently made. There's just no way that the problem is every publisher they've ever worked with.
posted by shmegegge at 3:53 PM on October 30, 2015

Our first pooka was played as a genderqueer BDSM aficionado.

The darkest our pooka made it was being Elmira from Tiny Toons. This was the pretty much the same character they had pitched as a Malkavian primogen in our LARP, but with the fangs filed off. That character was abandoned after someone declared "If your Malkavian needs Dementation to drive people mad, you're doing it wrong."

We were hard up for STs and had to deal with the players the brought.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 4:08 PM on October 30, 2015

Pillars of Eternity‍ had virtually no publisher (Paradox only handled marketing and distribution responsibilities) and is not known for being particularly buggy. So either that means the organization has matured to a point of being able to fix bugs, or not being hamstrung by publisher constraints allowed the team to apply enough polish. Or both.
posted by Apocryphon at 4:10 PM on October 30, 2015 [1 favorite]

Pillars of Eternity‍ had virtually no publisher (Paradox only handled marketing and distribution responsibilities) and is not known for being particularly buggy.

Err...I'm a pretty big fan of Obsidian and I like Pillars of Eternity, but it was very buggy on release, with a few that just should never have made it past a half-awake tester. Double-clicking an item to equip it caused the equipping character to lose all passive abilities and buffs; you could drop and re-add NPCs to reset their stats, but your main character was hosed unless you edited them in the console. However, dismissing an NPC from the party caused all their items, equipped and otherwise, to disappear forever. Every time you reloaded a save in an area where that character was recruited (like, say, the very first town), any ability buffs they had were made permanent, and then the abilities reapplied themselves on top of that, so three or four reloads caused stats to skyrocket to ridiculous numbers. If a Cipher character used a specific item, their ability to gain Focus (their casting resource) was disabled permanently. So, yeah, it's definitely still an Obsidian game, with all that that means, and they haven't really gotten better at QAing their products pre-release.
posted by Errant at 4:43 PM on October 30, 2015

I should also say that I haven't come anywhere near finishing the game, so I don't know if they've created a coherent ending, which would be an improvement over previous outings with publisher-coerced release dates.
posted by Errant at 4:46 PM on October 30, 2015

And old Abehammerb's heart grew three sizes that day!
posted by Abehammerb Lincoln at 7:57 PM on October 30, 2015

Yeah, Obsidian games are buggy as all hell upon release. I'll still take a buggy as hell Obsidian game over polished mediocrity any day of the week and twice on Sundays. Obsidian's current kickstarter success didn't mean they no longer release bugfests but it did mean they have the freedom to fix the bugs and release a finished product. That's not an opportunity they had in the past. Games were unfinished and buggy and they stayed that way.

New Vegas is still the best game made on that now-archaic Bethesda engine, bugs and all. Better than FO3, better than Oblivion, better than Skyrim. And I doubt it will be surpassed (warts and all) since Bethesda seem to know how to make engines but not games. Here's hoping I'm proven wrong in two weeks.
posted by Justinian at 11:30 PM on October 30, 2015 [4 favorites]

I think Exalted was definitely the craziest out of all of WW's lines, which was definitely something.

Depends on what you measure the crazy by. This was the company that published the Tabletop RPG adaptation of Street Fighter II, after all.
posted by radwolf76 at 3:14 PM on October 31, 2015