Obsidian Entertainment

Obsidian Entertainment is an American studio that has built a reputation as a specialist in deep RPGs with an emphasis on story, moral ambiguity, and freedom of choice. It grew out of people who worked on classics like Fallout and Baldur's Gate, carrying that experience into its own projects. The studio is known for taking someone else's franchise and giving it a depth few would expect elsewhere – Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II and Fallout: New Vegas remain among the most cited examples of a sequel surpassing the original in writing and systems. For RPG fans, Obsidian is synonymous with writing full of gray areas and decisions with no clearly right answer.

History

The studio was founded in 2003 by veterans of Black Isle Studios, Interplay's in-house RPG team, who had helped establish the isometric computer RPG genre with games like Fallout and Icewind Dale. They immediately put that experience to use on their first major project, the sequel Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II, which despite a troubled development and unfinished content earned a reputation as one of the best-written games in the Star Wars franchise. Neverwinter Nights 2, another computer adaptation of the Dungeons & Dragons rules, followed.

A turning point came with Fallout: New Vegas in 2010, which the studio made on contract for Bethesda using the previous game's engine and on a fairly tight development schedule. The game expanded the post-apocalyptic American setting with factional politics and a reputation system, and to this day many players consider it the high point of the entire series. After years of working on other companies' franchises, the studio struck out on its own – in 2015 it released Pillars of Eternity, a return to isometric RPGs inspired by classics like Baldur's Gate, largely funded through crowdfunding on Kickstarter. Its success showed that demand for traditional computer RPGs hadn't disappeared, only that major publishers had stopped meeting it. The sequel, Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, expanded the world with a pirate theme and seafaring, and deepened the faction and reputation system the studio had already built on in Fallout: New Vegas.

In 2019 the studio released The Outer Worlds, a sci-fi RPG with a strong streak of black humor and criticism of corporate profit-chasing, still as an independently published project. Shortly before that, in 2018, Microsoft acquired Obsidian and folded it into Xbox Game Studios, giving the studio a more stable footing for future development. Smaller, more experimental projects followed – the survival game Grounded and the narrative Pentiment, set in historical Bavaria and praised above all for its inventive writing and manuscript-inspired visual style. In 2025 the fantasy RPG Avowed was released, set in the same world as Pillars of Eternity.

Key People

The studio was co-founded by Feargus Urquhart, who had previously led Black Isle Studios and helped create the classic computer RPG genre, and who still heads Obsidian today as its CEO. Alongside him, other developers with roots in the teams behind Fallout and Baldur's Gate helped found the studio, bringing from Black Isle Studios experience in writing branching dialogue and reputation systems – and this emphasis on choices and their consequences still shapes most of Obsidian's projects today, regardless of whether it's their own IP or work-for-hire for another publisher.

Today

Since 2018, Obsidian Entertainment has been part of Microsoft under Xbox Game Studios and continues developing RPGs both in its original worlds, such as Pillars of Eternity and Avowed, and in smaller narrative projects. Even under a major publisher, the studio has kept its reputation as the genre's maker of games with the strongest emphasis on storytelling.