How Obsidian writes

A chat about the words that go into video games, with creators behind The Outer Worlds, Pillars of Eternity, Pentiment and more.

A couple of decades ago, Fallout co-creator Leonard Boyarsky was working on role-playing games full of chatty characters whose lines were written into Microsoft Excel.

Using that program to organize the games’ dialogue was simple, but cumbersome.

Not long after, over at Obsidian Entertainment, the studio that would make Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, and myriad other wordy RPGs, writer Josh Sawyer started using a tool he called a “cascading tree.”

That too became unwieldy.

These days, they’ve got something better.

A couple of weeks ago, I connected with Boyarsky, Sawyer and writer Kate Dollarhyde, who are now all long-tenured staff at Obsidian, to talk about how they write their games. Boyarsky was creative director on the recently-shipped sci-fi role-playing escapade The Outer Worlds 2. Dollarhyde had worked on this past winter’s first-person fantasy adventure Avowed. Sawyer’s most recently shipped game was 2022’s 16th century monastery murder mystery Pentiment.

Back in 2006, Sawyer explained, he worked with Obsidian’s tools team to design OEI Tools, a dialogue program that’s become a studio staple. It has “evolved massively, from tons of teams using it, and tons of narrative designers and leads giving their feedback on it over the years,” he said. According to Sawyer, OEI Tools has been used in most of Obsidian’s games and across multiple game engines.

And it was used to write the dialogue in The Outer Worlds 2, Obsidian’s newest RPG.

I asked if I could see it.

“I’ve got it,” Boyarsky said.

“Leonard, pull it up!” Dollarhyde cheered.

He did. Suddenly, before my eyes, there was The Outer Worlds 2, but different.