The full Obsidian interview – building worlds and Pillars of Eternity’s future

What makes Obsidian the leading studio in the world for, well, worlds? The beloved RPG developer has built a reputation for creating distant lands so coherent and evocative you start to believe in them more than your own childhood memories. Whether working with Star Wars, South Park, and Fallout, or inventing their own realms for Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian has excelled at taking us to other places. It’s easy to imagine staff at the California studio working in service to a huge lore tome - a Silmarillion written specifically for that game, filled with the answer to every possible question, from the tread type of a goblin’s boot to the Voices of Nerat’s relationship with his mother. Rather than continue to speculate, we decided to just ask them, digging into the process of PC gaming’s finest worldbuilders with narrative designer Alex Scokel. The picture that emerges is one of meticulous yet surprisingly malleable storytelling, as Obsidian often tears pages out of its game bibles - or scribbles notes in the margins.