Damn you Netflix, damn you! Stealing our talent! First Joseph Staten and now Carrie Patel!

Just kidding, Lol. It hurts to see her leave Obsidian because I thought she did a great full game director debut on Avowed but all the best to her, 12 years at the same company is a lot of time, across those 12 years she worked on 4 games, 3 of those were the Pillars of Eternity IP, the majority of her time was spent on one IP and then of those 12 years, about 5 years were spent on directing a single AAA IP (once again, Pillars IP). But unfortunately she was one of the Pillars veterans, her alongside Josh Sawyer were the top two people on Pillars.

She takes up a role at Night School, the developers of Oxenfree, a small studio of only around 50, she also takes the same role she had at Obsidian (Director) so she'll still be a team lead/creator and so I'm going to assume that she's going through a Josh Sawyer moment of wanting to lead on something small and different now but Obsidian didn't have the capacity to allow that at the minute considering they already have multiple directors and multiple projects in development right now.

My Thoughts on Obsidian's Future.

Adam Brennecke (Director of Grounded) creates a Grounded 2, which will be bigger than the last, so will require a slightly bigger team. Probably 30-50 which would be a decent chunk of Obsidian's 300 employees (and Feargus said he doesn't want to expand anymore).

The Outer Worlds 2 releases, I don't think they'll do The Outer Worlds 3, Obsidian doesn't tend to focus heavily on sequels, they often stop at 2, I don't think they've actually ever done a 3rd entry before unless we count Avowed (Pillars of Eternity 1-2). Not sure where that leaves Brandon Adler (Director of The Outer Worlds 2) and Leonard Boyarsky (Director of The Outer Worlds 1/Creative Director of The Outer Worlds 2) but I think Leonard will likely retire soon as Tim Cain has.

John Gonzalez (Creative Design Lead & Lead Writer of Fallout New Vegas) re-joined Obsidian as a Creative Director in January 2025. I think he's going to take up an AAA project but he claims he's not working on Fallout, Lol. My prediction is Josh Sawyer and John Gonzalez team up on something and Josh returns to AAA.

If John's project is AAA it will likely require either The Outer Worlds team or Avowed team to merge into it.

Whatever it is, it is probably in pre-production still so the Avowed team won't be ready to move over if it's them, but that means it could probably be The Outer Worlds team because the timeline would match up, about a year of pre-production then move The Outer Worlds 2 team over to John's team while maintaining a small DLC support for The Outer Worlds 2. Then again, I imagine parts of Avowed's team have moved over to The Outer Worlds 2 now to help finish up the last part of development.

I want to recreate my evil character in Oblivion...

FUCK YEAH STELLAR BLADE!

Another game in my endless backlog lol

"Despite Countless Players Coming From Game Pass"

I know that's IGN's quote, not Hazzador, does IGN realise that Xbox pays developers to put their games in the service? Lmfao. In fact it may be that it was immediately profitable BECAUSE of Game Pass.

I really struggle to see why anyone would wanna work in the gaming department at Netflix. I mean literally look at what happened with Staten. That lasted what...a year or two? Has Netflix published any games of their own that aren't like reality show tie ins?

Would you count Oxenfree II: Lost Signals as an example?  Because that's the only one that comes to mind for me.