Obsidian staff pick an RPG class when they join, then ‘level up’ receiving gifts for the next 20 years they work there
It’s a novel way of keeping staff at the company, execs say
Obsidian Entertainment execs have shed light on its employee rewards scheme, which works like one of its own RPG games.
The Outer Worlds, Avowed and Grounded studio has a system whereby new employees pick one of three classes, and then continue to receive gifts for staying at the company, up to a total of 20 years.
The system was revealed during an interview with The Game Business, in which Obsidian‘s VP of operations Marcus Morgan explained how it works.
Speaking about the studio’s high staff retention rate, Morgan said: “We have these employee tenure gifts that we just rolled out, that are just a lot of fun and just speak to why we want people to be here forever. We just put these out at every milestone up to 20 years.
“When you join the studio, you pick a class. It’s a warrior, a rogue or a wizard class. And then you go on that journey of collecting every item. So you start with some dice here.”
Morgan then showed a box containing a set of D&D style dice, with the words Path of the Warrior written on it, revealing that he chose the warrior class.
“And then you get the various aspects of those things. So you get, like, a shield, then an axe, and then a helm. The wizards get a cloak. And I just think it speaks to our hope.
“It’s funny we would create this thing of… I don’t know, we just hope people want to be here for 20 years, and it always goes back to those roots of building your character, finding your way. So it’s just a fun plug for that, because we just rolled them out recently.”
Asked whether there were more classes, or ways to take on more than one class, Morgan replied: “We only did three classes for now, but we did talk about if you want to stay for more than 20 years, like me and Justin do, then you can start to multi-class, then you can start to collect the other elements of the different classes too.”
Obsidian has been the most prolific of the development teams at Xbox Game Studios. In the five years since the release of the Xbox Series X/S, it’s released five titles – Grounded, Pentiment, Avowed, Grounded 2 (currently in early access) and last week’s The Outer Worlds 2.
