58 Facts About Chris Avellone

Chris Avellone is an American video game designer and comic book writer.

Chris Avellone is known for his significant roles on a large number of video games, primarily role-playing video games, praised for their writing across his three-decade career.

Chris Avellone departed Obsidian in 2015 and has since worked as a freelancer for various companies on games such as Prey, Divinity: Original Sin II, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.

Chris Avellone attended the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in nearby Fairfax County.

Chris Avellone later worked in a toy store and as a campus center supervisor.

However, when Hero Games had a new product line for their Champions RPG called Dark Champions and needed writers, Hero Games' line editor Bruce Harlick contacted Chris Avellone, asking him to write a character book for it, which he agreed to, resulting in 1993's Underworld Enemies.

At the beginning of June 1995, Chris Avellone flew to Irvine, California and interviewed with O'Green, who asked him hard questions about how he would go about designing a video game using the Planescape license, which Interplay held the video game rights for at the time.

Chris Avellone told him he would "start at the death screen, and just tell the story of what happens after that".

Chris Avellone then contributed mission design to Interplay's 1997 game Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, a space flight simulator that made extensive use of full motion video.

Chris Avellone initially titled the game Planescape: Last Rites, and, recalling the design ideas he had shared with O'Green in his hiring interview, used them as the starting point for the game's vision document, which was warmly received by Interplay's studio head Brian Fargo, who nonetheless asked Chris Avellone to promise he could actually deliver on it.

Chris Avellone incorporated the many ideas for fantasy quests and characters he had gathered over the years into his design and sought to turn fantasy conventions upside down.

At the beginning of 1997, Chris Avellone asked Urquhart to be transferred to full-time work on Last Rites because he no longer felt there was much he could contribute to Undermountain given that game's development troubles, but this request was only granted in the summer of that year.

When Colin McComb was assigned to Last Rites as its second designer in April 1997, he found that Chris Avellone already had a broad outline of the entire game from start to finish, with all of the major characters sketched out.

Fallout 2 was released in October 1998 and has been ranked by video game publications as one of the best RPGs of all time, though Chris Avellone has expressed misgivings about the game's tonal inconsistencies and overuse of breaking the fourth wall.

McComb would later estimate that, although there were seven other designers on his team, Chris Avellone did approximately half of the design work on the project.

However, as the game's localization costs mounted due to its long script and quality assurance testers regarded it as the strangest game they had worked on, Chris Avellone thought that Torment would be poorly received at large and was afraid he was going to be fired.

When Urquhart and Donley asked him if he was willing to work on a sequel to Torment, Chris Avellone declined, saying he was too tired.

Chris Avellone was one of the few technical designers involved with directly implementing content in the game.

Chris Avellone felt the game had the potential to be better than Torment, as everything in its design seemed to be clicking into place, but none of the teams at Black Isle were available to work on it, and it languished in pre-production with Chris Avellone as the sole person assigned to it, his only chance to playtest and refine his design coming from tabletop sessions based around it that he ran for his fellow developers.

At fellow designer Josh Sawyer's suggestion, its story was based on the lore Chris Avellone had written for one of his Easthaven quests, and Chris Avellone continued his dialogue-focused duties on the title.

Black Isle's Torn, which Chris Avellone did not work on but had offered occasional design input on, was cancelled in July 2001, as Urquhart estimated it would not be done in time to help Interplay with the financial difficulties it was going through.

Development on Icewind Dale II was started in its place, using the Infinity Engine, with Sawyer as the lead designer and Chris Avellone doing area design for the starting town of Targos and for Kuldahar, which he greatly enjoyed because of the unusual amount of freedom the designers were given on the project.

In early 2002, production began on Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader, an alternate history action RPG developed by Reflexive Entertainment and published by Interplay, on which Chris Avellone was assigned to provide design assistance for a short while after its overall storyline had already been established several months into development.

Chris Avellone's assessment turned out to be correct when, half a year later, Black Isle was shut down and Van Buren was cancelled.

Additionally, Chris Avellone had to write a blind first draft of the story without having played the original KOTOR, as it had not yet been released and LucasArts did not want to provide a copy of it before a full contract had been officially signed, which then led to Chris Avellone having to start over with an entirely different story once he was able to play it.

Chris Avellone wrote the game's overall storyline and most of the companions and did area design for Peragus, Malachor V, part of Nar Shaddaa and other smaller areas, while dividing and coordinating the tasks of six other designers.

Chris Avellone joined the game's development team once KOTOR II was finished and was primarily responsible for writing major characters, including the game's companions and their associated quests, but for implementing influence mechanics and critiquing area designs, and additionally proofread almost all the dialogue in the game.

Obsidian's third project Dwarves, an RPG prequel to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves that Obsidian was enlisted to create by Disney in 2005, was the first one that Chris Avellone did not have a direct role on, with his involvement instead consisting of reviewing the work done by its lead designer Kevin Saunders and its lead story writer Brian Mitsoda and offering insight into which elements in its story achieved their goals and which elements needed improvement.

In July 2006, pre-production began on Mask of the Betrayer, the first expansion pack for Neverwinter Nights 2, with Chris Avellone offering designer George Ziets the role of creative lead on it and giving him a lot of flexibility on its story and setting, which Ziets used by exploring the religious and mythological elements in the Forgotten Realms that were the most interesting to him.

Chris Avellone, who was not directly assigned to the project at the time, asked to write her himself so she could be kept, with Ziets remarking that she then ended up being his favorite companion in the game.

Chris Avellone wrote a second companion for it, the spirit shaman Gann-of-Dreams.

Chris Avellone was assigned as its creative lead and sought to incorporate survival mechanics into the title, giving players the goal of building up a base over time and carefully managing their resources in a tense atmosphere where they would be vulnerable to attack even during conversations.

Chris Avellone created a new storyline for Alpha Protocol that was less linear and allowed for a very large number of player choices, while reusing character designs, locations and plot points from Mitsoda's iteration of the story.

Chris Avellone wrote most of the characters in the game, except for their emails, which were written by Matt MacLean, and except for the characters in Taipei and the peripheral ones in Rome, which were written by narrative designer Travis Stout.

Chris Avellone moved over from Alpha Protocol to the New Vegas team as a senior designer in October 2009.

For New Vegas, Chris Avellone wrote two companions: Ulysses, a former scout from Caesar's Legion who was supposed to provide insight into the game's events from the perspective of that faction, and Rose of Sharon Cassidy, the hard-drinking caravaneer daughter of Cassidy, a Fallout 2 companion who had been written by Chris Avellone and had been Sawyer's favorite companion in the series.

Chris Avellone provided writing for the game's ending slides, the endgame characters Legate Lanius and General Oliver, as well as for the Mojave Outpost and the REPCONN Headquarters areas, and helped lead writer John Gonzalez with structuring the story and its associated character dialogues, as Gonzalez was not used to writing branching narratives.

Chris Avellone decided instead to reuse the character as an overarching antagonist in the downloadable content expansions that were planned, with foreshadowing about his new story being added to the base game.

New Vegas received four downloadable content expansions, with Chris Avellone being the project director and lead designer on three of them: Dead Money, Old World Blues and Lonesome Road.

Chris Avellone shared writing duties on Old World Blues with Travis Stout, but did almost all of the writing on the other two.

Chris Avellone sought to create a survival horror experience for it based on an idea he had originally had while working on Torment after watching the 1997 film Cube and which centered on taking disparate personalities that would normally be very hostile to each other and forcing them to work together, focusing on the themes of greed and human nature.

Meanwhile, as Chris Avellone was finishing work on the Fallout: New Vegas expansions, he began developing new pitches for the studio, including pitches to Bethesda for spin-offs to The Elder Scrolls series, one of which would have taken place in an alternate world that the heroes of previous games had failed in saving, and which were meant to serve a similar role to New Vegas by filling in the gap between major installments, but they were not picked up.

Shortly afterwards, Fargo asked him if he was interested in working on the game, to which Chris Avellone replied that he was, leading to an arrangement between Fargo and Urquhart whereby Obsidian would be paid for Chris Avellone's participation on it.

Chris Avellone spent around 2 days a week at inXile over the following months and his contributions to the game consisted in writing its vision document and in doing area design for Highpool and the Agricultural Center, along with a few other areas such as the Synth Refinery and Seal Beach that were not included in the final game, as well as providing templates and design formats for the other designers and taking part in story meetings.

For Pillars, Chris Avellone provided feedback on the story and wrote two companions: Durance, a cynical priest betrayed by his own god, and the Grieving Mother, a cipher with the ability to draw energy from her soul and mind who used her talents as a midwife but was forced to flee her community after hiding the fact that the children in it were being born without souls.

Chris Avellone was originally the game's creative lead and worked on it throughout its pre-production period.

However, after a series of disagreements with some of Obsidian's other co-founders about the company's management practices, Chris Avellone left Obsidian in June 2015.

Some months prior, Chris Avellone had been asked by Raphael Colantonio, the founder of Arkane Studios and a fan of his work, if he could write for Arkane's new first person science-fiction title, later known as Prey, but Chris Avellone had replied that his full-time position at Obsidian did not allow him to do so.

However, upon going freelance, Chris Avellone contacted Colantonio to ask if the offer was still open and found that it was.

Lead designer Ricardo Bare was impressed by the result and Chris Avellone joined the team, writing several of the game's major characters, including neuroscientist Dayo Igwe and chief systems engineer Mikhaila Ilyushin, as well as many of the side ones and their associated quests, while offering feedback and insights into the story in general and contributing to the game's lore and alternate history.

Chris Avellone designed the varied personalities of the mech pilots, giving them many different reactions to gameplay situations, as well as fleshing out the lore of the corporations in the game and writing the dialogues of their CEOs.

Chris Avellone noted that, in a shift from other World War II games, Burden of Command would focus on dealing with the emotional pressure of being in command and having to accomplish your mission while protecting your soldiers.

In March 2019, Chris Avellone revealed that he had recently finished up his work on it, which consisted of story contributions, story and character reviews and the writing of certain cinematic scripts.

Chris Avellone was thrilled to work on Star Wars again and noted that he appreciated the game's story taking place after Episode III, as that timeframe provided a lot of potential for drama and conflict.

In December 2018, Norwegian game developer Moondrop Studios announced that Chris Avellone had written the story for its upcoming cooperative puzzle platformer Degrees of Separation, a game following two characters, Ember and Rime, the former from a world of warmth and light and the latter from a world of cold and darkness, who use their contrasting powers to overcome obstacles together.

In December 2019, Owlcat announced Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, their second Pathfinder game, having Chris Avellone involved as a narrative designer.

Several days later, Chris Avellone revealed that he had been working on the action role-playing game Weird West, the first game from Raphael Colantonio's new company WolfEye Studios.

Chris Avellone published a denial of the allegations through Medium in June 2021 and stated he had filed a libel suit against two accusers in a California court.