What's your take on Obsidian?

IMO Obsidian needs to take more responsibility for their "innovations". Someone seems to have forgotten technical functionality, simplicity and ease-of-use.
Technical functionality, there should be no problems when skill bars and windows in NWN2 overlap, among other bugs. Simplicity, adjusting the status window should be easier, among other things. Ease-of-use, it would be nice if characters automatically went into-ready state when it is obvious that something in front of them wants to kill them, etc.
New stuff/modifications are nice but they should also be well implemented. Once that is done, then you could focus on creating the best adventure you can possible spin in your lifetime.
At least, that's what I think they should do for now.

It's been one game with annoying features after another so far.

 

Just to give another perspective on Obsidian:

I have been Admining a Neverwinter Nights 2 persistent world (A Land Far Away) for the last year or so and heavily involved before then. From my point of view, Obsidian have certainly been impressive. Since NWN2 was released, they have always been very open and easy to make contact with. When, in the early days, we found a big bug that had been missed until then, we were able to get in touch with them and between them and a few of our tech experts, we worked out a solution - eventually to be incorporated into their patches.

Since those early days, things haven't dropped off. Only about a month ago, we had Rob (from Obsidian) stop by our forum for a week or so answering a big pile of questions we had, and in turn asking us what we thought of X, Y and Z. This gesture alone really impressed me - given how many Persistent Worlds there are out there, to get in touch with them individually really shows a care for the community.

Are they better than bioware in this sense? I can't say. We certainly never had that level of contact with bioware. But then again, back with NWN1 the community was a lot bigger, and when you're just one fish in the sea it's a lot less likely you are going to see that personal attention.

 

True, the patches were good and they did a great job seeing as how NWN2 really did start to become pretty a great game from MotB onwards, but I'm only trying to point that one important thing that makes them different from the older developers is that they're using much more advanced and complicated technology, so they really should try harder to account for that come other games.