1993-2003: Tabletop games and Interplay Early projects, Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment Avellone's hobby of gamemastering for tabletop roleplaying games made him try to get his adventures and articles published. Starting in his high school years, he sent a large number of submissions to
Dungeon magazine,
Dragon magazine,
Palladium Books,
GURPS and
Hero Games, but they were all rejected. 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 Avellone, asking him to write a character book for it, which he agreed to, resulting in 1993's
Underworld Enemies. It was followed by
Dystopia in 1994,
Widows & Orphans in 1997 and
New Bedlam Asylum in 1998, as well as contributions to the adventure anthologies
Heroic Adventures Volume 1 and
Volume 2 in 1996 and to
Dragon,
Alarums and Excursions,
Adventurers Club and
Shadis throughout that period. Avellone was also one of the authors involved in the
fanzine Haymaker! alongside Harlick. After asking
Steve Peterson, his editor at Hero Games, to help him find him a job with a steady paycheck, Peterson put in a recommendation for him with Mark O'Green, the head of
Interplay Productions' Dragonplay division. 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 in the
Planescape campaign setting, which Interplay had recently acquired the video game rights for. Avellone told him he would "start at the death screen, and just tell the story of what happens after that". O'Green was intrigued and hired him as a junior designer. His first task at Interplay was to design cities for a
Dungeons & Dragons game set in the
Forgotten Realms. When that project was cancelled a few months later, By late 1996,
Feargus Urquhart – who had replaced O'Green as the head of Interplay's role-playing division, soon to be known as
Black Isle Studios – was being mandated to make use of the
Planescape license by his superiors and became interested in making a game for it using the
Infinity Engine, the isometric engine in
BioWare's ''
Baldur's Gate'', which was then in development and which Interplay had access to as BioWare's publisher. Urquhart asked Avellone if he was interested in being the lead designer on the new project and Avellone agreed, seeing it as an opportunity. 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, coming up with a story where the player character was an amnesiac immortal trapped in an endless cycle of death and rebirth. The resulting vision document was warmly received by Interplay's studio head
Brian Fargo, who nonetheless asked Avellone to promise he could actually deliver on it. As Avellone described it: Once the vision document was approved, we scaled it down and outwards and turned each bit into reality. The lead artist, Tim Donley, did sketches of each of the major locations one by one before they were arted on the computer. I then took the characters and quests and did area design documents. I wrote a first pass of much of the dialogue and companions (many of which made it all the way to the final draft). All the while our programmers started digging into the Infinity Engine (which wasn’t done at that time, since
Baldur’s Gate 1 was still going on) and learning more about how it worked so we could see if our ideas were feasible or not. 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. Around this time,
Tim Cain also offered Avellone a role on
Fallout as a designer, but Avellone had to turn him down because, between
Last Rites and his continued responsibilities on
Undermountain, he was already overburdened with work, and he recommended
Scott Bennie for the role instead. At the beginning of 1997, 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. he found that Avellone already had a broad outline of the entire game from start to finish, with all of the major characters sketched out. It was soon realized that the name
Last Rites was already trademarked and being used for another company's game, Throughout that period, Avellone also contributed writing to Interplay's racing combat game
Red Asphalt and
Treyarch's swordfighting
action-adventure game Die by the Sword, both of them released in early 1998.
Undermountain was finally released in January 1998 and sold poorly and was widely panned by critics. That same month,
Fallout's central creative trio of Tim Cain,
Leonard Boyarsky and
Jason Anderson decided to leave Interplay and start their own company which they named
Troika Games. This created an uncertain future for
Fallout 2, which they had been leading development on for a few months, so designers, programmers and artists were taken from other projects and assigned to help with it. This included Avellone, who became an area designer on the game and designed New Reno, Vault City, the raider caves and the game's various special encounters. and "possibly Avellone's single greatest creation [...] emblematic of everything a true RPG should be: non-linear, dynamic, detailed, and expertly written". though Avellone has expressed misgivings about the game's tonal inconsistencies and overuse of breaking the fourth wall. Once
Fallout 2 was finished, he immediately had to enter crunch time again on
Torment as the game's development team expanded from the 10 people it had at that point and has been especially praised for reaching a quality of writing that had not existed in games up to that point. By the end of the game's development, Avellone's health had declined significantly from the long hours and he was advised by his doctor to not continue down that path. After promising them another chance to make that sequel in the future, Urquhart had tasked them in May 1999 with developing
Icewind Dale, a more traditional
Dungeons & Dragons game which, like ''Baldur's Gate
, was set in the Forgotten Realms
and also used the Infinity Engine, but was more linear and had a strong focus on dungeon crawling. Despite joining halfway through development, Avellone wrote the dialogues of all the major NPCs in Icewind Dale'' and also edited those written by the other designers. Additionally, he designed a number of quests for the starting town of Easthaven and many of the special items in the game, as well as writing the game's narrative style guide and manual.
Icewind Dale was released in June 2000 and was well-received, but was regarded by Avellone his only chance to playtest and refine his design coming from tabletop sessions based around it that he ran for his fellow developers. A few weeks after the release of
Icewind Dale, work began on an expansion pack for it called
Heart of Winter. At fellow designer
Josh Sawyer's suggestion, its story was based on the lore Avellone had written for one of his Easthaven quests, and Avellone continued his dialogue-focused duties on the title.
Heart of Winter was released in February 2001 and was not as well-received as the original game, mainly because of its short length. To allay the fans' complaints, the team including Avellone During
Heart of Winter's development, Avellone was also asked to write the story for ''
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance'', a console action RPG that Interplay had tasked
Snowblind Studios with developing in an attempt to enter the increasingly lucrative console market. Although Avellone quickly wrote a draft of the storyline that he liked, it became a target for what he called "the most mind-boggling iterations and suggestions" from his bosses, and he was unhappy with the result as he felt it was lacking and not similar to his original vision. ''Black Isle's Torn
, which 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, once again using the Infinity Engine, with Sawyer as the lead designer and 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 Avellone was assigned to provide design assistance for a short while after its overall storyline had already been established several months into development. Afterwards, before he could return to work on
Van Buren, he contributed to the design of ''
Baldur's Gate III: The Black Hound, Once the license turned out to have been lost because of unpaid royalties, in April 2003. For the first time, a full team was now available to work on Van Buren'', but Avellone did not believe it was possible to make the game any longer given Interplay's financial troubles and the management's complete focus on the console market, so he also left the company a couple of months after Urquhart. His assessment turned out to be correct when, half a year later, Black Isle was shut down and
Van Buren was cancelled. Avellone thus became the lead designer of
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, a role which he was not pleased with at first as he had not been a fan of
Star Wars since his childhood, but which gradually became interesting to him as he immersed himself in the franchise, reading all of its novels and comic books, and realized he could explore the questions he had about its universe through his design and try to recapture the feeling of
The Empire Strikes Back, his favorite movie in the series. However, the task of making a sequel to a
AAA game was fraught with difficulties, as Obsidian initially had no employees and no office space, with the co-founders working in Urquhart's attic. Additionally, 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 Avellone having to start over with an entirely different story once he was able to play it. After a contract was signed in August 2003, Obsidian were able to move into an office in
Santa Ana and hire enough employees to start full production on the game by October, but still had a very aggressive schedule that required them to finish the game within a year. 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 also dividing and coordinating the tasks of six other designers.
KOTOR II was released on time in December 2004 in what many regarded as a partially unfinished state, but still received very positive reviews, with its story being named one of the greatest in video games and in the
Star Wars franchise. After
KOTOR II, Avellone pitched comic book publisher
Dark Horse a comic named
Unseen, Unheard about characters from the game, This also led to him contributing short stories to the
Star Wars: Clone Wars Adventures comic series until it ended in December 2007. In July 2004, Obsidian began development on
Neverwinter Nights 2, a
Dungeons & Dragons PC RPG taking place in the
Forgotten Realms, after another situation in which BioWare, who had developed the first game, recommended Obsidian to its publisher, in this case
Atari, for developing the sequel. 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 also for implementing influence mechanics and critiquing area designs, and additionally proofread almost all the dialogue in the game. Despite the game's design having an unrealistically large scope that created difficulties and led to its original lead designer Ferret Baudoin being replaced by Josh Sawyer in March 2006,
Neverwinter Nights 2 had generally favorable reviews when released in October 2006, with its story and writing noted as being its strong points. As Obsidian began to always have multiple projects in pre-production or development at any given time, Avellone — in his capacity as the company's chief creative officer — oversaw the high-level design on all of them, offering feedback and critiques on prototypes, game builds and design documents, as well as writing and improving pitches for new games and talking to publishers about them. Obsidian's third project
Dwarfs, 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 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 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. One of the five companions intended for the expansion, the half-celestial cleric Kaelyn the Dove, was almost cut early on when it was estimated she could not be written and implemented in the time the team had available. 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. Avellone also wrote a second companion for it, the spirit shaman Gann-of-Dreams.
Mask of the Betrayer was released in September 2007 and was well-received, with game publications calling it the best
Dungeons & Dragons experience since ''
Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn and Torment'' and sometimes referring to it as a thematic sequel of the latter.
Alpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas In early 2006,
Sega expressed interest in having Obsidian develop a cross-platform RPG for them and were pitched an idea from Urquhart and fellow co-founder Chris Jones about making an espionage RPG because the new leadership at that company wanted to avoid going in that game's direction with the
Snow White intellectual property. Brian Mitsoda was reassigned from writing the story for
Dwarfs to being the creative lead on the espionage RPG, which was named
Alpha Protocol. Sega announced their collaboration with Obsidian on a game based on new intellectual property on March 23, 2006. Near the end of 2006, where they would be vulnerable to attack even during conversations. In early 2008, — though not in charge of its gameplay systems, which were handled by lead systems designer Matt MacLean — while Josh Sawyer took over the design of
Aliens: Crucible. 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. 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. Avellone estimated there were approximately 120 hours of dialogue in the final game of which players would only hear between 22% and 33% in a single playthrough. In February 2009,
Aliens: Crucible was cancelled by Sega in favor of
Alpha Protocol, which they deemed to be much farther along in development. After a round of layoffs at Obsidian, Urquhart began talking to Todd Vaughn, the vice president of development at
Bethesda Softworks, about making a game for them, as Vaughn had previously raised that possibility as early as 2004, but Obsidian had never had any free teams whenever it had come up. Bethesda, who had obtained the rights to make
Fallout games in 2004 during Interplay's bankruptcy and had released their own
Fallout 3 in October 2008, were now busy developing
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and would not be able to make a
Fallout 4 for a long time, which made them interested in having an external studio develop another
Fallout title in the interim to avoid a large gap between titles. Obsidian were thus asked by Bethesda to pick an interesting location in the
Western United States and pitch a
Fallout game around it. After multiple people at Obsidian independently chose
Las Vegas as a signature western city, Avellone wrote a story pitch about a stranger getting shot in the head and dropped in a shallow grave in the desert, with Vegas visible in the distance. Bethesda approved it, signing up on the development of
Fallout: New Vegas, with the
Aliens: Crucible team being transferred to it and Sawyer becoming the game's project director and lead designer. As Sawyer had taken part in Avellone's
Van Buren pen and paper campaigns at Black Isle and had become the lead designer on that game for its final six months, he incorporated certain elements from it into
New Vegas, such as
Hoover Dam as a plot-important location, the Caesar's Legion tribal confederation as a major faction, the mentally ill Nightkin super mutants as occasionally encountered characters and the caravan wars as part of the story's background. Avellone moved over from
Alpha Protocol to the
New Vegas team as a senior designer in October 2009. but the game did not receive any additional development time during the delay. Upon its release,
Alpha Protocol received lukewarm reviews, with frequent criticisms about its gameplay being clunky and bland, while its storytelling and freedom of choice were praised. Although Avellone had many ideas for a sequel and wanted to have an even more complex story in it, The game has, however, become regarded as a cult classic because of its unique style of reactivity. For
New Vegas, 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 also been written by Avellone and had been Sawyer's favorite companion in the series. Avellone also 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. However, as development on
New Vegas was nearing the end, it was realized that Ulysses as a companion had so much dialogue that it would not have fit on the game's disc and there was not enough time to trim it down, which led to his complete removal, a difficult task in itself given that his dialogue had so many different hooks into the storyline. New Vegas was released in October 2010 and was well-reviewed, but received significant criticism for its technical issues. With the passing of time, it has become regarded as one of the greatest RPGs of all time.
In Dead Money, the story revolved around the player character being kidnapped, fitted with an explosive collar and forced to rob an impenetrable casino with the help of three other characters in the same predicament. 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. To provide a contrast to the dark atmosphere of the other expansions,
Old World Blues had a much more humorous story that involved the player character being taken to the highly advanced scientific facility of Big MT, having their brain stolen, and exploring the remains of the facility to recover it. Its story was conceived around the theme of "the optimistic atomic future of what might have been" and the idea that the advanced technology in the
Fallout setting could have saved the world if it had not been misused by its creators.
Lonesome Road was inspired by the final image at the end of the original
Fallout of that game's protagonist being cast out of their home and attempted to evoke the same sense of abandonment by having the player explore an area that their character had caused devastation for in the past, with rival courier Ulysses holding them responsible for it and waiting to confront them inside. The
New Vegas expansions were released between December 2010 and September 2011 and have been praised for providing "some of the best sci-fi in games", with
Old World Blues in particular being named one of the greatest video game expansions ever. In early 2011, a team led by Sawyer created a demo for a project named
Stormlands, a fantasy action RPG set in a world of magical storms, and pitched it to
Microsoft, who decided to sign up on publishing it as they wanted to have an RPG as a launch title for the
Xbox One in 2013. Meanwhile, as Avellone was finishing work on the
Fallout: New Vegas expansions, he also 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.
Forays into crowdfunding and final projects at Obsidian On February 8, 2012, game developer
Double Fine launched a campaign on crowdfunding service
Kickstarter to raise funds for a new adventure game and reached their stated goal of $400,000 in less than 8 hours, which was unprecedented at the time. This inspired Avellone to write a blog post soon after asking fans what kind of project they wanted to potentially see Obsidian launch a Kickstarter campaign around, the responses to which briefly crashed the Obsidian website after it received more traffic than it could handle, but revealed that the most requested project was a sequel to
Planescape: Torment. That same month,
Wizards of the Coast, who held the license for
Planescape, were contacted about the possibility of providing it, but were not interested. Former Interplay studio head Brian Fargo, who had left Interplay in early 2002 and founded another company named
inXile Entertainment later that year, was also inspired by Double Fine's success and decided to use Kickstarter to crowdfund
Wasteland 2, the sequel to the 1988 post-apocalyptic RPG
Wasteland on which he had been the game director, announcing his decision to do so on February 15. Aware that
Wasteland had been one of Avellone's favorite games, Fargo initially contacted him asking him to provide a promotional quote for the Kickstarter campaign, which resulted in Avellone writing a blog post in support of it on February 21. Shortly afterwards, Fargo asked him if he was interested in working on the game, to which Avellone replied that he was, On March 12, 2012,
Stormlands was cancelled, as Obsidian's vision for the project had become increasingly disconnected from Microsoft's demands for it. That same day, the Kickstarter campaign for
Wasteland 2 was launched and surpassed its original target of $900,000 in only 48 hours. By the end of the month, when it had reached $1.7 million in pledges, it was announced that Avellone would be joining its development team if a new stretch goal of $2.1 million was reached, although Avellone had been unaware when agreeing to his participation that it would be tied to a stretch goal. The campaign ultimately raised slightly over $3 million. 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. However, none of Obsidian's pitches were picked up by publishers. As a result of the pressure, a Kickstarter campaign around a spiritual successor to
Torment that did not take place in the
Planescape setting was considered at Obsidian, However, after further discussions, a decision was made to instead create a game combining elements from all of the Infinity Engine titles, but with a more traditional fantasy setting inspired by the
Forgotten Realms. The resulting game concept was called
Project Eternity and, on September 12, 2012, a Kickstarter campaign was launched for it, with an initial funding target of $1.1 million that was reached in just over 24 hours. By the end of the campaign on October 16, it had raised over $3.9 million, the most money ever raised by a video game on Kickstarter at that time. On November 27, 2012, Brian Fargo acquired the recently expired trademark for the word
Torment, Once he had the trademark, Fargo asked Avellone to work on the new game, but Avellone's responsibilities on
Project Eternity made it infeasible to do so. In January 2013, it was announced that the game would be called
Torment: Tides of Numenera. On March 6, 2013, a Kickstarter campaign was launched for it, with an endorsement from Avellone and an initial funding goal of $900,000 that was reached after just 6 hours, although there was some disappointment among fans that Avellone would not be involved in the game. In the middle of March, however, discussions between Fargo and Urquhart led to an agreement on a workload for Avellone on
Numenera that would not negatively impact
Project Eternity. On March 22, at which point the
Numenera campaign had $2.9 million in funding, it was announced that Avellone would be joining the game's team if a further stretch goal of $3.5 million was reached, with his role consisting of reviewing and providing feedback on the story, characters and areas, as well as writing one of the companions. The campaign passed that goal on April 3, which led to Avellone being referred to as a "human stretch goal" by the gaming press from then on, and ended on April 6 with a final tally of $4.18 million, overtaking
Project Eternity to become the highest-funded game on the platform. Avellone created eight different concepts for a companion character, wishing to only settle on one after sufficiently exploring the game's plot and themes, and ultimately chose to write Erritis, an impulsive warrior with a love for danger who was meant to introduce some levity to what Avellone regarded as "an otherwise dark and frightening world." and being credited as a guest writer on it. The
Advanced Edition was released in April 2014. In December 2013,
Project Eternity was renamed into
Pillars of Eternity. For
Pillars, Avellone provided feedback on the story 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. Both characters have been regarded as fan favorites, although a significant part of the content Avellone designed for them, such as sequences where the player entered their subconscious to explore their shared past and understand how to affect their present personalities, did not make it into the final game. At the beginning of 2014, Avellone was originally the game's creative lead and worked on it throughout its pre-production period. His goals for the title included having a protagonist tasked with restoring order to a conquered area for the forces of evil but provided with the option of rebelling against them, as well as an open world structure where any kind of activity, such as exploring dungeons or doing quests for factions, would cause the story to progress.
Pillars of Eternity was released at the end of March 2015, which freed up development resources and led to
Tyranny entering full production. However, after a series of disagreements with some of Obsidian's other co-founders about the company's management practices, Avellone left Obsidian in June 2015.
Tyranny's game director Brian Heins later noted that concepts, characters and ideas from Avellone's work on the game had been retained.
2015-present: Freelance writing and design After departing Obsidian, Avellone quickly became an in-demand freelance writer and designer, working on multiple games for different companies at any given time and seeking experience in a variety of genres in order to improve his craft. Also in June 2015, inXile launched a Kickstarter campaign for ''
The Bard's Tale IV'', which was billed as a proper sequel to Interplay's ''
The Bard's Tale'' trilogy from the 1980s, and it reached its funding goal of $1.25 million in 12 days. On June 29, with 11 days remaining, it was announced that Avellone would be joining the game's team if its campaign surpassed $1.9 million in funding and that he would design a deadly dungeon named the Cairn of Horrors for it, but this goal was not reached. On August 12, 2015,
Larian Studios announced they would be launching a Kickstarter campaign for the turn-based
tactical RPG Divinity: Original Sin II at the end of the month and asked their community to vote on what reward tiers they wanted to see in it, but many fans reacted by voting for potential stretch goals instead, with Avellone's addition to the team being one of the most requested. This resulted in Larian CEO
Swen Vincke meeting up with Avellone at
PAX Prime 2015 to discuss the possibility of his involvement. On September 25, it was announced that Avellone would be working on the game, although not as part of a stretch goal. As a senior writer, he was responsible for doing story and companion reviews and also designed and wrote the backstory for the
undead playable character and recruitable companion Fane. In late 2015,
BioShock creator
Ken Levine contacted Avellone to ask him if he was interested in working on the first game from his new studio
Ghost Story Games, which Avellone immediately agreed to as he had always hoped to get the chance to collaborate with Levine. The game was revealed in December 2022 as
Judas. In September 2016, inXile announced
Wasteland 3, with Avellone revealing several months later that he had been working on it. In addition to writing for the game, Avellone was asked to provide ideas and design pillars from his work on
Van Buren that could be adapted to the
Wasteland setting, with lead designer
George Ziets using them as inspiration. Alaloth was an unusually art-centric project from Avellone's perspective, as a lot of concept art had already been created for the characters in the game and he was tasked with using it as a starting point for writing deeper stories around them. On February 10, 2017, Subset Games announced the turn-based strategy game
Into the Breach, as well as Avellone's involvement in writing and world-building for it. The game depicted the conflict between human civilization and giant insectile aliens, with the player controlling time-traveling mechs attempting to save the remnants of humanity across multiple timelines. 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. and Rock Paper Shotgun noting that "its short lines drip with implication about the rules of time travel, parallel realities and the motivations and peccadilloes of its pilots". In March 2017,
Beamdog announced
Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition, a remaster of
Torment for which Avellone helped curate improvements as well as doing an editorial pass of all the text in the game. Avellone was also a consultant on Beamdog's short-lived attempt to make a new
Planescape game which failed due to lack of publisher interest. On May 17, 2017,
Owlcat Games announced
Pathfinder: Kingmaker, the first computer RPG based on the universe of the tabletop
Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, an offshoot of
Dungeons and Dragons from game publisher
Paizo, and also announced that Avellone would be contributing narrative design to the title. Owlcat had already secured the budget to make the game, but they launched a Kickstarter campaign at the beginning of June to increase it and allow for more companions, areas and quests to be included, successfully reaching their goal of $500k on June 26 and ending up with a final tally of $909k two weeks later. Although
Kingmaker was based on an eponymous series of adventure modules for
Pathfinder, Avellone helped the studio expand its story so it would have enough new content for people who had played the original tabletop version of it. He also wrote one of the companions — the goblin rogue Nok-Nok — from start to finish, worked with the other designers on setting up the quest arcs for companions across the game, and assisted with the writing and editing of a large number of characters. In July 2017, Green Tree Games announced a tactical leadership
World War II RPG titled
Burden of Command, bringing Avellone in as a senior advisor tasked with guiding the developers on "creating empathy, memorable characters, and compelling narrative arcs". 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 also protecting your soldiers. which included Avellone on its writing team. In June 2018, publisher
Electronic Arts announced
Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, an action-adventure game developed by
Respawn Entertainment. In March 2019, 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. 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. 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. Having never worked on a platformer before, Avellone saw it as a chance to stretch his writing skills further, and was also intrigued by the ways in which the gameplay mechanics were meant to reflect changes in the relationship between the two characters, with them building bridges when supportive of each other and later having explosive powers when arguing with each other. In December 2019, Owlcat announced
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous, their second
Pathfinder game, once again having Avellone involved as a narrative designer. Several days later, Avellone revealed that he had also been working on the action role-playing game
Weird West, the first game from Raphaël Colantonio's new company WolfEye Studios. In June 2025, it was announced that Avellone had joined the inaugural project of Republic Games, a new studio founded by video game writer
Adam Williams. The unnamed project is a dystopian fantasy game described as "A tyrannical regime is brutally enforcing its ideology and crushing all dissent. But a faction of rebels seeks to overturn the tyrants and expose the lies at the heart of their doctrine." Avellone has also been brought on by Red Info, a studio founded by
Robert Kurvitz and Aleksander Rostov, former leads at ZA/UM for
Disco Elysium, to help with developing the story for their planned
spiritual sequel to
Disco Elysium. == Misconduct accusations and retraction ==