I'll be honest, after how successful Pentiment has been I simply assumed that we'd be very very unlikely to be able to get anyone from Obsidian coming: generally bigger companies in the RPG sector have given Coding Medieval Worlds a miss in recent years, I think partly just not really assuming that a free workshop hanging out with historians might have much utility to it. Tess, via our friend Adam/LudoHistory, did a wonderful job getting us in contact with Zoe, who has proven wonderful to work with and I think gave a really fantastic keynote to round out the CMW3 weekend, which you can see below.
I'm really excited by the possibilities for games that move role-playing out of the hack-and-XP storylines we most commonly see, and I think the success of Pentiment is also a really good sign in that department. There's a lot in this talk that gives really excellent detail on how they built that and made it immersive:
Links:
Pentiment
Meandering Medievalist (Zoe's Website)
Maniculum Podcast
