Obsidian Turns Employee Rewards Into a 20-Year RPG Adventure

Obsidian Entertainment isn’t just building RPG worlds, they’re turning their company into one. New staff pick a RPG class on day one, then “level up” with gifts each year they stick around, stretching out over a stunning 20-year path. At a company famous for its work on The Outer Worlds, Avowed, and Grounded, employees get to be the main character in a journey that blends D&D flavor with workplace loyalty.

The program, freshly revealed in an interview with The Game Business, gives a look at why Obsidian has such a high staff retention rate, and how the studio’s love for RPGs shapes even their culture behind the scenes. VP of operations Marcus Morgan described the annual rewards in playful detail: “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.”

Pick Your Path: Warrior, Rogue, or Wizard

Your first choice at Obsidian isn’t which project you’ll work on, it’s which RPG class to embody during your career. On day one, every new hire is given a choice: will you be a warrior, rogue, or wizard? The decision shapes the physical gifts you’ll collect over the decades, each mapped to traditional RPG gear but realized as real-world items.

To illustrate, Morgan shared his own pick: “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.” He showed off a box etched with Path of the Warrior on the lid, packed with custom, D&D-style dice, the starter gift for all adventurers.

But the loot doesn’t stop at dice. “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,” he said. It’s a literal character progression, and a tangible way to see your time at the studio take shape.

Why Obsidian Wants Staff to Stay for Decades

Obsidian’s approach goes way beyond simple anniversary swag. This is about forging an identity within the company, and feeding into the same systems that make RPGs addictive and rewarding. Morgan summed it up: “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.”

The system is new, only recently rolled out, but it already reflects the studio’s DNA. “We just rolled them out recently,” Morgan added. The idea isn’t to keep things rigid, either. When asked if employees could switch roles or collect gear from other classes, he said: “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.” The longer you stay, the more epic your inventory, just like in their own games.

Obsidian is one of Xbox Game Studios’ most prolific teams. Since the Xbox Series X/S launched, they’ve dropped five games: Grounded, Pentiment, Avowed, Grounded 2 (now in early access), and The Outer Worlds 2 just last week. Their output is matched only by the quirky, ambitious ways they support the people making those worlds.

Building a Legacy, One Anniversary at a Time

Not many companies ask staff to picture a 20-year tenure, let alone reward it with themed dice, wizard cloaks, and the possibility to “multi-class.” At Obsidian, game design isn’t just for players. It’s for everyone under their roof, crafting a company culture as imaginative as anything they put in a trailer.