A conversation with Emmanuel Obert, Chief Content Officer &amp; Co-founder at New Tales.Emmanuel and I first crossed paths at Blizzard, back when he was running publishing for Overwatch in Europe. We've kept in touch across studios and continents ever since.Over the past year, building Sparking Waves has put me in conversations with gaming leaders across Europe almost every week. When I decided to start Gaming Voices, I didn't have to think long about who to open the series with. Emmanuel thinks out loud in a way few people do: clearly, honestly, without needing to sound like he has it figured out. That's what I wanted to capture.Emmanuel brings over two decades of experience across Ubisoft, Blizzard, and now New Tales, the independent studio he co-founded. Today he leads creative and content direction, a role that sits at the crossroads of making games and communicating them to the world. I wanted to understand what that intersection looks like from the inside, and what he has learned that he wishes someone had told him earlier.<hr><h2 id="d37a18c2-a508-4548-a37b-c16171611a38" data-toc-id="d37a18c2-a508-4548-a37b-c16171611a38" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Craft</h2><h3 id="ca049346-800d-4197-856b-350dc4fc15d1" data-toc-id="ca049346-800d-4197-856b-350dc4fc15d1" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">What does your role look like today, and what are you currently focused on?</h3>My role is a bit of a hybrid, which I actually enjoy a lot. I lead creative and content direction at New Tales, so I'm constantly moving between the games themselves and how we express them to the outside world.Right now, most of my energy goes into Fading Echo and Terrinoth: Heroes of Descent. Fading Echo is the project closest to me. I've been deeply involved in shaping its universe, and it represents our first original IP and fully internal development at New Tales, so there's a very personal dimension to it.We're now in the final stretch of production, which means a strong focus on how the game feels to play. Not just how systems work on paper, but how readable, responsive, and satisfying everything is moment to moment. The combat system is quite systemic, built around elemental interactions and physicality, so a lot of our effort goes into making that underlying complexity feel natural and intuitive for the player.At the same time, I'm constantly thinking about how we communicate that experience. If players don't immediately "get it," they won't reach the depth we've built underneath. Bridging that gap between intention and perception is a big part of my role, both as a creative lead and as part of how we position our games at New Tales.<img src="https://ezycourse.b-cdn.net/6017/cmppnee4q1q7npgqu1semh20g.png" alt="image" containerstyle="width: 100%; height: auto; cursor: pointer; " wrapperstyle="display: flex"><h3 id="4b95e7d1-4ccd-49b6-9354-92443f802596" data-toc-id="4b95e7d1-4ccd-49b6-9354-92443f802596" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">What are you particularly passionate about?</h3>I'm obsessed with that moment when a system just clicks for the player. When you stop thinking about controls or rules and just start expressing yourself through the game. That's what I'm always chasing, and something I definitely learned during my time at Blizzard. With Fading Echo, we're really leaning into expressive combat, where players combine elements and movement in a way that becomes almost instinctive over time.More broadly, I care a lot about building original IPs. There's something very raw and exciting about starting from nothing and discovering what a game is, what it wants to be, and how it speaks to players.That said, working on existing IPs brings its own creative challenges. With Terrinoth, for example, exploring the unwritten parts of a known universe and making sure what you create fits organically within an established canon is incredibly stimulating. In the end, whether you're creating from scratch or working within an established framework, that act of creation is what drives me the most.<hr><h2 id="7972c23e-125f-4fb4-8514-28604fc3b0fc" data-toc-id="7972c23e-125f-4fb4-8514-28604fc3b0fc" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Pressure</h2><h3 id="e4646953-8dcb-4c6a-ad7a-0ab14983970b" data-toc-id="e4646953-8dcb-4c6a-ad7a-0ab14983970b" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">What's the biggest challenge you're navigating in the industry right now?</h3>Honestly, it's visibility. The market is incredibly crowded, with a huge number of high-quality games competing for attention. And beyond games, there's a constant stream of content, films, series, social media, so you're competing across entertainment as a whole.<blockquote>Quality alone isn't enough anymore. You also need to be immediately understandable and find a way to stand out in that noise.</blockquote>Players make decisions very quickly, and if your game doesn't communicate its identity almost instantly, it becomes very difficult to build momentum, especially as a smaller, independent structure.For us, that means constantly asking: are we making our games clearer, sharper, more readable, without losing what makes them unique? And are we communicating that clearly to players? That balance is probably the hardest part today.<hr><h2 id="c0d13127-9466-4ac1-8a06-6b6f9e3cc5c6" data-toc-id="c0d13127-9466-4ac1-8a06-6b6f9e3cc5c6" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Team</h2><h3 id="28e86339-0890-4c64-8afd-67be43d1298d" data-toc-id="28e86339-0890-4c64-8afd-67be43d1298d" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">What do you wish your team had more of? Skills, time, support, something else?</h3>Time, but in a very specific sense: uninterrupted time to iterate. A lot of what makes a game feel great doesn't show up in major milestones. It comes from dozens of small adjustments, timing, feedback, interactions between systems. That's where the real quality emerges, but it requires focus and continuity.So if I could give the team anything, it would be more space to go deep on those details without constantly switching context. The same applies to publishing: the ability to iterate, test, and learn is critical, and that ultimately comes down to time.<h3 id="4de2c4b0-2743-49f2-a59e-18432d867840" data-toc-id="4de2c4b0-2743-49f2-a59e-18432d867840" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">If budget and time weren't an issue, what's the one thing you'd invest in to make your team stronger?</h3>I'd invest in iteration speed. Anything that helps us move faster from idea to implementation to feedback has a massive impact. Better tools, stronger pipelines, more structured playtesting. Those are the kind of investments that compound over time.On a game like Fading Echo, where feel is everything, even small improvements in iteration speed can significantly elevate the final experience. The same applies to Terrinoth, especially with our current focus on multiplayer, where feedback loops are essential.<h3 id="d0415afc-83e4-43bd-8a21-6cf0845fa051" data-toc-id="d0415afc-83e4-43bd-8a21-6cf0845fa051" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">What's one thing you know now that you wish you'd known earlier in your career?</h3><blockquote>Methodology matters more than knowledge.</blockquote>Over time, you realise that everything around you evolves: tools, platforms, player expectations, even design standards. A lot of what you learn at one point simply stops being applicable because the context changes.What remains valuable is how you approach problems: your methodology, how you structure your thinking, how you iterate, how you learn. In a way, you have to accept that you "know less" than you think, but if your methodology is solid, you can adapt and keep growing. That's probably the most important lesson I've learned.<hr><h2 id="7f5bfb2b-2d5e-45c5-a6f5-29d8a07f8c09" data-toc-id="7f5bfb2b-2d5e-45c5-a6f5-29d8a07f8c09" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">The Lesson</h2><h3 id="1de179e6-3cd1-4e06-bd9e-6a963ee7c411" data-toc-id="1de179e6-3cd1-4e06-bd9e-6a963ee7c411" style="font-size: 20px; line-height: 1.2;">What's the best piece of advice you'd give to someone stepping into a leadership role in gaming today?</h3><blockquote>Don't try to be the smartest person in the room. </blockquote>Try to be the one who brings clarity. Your role is to create alignment: making sure everyone understands what you're building, why it matters, and what "good" looks like. If you get that right, the team will often come up with better solutions than you would on your own.You also need to cultivate the right mindset. I often think about a quote from Dr. Harold Winston in Overwatch: "Never accept the world for what it appears to be. Dare to see it for what it could be." For me, leadership is also about creating the conditions where people feel empowered to challenge assumptions, whether they come from habits, conventions, or even their own illusion of knowledge.And last but not least, stay connected to the player experience. It's easy to drift into abstraction in leadership roles, but in the end, everything comes back to what someone feels when they play your game. Video games are, above all, about human experiences.<hr><h2 id="484a5bb8-9cff-4e79-9329-1e3e1f7447cc" data-toc-id="484a5bb8-9cff-4e79-9329-1e3e1f7447cc" style="font-size: 24px; line-height: 1.2;">What this conversation left me with</h2>What stayed with me wasn't Emmanuel's experience. It was his ease around what he doesn't know and his trust in process over certainty. "Methodology over knowledge." That's not a lesson you pick up in a classroom. It settles in slowly, after years of watching solid expertise go obsolete and watching people with strong frameworks thrive in contexts they've never encountered before.As a coach, I see this every week. The leaders who navigate change best are rarely the ones with the most answers. They're the ones who know how to ask better questions and create enough clarity around them that their teams can do the same.Emmanuel has clearly built that into how he leads. And in an industry moving as fast as gaming right now, that might be the most durable advantage of all.<hr>Emmanuel Obert is Chief Content Officer and Co-founder at New Tales. You can follow his work on LinkedIn.Next conversation coming soon. Subscribe to the blog to catch it.

A conversation with Emmanuel Obert, Chief Content Officer & Co-founder at New Tales, on methodology, leadership, and what it really takes to build games that connect with players.

"Don't try to be the smartest person in the room" Gaming Voices #01

What does your role look like today, and what are you currently focused on?

What are you particularly passionate about?

What's the biggest challenge you're navigating in the industry right now?

What do you wish your team had more of? Skills, time, support, something else?

If budget and time weren't an issue, what's the one thing you'd invest in to make your team stronger?

What's one thing you know now that you wish you'd known earlier in your career?

What's the best piece of advice you'd give to someone stepping into a leadership role in gaming today?

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"Don't try to be the smartest person in the room" Gaming Voices #01

"Don't try to be the smartest person in the room" Gaming Voices #01

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