[8] Upon finishing high school, he moved south and pursued a degree in architecture at Virginia Tech because he had enjoyed drawing maps and structures for his pen-and-paper gaming sessions.

[9][10] After two years, however, he realized his "sketchbook was often filled with more sentences than sketches", which made him question himself and led to him transferring to the College of William & Mary and switching over to English as his major, graduating in 1994 with a minor in fine arts as well.

[8] He then contributed mission design to Interplay's 1997 game Star Trek: Starfleet Academy, a space flight simulator that made extensive use of full motion video.

[45]: 1 [46] 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.

[16]: 2  When Colin McComb was assigned to Last Rites as its second designer in April 1997,[47] 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.

[16]: 2 [52] 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.

[71] Icewind Dale was released in June 2000 and was well-received, but was regarded by Avellone[58]: 2  and the general public as not pushing the genre forward compared to Black Isle's previous games.

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.

[79][80] Black Isle's Torn, which Avellone did not work on[81] but had offered occasional design input on,[82][83] was cancelled in July 2001,[84] as Urquhart estimated it would not be done in time to help Interplay with the financial difficulties it was going through.

[91] Once the license turned out to have been lost because of unpaid royalties,[70] The Black Hound was cancelled after a year and a half of active development, which made Urquhart leave the company in frustration[92] in April 2003.

[93] 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.

[94][72] Now a free agent, Avellone was invited by Snowblind Studios to help with the writing on their next game, Champions of Norrath: Realms of EverQuest — another console action RPG in the same vein as Dark Alliance but taking place in the EverQuest universe — as they had enjoyed working with Avellone despite their relationship with Black Isle becoming frayed after Black Isle had used their engine to make Dark Alliance II without their permission or involvement.

[104][105][106] 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[107] and in the Star Wars franchise.

[127] 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[128][129][130] and sometimes referring to it as a thematic sequel of the latter.

Avellone was assigned as its creative lead[48] and sought to incorporate survival mechanics into the title, giving players the goal of building up a base over time and carefully managing their resources in a tense atmosphere[136] where they would be vulnerable to attack even during conversations.

[139] 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.

[160][150] After getting Dark Horse in touch with Bethesda, Avellone also wrote All Roads, a graphic novel included with the collector's edition of New Vegas that detailed the events leading up to the beginning of the game.

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.

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,[185] and Avellone publicly began expressing interest in one in July 2012.

Both characters have been regarded as fan favorites,[227] 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.

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.

[236] 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.

The two of them initially met up at E3 2015 to discuss the project, after which Avellone flew out to Arkane's studio in Austin, Texas, where he was shown the game and taken through its critical path storyline before being asked to try his hand at writing two of the side characters.

[240] On the 29th of June, 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,[241] but this goal was not reached.

[250][251][252] 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.

[256] 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.

[263] 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.

[264] In July 2017, Green Tree Games announced a tactical leadership World War II RPG titled Burden of Command,[265] bringing Avellone in as a senior advisor tasked with guiding the developers on "creating empathy, memorable characters, and compelling narrative arcs".

[268][269] 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.

[271] 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.