Feargus Urquhart on Pillars of Eternity II, Tyranny, Bloodlines Sequel and Secret Project

Gamepressure has published its full interview with Feargus Urquhart, the CEO of Obsidian Entertainment, after offering us an early snippet in which they confirmed Pillars of Eternity II is in production. During the interview, Urquhart talks about his new attitude towards bigger projects and IP ownership, the differences between Tyranny and Pillars of Eternity, and the genesis of the project.

He also teases Obsidian’s new secret project, though it doesn’t sound like it will be a Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines sequel in spite of Tim Cain and Leonard Boyarsky’s involvement:

You could consider Tyranny a slightly smaller project than, for example, Pillars of Eternity. Is there something big that you’re working on at the same time?

Everything we’re working on right now is announced, except for one thing.Well, Eternity II is not announced, but it seems silly for me not to acknowledge it, though. If someone asks: (Are you working on it?), I respond: (Well, wouldn’t you work on it?). So then they say: (So you must be working on it), and then I’m like: (Well, yeah). How do you even get around that? It’s tough. So we have Eternity, Tyranny, the Pathfinder Adventures card game, and then there’s Armored Warfare. And that sucks up all but a few people. We’re looking at what the next thing will be that we’re going to make. We have Tim Cain working for us and Leonard Boyarsky has come to work for us recently. So I let people put two and two together.
That sounds interesting! Does this have anything to do with the Unreal Engine-based prototype that you mentioned during your podcast with Game Informer?

It’s funny, even our artists wanted to get good at Unreal Engine 4. But no, it is NOT a Star Wars game. What our artists did is that they created Mos Eisley in Unreal Engine 4. We think that the whole reason for it is that one of our artists, Jason Lewis, who’s working on Armored Warfare and worked on Call of Duty and Medal of Honor beforehand, really wanted to create a one-million polygon Millenium Falcon. Then he just convinced a bunch of artists to build Mos Eisley around it. But there was a purpose to it, which was to learn everything about the Unreal Engine so that we could use it.

White Wolf Publishing registered Vampire Bloodlines. Would you like to work on that?

I think Vampire would be really cool, but that’s the tough bit there are so many cool things, there are so many awesome things out there. I know Tim and Leonard both loved working on it. We flirted with White Wolf long ago, right before CCP actually bought White Wolf. Mike Tinney was the president of White Wolf, and we got to know each other. What we were trying to figure out back then was whether we could take the Neverwinter 2 engine and do a Vampire or a World of Darkness game. It would be cool, not only as just a game, but also from the standpoint of people who love World of Darkness, who would then be able to go and make more World of Darkness modules and things like that. It would be cool, I’ve always loved Vampire, I read the books, read the novels, all kinds of that stuff.