GB Feature: E3 2010: Feargus Urquhart Interview

Following my conversation with Chris Avellone at this year’s E3, I had the opportunity to sit down with Feargus Urquhart in between demonstrations of Dungeon Siege III at the Square Enix booth. The Obsidian Entertainment CEO didn’t hold back on anything, even answering my questions about their post-release plans for Alpha Protocol, the project they’re working on in addition to New Vegas and DS3, what the deal is with The Wheel of Time, their talks with Atari about doing a Baldur’s Gate III, what they might end up doing with the Icewind Dale assets they purchased years ago, and more. A few excerpts:

GB: I don’t know if you can talk about Aliens: Crucible, and I assume “Crucible” was going to be the final subtitle… is there any chance of that project getting picked up again?

Feargus: It was the internal subtitle and I’m not sure if there was ever an official name for the game. I thought it was turning out really good, but I don’t think we would make it at this point. I think the last milestone that we did was a great milestone and I think it was showing a lot of progress. But, we’ve moved on from that. What’s great is that our internal engine, Onyx, is what we built for Aliens and it’s now being used for Dungeon Siege III.

…

GB: Have you been having anymore discussions with Atari? I know at one time you mentioned to me off the record that maybe you were in negotiations about making a third installment to our favorite D&D game…

Feargus: Well you know, it’s one of those things. I constantly call and contact everybody, we have what we think is an awesome pitch for Baldur’s Gate III. We continue to talk to people and talk to Atari, and talk to Hasbro, and have been trying to figure it out. I would love to make it.

…

GB: Have you ever thought about bypassing all of that and not even using a license? You know, just go with D20 or the OGL ruleset and just create your own RPG?

Feargus: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s funny you should mention that. We’ve been talking about that recently and I need to call them up to ask the question about whether D20 is encumbered by all of the stuff going on or not. But it would be a cool thing to use D20. I actually checked the other day whether the open gaming license covers 4th Edition D20 and it does.

The entire four-page interview can be found here.