Obsidian’s Feargus Urquhart on the Future of RPGs

PC Gamer has published a short but dense interview on the state and future of the role-playing game genre with Feargus Urquhart, the CEO of Obsidian Entertainment. In the interview, Urquhart talks about the games that interested him from the last few years (mostly AAA to AA RPGs), the themes he’d like to see tackled in new RPGs, and how he thinks the genre will be affected by new technologies. An excerpt:

PCG: Broadly speaking, what would you say are the topics, types of subject matter or story themes that you think RPGs will explore (or explore more) in the next few years? Are there any kinds of story you personally wish that RPGs would look into more – or less?

FU: Funnily enough, this is something we talk about a lot. We ask ourselves questions like, if Fallout came out now, would it resonate the same way as it did in 1997. Fallout was made by a bunch of Gen Xers – the cold war kids. Now-a-days, I think we should look at how invasive technology has gotten into our lives, where AI is going, what is it to be human or machine (Tears in Rain by Bruna Husky is a cool book about that), hacking biological viruses, could anything we want be printed in twenty years and what would that mean, and what is the natural progression of mega-corporations like Apple and Amazon and their ecosystems? I’m not trying to get all paranoid here, but it’s interesting to take a lot of these things to a logical end, particularly when I think those things are concerning to a lot people.