Black Isle Speaks

Feargus Urquhart, President of Black Isle Studios, made a post on the official Black Isle message boards explaining exactly why TORN was cancelled and what the company has been up to recently. Here’s a rip from the post:

I noticed that there have been a number of posts about a few things over the course of the last month. I will try to give you all as much information about these things that I can. Unfortunately due to Interplay being a public company and some of these things having to do with legal matters, it is hard for me to explain everything.

1) TORN being cancelled. I have heard that a lot of people felt that this was done by a flippant “corporate” decision. So you all know, it was ultimately my decision to cancel TORN. This was approved by others at Interplay, but if it had not been a decision I was happy with, then TORN would not have been cancelled. To be somewhat frank with all of you, the development of the project was not going well. I am not talking about only a few things going badly on the project – I am talking about almost nothing going right on the project. I felt that the best decision was to get people off of it and onto other things. A lot of very talented people who work for BIS were working on TORN and I felt that a lot of them would have left or got burnt out if the project continuued. The best way I can explain it is that, while you may wish as hard as you can for something – it doesn’t always work out.

2) The Neverwinter Boards. Unfortunately I can not discuss the Neverwinter Boards coming down. I can say that Black Isle is still 100% behind BioWare and Neverwinter Nights, and will do whatever we can do to help with the project. Ultimately the Neverwinter boards would have been hosted by BioWare – this just happened on a faster timeline.

3) Project Announcements. I know people are worried about us not having announced anything recently. To at least put some of people’s fears to rest – we are working on things – a lot of which are very cool. However, either due to project timelines or approvals we are not in a position to talk about any of them yet. Believe me, as soon as we can talk about them, you will all hear all about them.

As always, please feel free to ask any further questions.

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Feargus Urquhart
President
Black Isle Studios