Chris Avellone on Obsidian’s Canceled Aliens RPG

With a new Alien-themed pen and paper RPG in the works, now might be a good time to look back at what could have been. As such, you may be interested in this VG247 article where Chris Avellone briefly talks about Obsidian Entertainment’s Aliens: Crucible, a canceled RPG that resembled a mix of Mass Effect and the movie Prometheus. A snippet:

The RPG would have seen players flying to an alien planet where they’d find one of the ships or installations – like what they find in Prometheus – left behind by the Engineers, as well as a valley of creation and weapon testing facilities.

“But as you’re entering the atmosphere, [you realise] that this planet is incredibly unstable, so your entire crew gets blasted all over the planet,” Avellone explained. “And you land and the player, and some marines, and your squads, and scientists – and the weird thing is that when Prometheus came out, I saw some of the similarities, [and thought] ‘oh, we had a character like that’. But the entire world was more violent and there were a lot more Aliens running around. It was more a question of survival, and ‘how do we recover all the supplies, and desperately try to make a base?’ It was fun to set up.”