Feargus Urquhart Interview

One good Feargus Urquhart interview deserves another. So, hot on the heels of this recent Gamepressure interview with Obsidian’s CEO, we’re treated to this one from NME.

This new interview primarily focuses on Obsidian’s recent experiments with non-RPG projects and how that doesn’t necessarily reflect a major shift in the studio’s direction, what with even their more experimental projects like Grounded and Pentiment still carrying some of that Obsidian DNA within them.

It also touches on some really out-there projects that never got a chance to materialize, like a game based on the Cops reality TV show. We also get a neat little trip down memory lane covering Urquhart’s time over at Interplay and the early years of Obsidian.

And finally, we get a chance to look towards the future, with titles like Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 looming on the horizon and Microsoft now overseeing things.

All in all, there’s a lot to go through there, so here’s a couple of sample paragraphs to get you started:

“I think we are in a different place because of the Microsoft acquisition,” he explains, arguing that while the team would probably have ended up working on The Outer Worlds 2 either way – the original has so far sold over four million copies – they likely wouldn’t also be developing Avowed simultaneously, or have the extra 90 staff who have joined since Microsoft took over.

In what could be a sign of the strength of the relationship, or a telling slip into corporate speak, Urquhart repeatedly leans on his inner Vin Diesel when discussing Microsoft, returning repeatedly to one word: family.

“We’re the same family,” he says when discussing how it compares to the traditional developer-publisher dynamic. Instead of simply fulfilling a contract, the question instead is: “How do we take care of each other?”