Feargus Urquhart Interview

I really can’t pass this interview with Obsidian’s Feargus Urquhart on Joystiq exclusively into Dungeon Siege III territory, as the CEO also discusses the new IP they’re working on, his discussions with Atari about Icewind Dale III, why he’d like to work on a new Ultima, and more.

The ultimate goal for a lot of studios making sequels is to finally jump off and work on their own original IP. Does Obsidian ever want to take that jump? “Absolutely,” confirms Urquhart, before going on to say that Obsidian already has an original IP title underway. “We have a whole big cool world idea that we can hopefully talk about soon. That is a whole new world, a whole new thing. It’s being put together by Josh Sawyer, who was the project director on Fallout New Vegas, and Chris Avellone is involved.”

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Obsidian is also pushing on updating a former Black Isle property: Icewind Dale 3. “I was talking to Atari last week,” he confides, “and said why don’t we do this?” The old series, he says, didn’t end because of low sales. “They stopped being made because of licensing issues, and Interplay going out of business, and BioWare moving on to console, and a whole lot of things. So a part of it is, why not go make Icewind Dale 3? You can’t spend $20 million on it, but why not go make it?”

And if Obsidian had their pick of any property to update and make their own? “I’d like to do Ultima,” says Urquhart. ” I think doing an Ultima would be awesome. I think it’s been long enough since Ultima 9. Those Ultima games that Garriot did were cool, and I think doing an Ultima would be awesome.”

There’s even more information about these same subjects in my interview with Feargus, but the Q&A isn’t quite ready to go live yet. Once he returns from GDC, hopefully it will be given the green light :).