Obsidian Entertainment Video Interview

Atomic Gamer provides us with a video interview with Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart about Dungeon Siege III (porting it to consoles, and the like), before moving on to subjects like smaller projects.

Feargus Urquhart: So we always want to make big epic RPGs, it’s what I love to do, it’s what we all love to do. But we have actually been working on an XBLA game, it’s sort of a “how do you take one of our RPGs and put it on XBLA”. So we’re now taking it around to publishers and seeing who is interested in publishing it. Hopefully there’ll be an announcement in the next few months on what we’ve been doing, sort of like what Tim Schafer’s group has been doing, in taking everything we know about these bigger games and making it a little bit smaller.

AtomicGamer: Do you feel like there’s room for a…coz y’know, every RPG has to have action now. Do you feel like in the direction of downloadable games, you can go back to the roots of turn-based RPGs? And can you get both PC and console players in that.

Feargus Urquhart: That’s a tough call. Someone had asked me back at E3; “Why aren’t there Baldur’s Gate/Icewind Dale/Planescape: Torment type games anymore?” And I didn’t have a good answer. I’m usually full of good answers, and you can insert whatever word you want with answers. But it made me stop and go “well, why isn’t there?” It’s not because we weren’t selling them. They actually were all selling…obviously BG2 sold amazingly, not amazingly more but quite a bit more than BG1 did. Icewind Dale 1 and Icewind Dale 2 did well too, Torment did well. So why did we stop making them? And the answer wasn’t “because they weren’t selling”, the answer was because BioWare moved on to the console and Interplay lost the license for D&D stuff. It made me think “I would go buy a game like that”. And so it’s one of the things we’ve been kicking around in our heads a lot, like “how about an Icewind Dale 3, how would people react to an Icewind Dale 3?” Obviously it couldn’t be exactly the same, you can’t just dust off the code and render new art, it has to be more than that. It has to take where players are today, because even for PC players, what we remember fondly from 12, 13 years ago, I don’t know if we’d feel as fondly about it today, if it was a full-priced product. But picking up something like Icewind: Dale for GOG or something like that, go do that. But you have to think a bit diffirently, but I think there’s something there. We’ve been talking about it. I don’t know if it’s going to happen, but I think it’d be cool.