That’s not even counting a string of pitches for licensed games that never saw the light of day, from tantalising ideas including a Walking DeadRPG (with the team unable to get publishers interested) or a Rick and Morty game (which petered out due to the Microsoft acquisition) to downright eyebrow-raising possibilities like a game based on the reality show Cops. Urquhart is quick to rule out an Obsidian take on sitting behind a steering wheel (“I feel like you have to have 15 years of experience in racing games to say you’re going to start up a new racing game”), and admits that the studio once shelved a Journey to the Centre of the Earth-inspired game that would have seen them competing against God of War. That means some things are off the table. My job is to say, ‘Hey, does it make sense to make this game? Are you guys really into it? Is this going to be meaningful to the player and do we have the ability to make this?’” “I don’t look at it as my job to be prescriptive in certain ways. “So much about a game is the team,” he adds, arguing that at the core of both Grounded and Pentiment is “things we know how to do and things the team knows how to do.” “The core there is that these teams are led by people that have been here for a long time,” Urquhart explains. To find that connection, you have to look outside the games themselves. It’s less clear how Grounded, a traditional action-survival game with a microscopic setting, connects to the company’s past though. The art team’s careful recreation of illuminated manuscripts is more of a departure. You can see some of Obsidian’s RPG pedigree in the “super dialogue-focused” adventure game Pentiment, which prioritises narrative and character development as the player investigates a murder in 16th Century Bavaria. Almost all see the player leading a party of characters through dense storylines and carefully constructed worlds, with combat often taking a backseat to interpersonal dynamics and branching dialogue trees. That’s a pretty good description of most of the Obsidian canon, which includes games like Fallout: New Vegas, Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, and Pillars of Eternity. “I’m always thinking about how we don’t need to just peg ourselves as ‘we make region-based, character-focused, party-based, first person RPGs that use our dialogue tool set’,” he says of the move to a more “eclectic” slate of games. The Honey I Shrunk the Kids-inspired survival adventure Groundedand medieval monastery murder mystery Pentiment are hardly the games most fans would expect from one of the industry’s most acclaimed – and iconic – RPG studios, but Urquhart sees a method to the madness. That track record makes it all the stranger that the latest two releases from Obsidian Entertainment, the development studio he’s led since founding it in 2003, aren’t RPGs at all. Across a decades-long career as both developer and publisher he’s worked on three Falloutgames, most of the good Dungeons & Dragons titles, and even an unexpectedly successful RPG spin on South Park. Few have left as heavy a mark on the world of role-playing games (RPGs) as Feargus Urquhart.
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