Interview Feargus Urquhart feargs out at Red Bull Games, reveals Obsidian turned down Game of Thrones RPG

[Forest Dweller]

“Part of it was very interesting to us because of the focus on characters, and that’s kind of what we do. But if you think about the world, it’s so much about the politics and it’s so much about the linear story of what’s going on. Then you tie that to magic playing a very little role, and to be honest, [the story is] mostly [about] people. There’s not a lot of standard role-playing fantasy things, [like] putting an adventuring party together and going to find the abandoned ruins full of zombies and witches and ghosts and spectres and ghouls and all that kind of stuff.

Fixed.

 

[Name]

Red Bull Games reminds me of Red Eagle Entertainment.

They could have add The Wheel of Time into their impressive IP turn-down list.

Does that mean A Game of Thrones: Genesis is actually brainchild of Feargus?

Because it's an RTS, it has geopolitical phase and then war phase, and you can call it more like a war simulation than the usual C&C-style RTS.

 

[hiver]

Whats the problem here?

Feargus was right. You cant make any kind of BG/DnD rpg out of ... well, not even from the retarded shit like GoT without making even bigger incoherent shit out of it.

As for the original story Songs of Ice and Fire, i..

The story is too specified and too determined, so you cant have any deviations from it or from all the predetermined characters.
If you deviate, you end up in stupid laughable shit territory. If you dont, then its not an RPG and you cant turn it into an aRPG either without turning it into stupid garbage.

Of course, such garbage would sell just based on hype and most of codex would have slurped it all and loved it.
After all, the only important value is how fun it is.

 

[Crescent Hawk]

Glad they didnt get it, its such a dull fantasy world. Would actually prefer another Stars Wars game.

 

[Zeronet]

Would of loved a post-apoc game, especially after being so disappointed with WL2. I liked FNV but kept wishing it wasnt hamstrung by the gamebyro engine etc.

 

[Crescent Hawk]

Would of loved a post-apoc game, especially after being so disappointed with WL2. I liked FNV but kept wishing it wasnt hamstrung by the gamebyro engine etc.

I would love a ancient world,Mesopotamia, 10000bc, Iliad, Argonauts rpg, its such a simple and beautiful setting. What was the last one? Titan Quest? A Iliad rpg would be badass. All the mystery, the mythological creatures.

 

[Ninjerk]

Anthony Davis delivers again.

Clearly, the message to take from this is to insult Obsidian employees/CEO more often.

That Tim Cain guy is washed up and couldn't make a good TB RPG if he had the entire Obsidian development budget

Spoiler

give him everything

 

[Morality Games]

The level aggression certain members of the Codex have shown to Obsidian and Josh Sawyer in particular is sort of tense and strange.

im gonna drop my pants and show you something tense, strange and aggressive

Well, alright.

Spoiler

This isn't going to be your penis, right? RIGHT?

 

[Ovplain]

In fact, around eight years ago, Obsidian actually turned down the opportunity to do the first Game of Thrones RPG.

So that was well before Game Of Thrones premiered on HBO. It was already a popular series of fantasy novels, sure, but it wasn't close to what it is now, pretty much a household name. Probably wasn't that hard to turn it down back then and they probably did turn it down for the reasons Feargus stated.

 

[Lady_Error]

I wonder how much magic will be in that Breakfast Club RPG MCA is always talking about?

Or Avellone's "The Wire RPG".

 

[Shevek]

A good Star Trek game would be nice. I haven't played a Trek game I REALLY liked since "A Final Unity." I am sure Obsidian would make a good one.

 

[Name]

Didn't Avellone start reading (indie) comics again last year or so? They should pick one and start a kickstarter for adaptation, will be just in time for the Telltale Marvel adaptation bandwagon starting next year.

It's way more realistic than Archer RPG.

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

Whats the problem here?

Feargus was right. You cant make any kind of BG/DnD rpg out of ... well, not even from the retarded shit like GoT without making even bigger incoherent shit out of it.

As for the original story Songs of Ice and Fire, i..

The story is too specified and too determined, so you cant have any deviations from it or from all the predetermined characters.
If you deviate, you end up in stupid laughable shit territory. If you dont, then its not an RPG and you cant turn it into an aRPG either without turning it into stupid garbage.

Of course, such garbage would sell just based on hype and most of codex would have slurped it all and loved it.
After all, the only important value is how fun it is.

Fun should be filtered to an appropriately retarded word. Too many dumbfucks will use it to justify them liking a game that they gullibly bought and is simply shit.

 

[RK47]

Yeah, clearly GoT doesn't have enough xaurips.
Killing people is boring.

 

[DeepOcean]

Obsidian should stop with this nonsense, Fergie talk too much and most of the time is hot air, if they were so fucked before the kickstarter why they didn't on PoE: place MCA as Creative lead, Tim Cain as project lead, re hire Ziets ASAP (once he is done with Torment now). The way they did the kickstarter was... yeah, gonna let Sawyer go wild with all crazy popamole balance ideas on a nostalgic project and Fenstermaker that cleary needs some more experience to handle being the lead writer with no major help from a more experienced writer like Avellone, get Tim Cain to waste time programming stuff(common the stronghold was a joke, I don't believe for a minute he spent those whole 2 years designing it.) and Avellone probably on some console crap and probably contributing more for the kickstarer for a game of another company than on your own.

This doesn't make sense Obsidian. It is like you have the soccer dream team and when you go to the finals you just think alright, I will go with the reserve team and the few players that are experienced on the reserve team (Sawyer) instead of playing the tried a trusted strategy to win the game, they go all crazy on tactics because they think they can reinvent the wheel in two years without causing major problems when nobody even asked for it in the first place to chase this casual RPG gamer popularity dream. You know, kinda shitty that the PC master race fans that actually even know who Obsidian is and respect the work of the people that work in there are treated like second rate, low priority, garbage to milk. Yeah, I hope the russians really enjoy their MMO and tank BOOM BOOM MMO because sure as hell Obsidian doesn't give a flying fuck to old school gamers.

 

[Black]

You either die a developer or live long enough to see yourself become the CEO.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

I was always waiting for Obsidian to get the crappy fantasy game out of the way so they could focus on a good Kickstarter campaign.

 

[Ninjerk]

Yeah, clearly GoT doesn't have enough xaurips.
Killing people is boring.

 

[Athelas]

This doesn't make sense Obsidian. It is like you have the soccer dream team and when you go to the finals you just think alright, I will go with the reserve team and the few players that are experienced on the reserve team (Sawyer) instead of playing the tried a trusted strategy to win the game

You seem to be forgetting that Sawyer was responsible both for Obsidian's best selling-game and their most universally acclaimed game, and was formerly a lead on Van Buren and Baldur's Gate 3. 'Reserve team' is a very weird qualifier.

Avellone and Cain have also expressed the desire to work in smaller roles rather than be the lead of a big game.

Which means from the perspective of Feargus, it's going to be all Sawyer for all games.

 

[Hobo Elf]

What the world needs is less GoT trite. Good on him for turning it down.

 

[Duraframe300]

Obsidian should stop with this nonsense, Fergie talk too much and most of the time is hot air, if they were so fucked before the kickstarter why they didn't on PoE: place MCA as Creative lead, Tim Cain as project lead, re hire Ziets ASAP (once he is done with Torment now). The way they did the kickstarter was... yeah, gonna let Sawyer go wild with all crazy popamole balance ideas on a nostalgic project and Fenstermaker that cleary needs some more experience to handle being the lead writer with no major help from a more experienced writer like Avellone, get Tim Cain to waste time programming stuff(common the stronghold was a joke, I don't believe for a minute he spent those whole 2 years designing it.) and Avellone probably on some console crap and probably contributing more for the kickstarer for a game of another company than on your own.

This doesn't make sense Obsidian. It is like you have the soccer dream team and when you go to the finals you just think alright, I will go with the reserve team and the few players that are experienced on the reserve team (Sawyer) instead of playing the tried a trusted strategy to win the game, they go all crazy on tactics because they think they can reinvent the wheel in two years without causing major problems when nobody even asked for it in the first place to chase this casual RPG gamer popularity dream. You know, kinda shitty that the PC master race fans that actually even know who Obsidian is and respect the work of the people that work in there are treated like second rate, low priority, garbage to milk. Yeah, I hope the russians really enjoy their MMO and tank BOOM BOOM MMO because sure as hell Obsidian doesn't give a flying fuck to old school gamers.

That reserve team just managed their possible biggest win before though with New Vegas.

Even by Codex *opinion* if you look at the poll.

Edit: Oh, I'm very late.

 

[Rake]

I think i prefered Sawyer when he was still under the curse of his games getting canceled...

 

[Israfael]

Ah it's funny to see that a high fantasy deconstruction novel is now being referred as an example of the said fantasy. It's kinda ironic that ASoIaF suffered the same fate as Farscape - what has begun as anti-LoTR or anti-Star Trek ended up as a typical 'gritty war drama' (tm), when the thing gained in popularity. I'm almost expecting the next GRRM book to be of the same stripe as the most recent Drizzt Salvatore novels (flashy Michael Bay style action, a lot of pseudo-reflections by the main character cast and lots of senseless and random deaths (i'd say i was amused with the way Drizzt died in the last book i read). Still, it'd be intresting to see a truly Obsidianite deconstruction-in-deconstruction type of game.

 

[hiver]

AsoIaF was never anti-LoTR.

It was anti cheap repetitive derivative shit copies of LOTR. Anti - cliche.

 

[tyrannosaurus rex]

It was a cheap cliche of medieval europe instead. Now it's evolving into a new take on the absurd genre.