Despite what CEO Feargus Urquhart said that it ”felt like it was ready to ship”, Avellone divulged it was far from ready. It was a third-person RPG and we picked two companions.
It wasn’t a marine squad, said Avellone, but more of a mix of skills and backgrounds that helped diversify the experience. It also had us base building to survive against the xenomorphs.
”…you create your own avatar in the Aliens universe, you guide a squad of - it’s not like a Marine squad, it’s a whole mix of different individuals who happen to be in this one location at this one time, which allows for a lot more variety,” described Chris Avellone, speaking at Rezzed 2013.
”If you’re dealing with a ship repair mechanic who may have no combat experience whatsoever, that obviously would serve a vital function in surviving in this predicament. So it’s more of a third-person, two companions with you survival game, but it had a lot of the RPG trappings in terms of you could set up your own stronghold and base and build that up over time, explore more of the environment, figure out how you get all of the resources and stuff to survive.”
The project was ”shaping up to be pretty strong” but SEGA scrapped the project in 2009.
”No, I don’t believe that was the case,” he said, when on the topic of it being ‘ready to ship’. ”It was mostly just focused on the vertical slice of gameplay that was solid.”
”There was a lot of game design being done: obviously the narrative was down, the systems were down for what we wanted to do, all the companions had all the breakdowns for all of their narrative arcs, the concept art followed that.”
A 13 minute long gameplay video of Aliens: Crucible leaked onto the Internet earlier in 2013. ”There was a vertical slice of it and I don’t know if the video that was released was the actual vertical slice that we had,” he said. ”One of our designers mentioned that it was actually a milestone build from like a month or two before the actual vertical slice.”
”…man I’m really sorry that I didn’t get a chance to do it, but things just didn’t work out.”
Despite the obvious pain of having SEGA cancel the project, and the subsequent laying off of staff, Obsidian did at least get to walk away from Aliens: Crucible with the technology they had been developing for the game.
Today Obsidian is creating Kickstarter RPG Project Eternity and wrapping up on South Park.
