Obsidian Entertainment - Backspace A Sci-fi Game from Obsidian

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Obsidian Entertainment - A Sci-fi Game Called Backspace

Kotaku has news about a new Obsidian game called Backspace. It was a time traveling sci-fi ARPG that a small team at Obsidian worked on for a while before getting shelved.

Imagine, if you will, a massive role-playing game featuring guns, time travel, and a nasty alien invasion, all built on Skyrim's engine, with Skyrim's "Radiant AI" system.

That's Backspace, a project that was once under development at the studio Obsidian, I've learned from sources. A small team was designing and prototyping the game in early 2011, and although progress never got very far, concept art and design documents reveal an ambitious project that could interest a lot of people, if it's ever made.

Obsidian, of course, is the Irvine-based game studio responsible for Fallout: New Vegas, Alpha Protocol, and the upcoming RPGs Project Eternity and South Park: The Stick of Truth.

I reached out to the studio yesterday to ask for comment, and Obsidian boss Feargus Urquhart told me that Backspace is still on the shelf somewhere.

"Backspace was a project concept that we neither cancelled nor greenlit," Urquhart told me. "We had some great people work on the idea for Backspace for a bit of time and then moved them off to other projects as opportunities came up. We've been around for ten years now and have had a bunch of great ideas that we still have sitting around that we may be able to return to in the future."
More information.
 
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Action RPG. Meh. Love the Mass Effect universe, but something tells me this would be more like Borderlands.

C'mon Obsidian, make another Fallout after Project Eternity. I'll pay for it.
 
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Lot of intriguing ideas in that article... wish they could have pitched this on Kickstarter instead of the stale and tired mess of Project Eternity. Potential problems with licensing Bethesda's engine on a Kickstarter project likely curtailed any progress down that road however.
 
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Wrong funding scale for KS. I'd wager a development budget around $20-30 million if they keep it tight.
 
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This game would have been awesome. What a shame it won't get made!
 
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A mouth-watering concept. I'm not so sure about the AI system though; having a bunch of chatty but useless computer programs seems… dubious. Maybe they go on hacking encounters?
 
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Wrong funding scale for KS. I'd wager a development budget around $20-30 million if they keep it tight.

Actually most of the budget for games that cost $20-30 million is in the marketing and it only costs a few million to actually make most games. In this case they were planning on using an already developed engine so it would cost even less so probably would be within the budget of a Kickstarter.
 
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Actually most of the budget for games that cost $20-30 million is in the marketing and it only costs a few million to actually make most games. In this case they were planning on using an already developed engine so it would cost even less so probably would be within the budget of a Kickstarter.
Your right Fergus already stated on a previous interview it's not as expensive as people think to use licensed engines to make games. Marketing and staff size are the biggest cash wasters.
Urquhart revealed that some games we think of as AAA actually cost significantly less—Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas were called out specifically—due to a different development philosophy. He also stressed that better tools allow high quality games to be made for less money, and that the big publisher model is ultimately something that will remain restricted to a very small percentage of studios going forward.
 
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Your right Fergus already stated on a previous interview it's not as expensive as people think to use licensed engines to make games. Marketing and staff size are the biggest cash wasters.

Staff size? Well yes, but surely you need the staff to make the games. Of course it's a challenge for many businesses that they have to retain staff over lean periods, like hotels in the off season.
 
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Staff size? Well yes, but surely you need the staff to make the games. Of course it's a challenge for many businesses that they have to retain staff over lean periods, like hotels in the off season.
Yes but that staff eats up your resources everyday, and their not infinite they will run out. You were given x amount of money to make y, and publishers don't like giving more easily.

Marketing though is the most resource drain as it can cost $10 million or more on larger games. Look at the COD games for an example that is outrageous.

You also have to figure in rent and other expenses. If your using your own money it gets even worse.

Game development is not as easy as we think it is.:)
 
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Actually the marketing costs more then $10 million since the marketing budget for "The Witcher 2" was about $18 million.

Joxer: I guess you must have hated Fallout: New Vegas then since it was a massive rpg.
 
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