RPG Codex - Interview with Feargus Urquhart

Jedi Master Radek: If you ever get a chance to develop a game in the World of Darkness setting, what qualities should this potential game possess? What should a great World of Darkness game be like?

Feargus Urquhart: Gotcha! That's… that's a lot of… so, what's interesting about World of Darkness is, we were talking to, we were talking to White Wolf, geez, in 2007? 2008? Well, maybe 2006, 2007. I was… we were talking about doing a World of Darkness game and so I think a World of Darkness game can be done in lots of different ways. But I think like, Bloodlines is a great example of one way, and I think that, that one way if we were ever to make a World of Darkness game, I would want to, I think Bloodlines is a good direction. I think that the other direction, what we had been talking back then, is because we were working on Neverwinter Nights 2 and we thought wouldn't be it cool to take Neverwinter Nights 2 and do a World of Darkness version of Neverwinter Nights. I mean not Dungeons and Dragons, but you know, and then it would not only would it give people, we could make that story and character-based RPG, but what we could also do is then give everybody the tools to go build their own World of Darkness, which is you know, ehm, the Storyteller. The Storyteller? [short pause] I forgot what's the name of the RPG system. I can't believe I just blanked on it. The RPG system is very much about telling stories, not so much about stats. And so if we could create that thing, where people could now create their own worlds and run their own little servers and everything. I thought that would be, that would be a really cool way to make a World of Darkness game.

JMR: One of Obsidian's canceled project we know the least about is Dwarfs.

FU: [enthusiastically] Mmm hmm, mmm hmm?

JMR: Could you tell us something more about it…

FU: Right.

JMR: …and if we'll ever get a chance to see those Brian Menze concepts…

FU: [laughs]

JMR: …Kevin Saunders praised so much?

FU: [laughs] Yeah, I don't, so, so, you know. If there is… I would love to share those concepts, and I should ask at some point, I should ask to see if, if Disney would be okay. I have a feeling they would say no, and that's not because they're bad people, but I think that that would be, but I should ask, and so…but particularly, you know, working with a company like Disney, we always, we have to ask to share things. But I will try to share stuff about the game, you know. It was, so it was a third person, it had a party of the dwarfs… so it was you as the prince and then you had dwarfs, and it was third person so you were kinda running, and it had this kind of interesting where as you…you had a conversation system as you were moving with your companions, so it was running from place to place. I can press A, B or, or I could talk with my companions, but I didn't have to stop and talk to them. You could have bigger conversations outside that, but I thought that was interesting. I thought the fight system was pretty cool. From the standpoint of it… it sorta was this fight system which it had these kind of concentric rings of like…and things could be in the different rings, and so it felt really good to do it. It was… we were really proud of like the vertical slice we ended up doing. It had… it was very sort of streamed in open world. So there was no… you just went from place to place and you did stuff there and you did stuff there and that was on a very early version of Unreal 3. And it just had all these qualities, the art was fun, the prince, it felt like, it felt like, I don't want to say a youthful fable. But it just… it was, it had more like… it was just more cartoony but, it was just more fun and like, youthful. And it was too bad that one didn't move forward. I think we… there's still people at Obsidian today that are, that still ask me about doing it. You know and I'm like, particularly now with the announcement stuff from Disney. Yeah, it's too bad that that one didn't keep on going.

JMR: Did it go past the vertical slice, or not much more?

FU: We were at vertical slice, so basically it was at vertical slice where it was canceled.

Originally Posted by Feargus Urquhart
[enthusiastically] Mmm hmm, mmm hmm?

Originally Posted by wiretripped
Reading that interview made my brain hurt a little.