After the cancellation of "Dwarfs", Obsidian's role-playing game prequel to "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" it was developing for Disney, the staff from that game began work on "Alpha Protocol".
(meta data) TITLE: Obsidian worked on Snow White prequel - GameSpot 10 captures 29 Jun 2017 - 12 Jun 2021 About this capture COLLECTED BY Organization: Internet Archive These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved. Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors. The goal is to fix all broken links on the web. Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. Collection: Wikipedia Near Real Time (from IRC) This is a collection of web page captures from links added to, or changed on, Wikipedia pages. The idea is to bring a reliability to Wikipedia outlinks so that if the pages referenced by Wikipedia articles are changed, or go away, a reader can permanently find what was originally referred to. This is part of the Internet Archive's attempt to rid the web of broken links. The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20170903204350/https://www.gamespot.com/articles/obsidian-worked-on-snow-white-prequel/1100-6401656/ # Obsidian worked on Snow White prequel ## Fallout: New Vegas developer spent a year making "Dwarves" for Xbox 360 and PS3 before change of direction at Disney led to its cancellation. ### Published by Eddie Makuch on December 17, 2012 at 10:28AM ##### Related Can't Get Enough %gameName%? No spam, no fuss; just the latest updates delivered right to you. Want the latest gaming news as it breaks? All the highlights in the world of games, lovingly delivered 2-3 times/week. Subscribe for the latest gaming news Fallout: New Vegas developer Obsidian Entertainment spent a year developing a Snow White prequel before Disney canceled it outright. Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart explained to Kotaku in a new feature that the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 game was to be a third-person action title focusing on Snow White's seven pals. Tentatively titled "Dwarves," the game was conceived as a new chapter in the familiar story and development began in 2005. Its final scene was even planned, as Urquhart said the endgame would have players banishing the unnamed antagonist into Snow White's mystical mirror. "It was a lot of fun," Urquhart said. "We feel we turned in a really cool prototype. We worked on it for about a year. It's one of the games here that the team just loved working on. And unfortunately--which, it happens in this industry--you have changes of focus at a publisher." A CEO change at Disney led to a "total shift in direction," with the House of Mouse considering the Snow White fiction to be "untouchable." Thus, the project was cancelled, Urquhart said. Filed under: Fallout: New Vegas Leave Blank View Comments (0) Game of the Week (meta data) TITLE: Obsidian: base building in Aliens: Crucible, canned games and publishers now open to Kickstarter-sized projects • Eurogamer.net 75 captures 30 Jun 2013 - 05 Sep 2022 About this capture COLLECTED BY Organization: Internet Archive These crawls are part of an effort to archive pages as they are created and archive the pages that they refer to. That way, as the pages that are referenced are changed or taken from the web, a link to the version that was live when the page was written will be preserved. Then the Internet Archive hopes that references to these archived pages will be put in place of a link that would be otherwise be broken, or a companion link to allow people to see what was originally intended by a page's authors. The goal is to fix all broken links on the web. Crawls of supported "No More 404" sites. Collection: Wikipedia Near Real Time (from IRC) This is a collection of web page captures from links added to, or changed on, Wikipedia pages. The idea is to bring a reliability to Wikipedia outlinks so that if the pages referenced by Wikipedia articles are changed, or go away, a reader can permanently find what was originally referred to. This is part of the Internet Archive's attempt to rid the web of broken links. The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20170903211904/http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2013-06-27-obsidian-base-building-in-aliens-crucible-canned-games-and-publishers-now-open-to-kickstarter-sized-projects XCOM 2: War of the Chosen guide, tips Beat the Chosen, align with Factions, AP explained and more. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy collectibles guide Find every treasure, photo, lockbox and conversation. The cheapest price for PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds right now The best deals for PUBG on PC. Sign in Create an account Forgotten your details? Recommended Games Digital Foundry Release Dates Loading... hold tight! Xbox 360 PlayStation 3 PlayStation 4 Xbox One # Obsidian: base building in Aliens: Crucible, canned games and publishers now open to Kickstarter-sized projects "We would like to do a real-world-style RPG." By Robert Purchese Published 27/06/2013 The Aliens: Crucible RPG that Obsidian was building for Sega was a kind of survival game that allowed you to build a base and improve it over time. "It was third-person, obviously over-the-shoulder [perspective], 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," explained Chris Avellone, Obsidian's creative director, speaking to me 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." Chris Avellone reckoned it was "shaping up to be pretty strong", but Sega pulled the plug in 2009, three years after it was first announced. Obsidian boss Feargus Urquhart mentioned a couple of years ago that Aliens: Crucible "looked and felt like it was ready to ship". That must have been a comment praising the quality of the game's vertical slice build, because to hear Chris Avellone talk, the game wasn't ready to ship at all. "No, I don't believe that was the case," he said. "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 a 13-minute gameplay video of Aliens: Crucible appeared on the internet earlier this year and showed a game that, at a glance, could have been the finished article. But in reality it was a brushed up portion of the game not representative of, but a kind of target for, the whole. It may not have been the most up to date video of Aliens: Crucible, either. "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. "There was a lot done with it," Chris Avellone rued, "and man I'm really sorry that I didn't get a chance to do it, but things just didn't work out." Sega said at the time that it need to "take a step back and carefully consider the type of game we want to release". Years later, Aliens: Colonial Marines emerged, a fact I'm sure Sega won't want reminding about. The game's cancellation was an obvious blow to Obsidian Entertainment, which had its work amount to nothing and had to find another project to work on. "The consequences are a little bit more severe than that," Avellone corrected me. "Usually publishers will cancel quite suddenly, there's little or no warning, and that causes a lot of problems at this studio in terms of well, now we have to get another project signed. "Sometimes it results in lay-offs, which are really painful because it's nothing the developers have done and it's not that the developers were doing a bad job - they're skilled people - but at the same time you can't keep them because you can't afford them, and those are the worst conversations in the world." But in the case of Aliens: Crucible there was a silver lining: "Sega was paying us to develop our own tech," he explained, "so we're like OK, we walked away with an engine. That's totally great." "There were a lot of mechanics we were designing for Alpha Protocol 2 that could find their way into either another espionage game or another role-playing game..." Chris Avellone But Aliens: Crucible isn't the only project Obsidian has had canned. Back around the time of Neverwinter Nights 2 (2006), Disney approached the studio about making a Snow White RPG. "We were like, 'A Snow White RPG? What are you talking about?' But then we saw the concepts for what they wanted to do with that and OK, that sounds really interesting actually." It was tentatively called Dwarves and was to be a third-person action game prequel to the famous Snow White story, for PS3 and Xbox 360. The plot would culminate in you banishing the villain to Snow White's magical mirror, Feargus Urquhart told Kotaku. But Disney changed CEO and Disney changed its outlook and Disney canned the game. Obsidian had another project cancelled much more recently, when the final pieces of Fallout: New Vegas DLC came out (late 2011). Feargus Urquhart has already revealed that the game was signed to a publisher, and it was rumoured to be an Xbox One-exclusive called North Carolina. Whatever it was, Chris Avellone told me it's no more. "It is off the table for good," he said. "Although, like with Alpha Protocol 2, there are systems and learning experiences that we took from that game that would be applicable to just about any other role-playing game, because they're not intimately tied with that title, so there's opportunity to see elements like that in the future." Alpha Protocol 2, incidentally, can't happen until IP holder Sega says so. "That is a question for Sega to answer," said Avellone. "They've come out on record as saying that they will never do a sequel, or that they weren't planning to do a sequel for Alpha Protocol, and because they own the IP that's probably the last that will be said on that. "However, there were a lot of mechanics we were designing for Alpha Protocol 2 that could find their way into either another espionage game or another role-playing game, whether it's espionage or not, so we're kind of excited about that. "We would like to do a real-world-style RPG," he revealed, "because that would be really interesting for us. Usually there's some minor spin on it, a minor sci-fi spin on it, and sometimes it diverts into superhero territory, but the idea of doing role-playing and design in a real-world environment is actually pretty interesting to us." Chronologically, the cancelled games were the Snow White RPG, Aliens: Crucible then the third, secret project, which may or may not have been called North Carolina. But as much as game cancellations are an inevitability of the industry - "If you work in game development for any period of time, eventually a project you have is going to get cancelled" - it sounds like pre-Project Eternity, Obsidian was having a particularly hard time. "It was, before Kickstarter, in my opinion, yeah. The Kickstarter was a huge morale boost to us as a company because after getting punched a few times..." he trailed off. "And again, the cancellation was pretty sudden. Then you have the conversations when you lay people off..." "We've been contacted by more than one publisher about doing that [Project Eternity] style of game..." Project Eternity, though relatively small in terms of project scope (around 15 people and a budget of $4 million), put Obsidian firmly back on the map, with tens of thousands of people throwing money at the idea. In the background, the promising South Park RPG wobbled as publisher THQ sunk, but was thrown a lifeline by Ubisoft and is now on track for release later this year. Now, Obsidian seems to be OK, and due to the popularity of Project Eternity and other Kickstarter RPGs - Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera - that Chris Avellone and Obsidian are linked with, the future's bright. Avellone said publishers are even beginning to look at the smaller budget games being funded on Kickstarter as possible avenues for the future. "We've been contacted by more than one publisher about doing that style of game because financially it makes sense for them and they realise the interest level from backers and players also works for them," he said. "I couldn't comment on the specific publishers, but it was just gratifying to see that they actually were interested in that style of game, when previously I thought it wouldn't be a good fit for any publisher. "But that sort of model did seem interesting to them and it seemed like it would work for them. What's even more gratifying is the publishers we've talked to are ones that aren't afraid of having a very reactive storyline or a deep storyline, or really deep mechanics. "They're not interested so much in accessibility because they recognise the people [who] support these games like those kind of mechanics and depth, and like worlds set up like that - that's the market that we would like to cater to. And I think that's admirable and that's awesome." To be clear, publishers haven't been in touch about publishing Project: Eternity specifically. Avellone couldn't categorically rule out the possibility of that ever happening - it's more a call for Feargus Urquhart than him - but he would be "really surprised" if that was ever the case. Today, Obsidian has four projects in development: Project Eternity, South Park, the Westernisation of Russian MMO Skyforge (more on that in a separate article) and the secret new game. All we really know about the new game is that it's a next-gen RPG with action, oh, and it's "already looking great". 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Alpha Protocol
Development.
The development of "Alpha Protocol" began around March 2006. In late 2005, developer Obsidian Entertainment was finishing work on their video game "Neverwinter Nights 2", during which the studio received a call from publisher Sega about making a new role-playing game for them. Around this time, Obsidian was busy with other projects and had no employees to spare for another game. Obsidian agreed with Sega's request for them to originate a new concept and to begin work on it when possible. Obsidian co-founders Feargus Urquhart and Chris Jones originated the concept of a "spy RPG"; Sega was pleased with the idea and its originality.