Obsidian Entertainment - Interview - on IWD3 and More

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Feargus Urquhart has been interviewed at Joystiq, discussing their past games but also the future, including a new game they are working on with a small team, a new IP for the future, the possibility of doing Icewind Dale 3 and more. A sample:

Before Obsidian begins on its own work, Urquhart says there are a few other projects in the pipeline, and one is an unannounced title we'll be hearing about soon. "There is a property that we are working on, that we can't talk about yet," he teases. "It's something we've been working on since the middle of last year, just with a small team, it's only been five or ten people. It's a license that you would go, well you gotta do it. It's not a license where it's, 'Ok, we'll take that and we can do something with it.' It's more like, well that's once in a lifetime." (Presumably, this is the Wheel of Time game, but Urquhart didn't say more on the subject.)

Obsidian is also pushing on updating a former Black Isle property: Icewind Dale 3. "I was talking to Atari last week," he confides, "and said why don't we do this?" The old series, he says, didn't end because of low sales. "They stopped being made because of licensing issues, and Interplay going out of business, and BioWare moving on to console, and a whole lot of things. So a part of it is, why not go make Icewind Dale 3? You can't spend $20 million on it, but why not go make it?"

And if Obsidian had their pick of any property to update and make their own? "I'd like to do Ultima," says Urquhart. " I think doing an Ultima would be awesome. I think it's been long enough since Ultima 9. Those Ultima games that Garriot did were cool, and I think doing an Ultima would be awesome."​

 

It would be nice to see Icewind Dale 3 and an exp for it coming out but i doubt atari will go for it. One can dream tho cant thy?

 

So, one of their peers states that Bioware is going console. Nice to hear it from someone else.

As for IWD 3, only three letters: DNF

 

2 letters D3 or SC2 lol

 

I might have a heart attack from excitement if Obsidian did IWD3 or a new Ultima game . The only thing missing from IWD were NPCs that could join the party and a little more freedom on where to go like in BG. So long as 4E isn't involved, I don't see how they could go wrong with IWD3 .

 

IWD3 coming from Obsidian sounds promising. Obsidian seems to manage to push reasonably good D&D games through Atari.

A Wheel of Time game series could be very cool too!

 

4th edition will ruin IWD2. No doubt in my mind about it. Most likely it will be in 3d too, not isometric like the other IWD games.

 

I'm fine with 3d graphics as long as it is still in the top-down view. I recently got into Dawn of War II, and despite being a strategy game (with nice RPG elements), I kept thinking as I was playing how great an IWD/BG type game would be if designed in that (or a similar) game engine.

I'm not sure I would care about 4th edition, either. It's the party-based strategy gameplay, Forgotten Realms setting, loot, music and story that made the IWD games for me (IWD2 much less so), not the 2nd edition D&D ruleset.

 

I've never actually played 4th edition, but I've read up on it a fair bit. I'm not in love with what I've read, but I don't hate it either. My old P&P gaming group (which I've been too busy to game with for more than a year, but that's another story) decided to stick with 3.5, and to some extent, Pathfinder. None of us were interested in spending hundreds of dollars (if not more) on new, incompatible books when we already had huge investments in the 3.5 system.

That said, I'd be more than willing to try out 4th edition in a CRPG. Let's face it, we'll never see a brand new 3rd edition game, so if you want to play new D&D CRPGs you need to learn to deal with the version that happens to be current, or your just out of luck.

 

Yes! I would so love to see a 3rd installment in the series! Freaking yes please make IWD3.

Of course it would be in 3d which is fine really, IE was not perfect but still the best gaming engine I've ever played a RPG in. It's unrealistic to expect them to go back so let's just embrace the 3d.

4e is just so lame though, it feels like a MMORPG really, but I'd be willing to give it a chance in a computer game.

Obsidian is probably the company that I have the most faith in nowadays seeing that EA is screwing BioWare over with the console mind set for games.

 

An engine like what was used in ToEE (2D pre-rendered +3D objects/monsters/characters/effects) would be totally killer, as you said though, 3D is probably the way it would go . I suppose I probably wouldn't mind as much about 4E being a computer game, 3rd would just be so much better.