RPG devs Obsidian Entertainment had been approached by EA Partners to make a videogame primarily based on George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books – higher identified today as Game of Thrones, after the primary e-book within the sequence and the TV sensation primarily based upon it. Trouble is, they had been approached in 2005, earlier than the present’s success, they usually mentioned ‘no’.
Obsidian have made among the best RPGs on PC.
Obsidian co-founder and CEO Feargus Urquhart was a fan of the books, having adopted them because the sequence began in 1996. He knew what he was turning down, and his causes for doing so make sense. Speaking with Eurogamer, he says:
“My feeling was, understanding the IP on the time, it is about this political intrigue, and folks’s connection to the IP is to all these characters – that is how the books are written, every chapter is an individual and what’s taking place to them.
“Other than what bizarre stuff is happening past The Wall, and the dragons, and a few trace [of fantasy], there aren’t any magic customers, there aren’t any clerics, no thieves. Basically there’s dudes with swords and armour and somewhat little bit of mysticism, however throughout the mainland there isn’t any goblins, no kobolds…”
You can see his level – Game of Thrones is fairly non-fantastical, particularly within the earlier books earlier than Daenerys’s dragons have grown, and when the White Walkers and the resurrecting Red Priesthood are nonetheless mysteries.
Co-founder and VP of improvement Chris Parker provides “you possibly can’t give the participant a personality they will play that’s necessary on this world. All of the necessary characters are all clearly spelled out and you’ll’t even actually go have a dialog with them.”
That’s the strategy that Telltale took, casting the participant as a part of a minor home which turns into embroiled within the occasions of the primary e-book, however you possibly can see the way it presents a problem, particularly for an RPG. Exploring spin-off story threads or alternate durations within the fiction’s historical past, like “BioWare did with Knights of the Old Republic,” had been floated as doable options, and given the success of the IP within the years since, one assumes Obsidian would take these options extra critically right this moment.
“Maybe there may have been one thing we may have completed,” Urquhart says, however on the time, “we had been beginning to suppose extra about open-world RPGs, and we wished our gamers to have company, to be necessary on the earth.
“Back then [real-time strategy games] had been extra related and I mentioned… ‘it simply feels extra like an RTS sport.’ You have totally different factions and you set extra political intrigue in there.”
And there was certainly a Game of Thrones RTS made… nevertheless it wasn’t nice. Personally I might love a GoT RPG or RTS, simply as long as they’re made by a studio of Obsidian’s calibre.
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