Fallout: New Vegas Director explains why Aliens RPG was axed
"Get away from her, you b*tch." In terms of iconic sci-fi movies, they don't come much bigger than James Cameron's Aliens. So, why is it so hard to get a video game adaptation of the 1986 classic right? In one of the great "what ifs" of the gaming world, it turns out we missed out on a major one.
While Obsidian Entertainment is known for the likes of The Outer Worlds and Knights of the Old Republic II, arguably its biggest hit was Fallout: New Vegas. Once upon a time, the team was going to turn its attention to an Aliens RPG that could've been one for the ages.
What happened to Obsidian's Aliens RPG?
Posting on Twitter, Fallout: New Vegas Game Director Josh Sawyer responded to a viral tweet about which games should be considered "the one that got away." According to Sawyer, some "dysfunction" at Obsidian led to Aliens: Crucible being blasted out of the airlock.
In the works around 2006 and canned in 2009. Sawyer explained, "Obsidian didn't have directors at that time, just leads who were all considered peer. It resulted in a lot of dysfunction when the leads didn't agree on how to do something. Progress on the game was very slow, especially when it came to creating workable game levels."
Expanding on where things went wrong, Sawyer said that efforts were channelled into the underwhelming Alpha Protocol from 2010. "Sega (understandably, in my opinion) shelved Aliens in favour of Alpha Protocol,” added Swayer. "There were a lot of cool ideas in the works, but you don’t ship ideas."
As for what could've been, he concluded, "The biggest lesson I learned from the experience is that if you don’t have playable levels, you don’t have much of a game (there are some exceptions, of course)."
Aliens: Crucible looks like an incredible game
Click to enlargeAs reported by PCGamesN, Sawyer's words don't quite match up with Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart. In a (now-removed) article with Joystiq from 2010, Urquhart claimed Aliens: Crucible "looked and felt like it was ready to ship."
There's some impressive footage from YouTube channel Alien vs. Predator Galaxy, showing how far along things were. Although Crucible is no more, Sawyer said you can see elements of it living on in Cold Iron's Aliens: Fireteam Elite from 2021.
"I was happy to play Aliens Fireteam Elite because the overall setup was similar," he concluded. "Small team, third-person, with an emphasis on deployables and support actions. The similarities ended there, but it was nice to see the idea could actually be fun in practice."
In the end 2010's Alien vs. Predator game wiped Crucible off the board, as did Creative Assembly's Alien: Isolation. Thankfully, the latter is one of the best horror games of all time, so we guess we'll let it slide. Maybe one day we'll get a good Aliens RPG.
