While Sega has managed to release some great
Alien games (including one of the most overlooked titles of the decade, Creative Assembly’s
Alien: Isolation), there was one more project that could've top the lists of best-reviewed and best-selling video games of the early 2000's – Obsidian's
Aliens: Crucible.
In a recent interview with VG247, Writer Chris Avellone, who was heavily involved in the development of
Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, Alpha Protocol and
Fallout: New Vegas, revealed that “
Aliens: Crucible was really sad to see cancelled, but I don’t blame Sega for it."
According to Avellone,
Crucible "
would be like – this is going to be really rough comparison – basically Mass Effect but more terrifying. We wanted to make it. But by that point Sega, I think, was… the publisher/management relations had gotten to a point where they were just tired of dealing with [Obsidian]. Everyone working on Aliens: Crucible was really excited about it. It was shaping up to be a really cool game. The prototype was really cool. But then Sega’s like ‘nope!’”
Aliens: Crucible was first announced by SEGA on December 13, 2006, two days before
Aliens: Colonial Marines' reveal by the same publisher. The RPG would have seen players flying to an alien
Prometheus-like planet to find one of the Engineer's ships and a fully operational weapon testing facility.
“
But as you’re entering the atmosphere, [you realise] that this planet is incredibly unstable, so your entire crew gets blasted all over the planet,” Avellone said. “
And you land and the player, and some marines, and your squads, scientists and the weird thing is that when Prometheus came out, I saw some of the similarities, [and thought] ‘oh, we had a character like that’. But the entire world was more violent and there were a lot more Aliens running around. It was more a question of survival, and ‘how do we recover all the supplies, and desperately try to make a base?’ It was fun to set up.”
“
The biggest challenge we had was how to keep the fear going even in conversations,” Avellone added.
“You can make conversations stressful and frightening. How do you do it so that an alien could be attacking you at any moment? You can’t take shelter in a conversation with two talking heads while you try to figure out what to do.” As a reminder, Sega canceled
Crucible in February 2009.
If you want to learn more about
Crucible, take a look at this excellent GVMERS video essay below:
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