Feargus Urquhart Interview
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Q: Is Obsidian looking at any other their past franchises to pick up, or do you have a full plate right now?
A: Right now we're pretty full-plate, but KOTOR II is about to wrap up, so we're looking for something else. There've been some big changes at LucasArts recently, so right now we're kind of in a state of flux over whether we'll work with them some more or not. Certainly we'd love to do a KOTOR III if they were interested in one. We've also been trying to talk LucasArts into the idea of making a Knights of the New Republic. That would be really cool; you could have cameos and everything. It's only been a year, essentially, between the two KOTORs, and I think it'll be important to do something new with the series.
Otherwise... you know, I'd like to do a sequel to Icewind Dale, because Icewind Dale II was really a very poorly launched title. There were no ads; it just popped up out of the blue, and I hate to say that Vivendi Universal did a poor job on it, but they did -- not that Interplay was doing much better at the time. It was also rushed very heavily, and yet despite that it still turned out far better than I ever expected.
The only thing I'm kicking myself in the ass over with Icewind Dale II is not replacing all the avatars in the game. We could've done it, but we were so pressured for time... It was supposed to be done in five months, and we could have done it, but a month into that timeframe, Interplay lost the Dungeons & Dragons license for the second time. They didn't get it back until February, when the game was supposed to ship, but we ended up getting strung along with the negotiations on a weekly basis, and it made scheduling on that project a major hassle. I wish we changed the avatars, though, because otherwise the game was a true sequel -- it had a new interface, new ruleset, and everything.
I'd kind of like to do something set in the near future, too; a hardcore RPG set in the near future.
