Stormlands and the million-man raid: Obsidian's cancelled Xbox One exclusive - NeoGAF
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Link.QuoteThrow your mind back to Microsoft sharing a dream of an infinitely powerful Xbox One cloud, a box under your TV able to suck an almost mystical power into your living room, transforming games as we know them. The vision wouldn't quite materialise, but while Microsoft was hallucinating over the cauldron it was also throwing money around - throwing money at Xbox One exclusives to embody this future, and Obsidian Entertainment was spinning in its pot. "We were given a proposal, the million-man raid," Obsidian co-owner and CEO, Feargus Urquhart, tells me. "Conceptually what came from Microsoft was this idea: imagine you're playing The Witcher, maybe with a friend. What happens if at points in time a giant creature pops up that you can see in the distance and it's not just popping up while you're playing, it's popping up for everybody who's playing. You all rush this creature and there's this haze around it, and as you're all rushing through the haze the game is matchmaking you into 40-man raids who are going to fight the creature. "Then you fight it, but while the creature is being fought all the footage is being recorded up into the cloud. Then at the end we would come up with some kind of intelligent editing thing which would deliver everybody who fought a personalised, edited video of their participation in the raid. That is what was proposed to us." "Microsoft's ambition," says fellow owner Chris Parker, vice president of development, "was to do a lot of things and do it very new. Nothing that was standard or typically accepted in video games should be taken as acceptable. It was always, 'Try to get it up to the next level, try and figure out something different or some new way to approach it or put a different spin on it.' Every feature it was, 'How do we change this feature to make it better than it has ever been before?'" This game was a big deal, an exclusive Xbox One launch game, and barring four and a half years of Armored Warfare cheques it would be the biggest deal Obsidian would ever sign - bigger than Fallout: New Vegas, South Park: The Stick of Truth, the lot. Microsoft was even already talking about a sequel. "They wanted to invest in a developer and IP over the long-term," Urquhart says. "That deal was the largest contract we signed." The game was Stormlands, codenamed North Carolina, and it would never see the light of day.More at the link including pictures.
