Obsidian Entertainment CEO Feargus Urquhart was just featured in an hour-long interview with YouTube channel Limit Break Network. When asked which Xbox IP he’d like to tackle if given the chance, Urquhart singled out Shadowrun.
I love Shadowrun. I think it’s super cool. Within, like, two months of Obsidian getting acquired I asked for the list. It’s just a spreadsheet. I think I got the latest version and I looked through all the stuff. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff on there. It’s been a while since I looked at it, but it’s a pretty incredible thing, and now you add in Activision and all the stuff that they have… But yeah, if you had to pin me down on one, yes, it would be Shadowrun. I bought the book of the first edition when it first came out. I probably own four of the six editions. I think it’s a super cool IP.
Personally, I agree with the Obsidian CEO. Shadowrun has a lot of potential to flourish and even go mainstream with the right project and budget. I advocated for Microsoft to purchase Harebrained Schemes, which made the latest Shadowrun games, but it looks like they’re busy with something else. Obsidian could be an amazing fit.
Of course, this question followed the more obvious one: would the studio head like to make Fallout New Vegas 2? Urquhart again said yes without giving away anything else.
Fallout is very dear to me. I put an incredible amount of my own time into Fallout. I wrote dialogues, I designed maps, and I was a lead designer. That was back at Black Isle. For Obsidian, it was an incredibly important game, not just from the standpoint of how much people love it, but it got us to make a big open-world game, and we learned a lot from it, and so I think it’s important to us. Fallout’s just fun. I mean, that’s why the series also worked well. It’s so silly. For me, I would love to make another Fallout game. I always say that, I never back away from it. We’ll see. That’s the best thing I can say, but if that opportunity comes out, I’d love to do it.
There’s been a lot of speculation on Fallout New Vegas 2, and it was rekindled after the show’s success and the second season tease of New Vegas. On the other hand, Bethesda seems staunchly against lending their franchise to someone else, so Shadowrun may really be the best option for Obsidian.
Of course, the studio is already busy with its own franchises, such as The Outer Worlds and Pillars of Eternity, which is about to get the action RPG spin-off Avowed. On that note, the Obsidian CEO talked about some changes made to the beginning of the game (now delayed to February 18, 2025).
We made a specific decision about a year ago. Where the game started a year ago is not where it starts. It now basically starts with a prologue. Where we’re putting character creation within that and how much we were asking the player to actually do within character creation has been a lot of that. With the prologue, we basically said hey, we need to create a much more directed experience for people to get a taste for a lot of the stuff. Not all the depth that they will be able to do with a character, but give them enough of a taste so they can understand what this game is. It also helped the game introduce players to a taste of what’s going on with the conflict and a taste of this part of the world of Eora. In this case, we did make changes specifically because we wanted people to get in quicker and not just hit a wall of too much exposition.
