Obsidian’s Cancelled Aliens: Crucible RPG Would Have Been A More Terrifying Mass Effect

For those who remember the Obsidian project titled Aliens: Crucible, which got cancelled by Sega in 2009, you are probably still wondering what led to Sega’s decision to pull the plug on the project, as well as what the game could have been.

Writer Chris Avellone shared with VG247 in an interview during Reboot Develop that the team was really sad to see the game cancelled, but he doesn’t blame Sega for making the decision.

“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],” Avellone explained. “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!’” Avellone explained.

Avellone also shared that Aliens: Crucible was shaping up to be similar to Mass Effect, only more terrifying.

The plot of the game will see players travelling to an alien planet, where they will find one of the ships left behind by Engineer’s, a valley of creation, as well as weapon testing facilities. Players will soon discover that the planet they are on is unstable, and their entire crew will then be blasted all over the planet. Avellone described it as being similar to Prometheus, a fact he only realised after watching the film when it was released.

As with any game taking place in the Alien universe, a major factor to take note of is fear, and that was what Obsidian wanted to focus on when developing the game.

“The biggest challenge we had was how to keep the fear going even in conversations. 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,” Avellone shared in his interview.

Sadly, Aliens: Crucible is a game that will most likely never see the light of day, and all we have left of the game is early prototype footages.