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[KyoZz]

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Aliens: Crucible was really sad to see cancelled, but I don’t blame Sega for it, 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!

The RPG would have seen players flying to an alien planet where they’d find one of the ships or installations – like what they find in Prometheus – left behind by the Engineers, as well as a valley of creation and weapon testing facilities.

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. And you land and the player, and some marines, and your squads, and 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.

One of the things Obsidian really wanted to nail with Aliens: Crucible was a sense of fear, even during conversation. Where most RPGs pause the action while you have a chinwag, here the xenomorphs could arrive at any time, interrupting your plans.

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

The game was a fair bit into development and featured conversations, combat, and even hacking. Much like Mass Effect, combat would be real-time with two AI characters supporting, and you could give them simple orders to get them to engage specific enemies or hunker down, for example. It’s easy to imagine how this would have worked in the Alien universe, since there are already plenty of established xenomorph variants, the enemies are durable and smart, and that acid blood is a ready-made status effect.


Some early gameplay:



Source: Vg24/7

 

[JareBear: Remastered]

Damn, sounds pretty damn interesting to me.

A shame. I don’t see why Obsidian wouldn’t have delivered here. They are up there on my list of most trusted devs

 

[TeamGhobad]

this needs to get revived asap. so many great premises for games present but we aint getting them.

 

[TacosNSalsa]

That long dark hallway from about 13:40 on coupled with the quietness...OMG this is exactly the kind of Aliens game I want .You're not as defenseless as in Isolation but the odds are greatly stacked against you..

 

[Threeshotgamer]

See now this could be something I would 100% get behind Epic throwing some of that fortnite money in and making happen. The relationship is already there so lets see something come of it.

 

[Enjay]

Developers are inherently full of shit. I doubt this game even got that far into development before being cancelled.

 

[Werewolf Jones]

I wasn't aware of Obsidian's quality in 2007 when I heard about this but yeah, it would have put BioWare to shame once again if Sega let it actually get finished.

 

[The Alien]

Great summary. Game looked great, ahead of its time.

 

[Havoc2049]

Too bad, game looks like it had potential. I probably would have bought it. Probably too expensive of a game for Sega to make at the time.