New information on cancelled Aliens RPG, Aliens: Crucible, reveals it would have been a Mass Effect-esque game of survival, where you’re never safe, and everyone can hear you scream, and please can someone just revive this?
According to a VG247 interview with Chris Avellone, writer for Obsidian at the time, poor relations between Obsidian and Sega were to blame for the cancellation.
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 basic concept for the game was similar to the plot of Prometheus (which came out a few years after Crucible’s cancellation in 2009); a bunch of scientists and marines land on a hostile planet, littered with leftover Engineer tech, and hilarity ensues. Except, in Crucible, your team is scattered to the winds, so you had to scramble to find people, gather supplies, and defend a base, while avoiding the horde of severely antisocial natives. Also, you could probably run in multiple directions.
As in Mass Effect, you would be able to manipulate your skill set, and that of each team member, and make forays into the world with two AI companions. Best of all, your conversations weren’t going to be the kind of refuge you usually find in RPGs, because the xenomorphs could appear at random. Awkwardly navigating the speech tree for the obligatory romancing options? XENOMORPH ATTACK!
Aliens: Crucible may be dead, but it lives on in our hearts, so that it might, one day, burst forth from our chests. Aww…
Here’s some super early gameplay footage: