Cancelled Aliens RPG would have been more terrifying than Mass Effect

Sadly, Aliens: Crucible never saw the light of day.

Back in 2009, the RPG from Obsidian was canceled without much explanation as to why. However, in a recent interview between Chris Avellone, the game’s writer, and VG24/7 at Reboot Develop, we have been given a sneak peek of what the game could have been. In the interview, it’s said that Aliens: Crucible would have been like Prometheus. Chris said, “The entire world was more violent [than Prometheus] 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 a fun setup.” Furthermore, he then commented that the cancelled Aliens RPG is akin to Mass Effect but more terrifying. It was made to be so because Obsidian wanted the game to have the right amount of fear in it. According to Chris, it was the team’s biggest challenge. To consistently keep the fear throughout the game they made fear and stress to be very present during conversations too, even taking it to a point where the xenomorphs could attack you while you were chatting.

As for the cancellation, Chris shared that the studio’s relationship with SEGA at that time wasn’t good and it deteriorated to the point of canceling the title. People working on Aliens: Crucible were very excited and looking forward to it because it was shaping up to be a cool game. Their prototype was cool and all but at the end of the day, it was SEGA who pulled out the plug.

What Aliens: Crucible should have been

It would have been Obisidian’s third-person Aliens RPG, a title where players would have traveled to an alien planet, where they would find something similar to one of the Engineer’s facilities, a valley of creation and a weapon testing facility. Players would enter the atmosphere to discover first-hand the planet’s unstable nature.

We saw some footage of the game back in 2013 but the development started way back in 2006. It was halted in February 2009 and eventually never came back after that. It´s a shame that this game never saw the light of day because it looked quite promising. It would have been a great addition to the list of Aliens games.