Pentiment Director Worked On A Canceled Aliens RPG For Sega With Many “Cool Ideas”

The Pentiment director, Josh Sawyer, had previously worked on a canceled Aliens RPG for Sega with many “cool ideas”.

Sawyer, who recently worked as the Director on Pentiment at Obsidian Entertainment, took to Twitter to reveal that he had the opportunity to work on an Aliens RPG for Sega between the period of 2006 and 2009. He mentioned that, at the time, there were no directors at Obsidian. Instead, the studio had lead developers who were all considered peers. It resulted in a lot of dysfunction when the leads didn’t agree on how to do something.

The Pentiment director mentioned that progress on the game was very slow, especially when it came to creating workable game levels. He mentioned that Obsidian also had Alpha Protocol in development with Sega at the time. Understandably, in his view, the publisher ended up shelving the Aliens project in favor of Alpha Protocol.

Sawyer added that there were a lot of “cool ideas” in the works for the Aliens RPG. His takeaway from the experience was that ideas alone don’t ship games, and if one doesn’t have playable levels, there isn’t much of a game at that point.

He mentioned that he was happy to play Aliens: Fireteam Elite because its overall setup involving a small development team, the use of a third-person camera perspective, and an emphasis on deployables and support actions, was similar to his Aliens RPG project. While the similarities ended there, Sawyer found it nice to be able to see how the idea could be fun in practice.

For the uninitiated, Aliens: Fireteam Elite is a 2021 third-person shooter game developed by Cold Iron Studio in collaboration with Disney’s 20th Century Games. It is a stand-alone continuation of the first three Alien films. Fireteam Elite, in contrast to Alien: Isolation, is more in line with Aliens: Colonial Marines and emphasizes action over survival horror.