Penitent Creator Josh Sawyer Worked On A Cancelled Aliens Game

gameranx.com:

Penitent’s Josh Sawyer has an interesting story to tell about Alien video games past.

A year on after the release of Aliens: Fireteam Elite, Josh has revealed that he worked on an Alien game himself! He was already at Obsidian at this point, so he likely was not the main game director. But he does explain all that, so I’ll let him share the story himself.

Josh shared this thread on Twitter:

“I got to work on an Aliens RPG for SEGA from 2006-2009. Obsidian didn’t have directors at that time, just leads who were all considered peers. It resulted in a lot of dysfunction when the leads didn’t agree on how to do something.

Progress on the game was very slow, especially when it came to creating workable game levels. We had another game in development with SEGA at the time, Alpha Protocol, and SEGA (understandably, IMO) shelved Aliens in favor of AP.

There were a lot of cool ideas in the works, but you don’t ship ideas! The biggest lesson I learned from the experience is that if you don’t have playable levels, you don’t have much of a game (there are some exceptions, of course).

I was happy to play Aliens: Fireteam Elite because the overall setup was similar: small team, 3rd person, with an emphasis on deployables and support actions. The similarities ended there, but it was nice to see the idea could actually be fun in practice. RIP, squad.”

In the last tweet, he also shares in development models of the characters that would have appeared in this cancelled Alien game. You can see those characters below.

I was happy to play Aliens: Fireteam Elite because the overall setup was similar: small team, 3rd person, with an emphasis on deployables and support actions. The similarities ended there, but it was nice to see the idea could