Star Admiral Posted February 12, 2010 Share Posted February 12, 2010 Source Any Wheel of Time fans around here? Quote: "Red Eagle Games and Obsidian Entertainment today announced they have entered into a services agreement which provides a comprehensive framework for Obsidian Entertainment to work closely with Red Eagle Games' in-house development team to create new video games for the PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 based on Robert Jordan's best-selling fantasy series, The Wheel of Time." Sounds exciting, and it has been a long time since a game based off the series was released. Last, and so far only, game was released in 1999, and it wasn't really an RPG. No release date has been announced, but since Red Eagle Entertainment plans to release the first movie based on the series in 2011, the game might follow soon after. Looking forward to see where the game will go; hope it lives up to the books. Thoughts? Discuss. - Star Admiral Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrrtoken Posted February 12, 2010 Share Posted February 12, 2010 From what I've gained, Obsidian is taking more of a resource-related role, rather than creative lead. By that, Obsidian does more of the technical work and content-creation, whereas Red Eagle does all of the creative-schtuff. Money is money, though. I've never really been privy to Wheel of Time until now, though I must admit, the setting seems... rather uninspired; generic. Maybe it's just me, but when I look at this, my enthusiasm drains a bit... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Miltiades Posted February 12, 2010 Share Posted February 12, 2010 Never heard of it before this, but that cover hurt my eyes. I like OE's work, but I'm not sure about this one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jae Onasi Posted February 12, 2010 Share Posted February 12, 2010 The books are reported to be excellent, certainly better than the cover art. I would love to see what OE would do with the Sword of Truth series. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mimartin Posted February 12, 2010 Share Posted February 12, 2010 I never heard of the books, so I'll take a wait and see approach to the game. As my grandmother told me, "Don't judge a book by its cover." Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darth InSidious Posted February 12, 2010 Share Posted February 12, 2010 This sounds a bit like the worst of both worlds, to be honest: the technical side is definitely Obsidian's weakest. I'm not sure I'd want to see a game coded by them and written by a generic industry hack. Obsidian's real strength is their writers, specifically Avellone. While the level of bugginess in their games compared to the rest of the industry has been overstated, it's still not something you'd exactly describe as their strength. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jae Onasi Posted February 12, 2010 Share Posted February 12, 2010 Point Man has read the series and enjoys them as much as the Sword of Truth series, so they're bound to be good books. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mur'phon Posted February 12, 2010 Share Posted February 12, 2010 The only good things about WoT is A: they are long enough to last a long haul flight, and B: my neighbor kept buying them so I could get them for free. In short, unless Obsidian is allowed to do a TSL (as in, making a story unlike anything you find in the universe allready) which seems extremely unlikely from what we know, I'll steer clear of this one. Of course, Obsidian sure could use the money, so I'm not really against this, still doesen't like having OE "waste" effort on this one. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jrrtoken Posted February 12, 2010 Share Posted February 12, 2010 Source First, you will all be happy to hear that we are not planning to make a traditional “movie” game that merely recasts the picture we are currently making with Universal. Instead, we want to concentrate our development efforts on telling the other facets of The Wheel of Time story. And as you know, we have a lot to choose from– literally thousands of years of history and scores of major characters, nations, geographies and critical moments in the history of the world since the beginning of the Third Age. Thus, we have been vetting many creative ideas for game formats, including games derived from the Age of Legends, The Breaking of the World, the War of the Shadow, and even a game concept that focuses on the battle among the Forsaken to become the one and only Nae’blis. We are also looking at skill-based games that are based on the testing of the Aes Sedai for the shawl and the wielding of the many intricate sword forms that are second nature to an experienced Warder. All of this is to simply say that we are critically thinking about game design for an entire family of WOT games that are consistent and supportive of the story portrayed in the movies, but that do far more that merely retell the plotlines, characters and scenes from the films. Trust me when I say that we intend to build games that will excite the imagination of every WOT fan. We just ask that the Wheel of Time community wait to see the fruits of our labor before passing judgement on whether we have been successful in our efforts. I would also like to make one additional clarification. We are not licensing our WOT development rights and stepping back from the process of building these video games. Quite to the contrary, Red Eagle Games will have an internal development team of its own. However, rather than staffing up a 200 person studio from scratch, we decided some time ago that for our first games it would be far more prudent to hire a small in-house team (e.g. positions such as Art Director, Game Designer, Story Writer, Software Architect, Quality Assurance Director, etc.) and rely on a third party developer to provide the majority of developers and their associated overhead and infrastructure. In this way, we will be providing technical and creative direction to our external developer. Obsidian Entertainment is a highly-respected game developer with a well-deserved industry reputation for building quality action/role-playing games. By eliminating the need to recruit and manage a large internal workforce within Red Eagle Games, we expect that this new relationship with Obsidian will enable the Company to achieve substantially lower development costs, a shorter production cycle, and improve the quality of our initial video game releases. Basically, Obsidian is playing the role of a serf: does all the work; never gets the credit and say in development. So, yeah, I'm not very interested... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mav Posted February 13, 2010 Share Posted February 13, 2010 I think Obsidian should release a game before they pick up a new one... I'm looking at you Alpha Protocol... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Darth InSidious Posted February 13, 2010 Share Posted February 13, 2010 I think Obsidian should release a game before they pick up a new one... I'm looking at you Alpha Protocol... That does seem to largely be Sega... and their unwillingness to actually advertise the thing. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DarthParametric Posted February 13, 2010 Share Posted February 13, 2010 It could just be that they are licensing them the Onyx engine that they made for the Aliens RPG. Seems the most likely scenario. Although Feargus Urquadt did say in an interview last year that they were working on an unannounced project for the PC and 360 using the Onyx engine, so perhaps they are working on it directly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gurges-Ahter Posted February 13, 2010 Share Posted February 13, 2010 I've read a little of the series - perhaps I'll dig into it some more to see how interested I might be in the RPG. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mav Posted February 13, 2010 Share Posted February 13, 2010 That does seem to largely be Sega... and their unwillingness to actually advertise the thing.Well from what I've heard it was delayed due to being excessively buggy which is in Obsidian's ballpark. But yeah Sega doesn't really handle the advertising of their games very well, poor Valkyria Chronicles got little to no advertising. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Star Admiral Posted February 14, 2010 Author Share Posted February 14, 2010 The book covers themselves are a bit generic/boring/uninteresting, but the story itself is excellent. While some have criticized the later books for going off-track and not focusing enough on the main story, the early books, especially books 1-3, are fast-paced and exciting. That said, New Spring isn't quite the beginning of the series. It's listed as a prequel, but the story actually makes more sense if read from the first book published, The Eye of the World, back in 1990. New Spring was published much later, in 2004, after the tenth book in the series, and is more logical when read at that point. I tried looking for a higher resolution cover, but couldn't find a better one. - Star Admiral Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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