Famed developer Obsidian Entertainment (Alpha Protocol, Fallout: New Vegas, Neverwinter Nights 2) has signed with new publisher Red Eagle Entertainment for a series of The Wheel of Time (WoT) video game adaptations.
WoT, if you're new, is a classic fantasy novel series by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson which has sold over 44 million copies and spawned several video games, films and television productions over the years.
Red Eagle's plan is to launch a feature film adaptation as well as several video games on "all major video game platforms, including consoles, personal computers, handheld systems and wireless devices." On top of that, there'll be an MMORPG taking in many themes, characters and the world of the books.
If that sounds like a cash grab to you, don't be too worried. Red Eagle CEO Larry Mondragon (he sounds qualified from the last name alone) was cool enough to stop by the Dragonmount fan community and leave us with these assuring words:
Hello Everyone!
Thanks to Jason for posting the announcement of our relationship with Obsidian. However, I would like to set the record straight about two important aspects of our development plan.
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.
We follow the message boards here on Dragonmount closely. We will always give careful consideration to your thoughtful comments and suggestions.
Obsidian is already hard at work on the twice-delayedAlpha Protocol and Fallout: New Vegas (set for release in summer and autumn, respectively) -- let's hope everything goes smoothly for all projects.
Source:Press release
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