Apparently there was once a plan for the Xbox One to launch with a huge action RPG that fully relied on the cloud. However, nothing came of “Stormlands”.
Developer Obsidian is a successful gaming studio that works for various publishers. Obsidian is independent – a rarity these days. It has its roots in the legendary RPG studio “Black Isle”, which was responsible for Fallout 2, Planescape Torment, and Baldur’s Gate.
The studio itself is known for RPGs like Fallout: New Vegas, Pillars of Eternity, or Tyranny. For my.com, Obsidian developed the tank MMO “Armored Warfare”.
Currently, Obsidian Entertainment is connected with the strategy experts from Paradox, apparently planning something big now that Armored Warfare is no longer in development.
To promote this properly, they have brought in the gaming site Eurogamer for a series about the studio, revealing some interesting details.
Stormlands – the game with the million-man raid
In around 2011, Obsidian was commissioned by Microsoft to develop a launch title for the Xbox One. Stormlands was a game with high ambitions, fully utilizing cloud technology. At that time, Microsoft still envisioned an Xbox that could be placed under televisions worldwide and access the endless resources of the cloud at any time.
The concept set by Microsoft was: You play an action RPG like The Witcher, but then you see a huge creature on the horizon. As you run towards this thing, all other players currently playing the game see it as well and also run towards this giant creature.
Stormlands would have packed the players into 40-man raids and made them fight this enormous creature. Recordings would have been made of this, tailored to each player to view after the battle.
This feature was referred to by Microsoft as a “1 Million Man Raid.” Even though Obsidian did not take the exact directive literally, they understood the idea as a goal of the dimensions they should be thinking for Stormlands.
According to Obsidian, the whole game was incredibly ambitious. Microsoft wanted it to be even bigger and more innovative.
Obsidian also had the team assembled and foresaw a number of difficulties they would have to deal with:
- They would have needed their own engine
- They would have to deal with multiplayer aspects as a studio focused on single-player
- And the fixed release date for the launch of the Xbox One would have been problematic as well
March 2012 marked the end for Stormlands
As Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart says, in March 2012 the phone call from Microsoft came: “The project is canceled.” Following this, Obsidian had to lay off some employees and restructure.
Today, Urquhart believes Stormlands failed because Microsoft “wanted to dream big,” while Obsidian faced the challenge of “how do we make this happen?” This created a rift.
After that, they presented the ideas for the game to other publishers like Ubisoft or 2k – but they did not take the bait. Ultimately, some of the ideas were used in the RPG “Tyranny”.
You can read the entire story with all the pictures about the game here at Eurogamer in English. The title image we used also comes from Eurogamer.
Mein-MMO thinks: An interesting “what if?” question. After the success of Destiny in 2014, it is clear that there was significant potential for an action MMO on the Xbox One. Such a title exclusive to the Xbox One a year before Destiny could have been a game-changer. But only if it was truly exceptional.
Stormlands could have shaken up the somewhat stagnant MMO world for years. But would have, could have – it went differently.
Obsidian has had bad experiences not only with Microsoft, but also with Armored Warfare it seems there was a setback:
Obsidian is no longer working on Armored Warfare – insider report with allegations
