Kotaku Reveals Backspace, a Sci-fi Game Concept from Obsidian

While I have to admit that it seems unorthodox to me that an internal pitch that went nowhere would get exposure on a major website, this is what has happened to Backspace, a time traveling sci-fi action-RPG that a small team at Obsidian worked on for a while before getting shelves.

You can read the full story on Kotaku, but I suppose we can get away with posting a small snippet to give you the idea:

“Backspace was a project concept that we neither cancelled nor greenlit,” Urquhart told me. “We had some great people work on the idea for Backspace for a bit of time and then moved them off to other projects as opportunities came up. We’ve been around for ten years now and have had a bunch of great ideas that we still have sitting around that we may be able to return to in the future.”

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So what is Backspace? Here’s how an Obsidian design document described it:

BackSpace is a single-player action-RPG set in a scifi space environment with simple elements of time travel. The combat is paced similarly to Skyrim, but slightly faster since there is no concept of blocking. The easiest way to look at it is a mix of Mass Effect, Borderlands, and System Shock 2 for gameplay and setting.

It was to be developed in some sort of partnership with Bethesda, I’ve heard, and it’d use the same engine as their ridiculously-successful role-playing game Skyrim. Although Backspace wasn’t an open-world game, players would be able to travel between a number of planets as well as one large space station.