14 DAY TRIAL // A while ago, in 2007, Big Huge Games announced that they planned on creating a role playing game. For a while, there was no information on the title. Ken Rolston and Mark Nelson, who had previously designed games like Morrowind and Oblivion, and who are working on the project, have recently talked a bit about it.
It's still all very sketchy and insubstantial but a RPG coming from Big Huge Games, which created Rise of Nations and the Asian Dynasties expansion for Age of Empires III, is definitely something to look forward to.
Mark Nelson is reported as saying that “We were trying to make an RPG that was going to have some strategy in it because Big Huge Games was founded on RTS, and had some of this Dynasty Warriors big battle simulation going on.” The complexity proved to be too much, IGN reports, and the team then fell back on its experience in game design and decided to do a proper role playing game.
Initially, they also thought about eliminating a lot of the RPG elements that people do not need to see, like the stats for every armor and weapon. This kind of streamlined experience would have allowed players to also take in other gameplay mechanics, which might not be immediately familiar to those interested in a RPG experience. The team even thought of bringing in mechanics that would have been taken out directly from the real time strategy titles that Big Huge Games had launched.
There's no release window for the game, which does not even have a title at the moment, but the developers insist that it is coming for the Xbox 360, the PlayStation 3 and the PC. Recently, publisher THQ, which took over Big Huge Games, has said that it is thinking of selling the studio because of its recent financial problems.