In 2011, a small team at Obsidian gathered and began the design of a massive role-playing game that has features from the games we all know and love–it uses Skyrim’s “Radiant AI” system, the hugeness of Mass Effect’s Citadel and plenty of shooting like in Borderlands. They decided to call it Backspace.
The game is a single-player action-RPG much like Skyrim. Although it’s not open-world, you’ll get to travel between planets and one enormous space station. Sounds like an awesome game though, doesn’t it? Well, it’s still in the works and the company pushed it aside for now. Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart says, “Backspace was a project concept that we neither canceled nor greenlit.”
Besides combining the features from these incredible games, Backspace also has an interesting storyline and gameplay. Your character is a cyborg who is 90% human and 10% machine, and your mission is to save humankind after you’ve been sent ten years into the future because of a technical error in the labs. What’s really cool is that you’ll get to jump from timeline to timeline, keeping you on the edge of your seat each time you enter a new area.
As for character development, it’s very much like Skyrim, Mass Effect, and Borderlands because you’ll get to customize your character’s appearance and perfect your skills. In addition, much like its inspirations, you’ll get to choose the background of your character from these three: The Mad Scientist, The Lone Wolf, and The Arrogant Savant. An excerpt from the prototype manual says that,
“As the player completes quests, solves puzzles, and eliminates enemies, they gain experience points towards their next level (similar to Skyrim). When they gain a level, they are awarded stat points and ability points that they may use to increase their stats and abilities respectively. Every other level they can add a Perk (just like FO3/FNV).”
The weapons you get to use are mostly guns for long-range weapons and katanas and battle axes for melee weapons. And guess what? You have a robot arm which has its own special abilities! It can transform into a claw which slices your enemies in pieces.
Want more awesome details? You also get to have an AI as your companion and they provide you with bonuses too, but they can’t travel through time with you. You can find them all over the game and each one is different.
The systems this game on which would be available is unknown for now. Stay tuned! That’s all we know for now. Hopefully, Obsidian will take this game into the works again and give us a chance to experience space and time in a unique way.
