Throw your mind back to Microsoft sharing a dream of an infinitely powerful Xbox One cloud, a box under your TV able to suck an almost mystical power into your living room, transforming games as we know them. The vision wouldn’t quite materialise, but while Microsoft was hallucinating over the cauldron it was also throwing money around – throwing money at Xbox One exclusives to embody this future, and Obsidian Entertainment was spinning in its pot.
“We were given a proposal, the million-man raid,” Obsidian co-owner and CEO, Feargus Urquhart, tells me. “Conceptually what came from Microsoft was this idea: imagine you’re playing The Witcher, maybe with a friend. What happens if at points in time a giant creature pops up that you can see in the distance and it’s not just popping up while you’re playing, it’s popping up for everybody who’s playing. You all rush this creature and there’s this haze around it, and as you’re all rushing through the haze the game is matchmaking you into 40-man raids who are going to fight the creature.