Reports are surfacing that Obsidian Entertainment was considering the development of a Sci-fi RPG in the Skyrim engine. According to some digging done by Kotaku, the game was called Backspace, and Obsidian described it as "a single-player action-RPG set in a scifi space environment with simple elements of time travel....The easiest way to look at it is a mix of Mass Effect, Borderlands, and System Shock 2 for gameplay and setting." It would have put you in the shoes of a cyborg researcher on a giant space station that is assaulted by alien forces, resulting in your character travelling through time and space to fix everything that goes wrong. The combat and leveling would have been similar to Skyrim, with much more futuristic weaponry - some of which would have been able to be constructed with items found in world - and with some leveling elements of the Fallout games for good measure.

Backspace was considered during the period when Obsidian was working with Bethesda, around the time that Fallout: New Vegas was released, before being cancelled in early 2011. According to Obsidian boss Feargus Urquhart "Backspace was a project concept that we neither cancelled nor greenlit. 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."

Hopefully between Obsidian's current projects - Project Eternity, and South Park - and whatever else they're working on, they find the time to revisit this concept, cause it looks awesome!