The biggest Obsidian Entertainment-related news this week — bigger, even, than this update to the Project Eternity Kickstarter page introducing us to concept artist Polina Hristova — was the revelation that the studio had, for a time, been planning and doing concept work for a game called Backspace. Billed as a “sci-fi Skyrim“, it would have featured time travel, sci-fi action combat, an alien invasion, and Bethesda’s amazing Radiant AI.

A small team was designing and prototyping the game in early 2011, and although progress never got very far, concept art and design documents reveal an ambitious project that could interest a lot of people, if it’s ever made.

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“Backspace was a project concept that we neither cancelled nor greenlit,” [Obsidian boss Feargus] Urquhart told [Kotaku’s Jason Schreier]. “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.”

The game sounds as though it would have been seriously, mind-blowingly cool:

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.

“This station is huge,” a Backspace design document reads. “It can be compared in size to The Citadel of Mass Effect [or] Babylon 5. The station has several locations devoted to diverse research fields which would allow us to have vegetation overgrowth, high-tech disasters, and mutations of science as visual themes.

Kotaku have a bunch more details about the game, as well as several pieces of concept art. Click on over and enjoy!

Deep Silver was announced this week as the distrubutor (and Kickstarter backer reward fulfillment handler) for Wasteland 2.

On the Project Eternity front, in addition to the update noted above, it was in fact confirmed that the crafting skill and item durability system have been dropped from the game. As well, it was clarified recently that Obsidian hope to turn Project Eternity into an ongoing series, and its world into something equally persistent.

Finally, Chris Avellone has been busy lately, giving several interviews, as well as participating in high-profile conversations about Kickstarter, Steam Greenlight, and the future of PC gaming.

Oh, and Ubisoft kind of confirmed this week that South Park: The Stick of Truth will ship…at some point. Yeah.