Silverheart

Chris Roberts had planned to work on a third person action-adventure title called Silverheart at Origin Systems, set in a universe created by English fantasy author Michael Moorcock.

Plot
Set in a fantasy world, the story told of Max Silverskin, an exceptional thief who must discover the secrets of his heritage. He has a few days to uncover a mystery of the witch mark – the silverheart – which is slowly killing him. He and Lady Rose, daughter of the leader of the powerful Clan Iron, are thrown into an edgy alliance as they search for the secrets that could save the city’s future.

The new title would have featured an entirely new universe with which the team hoped to start a new franchise.

Gameplay
It would feature a combination of first-person action for exploration, and third-person action for solving puzzles, the entire title creating a seamless interface that doesn't interfere with the player's enjoyment. The spell-casting used an interface that required skill, using the mouse to trace the different spelIs in the air.

Development
Michael Moorcock was originally asked to provide a scenario for the game. His condition, in writing the game, which at the time was going to be live action movie/game as some of Chris Roberts's other games, was to dump genre conventions and not have super villains with booming voices for a start, but people with different interests, different moral notions of how to order the world. Once they'd agreed the basic idea he sat down and began a scenario so detailed that it became a short novel of some 45,000 words. By this time they also had the script he had produced for the movie and for the game — re-done from the original ideas.

Silverheart was going to be Chris Roberts project right after Wing Commander III.

Electronic Arts came knocking for a fourth Wing Commander game immediately after the third title in the series, however, which ended up pushing back Silverheart’s development.

Silverheart was in early pre-production while Wing Commander IV was made. About $2m worth of work had been done on it when Electronic Arts pulled the plug.

Chris Roberts negotiated to get the rights to Silverheart back from Electronic Arts while doing the deal for the Wing Commander movie, and planned to produce the fantasy game after Freelancer’s completion.

Having sold Digital Anvil to Microsoft and going off to do movies, Chris Roberts never got around to doing Silverheart.

Michael Moorcock eventually published Silverheart as a book written with Storm Constantine based on and extending the game he had initially written for Chris Roberts. A critique of it was that it seemed to be written for a game's format, which it was.