Earlier today Big Huge Games made a couple of major announcements. One was that former Bethesda Softworks game designer Ken Rolston had moved over to Big Huge Games. The other is that the game he will be helping to create will be an RPG title, which is a departure from Big Huge Games' previous RTS game titles. While Rolston was not available for comment FiringSquad chatted briefly on the phone with Big Huge Games' president Tim Train to find out more about the company's new hire and new direction.

Train told us that the company had been working on a concept for an RPG title for the last couple of years but that hardcore development of the game's prototype only started in September of 2006. While the company was out showing the prototype to various publishers, they dediced to try and recuit Rolston who had actually announced his retirement from developing games after working on both Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind and Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. According to Train, Rolston was enthusiasitc about joining the team after learning about their RPG plans. Rolston was hired a few months ago, according to Train, and soon afterward Big Huge Games locked their publisher for the title as well. Unfortuately Train declined to talk about the game itself, including publisher, type of game design and a release date. He did say that contrary to the Big Huge Games press release about Rolston's hiring (which implied that the game would be console only) the RPG game would also be released for the PC, although the console version would be the main platform for the title.

Big Huge Games's next title will in fact be a console title as they are developing a version of the classic board game CATAN for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade service. Train told us that not only is the game something of a labor of love for the dev team (especially company co-founder Brian Reynolds who is a big fan of the original board game) but it was also a chance to dip their hand in the console dev waters for the first time. Train emphasied that they are not abandoning their strategy game roots, saying that a new RTS title is also in the works (again, he declined to go into details) but that getting into console game development was important for them, especially now with the popularity of consoles and the ability to update games via downloadable content.

While it looks like we won't find out much about Big Huge Games's next projects for some time we will keep you updated on their plans in the months ahead.