Project Eternity Kickstarter (successor to Infinity Engine RPGs)

Chris Avellone, Tim Cain, and Josh Sawyer are making an RPG in the style of Baldur's Gate and Planescape: Torment. Here is the Kickstarter link. I am pretty excited about this -- for some reason nobody makes games like that anymore. The company is Obsidian Entertainment and while their overall record is not exactly stellar, this is the kind of game I am sure these people can do well, particularly without a publisher breathing down their necks. It's the perhaps the greates of the independent RPG developers left and the people there have worked on many great games (the Fallout series is probably the most famous).

 

Will they actually finish it if they start it though? Every Obsidian game I've played has been buggy and unfinished.

 

To be fair, if I recall correctly they've patched most of the bugs out given some time after release. I certainly hope for better this time, but when small team tries to make a huge game, there are bound to be issues.

Regardless, I absolutely loved Neverwinter Nights 2,so I hope to see more of the same from this project. I wouldn't mind throwing some cash at this. At the very least I'll get a big game for $20, which is way more than most games of this scope tend to cost. I mean, if this is as epic and deep as Dragon Age: Origins, then I get a great deal, right?

 

April 201 4.. are you kidding me? Anyway, will pledge 25 bucks.

 

I don't believe the hype for this game. I think it will be another Bethesda game or Sega. Ditching the publisher route with only 1.5 Million? Please, I think people are delusional if they think 1.5 million is enough to fund a Oblivion Entertainment game that will take 2 years of development. Yeah right... I will laugh my butt off if it is announced months down the line Bethesda and in 2014 the game is rushed and Obsidian blames Bethesda for it.

Whatever engine they will use, will require money to license. Then tons of money to mod it for their needs. Then pay salaries for coders, artists, and of course all the developers want a cut. And do you think all these people will just say, yeah I'll take peanuts for salary and rely on sales %? Doubtful. 75 million wasn't enough for Kingdom of Amalaur, 300 million wasn't enough for Star Wars, but 1.5 million is enough for Obsidian. OK...

Remember Double Fine? Kickstarter for them too and yet ALL their games are mangled by GFWL. Whatever, Obsidian can go F themselves.

Anyone who thinks otherwise, well I think you are in fantasy land.

 

Mask of the Betrayer was pretty good. For a few of the other games, they appear to have gotten unlucky with publishers. In this case, there is no publisher so we'll see whether this really was bad luck or they just can't get things done on time and within budget.

But putting their history aside, who else is going to make a party-based RPG like this? I suppose BioWare is making Dragon Age 3, but the engine for that is based on an FPS.

 

You can't blame publishers for your inability to stick to a schedule when it happens every time you release a game.

 

This is delusional thinking. Obsidian pitched an idea, publishers turned em down. Bright idea, lets do what Double Fine did, let's use kickstarter for seed money.

Project underway and looks good. Then sign with publisher like Microsoft, like Double Fine. Game supposedly for gamers ends up being destroyed by the publisher agreement, like Double Fine games.

This is what I see going to happen more frequently. Developers using kickstarter as seed money, to start the project, but ultimately they sign with a publisher in the end.

I wonder how much money Bethesda signed for FO:Vegas which is still broken? I wonder how much money they got for Dungeon Seige III which I don't even have a slight interest in checking out? I bet it was a lot more than 1.5 million.

But go ahead, it's amusing to think there are 30,000 morons who think Obsidian will make a game with only 1.5 million and without publisher backing. ROFL ROFL ROFL ROFL ROFL ROFL ROFL.

That's like CryTek saying, hey we need your help. We won't use EA publishing, we are making our own in-house IP. Yay! And guess what, we only need 1.1 million! Really? I remember, I hate money, please take it, I don't want it.

 

I'll pass.

I never liked those isometric 'oldschool' games too much, even when they were in their prime. I prefer Bethesda's approach much more, and gladly they don't need to rely on Kickstarter just yet.

 

Cant say i have much faith in this myself.
Seems its common to sell you game as a "preorder" on Kickstarter now and thats not really how its meant to be used.
The only indie game in interested in at the moment is Cube World.

wollay's blog

 

Not necessarily. They will almost certainly adapt their own Onyx Engine from DS3 (they own the rights to it).

The games you quote here are not comparable to what is being proposed. It does not cost nearly as much money to make an old-school game. If you look on sites like Kongregate or Armor Games, there are free games out there made by single developers (or small teams) that are equivalent to full-fledged games made by major companies in the early 1990's. Project Eternity is one step above those, but far below modern AAA games.

It's certainly possible that they will be forced to do this, but even if it is the case, they will be in a better negotiating position than if they start with nothing but the idea. We'll see.

$1M is roughly the amount being asked for in game Kickstarters right now. Planetary Annihilation asked for $900K and so did Wasteland 2. Of course, it could be that all of these developers are badly underestimating the money it takes to make a game (either deliberately or because they're incompetent), but it's also possible that they know what they are doing.

 

Disagree with ALL of this.

 

Of course it costs money -- the question is how much. I suppose they could also license an engine. I don't think 2D engines go for much these days.

Baldur's Gate cost more than that to develop, but that was over a decade ago. This is not cutting edge stuff anymore -- like I said, there are now single-developer games (made as a hobby and available for free) that approach the old-school classics. And Obsidian is hardly huge; they are much smaller than most of their AAA competitors.

Why? Suppose they do ultimately have to go to a publisher for more money. What difference does it make as long as they deliver what they promised? It would be nice if this scenario could be avoided, but what do I care as long as I get my party-based "real time with pause" RPG?

You speak as though the entirety of Obsidian is going to dedicate themselves to Project Eternity. This is not the case -- they are still working on traditionally funded games. There is no reason they can't have a reasonably sized team work on this.

Also, I am not sure why you are so hung up on the $1.5M figure. They already have more than that on the fourth day of the Kickstarter. Given past Kickstarters, the money will slowly trickle in for the next four weeks or so and then rapidly increase in the final day or two. I would estimate they'll get $2-3M total.

As to the question of whether they can make a quality game for that kind of money... well, that's the crux of the matter. As I said, I personally trust them to do it, but it's a gamble, there is no doubt about that. Still, it's not like the money being wagered is huge. $25 is less than half the price of a AAA game (most of which are currently utter garbage).

 

Which Obsidian games have you played? They are all probably buggier than the industry standard of "pretty damn buggy", but only KOTOR2 is what I'd consider unfinished. The rest have had satisfying endings in my opinion (and above standard characters and storylines).

You're comparing apples and oranges here. They are likely using their own (surprisingly bugfree!) engine and are not paying dearly for an expensive IP or for A-list voice actors (since there's going to be a lot of text). Tim Cain had a good analogy in a recent Eurogamer interview that explains the situation; it's faster, cheaper and easier to bake "a cake, any cake" rather than bake "a specific cake that has to look exactly like this" (ie. using other people's IP).

What an excellent straw man. Also, you seem sort of angry for some inexplicable reason.

How big exactly does your derriere believe that Obsidian is (in ballpark numbers)? If they are all-caps HUGE, how would it rate something like EA Games?

 

KoTOR 2, New Vegas, and Dungeon Siege 3. I have Alpha Protocol, but i haven't played it yet. I consider an excessively buggy game to be unfinished. The fact that I can't get NV to run correctly on my machine without expending significant time and effort is a serious issue. I'm sure there's a great game in there, but between the crashes, forced low res textures, and inexplicable weirdness, I've not had the patience to find it yet. KoTOR 2 was just bad. I found it a let down in every way after the superb first installment. DS3 is abysmal. So, so boring.

 

I haven't played the others, but KotOR 2 was OK. Not my favorite game (neither was the original KotOR) and they could have spaced the party dialog out better so that the late game did not feel so empty, but there wasn't anything terribly wrong with it.

Back on topic, the Kickstarter has just passed the second stretch goal ($1.6M). That means there will be a Mac version and also an additional storyline with new quests and locations. They've also posted an update about the basic concepts of the game as well as an interview in which Tim Cain addresses precisely the question asked in this thread: whether or not Obsidian can make do with a much lower budget than they usually have.

 

And naturally he says yes despite their inability to release a complete game practically ever.