Project Eternity Kickstarter ending

The old thread is too far gone so I thought I'd start a new one. Project Eternity is a roleplaying game in the style of the Infinity Engine games (i.e. the Baldur's Gate series, Planescape: Torment and Icewind Dale). It's in isometric perspective and is distinguished by having party-based (up to 6 characters), real-time with pause combat. It's not something a traditional publisher would be interested in because of the scale, so it's being financed by a Kickstarter like many other such games. The studio producing it is Obsidian. It includes many of the people who worked on Planescape: Torment, Fallout, etc.

They've currently raised around $3.4 million which was roughly the budget of the Infinity Engine games back when they were state of the art. They've also made available most of the trinkets and add-ons that people asked of them over the past month. Here is the full list of reward tiers and here are the add-ons.

They've also released a lot (and I do mean a lot) of information about the setting, characters, rules and so on in the form of updates. The same page also addresses various concerns about how they are going to make the game and make sure that it doesn't suffer from too many bugs (classic case of turning a weakness into a strength: they decided to make a public beta and offer keys at the higher reward tiers).

This Kickstarter ends in a little bit over 16 hours (at 6PM Pacific Standard Time) so if you're a fan of the Infinity Engine games, and you have not seen it yet, take a look.

 

is it me, or in the end this is just a cheap way of getting publisher, distribution, adverts cheap or free? and as a bonus you get a game that wont fail in terms of money balance in the end.

I pledged some bucks to it

 

Reminds me of Grim Dawn...and thats a damn good thing! I pledged!!

 

Not quite. It does not give them anything as far as the publisher and distribution are concerned -- they have to publish the game themselves and pay the distributors their cut. However, it does provide more or less free advertising and, much more importantly, it lets them own the IP they create (this is rarely the case with independent studios). And yes, the development of the game is already paid for so they only lose money on it if they go over budget and everything they get from further sales is profit.

By the way, the Kickstarter has really taken off on the final day -- they're up to $3.58M now so we've hit the final stretch goal.

 

Obsidian is the best and I like pretty much everything they've done (even the dreadful parts of NWN2). The gameplay ideas and lore descriptions I've seen posted make it seem like an awesome IE throwback. Hopefully this will turn out great.

(I donated on day 1, natch).

 

I hope its good Im always getting burned by obsidian rpgs, they are always the ones making the sequel that I dont like, and always using the time as an excuse or budget cuts and the list goes on.

Im sorry, I for stupid reasons thought that kickstarter also had some kind of digital distribution system, So in the end they just need steam/origin/bazinga bum? and its done. Quite profitable for big studios to go that way.

This idea of development can lead to smaller studios regaining their independence from their publishers, like people running away from E.A. and all that. I hope bioware gets away.

Lets hope they reach the new stretch goal of 4 million