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Project Eternity is not the first classic RPG Kickstarter to make it big, but it is the highlight of the crowd-funded video game world right now. While inXile paved the way with the successful Wasteland 2 Kickstarter, Obsidian Entertainment is creating something brand new. Focusing on a completely original IP, currently dubbed Project Eternity, the company is already funded over the $1.1 millon initial goal and is well into the stretch goals. RPGamer staff was able to chat with Obsidian's Tim Cain, known for his work on Fallout, Arcanum, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, and The Temple of Elemental Evil, to chat about this project.
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Michael A. Cunningham (RPGamer): Greetings Tim, and thank you for taking the time out to chat with us about Project Eternity. We'd like to talk briefly about the game itself and your tentative future plans for the project.
You state Project Eternity will have "the central hero, memorable companions and the epic exploration of Baldur's Gate, the fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of Icewind Dale, and the emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of Planescape: Torment." I know fans that love Planescape, but have no love for Icewind Dale. Since it's impossible to please everyone, how do you plan on blending those aspects?
Tim Cain (Obsidian Entertainment): The game is going to support multiple paths, meaning the player can choose how he or she wants to play the game. If you don't enjoy combat, you can avoid much of it, and have companions that help speed combat encounters that you can't avoid. You can choose to play solo if you don't want any companions, you can choose how to treat other people in dialogs, and you can involve yourself deeply or shallowly in the storyline, since we will have lots of side quests.
Multiple paths also means the game will have a lot of replayability. You can pick different classes and races and companions and side quests, and you will experience a different game.
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MAC: Are there plans to have quests alter the entire balance of a world's cities and politics, something that Fallout and Fallout 2 did well?
TC: While we haven't set anything in stone, we do plan to make quests that change the local political balance. At the very least, the player will gain reputation with different groups, and they will begin to treat him differently.
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MAC: There have been questions about how much content this game will end up having. With that in mind, within your current design plans which prior game is this most likely to match up with in terms of depth and length?
TC: At this point, with the Kickstarter campaign still in full swing, I cannot really answer this question. With more funding, we will employ more designers on the project and have a deep, richer and longer storyline.
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MAC: To clarify a little. Will NPCs change their behavior over the course of the game based on completed quests and PC behavior or skills? This was something we loved in Fallout and Arcanum. How realistic do you feel having such a robust, changing world is within the original $1.1mil budget?
TC: Yes, the player's actions will most certainly change the behaviors of NPC's. For most of the world, that's done with reputation, which is affected by the player's actions and guides the behavior of any NPC in the group covered by that reputation. So the player may steal an important religious artifact, which really makes clerics of that religion hate him, and probably lowers his rep with the town guard too, but the thieves guild loves him.
With companions, the effects of the player's actions are more individual. A companion may dislike you for taking that artifact, but really dislike how you are playing one group against another in order to sell it to the highest bidder. Meanwhile, another companion may not care about the outcome either way, as long as there is a lot of money to be made. This is one reason that companions are included as stretch goals. Unlike most NPC's, their reactions (and hence their dialog) is highly individualized and personal, so each companion has to be written as a unique NPC. That takes a lot of time, so we are adding them only if we can afford to make them.
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MAC: Having stated that players can tackle the game without companions, how do you balance a game where you can play solo or have six party members?
TC: You can have six companions, but you will not always be using the same six, as there are mechanics that will encourage you to swap out companions over time. Not all of these companions will be combat-focused, and as I said earlier, not all combat encounters have to be fought. If the player is solo and cannot handle an encounter, he should look for another way to handle it. Companions give you options, but they won't necessarily make the game easier.
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MAC: With companions playing such a large role in the game, how are you planning to handle romance options and other party dynamics?
TC: Carefully. :)
We have plans for various ways in which the companions will react to the player and his actions. The player will be free to pick and choose which companions accompany the main character, so different party dynamics are available as much or as little as the player wants. We are still in the planning stages about exactly what kinds of reactions we want to support.
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MAC: Previous games you worked on featured changes in how the PC interacted with the setting based on which skills the PC specialized in. Later Black Isle games abandoned this. Will you bring this back for Project Eternity?
TC: Yes, I liked that the player could choose his own way through the setting based on how the character was specialized. This is one reason we are paying close attention to the design of the non-combat abilities. They cannot be an afterthought because they will change how the player moves through the story.
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MAC: For your stretch goals, you have additional party members, races, factions, etc. How did you decide what would be in the base game and what would be added as you reached goals?
TC: We made a schedule with as much content as we could create for the base funding level, and from that we added additional classes, race, companions and other content. For each feature, we figured out how long it would take to add it and planned for the additional funding to cover that feature's development by a new designer, artist, programmer or musician.
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MAC: With these additional stretch goals being added every time a new goal is reached, how will this extra content alter your development schedule?
TC: We are not planning to change the ship date. Instead, we plan to add additional personnel to achieve those new goals. We are also planning our goals to spread the workload to different departments. Some features need a lot of additional code, other needs more artwork. We tried to avoid a set of stretch goals that would tax one department too much.
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MAC: Given time and budget constraints, is there any concern over how robust these can be, and how many conversations can be written numerous ways for the PC and NPCs?
TC: We have addressed these concerns by pulling the really time-consuming features into their own stretch goals. For example, we have tiers for lengthy NPC dialogs, such as companions and faction-related dialogs. We have a lot of people who we would love to bring onto the project, and with more funding we can do that.
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MAC: How long has Project Eternity been sitting around in the minds of the creative staff? I'm sure your team has lots of ideas bouncing around, so how did this project get selected?
TC: Everyone on the team loved the same set of games from the 90's and early 00's, games like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Torment. We've been wanting to make games like those for a long time, but publishers were not interested. When we saw how much fans were willing to support games on Kickstarter, we figured now was the time to make our passion into reality.
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MAC: Obsidian has been hit hard in the past by having games released before they seemed as polished as they needed to be technically. How does having crowd-funding over publisher-funding change the way you'll plan to tackle QA down the line?
TC: The biggest change is that we will decide on each and every feature in the game, and we can avoid the ones that add little to the game's content but a lot to its complexity. For example, we are not supporting consoles or multiplayer, both of which make the game far more complex and hard to debug. Instead, we are focusing on making the best single-player PC RPG we can make, and that focus is simplifying a lot of our choices.
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MAC: So not having a publisher involved in this project is freeing in that you can make what you and the fans want, but is there anything you feel is lacking by not having a publisher on board?
TC: We certainly won't have a big budget marketing campaign for this game. We hope that the attention raised by our Kickstarter campaign as well as word of mouth from our wonderful fans will help spread the news about our game. But in the end, making a fantastic game should draw people to buy it who didn't donate to its creation.
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MAC: Is there a freedom in not having to develop for consoles? Would it be viable, financially or otherwise, to add a console release as a higher tier stretch goal even if it was secondary to the PC/Mac release?
TC: There is a great freedom to not including a console target. We are not limited by graphic restrictions or hard drive space, and it's easier to define what is and is not possible to do with the engine. I think including a console stretch goal would only cloud our current focus.
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RPGamer would like to thank Tim Cain and the crew at Obsidian for helping to conduct this interview. Check out the Kickstarter and its many updates here.
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