Today marks the first chance to see Project Eternity in action, with a new video released by Obsidian showing off the water, trees, and day/night lighting cycle. “We wanted to hit the high standard of visual quality established by games like the Icewind Dale series,” writes project director Josh Sawyer on the official site.

“We also wanted to introduce dynamic elements into the environment that were mostly absent from the classic games, like dynamic water, movement in foliage, and dynamic lighting of the scene.”

Check out the video for yourself below. In-engine footage starts around the 1:45 mark, if you want to skip all the chit-chat.

Source: Obsidian (Thanks, Zak)

While you’re passing the years until Project: Eternity shows up with the game of your dreams, why not kill some time with these concept arts and “grey renders” from very early prototypes?

Revealed on the Obsidian forums by Rob Nesler, Art Director on Project Eternity, the images are part of an attempt to “prove to ourselves and you, that we know what we’re doing, and to lay the groundwork for expanding these vacant golems into player and non-player characters”.

Nesler reveals that the company are now moving into Maya as their new rendering software, and having to learn a few new tricks along the way. Take a look at these WIP screens and concepts below.

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Obsidian’s Chris Avellone has sat down with Games Industry International to talk about Project: Eternity, where they’re going to go with the game and where the game is headed after that.

“Our hope with Eternity is that it’s just the first in a series of installments, and then obviously we want to do the full expansion packs, and then extra content, just because we know we really enjoyed doing that for Fallout: New Vegas,” Avellone said. “We’d want to continue adding new content to the world. The first game is only one moderately sized nation in a much, much, much bigger world where a lot of other things are going on. There’s plenty more room for games in that universe and that’s what we’d like to do.”

But games aren’t all the Obsidian team are considering. Without having to go through a publisher, Avellone says, they can consider things like novel or graphic novel tie-ins, to tell more of the world’s story. He also spoke about companion interactions and making them a little more nuanced for Project: Eternity and a little less ‘IF [character]=male and [companion]=female THEN romance.’

“I’d like to think that there are other types of relationships that you can have with a companion, whether it’s friendship, rivalry, hatred, or revenge,” he said. “Romances end up being an easy target, but I think there’s a lot more you can do with companion relationships. Also, I think a lot of games have fallen into the hole of the evil choice is always a psychotic option. There’s a whole spectrum of other stuff you can do in conversation that I’m looking forward to doing.”

Source: Games Industry International

To many backers, myself included, Project Eternity is something of a dream project; a veritable super-group of RPG developers, including Chris Avellone (Planescape: Torment), Tim Cain (Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura) and Josh Sawyer (Icewind Dale II) teaming up to create an old-school epic. By the end of the campaign, just shy of 74,000 people backed the project on Kickstarter, with another undisclosed number contributing through Paypal, After asking for $1.1 million to make the game, Obsidian Entertainment raked in over $4 million, making the project the most strongly backed Kickstarter game campaign so far, and increasing the size and scope of the game far beyond the original parameters.

With only a single screenshot of the game existing, it’s far too early to speak about the game itself, but the amount of money raised, the way the stretch goals for the campaign were structured and some of the comments on both the Kickstarter and on gaming forums say some very interesting things not only about Project Eternity but also about the industry and community as a whole.

Now officially the biggest Kickstarter game on record, Obisidian’s Project: Eternity drive has shut its doors at $3.98 million. Originally only asking for $1.1 million, the team crashed through their initial goal in just 24 hours and have since gone on to add stretch goal after stretch goal, culminating in a $4m goal to enhance the whole game with live instrumentation for the soundtrack, developer commentary, and more.

Although the Kickstarter itself stopped just shy of $4 million, PayPal funds — last announced as being in the realm of $140,000 — have bumped it well over the mark, according to Obsidian’s Twitter account. Unfortunately, Project: Eternity isn’t due until April of 2014, which means we’ll have plenty of time to sit and gnaw anxiously on our fingernails about how they’re handling our baby.

It is officially less than two days until I will shut up about this Kickstarter forever! But in these last 44 hours, GUYS! Go pledge some more money to the Project: Eternity Kickstarter!

At the time of writing the total is sitting at $3.1 million, which is crazy impressive considering their goal was $1.1 million. The last big stretch goal at $3 million added a player-run stronghold, inspired by features like The Sink in the Fallout: New Vegas DLC Old World Blues, where you can craft items, interact with companions and that sort of thing. But people said they wanted to interact with the surrounding lands, to make large-scale changes and go on special quests, more like Baldur’s Gate II or Neverwinter Nights 2. Hitting the $3 million stretch goal has provided these opportunities for players to experience between adventures.

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With five days left to go on the clock, Obsidian are unveiling more stretch goals for their Project: Eternity Kickstarter. At $3 million they’ll add a stronghold to player housing: a proper fort that players can capture, live in and look after, that provides special quests and “light strategic gameplay” as well as being fully customisable (along with the environment around it).

At $3.5 million things get more ambitious: they’ll fully concept, render and populate an entire additional big city with quests, NPCs, interiors, the works. At the moment, there’s only one big city in the game — if they make it to $3.5, they plan to make it two.

The latest Kickstarter update also includes a mention of a new almanac PDF, which will act as a primer or campaign source material to flesh out some of the game world. It’ll be free to all backers of $50 and above, but cost $15 for anybody else. Oh, and maybe you’d like to see this awesome new screenshot of an environment render? Of course you would.

Source: Project: Eternity

With just over a week left on its Kickstarter, Project: Eternity is still adding amazing new features with every update and stretch goal. The latest update, number 16 for those playing at home, added some great new rewards including an exclusive pet at the $50+ tier, and upgrading the Collector’s Book to hardcover at the $250+.

What I think is coolest though, is at $500+ you get to put your name and a personalised message in the game. But it’s not in boring old English though. Nope, it will be encoded into Glanfathan runes for other players to decode. Time to penis, anyone?

Tim Cain also answered some questions on Reddit about combat, which are viewable in text form over at their forums. There’s also a Reddit group available if you’re interested in being a part of the next Q&A. Finally, the most exciting aspect of the latest update: Obsidian have confirmed that, like Neverwinter Nights 2 and Fallout: New Vegas before it, Project: Eternity will be supporting mods. “Our plan is to release our file-format information and expose as much of the data in the game as possible for you to extend and edit. We traditionally do not ‘hard-code’ numbers so that our designers, and you, have the power to easily change and iterate on RPG data.”

As mentioned earlier there is barely a week left on the Kickstarter for this amazing-looking game so go forth, be generous, and support what is shaping up to be a great title.

Source: Project: Eternity Kickstarter

I’m pretty much Project: Eternity‘s biggest fan now. As part of their latest update, they’ve added some stretch goals for when they hit $2.3 mill. These include some ‘Godlike’ races, which the team describe as being like D&D’s aasimar, tieflings and genasi.

If you don’t already know what those are, you probably wouldn’t find it interesting anyway — but what is interesting are their gameplay modes that ramp the difficulty up to 11, 12 and 13 respectively.

The first is ‘Expert Mode’, which the team describe as ‘similar to hardcore mode in Fallout: New Vegas‘. All the more punitive and nasty game mechanics will be switched on and all the more helpful ones switched off, in and out of combat. “We’re not saying we’re going to have weighty gold (for real, we’re not saying that), but if we did, you can bet that would be automatically turned on by Expert Mode.” But that’s just the beginning.

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Over at their Kickstarter, Obsidian have outlined their goals for Project: Eternity‘s non-combat skills, and they are impressive. With most RPGs, there are combat skills and non-combat skills — both are usually unique and interesting, but you need to invest in combat skills if you want to finish the game, whereas non-combat skills are fairly optional.

In Project: Eternity you will be given the choice to avoid combat altogether, without gimping yourself by getting less experience or less exciting items. Non-combat skills will be useful and separate from combat skills, while still being used frequently.

Obviously, the game is still in its early stages, and things could change dramatically before its estimated release of April 2014. But frankly, even the idea of non-combat skills becoming more of a feature makes this veteran RPG’er pretty excited. There are more details over at the Kickstarter itself, so go and check it out. And while you’re there, you know, maybe you could get your wallet out. Just sayin’.

Full disclosure: this story finally made me back this game on Kickstarter.

Source: Kickstarter

Obsidian’s CEO Feargus Urquhart has revealed on the company’s Project: Eternity Kickstarter page that they have previously been approached by publishers, asking them to do a Kickstarter — but turned them down.

“We were actually contacted by some publishers over the last few months that wanted to use us to do a Kickstarter,” said Urquhart. “I said to them: ‘So, you want us to do a Kickstarter for, using our name, we then get the Kickstarter money to make the game, you then publish the game, but we then don’t get to keep the brand we make and we only get a portion of the profits.’ They said, ‘Yes’.”

Urquhart was quick to stress that he didn’t think the publishers really understood what they were asking. “I think they were trying, honestly, to be able to do something with us and they felt that was the easiest way to do it. They would then not need to go get budget approved and deal with the challenge of that. What I don’t think they did was to think about our side of it and what they were really asking.”

Obsidian’s Project: Eternity Kickstarter has now reached $1.7 million of its $1.1m goal.

Source: NeoGAF

Obisidian’s obscure teasing that took over their site last week has now had its true purpose revealed: a Kickstarter! The new project, currently named ‘Project: Eternity’, is billed as “an isometric, party-based RPG set in a new fantasy world” that “pays homage to the great Infinity Engine games of years past: Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment“.

“We have wanted to go back to our roots and create an epic PC role-playing game adventure for years,” writes the blurb. “But, it’s been almost impossible to get funding through traditional methods for a game like this. The great thing about Kickstarter is that we can go directly to the people who love to play RPGs as much as we love to make them. Plus, we don’t have to make compromises with a publisher. We make the development decisions, we market the game, and we don’t have to answer to anyone but you – our fans.”

Obsidian are asking for a budget of $1.1 million from their fans, and a mere 24 hours later, they’ve been given it. In fact at the time of writing, 27,684 people have donated a whopping $1,128,066 — and there’s still 31 days left on the clock.

If you’d like to be a part of the drive, there’s 5000 slots left of the $20 ‘pre-purchase on Steam’ support option remaining, so head on over and take a look.

Source: Kickstarter