Project Eternity Interviews

The press coverage for Project Eternity is clearly ramping up, with interviews coming out out at a pretty fast pace, and we have rounded up the latest three that have came out since our last post on the title.

GameStar.ru talks with Chris Avellone:

Why did you choose just that fantasy setting and not, for example, post apocalypse? Because you know, many people love you due to Fallout series, and, say, Tim Cain had some assets of so-called post-apocalyptic RPG at the time of Troika Games bankruptcy, which their team had failed to finish.

We discussed a variety of genres, and it came down that we felt doing a fantasy RPG was the one we felt the most excited about. We felt that genre still has a lot of room to evolve and Eternity seemed to be a great way to explore those themes and elements.

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Could you tell us about game’s world in detail? What climate and landscapes are expected to be seen by players? What will be the atmosphere of the game’s Universe? Will it be the dark fantasy?

More to come in the days ahead, but we can say this: we want to set up beautiful, interesting environments for the players to want to explore (we had a lot of fun in the Icewind Dale series creating dungeons like Dorn’s Deep, the Severed Hand, and even exploring the jungles of Chult). Dungeon crawling and being able to see the wonder of the fantasy world around you is one of our pillars. It won’t be doom-and-gloom fantasy, we want to shoot for a broader range of elements and experiences for the player, and we also don’t want to be too restrictive on the climate either. More to come!

The RPG Codex chats with Adam Brennecke:

RPG Codex: The budget of Obsidian’s other games has, I assume, been considerably higher than $1.1 million. Was there any hesitation about moving away from publisher-funded projects to a game with a much lower budget? Why did you set the initial funding goal at $1.1mil – would that really have been enough to develop the kind of game you wanted to make?

AB: Yep, you are correct to assume that $1.1 million is very small compared to our larger titles, but we felt we could have made an enjoyable title with that amount of money. With this type of game we won’t spend money on superfluous extras like cutscenes and next-gen graphics (although with that said, I think you all will be impressed when you see what we’ve been working on). These things can cost a lot of money, especially for games with larger scopes such as RPGs. Thankfully we can focus on the fun stuff, and devote all resources to gameplay.

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RPG Codex: Considering there are some extremely fine-tuned RPG systems available free of charge, such as Pathfinder OGL, why have you opted for the effort of creating your own system? What does this bring to the table compared to using an already existing one?

AB: We can create the game around a real-time system that fits our world, and it’s great that we have experienced designers like Tim and Josh to tackle creating our game system from scratch. It can be very difficult to convert pen and paper rules over to a computer game, and things get lost in the translation, or the rules detract from gameplay. We don’t have to make those concessions moving forward.

And finally, The Plagued Gamer has an audio interview with Feargus Urquhart, which touches among more or less the same subjects as the other interviews.

Spotted on the Obsidian Entertainment forums.