14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Obsidian has revealed more details about the style and the narrative of their Project Eternity and how it is designed to appeal to old-school role-playing game fans by evoking the unique look of Icewind Dale and Bladur’s Gate.
Josh Sawyer, the project director working on the game, has told Gamasutra that, “We're using Unity, but what we're doing is using pre-rendered 2D backgrounds with probably some 2D flipbook animations in the background but also 3D characters and 3D animated environments and props when necessary, and trying to blend the lighting and shadows together.”
The style of the game will mean that players will get much of the story of Project Eternity via reading text rather than watching sleek cutscenes.
Sawyer believes that players who will be interested in the new Obsidian game are tired of the modern industries attempts to cross the uncanny valley and talked about an experiment where members of his own team tried to recreate famous movie scenes via a game engine.
He added, “It was insane, the amount of subtle head movements, facial stuff... it really nailed home for us that goddamn, this is hard. It was cool, but then again, when you're free from the need to really labor over something just to not break the illusion, it also frees the player up to use their imagination a bit more.”
Project Eternity will include a new game universe, with a variety of new races and political factions that don’t always conform to fantasy tropes.
This means that the team at Obsidian needs to deliver a lot of information to players while at the same time keeping them interested in the narrative.
The game is close to reaching 2.2 million dollars (1.7 million Euro) on Kickstarter and Obsidian will soon offer more stretch goals for the game.