14 DAY TRIAL // Following Obsidian's previous successful crowd-funding campaign, the team revealed its keenness to try out their hand at, hopefully, a Skyrim-type Kickstarter.
Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity went through an impressively successful Kickstarter campaign, raising more than three times its already ambitious original goal.
Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart was quoted expressing his thoughts about the direction their success might lead them in, citing the Black Isle era of Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape: Torment, games which all felt distinct although being built on the same engine.
Urquhart is now thinking about doing the same thing with their Eternity engine, trying to figure out what a project of this scope might entail, what questions need answered and what potential problems could arise.
“What I'm trying to figure out is, how could we make something that is more like a Skyrim for PC – forget console for now – with the engine we made in Unity for Eternity,” Urquhart stated via RPS.
It appears that it's becoming a common practice for studios to start fund-raising for their next ambitious project before being done with their first, such being the story of inXile studios with their Torment: Tides of Numenera title, right after securing funding for their initial Wasteland 2 project.
There is, however, some solid reasoning for this, as inXile's Kevin Saunders commented on this move: “For a small developer, having multiple projects is very important. During different stages of production or game development, you need different people and a different-sized team.
“Right now, being in pre-production for Torment, we are able to have the design all established and the writing complete by the time Wasteland 2 ships in October. Then the production team can take a well-deserved break, and come back and they know what they are making. If we were to wait until later, either those people are idle or not being used as efficiently.”
“The hope is to come up with another Kickstarter that people would be interested in. My hope is that by March or April of next year, we'll have something we can kind of start talking to people about,” Obsidian's CEO provided as final words on the matter.