14 DAY TRIAL // The development team at Obsidian is delivering yet another update for their upcoming Pillars of Eternity title, which is designed to focus on the work being done by the animators at the studio to bring the various creatures in the game world to life.
Rose Gomez, an associate producer at the company, starts off by showing some of the ways the team worked on Pillars of Eternity while at the Game Developers Conference 2014, before running through the process of bringing a creature from the concept stage to virtual reality.
The team explains that, “The amount of time spent animating is smaller than one might think when compared to the time spent in iterations, adjustments, and actually successfully implementing the animations into the engine. When an animator feels like they have something ready for the game, the animations go into the game engine and off to the lead for review.”
Gomez explains that Pillars of Eternity is the first title at the company to use the Unity engine, which poses some unique challenges for the animation team, all of them presented in detail in the official forum post.
The developer adds that, “A typical full animation set can take up to a month (and for more difficult creatures, sometimes even two months) to implement. During the animation process, animators will work very closely with design to make sure that every creature looks and moves just like they envisioned.”
The cat druid form is used as an example and Obsidian has even delivered a video in order to show the various stages of its evolution.
The new role-playing game is designed to use the classic mechanics of the genre and will have an entirely new fantasy world.
Gamers will be able to choose from a variety of classes, some very old-school and some innovative, and Obsidian promises that the title will accommodate a number of different play styles while introducing plenty of choices that will entice gamers to replay the experience.
Pillars of Eternity will be launched during the coming year and the marketing and the distribution of physical copies will be handled via a new partnership with Paradox Interactive.
The forum post from Obsidian also offers a short April Fools’ hoax, which introduces the ARM system that the company plans to use in order to eliminate piracy on its title without using DRM.
The studio has already explained that the game will not use other security measures than those linked to the service through which it is sold.
