Chris Avellone Promises Transparency, Wondrous Things for Project Eternity

Planescape: Torment author and writing lead for Obsidian’s much-hyped Kickstarter venture, Project Eternity, Chris Avellone, sat down recently with VG247’s Dave Cook to discuss the game’s development and what it’s like to vet a project with (as of this writing) over 43,000 separate investors. Here are some highlights.

In discussing morality mechanics for the game, Avellone said the team is taking a cue from Alpha Protocol and moving away from explicit metrics:

I’m more interested in how people in the world perceive you rather than an internal morality bar. […] We’re still fleshing out the lore and faction elements, but I’d always felt that morality and hard choices are things you don’t need to weigh on a slider, you only need to introduce them in the right context to make a player pause and go “oh, shit, what do I do?”

Asked about the current stage of the project, Avellone answered, “We’re in pre-production, although most of our efforts at the moment are focused on the Kickstarter.” These regular updates have formed the basis of the early setting and mechanics details we currently have for the game, and on the order of which we can look forward to seeing more of. Avellone continued,

Obsidian’s known for story and characters. This time, however, we’re going to explore character and fantasy elements that we haven’t had the chance to in previous franchises, and even better, we get to explore those elements along the development process with the players.

Unlike traditional projects, we can share more about character and world evolution, and even work with players on bringing elements they’d like to see to the fore.

This may represent the most exciting aspect of Project Eternity, which is that much of its development will be taking place in public, rather than behind a veil of publisher secrecy and PR.

One of the more significant insights for fans of Avellone’s work was this tidbit, on Wasteland 2’s successful Kickstarter influencing Obsidian’s move toward the crowdfunding service for Project Eternity:

At what point did you decide you wanted to take the Kickstarter route? You have to imagine that all of this would have been a hard to do precisely the way you wanted under a big publisher.

A few months ago. Exhaustion with the pitch process was part of it. We’ve been pitching titles for months upon months upon months upon months, and even then, none of them are isometric RPGs that we used to do and love.

Considering how much success Wasteland 2 had with the public and the willingness of the public to support this type of RPG, we wanted to do the same thing and all pitch in on a world we were all excited about. If the public hated the idea, fine, at least we knew. Now we know they don’t, and they support it more than we had ever hoped for.

It’s been previously reported that Obsidian faced pressure from publishers to front a Kickstarter project for minimal profit. This revelation, which is sure to damn said publishers should their names ever come to light, together with the Eternity team’s professed exhaustion with traditional funding models and its embrace of Good Old Games as a DRM-free distribution solution, might be yet another much-needed nail in the coffin of conventional game publishing.

You can (and should) read the entire interview at VG247.