The Guildmaster

Hi guys, One of the most exciting things about working on this game is that we can do so with you guys throughout the entire process. No need to "go dark" or severely limit the kinds of topics we discuss. The funding to create this game is coming from you. You are our boss on this one, and throughout the process of this game, we want to make sure we're doing our best for you. To be blunt, we obviously want to continue to raise funding for this game as much as we can. Doing that helps us do more with the game and just make it more polished and as awesome as we can for as many of the fans of this type of game as we can reach. For fans of PS:T, Baldur's Gate, and Icewind, we want to bring you that feel of game again. We can't explain how excited we are to do that. To that end, we want to make sure we're giving you guys the things you'd like to see to get involved with the game. We want to know a few things about our stretch goals, and if you're willing to share your thoughts, we'd appreciate it! 1) Big Goals: A number of folks have suggested adding "big ass goals": Things like 3 or 4M stretch goals, but bigger in terms of scope. What kinds of things would you want to see that you think would motivate the community to invest more, and/or find more backers to get involved? (Besides mod tools or multiplayer) 2) Backer Rewards: With respect to backer rewards (basically when we hit certain thresholds of backer counts), do you like the ever expanding mega dungeon as an incentive, and if not, do you have suggestions for things you think would encourage folks to reach out to their friends to get involved? 3) Other Stretch/Backer Feedback? Have any other feedback you think would help this be better? Thanks everyone! -TG

Happy Monday! We've reached 50,000 backers, and have a special reward for everyone. Details below. Also coming this week, we have more updates about the development and creation of the game. Tomorrow, Justin Bell will discuss the process for composing the music for our trailer video. On Wednesday, Josh will update with more details about the game's design, and we are going to unveil a awesome art piece that we’ve been working on. Oh, PayPal is also coming on Wednesday! The 50,000 Backer Reward We are very excited to announce a reward to all backers that have helped us come this far. Today we are introducing The Endless Paths of Od Nua - a new dungeon experience for Project Eternity: In the western reaches of the Dyrwood lies the Endless Paths, an ancient network of cobbled trails that wind through arches of dense overgrowth, twisting within the confines of a high castle wall as they make their way to the gates of iron-shuttered towers that jut forth from the interior. In ages past, the towers rising from the gardens to pierce the canopy of the forest once marked the dominion of the castle's relentless, crazed builder: Od Nua. But the courses of Od Nua's madness run far below the surface, stretching forever deeper into wandering catacombs and bone-cramped oubliettes unseen by living eyes for centuries. The Endless Paths, as the old Glanfathans call them, cannot be walked by the living, but the storytellers say with certainty that many strong souls have found a permanent home beneath the grieving creator's estate. Most else that is said and written of the place is fiction or conjecture, more likely to have sprouted from the svef-enhanced imaginations of bored and boasting mercenaries than from any seed of truth. Hosts of lost souls that relentlessly stalk the living, cathedral-sized tombs overflowing with the restless victims of a horrific plague, lightless chambers sealing in the remnants of Od Nua's failed experiments. Most legends converge on a common theme: that under the castle rest myriad forgotten vaults of death and darkness glittering with Od Nua's enchanted creations and the abandoned treasure of ill-fated interlopers. So great is the fear of the castle's denizens that even drunken and drug-cheered adventurers do not joke of setting foot on the paths, lest their souls join the eternal ranks of those that have gone before them. The current plan is to make The Endless Paths with three subterranean levels, but it can grow larger with your help. For every 2,500 additional backers, the depths of Od Nua’s castle become deeper, which means one additional level will be added to the vaults. Continue to spread the word about Project Eternity, and let's see how big we can make The Endless Paths! Crafting and Enchanting at $2.4 Million We also have a new stretch goal at $2.4 million dollars to announce: Crafting and Enchanting! Crafting and enchanting in Project Eternity will allow players to use objects and materials they find during exploration to both create consumable items like potions and scrolls as well as give their gear custom upgrades that can't be accomplished by other means. This system is intended to be easy to use and very flexible, allowing players to customize many aspects of what they can create or alter. Whether it's brewing basic potions from herbs and minerals commonly found throughout the world or upgrading a humble broadsword into a custom-named, magically-imbued weapon of distinctive and legendary power, we want to give players the ability to make it. On the development side of things, we also want to make the system as data-driven as possible, allowing us to easily extend our list of recipes in the future. Each stretch goal we hit not only adds new features to the game like crafting, but also makes the game larger by adding more content, quests, dialogue, and characters. Together, we've already added two new races, companions and classes, along with a player house. $2.2 million is very close which adds a new faction and region, and there are more exciting stretch goals planned if we make it past $2.4 million and beyond. New Add-Ons Additionally, we have two new add-ons for you: Add an Early Access Beta Key for $25. The beta key is the same reward at the $110 and up levels, but now you can add it as an extra at the lower tiers. Add a Digital Strategy Guide for $7. The digital strategy guide is also included in the $80 and up levels, but now you can add it as an extra at the lower tiers. This will cost more when we ship the game, so get in on the opportunity to save! As a quick tutorial on how to add add-ons, go to the Project Eternity Kickstarter site and hit the Manage Your Pledge button. The reward tier you had already picked will still be selected and the amount will be in the big box at the top. All you need to do is add the dollar amount that covers the add-ons you would like to your pledge and enter the new total number. For instance, if you are at the $35 Pledge level and want to add the Beta Key, you would enter $60 as your total pledge. We’ll send you a fulfillment survey after the Kickstarter period is over and you can specify what you wanted to do with any excess monies added. Thank you! Update by Adam Brennecke and Josh Sawyer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Uyzap5FcgI This update is going to be a little different. Instead of doing an update on a topic that we chose, we asked readers on reddit to submit questions and vote them up or down, and on Friday we took the five highest scoring questions to answer here. You can visit the Project Eternity reddit group here: http://www.reddit.co...rojecteternity/ and the Q&A subgroup is here: http://www.reddit.co...ns_answered_by/ Let us know if you like these Q&A updates, and we can look into doing more of them. Tim. AtheistBots asks... Class vs. Classless systems You're most famous for classless systems involved in Fallout and Arcanum. It sounds as if Obsidian will be using a class based system. What do you see as being the advantages of a class based system that you're hoping to leverage in Project Eternity? Answer: We are designing a class-based system because we want the different characters in your party to fill different roles, and classes are the best way to achieve this goal. In a skill-based game, it's harder to tell if a companion gives you the skills you are looking for, especially before you recruit them. In a class-based game, you know what each class can do, so you can decide that you want a particular class even before a potential companion offers to join you. And when you have a lot of companions and can choose which ones you want to take on a particular adventure, classes make it easier to form the group and be assured that you have your skillsets covered. Bonus question: Are you considering multiclassing? Answer: Bonus questions are cheating…but yes, we are considering adding multi-classing to the game. A better way to put this answer is that we are not ruling them out at this time. If they work well with our final system, we will offer them. Kaaaboom asks… I was a bit discouraged when I heard that the combat was going to be RTwP (real time with pause), myself being a big fan of TB (turn-based) and the possibility of tactical combat that it lends to a game. My question is then: how are you going to make the combat in P:E tactically interesting despite it being RTwP? Answer: Hmm, this is a bit of a loaded question, as it implies that real-time games aren't tactically interesting while all turn-based games are. Believe me, I have played plenty of dull turn-based games with very few options on what to do on each turn, and there are lots of real-time games that are incredibly tactically rich. Look at all of the real-time strategy games out there! So to answer your question, we are going to make sure that the distinct abilities that our classes will have will each provide different roles to those characters in combat, and that you will always have choices to make in combat about how to best position yourself and use your attacks. In addition, we are going to design the enemy encounters to be ever-increasing challenges, so that one way of fighting won't carry you through every encounter. You will be forced to mix it up a bit, tactically speaking, and use all of your combat skills to make it through to the end of the game. Let me add that as an Infinity Engine inspired game, our pillars of design include isometric exploration of a fantasy world, a reactive storyline with interesting and believable characters, and real-time with pause combat. Those elements are expected in our game, and we feel strongly about providing them. Elthosian asks… How much reactivity can we expect from the world based in our character's race and sub-race? Answer: We will provide a lot of reactivity in our game to your choice of race. We are planning on giving each race a set of traits that the player can pick from, and those traits affect everything from dialogs choices to skill bonuses to what kind of options you will have to finish some quests. There probably won't be quests that are just for one race, but one thing we are not going to do for certain is make race-restricted items. While many items have a cultural connection to some races, they will still be useable by members of other races. It might be unusual to see humans in elven chain, but they can wear it. NeuroArcanist asks… What aspect of cRPGs missing from modern games do you most want to recapture with Project Eternity? Answer: I can answer that in one word: parties. I like playing cRPG's that allow the player to control big parties of characters, and by control, I mean you can pick the actions of each party member if you want. We will have lots of pause conditions in our combat, and if you want to have the game pause whenever a party member can perform a new action, you can do that. Most modern games only let you control one character, or if they give you a party, you only control one member of that group. In this game, I want to control all of them. Zinicel asks… Will there be modding capabilities for this game? I know it's a tall order for this style of game, but I've wanted a definitive answer to this question. Knowing Unity, I know it's somewhat unlikely to offer this. But it'd still be nice to know for sure. Answer: That is a very good question, but unfortunately, I don't have an answer for you. We are still looking at Unity and how it bundles up content in the shipped game, and we will have to see how much of that we can make available to the player. I can say that we want you to be able to mod the game, and if it's possible, we will allow you to do it. It's not our primary focus, which is to give you an amazing single player experience with our game, but we know a lot of people will want to tinker with the game and make their own content, so we will let you know how this objective is faring when we are further along in development.

Today's Project Eternity update is shorter and sweeter than usual (at least on the text side), and instead is a fun video from Obsidian's creative director, Chris Avellone. In the video, Chris talks about birthdays, gratitude for fan gratitude, his one really @$!$ messy desk, and some extrapolation of characterization in Project Eternity. The video is a follow up to his Project Eternity and Characterization blog post over on the Obsidian forums from a few days ago. We encourage you to check it out first if you haven't already, particularly if the process of character design interests you, and then watch the video! Our next update coming this weekend. Oh, and for those of you who might not know, we successfully hit the $2.0M stretch goal, so chillaxing (that is, chilling and relaxing, in elvish) with some of your favorite companions in your player house is now one more thing you can do in the game!

We love giving players options: character build options, personality options, story options -- all the options you might want to play around with. We recognize that many players also want to play the game their way and have an experience that matches their particular RPG tastes. RPG fans share a lot of common ground, but on matters of visible mechanical feedback, complexity, and the overall level of punitive face-punching a game provides, there's a big spectrum of opinions. In a lot of cases, it's not too hard for us to provide options to turn an individual feature on or off, so we want to make that possible when resources permit us to do so. Additionally, even among the ranks of RPG superfans, there exists a subset of players who can't get enough challenge. They want all of the difficulty features set to "I am pro." Collectively, we've worked on a bunch of these challenge modes in the past and enjoyed the results. Project Eternity seems like a very appropriate place to highlight suites of these difficulty options as distinct gameplay modes that players can opt-into at the beginning of any game. We've come up with three modes we'd like to support, which also includes the ability to turn many of their sub-features on and off on an individual level in an ordinary game: Expert Mode, Trial of Iron, and Path of the Damned. Expert Mode will disable all of the common ease-of-use / in-case-you-missed it gameplay elements like the display of skill thresholds, influence/reputation modifiers, and similar "helper" information. In a fashion similar to Fallout: New Vegas' Hardcore Mode, Expert Mode will also enable more punitive and demanding gameplay elements, in and out of combat. We're not saying we're going to have weighty gold (for real, we're not saying that), but if we did, you can bet that would be automatically turned on by Expert Mode. If you guessed that Trial of Iron is like Temple of Elemental Evil's Ironman Mode, you guessed right. When you start a Trial of Iron game, you have one save game that persists for the entire campaign... or until you die. And if you die, your save game is deleted. Enjoy! Path of the Damned is a spiritual successor to Icewind Dale's Heart of Fury mode. In our encounters, we like to turn individual combatants on and off based on the level of difficulty. If you come into an area on Easy, maybe casters are replaced with weak melee enemies. If you come in on Hard, maybe the casters are augmented by a tough melee enemy or two. With Path of the Damned, that goes out the window. All enemies from all levels of difficulty are enabled and the combat mechanics are amplified to make battles much more brutal for everyone involved. The first question you may have is, "Can I enable multiple challenge modes at once?" Yep, you sure can. They have to be selected at the beginning of the game, but if you want to play with two or all three at the same time, you can certainly can do so. If you're not quite sure you want all of the elements that come along with a given mode, this funding level will also cover implementing the ability to enable and disable the individual sub-features. Along with these modes, we also want to introduce the Godlike races. These folks have been described previously as being similar to the humanoid "planetouched" in D&D: aasimar, tieflings, and genasi. That is a good high-level description of them, but they are viewed differently by various factions, faiths, and cultures in the world of Project Eternity. Godlike were "blessed" before birth by one or more of the meddling deities of this world. Though their appearances vary, they are unmistakeably otherworldly when anyone gets a clear look at them. Sometimes, the reaction they get is overwhelmingly positive. Many times, the reaction is overwhelmingly not. For better or worse, the physical "gifts" that mark them as Godlike always come with supernatural blessings (and curses) of their own. The first question you may have after reading this may be, "Hey, what about the other races that have already been funded?" Those races are in the process of being fully designed and concepted -- and they can't be summarized quite as simply as "sort of like planetouched". We'll have more for you on those guys in the not-too-distant future. Thanks again for your support, your patience, and your questions. Update from Josh Sawyer In addition to today's update, we've got a few backer badges for you, including one for the fantastic Obsidian Order of Eternity! @Obsidian

We are still going strong over here on Kickstarter and we wanted to thank everyone that has been here since the beginning as well as those of you who have come on recently to back us with your pledge. With such great support, we want to thank everyone with a new addition to the $50 and later tiers, a new $110 digital only tier, and a big change to our $2.2M stretch goal. Oh, and what are we doing this week as to updates you might ask? Josh Sawyer, Tim Cain and Chris Avellone will be posting updates and videos all this week starting on Sep 26 with Josh, Sep 27 with Mr. Avellone and a great one from Tim over the weekend. French, German, and Spanish Translations added at $2.2M We are glad to announce that we will add text translations for French, German, and Spanish when we reach this goal. As we hit more of our stretch goals, we hope to be able to add even more languages as well! Novella by Chris Avellone added for $50 and Up! Chris Avellone has been so thankful for everyone's support that he himself has pledged to write a novella in the world of Project Eternity. We are adding that to everyone who pledges $50 and up. New $110 Digital Only Tier Thanks to popular demand, we are adding a new digital tier at $110 that has early beta access to the game, thanks in the credits, a postcard thanking you for your pledge (sent physically) along with all the other digital benefits of the $140 Tier. Since we added the new novella written by Chris Avellone at the $50 reward tier - that is in there as well! Oh and we have a little piece of artwork to share as well. The following is one of our traditional race and class combinations - the Human Fighter - but he's not just any Human Fighter. He has an integral role in the story that we will be hinting at soon. Don't worry, we will also be sharing more and more of the non-traditional options in the days and weeks to come. (See the official Kickstarter post for art)

We are over 1.8 million dollars and climbing! I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to make this dream possible, and in return we promise to make you the most amazing game we can. I know you all have asked for more details about the game, so let's talk about non-combat abilities. Most role-playing games can be divided into two sets of mechanics: those rules you use in combat and those you don't. For many people, an RPG is really defined by its combat. These people spend most of their time killing things and taking their loot, and leveling up is just a means to kill bigger things and get better loot. But for other people, an RPG is about the elements of the game they experience when not in combat. It's about the NPC's they talk with, the places they travel to, and the choices they make, including the choice to avoid combat altogether. Non-Combat Abilities Let's talk first about your goals as a player, about the things you would like to do besides fighting. Then I'll talk about our design goals and explain how we are putting the non-combat systems together. Player Goals When you are not fighting, that's when non-combat abilities come into play. We plan to add abilities that will let you become better at achieving four different non-combat goals. Learning new things. This includes finding out previously unknown information, like the location of town or a hidden door, or uncovering secret knowledge, like a potion recipe or the true name of a demon. Or maybe you just want to know a good place to gather materials like ore or herbs. We will make abilities that let you find things out. Traveling around the world. You will want to improve your movement capabilities (such as sneaking around some ruins), or traveling across the world map faster or more safely, or even teleporting directly to your destination. And sometimes movement requires removing barriers like locks or traps, so you will need some way to unlock and disarm. We'll add abilities for these actions. Getting new items. If you are not going to kill a creature to take its things, then we will give you the means to make new items, buy them, or steal them. Or maybe you will choose to support NPC's by bringing them the materials or the recipes needed to make new items for you. We congratulate you on your non-violent and cooperative plans of wealth acquisition, and we'll give you the means to do it. Interacting with companions. Once we have added many interesting and useful NPC companions, we will have to give you ways to recruit them, improve their usefulness, and keep them from dying (or even worse, disliking you!). We will make non-combat abilities that interact with your companions, so you can keep them alive and filled with a grudging respect for you. Now each of these goals represents a whole slew of related non-combat abilities. For example, for player traveling, we could have all kinds of abilities, including stealth and teleport abilities, as well as abilities to make world map travel faster, less likely to have encounters, and able to make use of alternate transportation routes such as over mountains using passes or over water using ships. Design Goals In putting together our non-combat system, we have made a list of goals for the design of these skills and the rules they need to follow. Non-combat skills are gained separately from combat skills. You shouldn't have to choose between Magic Missile and Herbalism. They should be separate types of abilities, and you should spend different points to get each one. Non-combat skills do not use the same resources as combat skills. You don't spend the same stuff for a non-combat skill as you do for combat skills. Some don't use anything at all to use, so you will never find yourself unable to blast an opponent if you get caught sneaking. All non-combat skills are useful. If we add lockpicking to the game, we will make sure that there are locks to pick and worthwhile rewards for getting past them. All non-combat skills can be used frequently. If you take disarm traps as a skill, you should expect more than two traps in the entire game world. Frequency of application has a large impact on how useful something is. Combat can be avoided with non-combat skills. There will often be ways to avoid fighting. Yes, we will have the standard methods of talking your way out of a fight or sneaking around an encounter, but there will be other ways too. Perhaps you can re-sanctify a desecrated cemetery to prevent any further undead from rising, or maybe figuring out a way across a ruined bridge will always avoid the bandits on this side of the river. Avoiding combat does not lead to less experience gain. You shouldn't go up levels any slower by using your non-combat skills rather than your combat skills. We plan to reward you for your accomplishments, not for your body count. We are still in the early design stages, but our plan is for non-combat abilities to make the game as fun and enjoyable outside of combat as it is in the heat of battle. Thanks for keeping up to date with Project Eternity and stop by the Kickstarter site or the Obsidian Forums for all the latest information. Next update will be on Monday! Tim Cain

Hi folks, I've been reading some of the comments and wanted to add a little of my own color to the discussion. We'll be using Unity 4, and it can definitely create the look and feel for the game we want to make. It's tools are really developer friendly, cross-platform work is abstracted beautifully, and our designers and programmers can't stop saying how much they love it after evaluating it. We are shooting for a higher resolution, IWD/BG/Torment art style, and it can deliver that. For those who aren't as much into how the tech works, the engine itself won't limit us to any particular art styles (even if there are games on it that look similar.) Unity has an extremely flexible rendering system, and we can use it to make the game look exactly as we intend. There aren't any cartoony limitations or anything like that suddenly come with it. -TG

Wow folks, we really don't know what to say other than we're extremely humbled and thankful for your additional pledges to help make Project Eternity even better. As a token of our appreciation, we'd like to give all of you customized titles on our forums, based on what you're setting it to be on Kickstarter. We'll start rolling those out shortly. Thanks again to all of you - incredible! -TG

At Obsidian, we have always tried to choose the engine and toolset most suited to the game we are making. When making a sequel to an existing game, we use the engine from the original game so that we don’t waste time recreating the inner workings and gameplay behavior in a new engine before we can even start developing new content. When creating a new game from scratch, we evaluate the options available to us and choose the one we think fits best. In the case of Project Eternity, we feel the best fit is Unity. Unity enables small teams to be very productive. Unity has an amazing development environment that makes it very easy for programmers, artists and designers to work together to build great games. In a very short time we have already made great progress prototyping some of the core functionality for Project Eternity. We do intend to use some of our in-house tools in conjunction with Unity where it makes sense, such as in the case of creating conversations and editing some of the RPG-specific game data. Unity makes it very easy to extend not only the game engine but the development tools as well, and we feel integrating some of the tools that have already proven effective on previous Obsidian games will get us off to a great start on the development of Project Eternity. Unity also supports a wide range of target platforms. We knew that a likely request from the community was going to be support for Mac and Linux versions of the game, and we wanted to make sure we were in the best position to do that. While we could have ported Onyx, our internal engine technology, to those platforms, the time and effort required to do so would reduce the budget we have to make the game and result in less of the awesome gameplay and content our fans desire. Mac and Linux will still require time and effort from us to test, maintain and support but Unity gets us most of the way there. In fact, our experience with Unity so far has made us confident enough that we have decided to remove Linux support from the stretch goals and just commit to providing a Linux version right here and now! Of course, we can’t take something away from our stretch goals without putting something else in its place, so what is that going to be? The $2.2 million stretch goal will still include a new Region, a new Faction, a new Companion and all the hours of additional gameplay, quests, NPCs and items that go along with those things. But we’ve also got something new coming to this stretch goal, and it’s big enough that it’s deserving of its own update to talk about it! So tune in this coming Monday, September 24th where we will reveal our new stretch goals, unveil a fun new tracker for them, and announce our schedule of guest stars for the week! Thank you for supporting Obsidian and Project Eternity! Chris Jones CTO, Obsidian

Perhaps there will be a way to redeem the key through GoG instead? I know nothing about such technology! Not promising anything yet, but we'll look into how to do that best. We wanted to use Steam to give folks achievements and cloud saves (we're not interested in the DRM features, just its streaming and gamer stuff) but it may be possible for us to support DRM free on the disc, but still give fans of Steam access to those things. Again not promising that, but that's how I'd ideally like to see it handled and we'll see what we can do! -TG

Well you all did it, you helped us get to $1.6M and we now have a Mac version and are adding more story into the world. We have also been listening and reading your feedback on Kickstarter and have some changes that are happening as soon as this update is posted. One thing, we are not updating just yet are the stretch goals, but don’t worry those are going to get updated very soon. Oh, and we are putting a schedule together for updates that will include guest stars almost every day – Josh will be talking more about the design tomorrow (Sep 20), our unflappable CTO Chris Jones (architect of the Fallout and Arcanum engines) on Friday (Sep 21), and I think we will be able to squeeze one in from Mr. Tim Cain over the weekend. So, what are those changes?!? DRM Free Options You asked and we are delivering. In conjunction with GOG, we are going to offer a DRM free version of the game for our Kickstarter Backers. When the campaign ends, you will be able to choose whether you would like a key from GOG or Steam. For our Mac friends, we are still working on a DRM free option, since GOG does not currently support the Mac. Oh, and the great guys at GOG are having a special right now on all of the great Infinity Engine games, so check that out as well. New Digital Tiers We are adding a $50 and an $80 digital tier. The $50 tier will get you the digital version of the game, the soundtrack, the digital version of the Collector’s Book, a collection of wallpapers made for multiple resolutions and multiple monitors, high resolution concept art, a high resolution version of the map, and ringtones. For the $80 tier, you will get all of that plus a digital copy of the strategy guide, and a second digital download of the game. Add-Ons This is a short list for right now, but we will be adding more as the days pass including some pretty swank Obsidian-wear. Add a Digital Download of the Game +$25 Add Three Digital Downloads of the Game +$60 As a quick tutorial on how to add add-ons, goto the Project Eternity site on Kickstarter and then hit the Manage Your Pledge button. The reward tier you had already selected will still be selected and the amount will be in the big box at the top. All you need to do is add the dollar amount that covers the add-ons you would like to your pledge and enter the new total number. For instance, if you are at the $35 Pledge level and want to add one Digital Download, you would enter $60 as your total pledge. New for our Collector's Edition Box Level ($140) Lastly we want to announce that we are going to give our backers at the Collector’s Edition Box Level ($140) a little extra today and that is Beta access to the game! That’s just a little taste of what we will be adding into tiers in the coming days and weeks through stretch goals and the occasional random act.

Thanks Solree, I'll take a look at that. Eeep.

It made you a Watcher. No one asks for that. And the weight, that guilt they want to hang around my neck, you don't have to carry it one more step. You think they won't let you rest, but it's not up to them. It never was.

Your kind must learn it comes from straining against the turning of the world. It spins thus. You cannot stop it. One day, you will wake up. You will stop pulling. The pain will be gone. Until then, all your waking hours are suffering.

The reason we don't explain it is the reason we use it. Its power is in its mystery. That is the Leaden Key, in part, in whole. Is it clear? Digging for truth buries the seeker.

OK you must know somebody on the inside... who told you our plans?!

Nothing. The Dirge of E

All LucasArts! Thank you LA folks!

Hi 00Engineer, the file you're crashing in is inside Intel's OpenGL implementation (ig4icd32.dll), which would lead me to believe it's your video driver. Do you have the latest video driver installed for your Intel HD 3000? Suggestions: 1) Try out Intel's Driver Update Utility 2) Try out the latest drivers, which look to be from May 24th, 2012. Let us know how that goes!

Hi Nerull, actually the version for Steam isn't any more patched than the older retail version. I'm assuming you were having problems on Win 7? What are you seeing?

One thing I noticed is that your graphics driver is really old (says it's from 2005) - I would recommend upgrading this and seeing if that helps. Here's a link that might help.

Hey Ryan, which version of the game do you have? The new combo pack, or an older K2-only? It is odd that when you did Start -> Run -> regedit it came back not existing. Have you ever had malware/viruses?

Yeah, that definitely sounds like either a driver issue or possibly just that the game's code doesn't support widescreen. Depending on where and how thick that black border is (especially on a laptop), it might be simply that your computer is just trying to display it the best that it can. I don't quite understand what you mean about it going away after the character build though. Can you elaborate and/or possibly post some images that show it?