Tigranes

I wish I was beat with a shovel every day, then I might have ended up more like Gorgon.

How do you have concept art that looks like or not like something from IE? You do realise that's not what 'concept art' means, right? For instance, BG concept art:

I funded $75 for Wasteland 2, minimum for Banner Saga, Dead State and Double Fine. Also forgot to do Expeditions.

I actually think that's a very good point, the way video game communication has worked has always been rather odd, and continues to work that way less for efficiency than for convention. Arguing for MORE DETAILS 3 days after a kickstarter launches isn't the most sensible, but arguing for a different way in which it's all presented so people understand the internal process a little better is eminently sensible.

Sure, they weren't very hard and quite nice to have, if not a big deal.

Great news. Three cheers to brofessionalism, then. I guess the task for us now will be to figure out who the heck is Hades, once all the official Kickstarter NPCs get put in.

I was a bit young for the BIS heyday, I lurked every now and then. I remember Rex Exitium, does that count?

Oh wow, it takes like 3 minutes to get off the front page. :/ Yeah, what differentiated him from some other regular weirdos was that he was willing to say he was wrong (sometimes). That goes a long way.

Let us know how your contact goes, Shadowstrider. Depending on whether Obsidian are willing to help in anyway we might want to think about making this an internal drive with small donations, if required. We do have 30 days.

Well, this idea isn't about bringing any Bio employee, it's about bringing the minds behind BG1 and BG2, right? The thing is, many of those guys have already left the company for whatever other things. Just about the only prominent contributor that remains is David Gaider; and considering Obsidian's greatest strength is in writing, it's not really going to improve things. Add in the practical difficulties and I don't really see the point.

Looks like it turned out to be pretty bad timing what with Kickstarter - I imagine they're far too busy at the moment.

(Responding to Chaos Theory:) For something like Project Eternity that's highly unlikely - for the Ouya console or other kinds of proposals, perhaps. For example, let's say that Eternity gets 50,000 backers, which is quite likely. That's 50,000 customers who won't pay a cent for your game. Now consider that at full price in the first few weeks of launch, Obsidian's titles sold as many as millions (New Vegas), a few hundred thousand (NWN2), or even below 500k (Alpha Protocol). All those were multiplatforms titles, and Xbox/PS3 has higher sales than PC, so you have to cut those figures by 1/3 at least. Project Eternity may sell quite well, but it most likely wouldn't sell millions upon millions. In short, you're not even close to looking at Obsidian walking away with buckets of gold. There is a potential for them to make a profit, of course, because they're taking the sales money, not the publisher (who normally takes 100% minus pre-agreed royalties, if even that). But that's incredibly important for this Kickstarter model to work, because without a publisher, the developers aren't getting any money at all while the game is out on the market. They'd have to rush to start yet another Kickstarter to get enough money to survive, if they didn't have this profit. Also consider that, in Double Fine's case, we've already seen how Amazon & Kickstarter take 5% each, then it cost them something like 10-20% of their earnings (~3million) to make and send out all the rewards, recoup the costs of the Kickstarter campaign, etc. My figures are from memory and fuzzy, but basically the point is, they need all the money they can get if this is going to work.

Yes. After all, nobody's actually paid anything yet, and there will need to be a mechanism by which you identify your kickstarter account with your forum account.

Game length in hours are the same as battery life on gadgets - it's almost an arbitrary number that will rarely correspond to your actual experience. I finished Jade Empire in less than ten hours; it took others thirty. A relatively 'complete' run of BG2, depending on player and other things, can take anything between ~25 hours and, by some accounts, well over 100.

Sawyer's explanations about house stretch goal added.

Merged.

It's not linear. In some cases tech and tools bring the costs down - e.g. creating an exact copy of BG2 would cost a lot less today. However, in other cases, newer technology exponentially increases the labour required - one of the main reasons game development is like a hundred times more expensive than ~15 years ago is because of voice acting, motion capture and 3D art assets. The thing with Eternity is that it's not going to use all the newest bells and whistles, but it's not going to be exactly the same as using the Infinity Engine again, either. I do expect that they can get much more bang for buck than an AAA game, of course, but that's why they can do it with 1 million plus alpha.

I've added this in the info thread, but I think this is worth a read for everyone: Josh Sawyer on the Player House stretch goal Source: Formspring

BG2 was an extraordinary project - it would be difficult for a fully funded AAA game to recreate its scope (though that's mainly because that would use all the latest technologies). Bioware has pretty much said in the past how it was a bit insane and they're not sure how it worked either. I think the size of BG1 - which isn't too far from all the other IE games (IWD1/2, PST) - could be hoped for, since we're likely to go past 2 million at least.

Apologies for the chaos, this thread now contains the 3 current discussions on DRM, Steam & GOG. Just cutting down on the number of parallel universes.

It's those damn video games that do it.

I disagree. If you like Steam that's all fine and good, but if I don't like it, why should I have to use it? Why can't I have options? It doesn't hurt any player that enjoys Steam if I don't use it. However, it hurts Steam's profit strategy. That's all there is to it.

NWN2, of course, had a gigantic budget, and a gigantic campaign.

Wasteland 2 is 3D. Diablo 3 is 3D, and though the viewpoint is not quite isometric, it's close enough for comparisons here. Most relevantly, Dungeon Siege 3 showed us, at the full zoom-out, what Onyx isometric 3D could look like (though the camera was very close).

They are looking into it, so it will probably happen soonish.