BAdler

Update by Rose Gomez, Associate Producer Greetings backers! In today's update, we've got some great new character, and area art for you to check out. Our artists have been hard at work creating beautiful new areas and lots of new armor for the game. Our next update will be the next chapter in the class series, all about chanters and priests, by Josh Sawyer. Characters Recently our character artists have been hard at work crafting as many armor types as possible. All of our armor types have a variety of quality levels: normal, fine, and exquisite. JD Cerince recently finished up the plate armor designs for the game, which you can see here. Plate Armor. James Chea worked on the scale armor for the game. Below you can see a few varieties for female player characters. Cloth pieces for our armor sets can be tinted as in Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale. Scale Armor. AreasIt's not all dungeons and darkness in Pillars of Eternity. Sean Dunny finished up the beautiful beachy area of Anslog's Compass. Wave effects and details are courtesy of John Lewis. Named for a rocky stretch of land which theoretically resembles a sundial, this lagoon provides decent fishing for both brave Dyrwoodans and a local contingent of xaurips. More than one ship has met its end upon the nearby reef, and debris occasionally washes ashore from the wreckage. Anslog's Compass. Here you can see the Hall of Warriors done by April Giron. This large wooden structure is used as a meeting place for visiting warriors within Twin Elms. It is here that the Glanfathan hunters gather and tell stories of past deeds, discuss upcoming events and hunts, and conduct friendly contests of physical prowess (arm wrestling, tests of endurance, etc.). Sometimes, a visiting anamfath will take residence in the hall when visiting the city. Hall of Warriors. Here we have a section of a much larger dungeon by Sean Dunny. This is from Clîaban Rilag, an Engwithan ruin. Clîaban Rilag Entrance. That's it for this week. We hope you enjoyed this quick art update! Come back next week for a thorough update on chanters and priests by Josh Sawyer.

Public Service Announcement by Darren Monahan, web guy Before we get started on this week’s update, we wanted to make all of you aware of a very serious website vulnerability called “Heartbleed” that was discovered since our last update. This bug affected a huge number of sites and services across the internet, potentially exposing passwords and other sensitive information to hackers that understood how to exploit it. Unfortunately, the Eternity website was running an affected version of this software, and as soon as we became aware of it, we took the appropriate steps to close the vulnerability. While we have no evidence or other reasons to believe any passwords or personal information was stolen, we do recommend you change your password if you have an account, especially if you reuse this same password on other sites. To change your password, visit your Account Profile, click on the E-mail & Password tab, enter your current password, and your new password twice and click Save Changes. Please leave the e-mail address boxes empty. Learn more about Heartbleed. xkcd comic: How the Heartbleed bug works. Update by Justin Bell, Audio Director Hello awesome backers. My name is Justin Bell and I’m the Audio Director at Obsidian, and the Audio Lead/Composer for Pillars of Eternity. I know a lot of you have been waiting patiently to hear some news about the game’s music. Thanks for waiting, I’m happy to say this update will focus entirely on music! In it we’ll cover the high level creative guidelines we’re using to write the score. I’ll also provide you with an in depth look into my music writing process. For those of you who are chomping at the bit for more info about the sound design for PoE, don’t worry... We’re going to do another update in the future that focuses on that as well. But for now, let’s talk about music! Our next update will be a look at the most recent art our talented team has put together for the game. Justin's every day workspace. Style Making Pillars of Eternity feel like a modern day Infinity Engine game is important to us, and music plays a big role in achieving that goal. But what does that actually mean in practice? Well if you were to loosely analyze the music from Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 and Icewind Dale 1 & 2 for example, you would find a number of stylistic similarities between them. Without getting too technical, their music combines tropes found in European folk and pre-Renaissance modal music, and mashes that together with modern day orchestration techniques and film music aesthetics. You’re probably thinking... “Where’s the human side of all this? Where’s the emotion? The music for the IE games is so much more than simply a mash-up of musical elements!” Putting it in such cold and analytical terms doesn’t really give those soundtracks the justice they deserve, does it? Still it’s important for me as the composer to understand things in that way, and here’s why. An incredible teacher of mine used to say, “When in doubt, use a model”. Another incredible teacher would likewise say, “Never proceed without a plan”. What they were both saying is that if you’re going to take a journey, you need to understand the path and know your destination to the best of your ability. Even if the plan needs to change at some point down the path, always think it through first. Luckily for me both are pretty clear. In that sense the soundtracks for the IE games are both my model and my plan, at least to a point. I’ve made a couple minor structural modifications to the formula, which I’ll describe in greater depth further on. But first I’d like to give you an inside peek into the creative process I use to write music. The Commute Here’s some news that’ll undoubtedly shock each and every one of you... I commute to work. Every. Day. Exciting right?! Right... Don’t let the mundaneness of that description fool you, as this is actually one of the most important parts of my day. It’s one of the few times that I get to listen to music without interruption, and I use this time to get inspired to write. Things I’ve been putting on lately are the soundtracks for The Elder Scrolls (III, IV, and V), The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, anything by Basil Poledouris, and of course the IE soundtracks, just to name a few. As I’m driving and listening I stay on the lookout for small moments that inspire me in some way. When I come across something that attracts my attention, like an interesting harmony or nice orchestral combination, I document the track number, time range, and any observations I have using a little handheld recorder. By the time I get to work I usually have roughly 10 small voice memos recorded for myself. When I get in front of my computer at work I pull the tracks I noticed into my audio program, edit out the sections in question, and categorize them with my notes for future use. It’s a way of systematizing inspiration, which I’ll admit may sound counter intuitive to some. When working on a project with deadlines while simultaneously trying to keep things the creative juices flowing, being organized is critical to successfully balancing those two often competing requirements. The audio booth with noise making props. Daily Bach After I’m through categorizing the nuggets of inspiration, I sit in front of my keyboard and sight read a single chorale from J.S. Bach’s beautiful collection of 371 four part chorales. Each day I read a new one in sequence, and I do this for a couple reasons. I’m a musician, sight reading is fun, and this is an excuse to keep my chops up. But more importantly, I do it to get motivated by the master of modern tonal harmony himself. When I’m actually writing music and get stuck at a tricky voice leading spot, the fact that I have Bach in my ear and at my fingertips is often a lifesaver. Sketches I like to keep the actual writing process as simple as possible. To do that, I open up my writing program (Nuendo 6 + NEK for those who are interested) and compose with one piano patch and one full string patch only. This is pretty standard practice for some, and I do it too. It allows me to focus on just the melody, rhythm, and harmony alone (i.e. the Music, with a capital “M”) without concerning myself too much with instrumentation or the mix. Both of those things aren’t important now and I know I’ll get to them later. For now it’s all about the music. By keeping the writing process simple, I free up my ability to stay creative. Here I’ll write whatever comes to mind. Sometimes it’s entire pieces of music, other times it’s a small fragment. I don’t really try to do anything specific or limit myself in any way; I just let the ideas flow as freely as possible. The idea here is to write as much music as possible without concern for the end result. Again, it’s important to keep things loose. At the end of each day I may write up to an hour of sketches, about 90% of which will never see the light of day. It’s the remaining 10% that I’m really after. I liken this process to panning for gold. The way I look at it is that in order to succeed, you need to know how to fail. It doesn’t matter to me if I’ve deliberately crafted a piece of music through the sheer force of my will and divine creativity or whatever. Happy accidents can and do often yield the best creative results, and allowing them to happen is essential to remaining creative while working under tight deadlines. Now you may be wondering, “Where’s the artistry in that?!? Anyone can do that!” The artistry lies in the ability to recognize a great idea when it comes to you, regardless of where it comes from or how deliberate the process to create it was. Simple as that! Process of Elimination and Categorization Once I’ve run out of time sketching things out, it’s time to start identifying the material that actually has potential to be made into a larger piece of music. I do this by color coding each region (i.e. sketch) based on how good I think it is. By default all of my regions are blue because it’s soothing for me to look at. All segments that are halfway decent get turned purple, which means I may or may not have a use for it. Everything that sounds amazing and I’m confident in gets coded red. Once that’s done, I version off my session and delete all the remaining blue regions for them to go to unwanted sketch heaven. In Eternity we break music into four basic “types”: town, dungeon, wilderness, and combat. Each major area of the game will have its own unique set of these. The next step for me is to assign each sketch to one of those categories. A sketch in progress. Musical Quilt So I have all these little segments of music and cool little snippets, but I don’t exactly have what you’d consider to be a piece of music. Time to change that! The next step involves stitching all of those little fragments, expanding them where necessary, into a full-fledged piece of music. A lot of mixing and matching goes into this and the process takes me about a half day per 3-5 minute piece of music. I focus a lot on form, pacing, and musical trajectory. Once the form has taken a shape I’m happy with, I separate each voice out into individual track lanes so I can begin the process of digital orchestration. A Word About Templates Prior to working on Eternity I spent a couple of weeks creating what’s known in the digital composing world as template. A template is essentially a collection of sample based instruments that are preloaded into a massive audio project. In my template I have all of the most common instruments found in the orchestra (i.e. winds, brass, percussion, and strings), as well as some less common ones, all set up and mixed in advance. This is done to help minimize the steps I have to take between the spark of inspiration and manifesting that inspiration into music. All in all I have about 150 unique tracks for all the instruments and articulations that I’ll need to write the music for Eternity, though I’ll rarely use all 150 at one time. There are a couple of reasons why using a template is important and they all have to do with speed and convenience. When writing, the last thing you want is to get bogged down with technical issues. Doing so will often destroy the spark of inspiration, which can be a fickle thing. By creating a template in advance you separate the technical from the creative which allows you to focus purely on writing the music. Templates are also critical because modern day multi sample libraries eat up a lot of RAM and take a long time to load. Your average sampled instrument can require anywhere from a couple hundred to a few gigs of memory. (Fun fact: My computer at Obsidian has 32 gigs or RAM installed, and my template uses every last gig!) Needless to say, loading all those samples takes up precious time, and it’s a waste to have to do that over and over. Using all the RAM. Orchestral Colors Back to the music writing... Right now the form of the music has been fleshed out, but it’s still just using piano or string orchestra. This is where orchestration comes in. We often refer to the different ranges and combinations of instruments as having a certain “color”, which is really just a fancy way of saying sonic timbre. You can think of orchestration as being similar to taking a pencil sketch and filling it in with color. The way I like describe this stage of the writing process is that here I have the “bones” of the music all assembled like an archeologist assembles dinosaur bones; it just needs to be “skinned”. At this point I already have a good idea for what the general moment to moment feeling of the music will be, and ideas for orchestration are already beginning to take shape. This is where those references I mentioned earlier on come in handy. What I do is comb through my reference library looking for snippets that will inspire and inform me on how to approach the instrumentation. When I find something suitable I line appropriate reference(s) up against the sketch. A piece in the middle of development. Even though the actual harmonic and rhythmic content of music that I’ve written is quite different than the references I have, I can still use them to extract the orchestral colors the original composer used and apply them to what I’m doing. This helps me to produce the most realistic result possible (remember I’m using samples most of the time) and allows me to get through the orchestration process in the fastest way without spending too much time on R&D. At this stage in the project it’s less important for me to spend a bunch of time trying to come up with the most unique orchestration known to man, than it is for me to get 70% of the way there using a combination that I know will work. I don’t always need to do this for each musical phrase, but it sure comes in handy when I’m stuck. Once the references are all lined up, I start assigning the different layers of music to the instruments that are loaded in my template. Polish In its current state, the music sounds really static and pretty bad. Not ready for prime time. Even though I just assigned the music to different instruments, it’s not quite done yet. For example, phrases lack shape, the mix between instruments is unbalanced, and articulations are all wrong. To fix that, I hand sculpt each individual note and phrase to make it sound more convincing, trying my best to make it sound as if a real live musician were performing the piece (which is actually impossible to do, but that’s the subject for another conversation). This, my friends, is where the music really comes to life. It’s a painstakingly slow and highly detailed process but by the end of it, we’re left with something that actually sounds pretty good! Now I bet you’re wondering how that sounds? Well wonder no more because I’m about to show you! Drum Roll Please... The first region I focused on was Dyrford, and I’d like to share the music that I wrote for the town of Dyrford with you. I hope you enjoy it! Dyrford Village ambient music. Modifications to the Formula While we are following in the footsteps of the Infinity Engine soundtracks in terms of style and implementation, we have decided to tweak that formula a bit. Most of the in-game tracks for the Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale games are between 1-2 minutes in length, and in some cases those tracks loop immediately. There are some inherent risks and benefits to looping a short piece of music immediately. One of the risks is that the music could eventually become annoying to the player if heard too many times in a row. We call this “listener fatigue”, and from a usability perspective, it can negatively affect the way a gamer will feel about a game. It’s a psychological effect; the fact that the music is short and repetitious can make long playthroughs tedious. On the flip side, a benefit to having short loops is that we can write more unique pieces of music, which will by nature increase variety throughout the game. Approaching it this way would allow us to make specific areas feel “special” because they will have unique music. We’re going to balance those two considerations for Pillars of Eternity. Music will always loop, but it will be longer in areas where the player spends a lot of time (like quest hubs) and shorter in areas where the player doesn’t (like some dungeons).

I haven't talked it over with anyone yet, but I don't think we will be putting any copy protection on the physical copies. If we do anything, it will probably be on the level of a CD key, but there is probably no reason we would even want to do that. Once we come to a final answer on that topic, I will fill you guys in.

This was always going to be a balancing act. We want our rewards to be of the quality that Obsidian employees would expect of a game like this - things that are built to last and of good quality. Right now we are still trying to find where that perfect balance of cost vs. quality is, though.

You know what, call me an idiot, but for a moment there, I really hoped that I'll find that copy protection wheel in my boxed copy... Sure that part about game being locked down for 72 was ugly, but the wheel... I... did... kinda... like those... back in the day. No, I'm not kidding. I loathe April Fools'. It's alright... a bunch of people here at Obsidian really want one too. This April Fools' Day joke was actually done by a producer at Paradox. We thought it would be pretty funny and he actually made a 3D prototype that he painted. Looks pretty cool.

Update by Rose Gomez, Associate Producer Hello backers! After a successful week at GDC everyone is back in the office energized and inspired. This week we'll be taking a look at what the life of an animator is like on Pillars of Eternity, from what an average day looks like to how an animation goes from concept to being in the game. In our next update, look forward to an update all about the audio design on Pillars of Eternity, featuring Justin Bell, our Audio Director. As a reminder, the survey deadline has passed. If you still need to fill out your surveys, we encourage you to do so by going to the backer portal and completing your order. We will attempt to accommodate as many late surveys as we can, but we can't promise that the content will make it in to Pillars of Eternity. Late survey entries may have to go into a future Eternity product instead. The animators gathering reference for a wild Xaurip attack. Average Day Each day, our animators gather together in the lead animator's office to give an update on what they're working on. Any road blocks or challenges that an animator is running into can be brought up and the entire animation team can help to figure out a way around it. Everyone on the team tends to work very closely together. It's very rare for an animator to be working alone for the entire day. Most animators will collaborate and look for critique and feedback as they work so that they can make sure their animations look as good as possible. Once everyone has been brought up to date with what the team is doing, the animators head back to their offices and begin to work. Many of our animators like to take reference of themselves acting out certain attacks, and it's not unusual to walk by an animators office and see them growling, snarling, and stalking around while they try to work something out. You can usually recognize an animator's office by the mountains of toy swords, shields, staffs, and guns they have lying around for any impromptu reference sessions that may come up. Once they've figured out how they want the animation to feel and look, they can sit down and really start animating. Animators acting out Xaurip animations. 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. Challenges For Pillars of Eternity, there have been a variety of challenges our animators have come across. To begin with, this is the first project at Obsidian to use the Unity engine. It's always a challenge to learn a new engine for a project and to adjust to a new set of tools. While animating is animating regardless of the project, the availability of different tools can really make a difference to an animator's process. Since Pillars of Eternity is designed from an isometric view, the animators need to stay aware of the locked camera at all times when animating. Characters are also relatively smaller on the screen than they would be in another type of game. This means that animators need to focus on stronger poses and broader movements than they would use on a game with a first person or third person camera. The motions of the animations have to have a strong silhouette from as many angles as possible so that they can be read clearly at a distance. From Concept to Completion A lot of work has to go into a creature or NPC before the animating even begins. Using the Druid Cat Form as an example, the pipeline begins with taking a look at the design documents to see what the designers have come up with as to how the creature should look and feel. What kind of attacks should he have? What mood should his walk and run animations portray? Once those things are decided, it moves onto the concept stage. When it comes to creatures, it's usually Polina who will take a crack at fleshing out what they are going to look like. You may remember the Cat Druid Form concept from a few updates ago, shown here again: Druid Cat Form Concept. Once the concept is finished, that's when animation team comes in. The animator will consult with the designer and the concept artist in order to break down what specific animations need to be made for every creature. An animation list gets written up and saved while the creature is sent off to the character team to get modeled and skinned. The character artist will block out and hook up the model in the engine so that we can take a look and see if any new systems need to be implemented for this creature. Maybe we want him to have a special ability that hasn't been designed yet, like a transformation between one form to another. That's when a programmer would step in to help design a way to make those special systems work. With the systems in place, the animators can finally begin to animate! Animating for a video game is a bit different than animating for a feature. Each action a character is going to use has to be broken into a separate animation so that the game engine can call on them when different criteria are met. Even simple things like a character's run and walk need to be planned out and separated into small individual animations. 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. Once all of the animations for the creature are blocked in, the animator can bring them into the engine and start seeing how they fit together in the actual game. There is a lot of back and forth between the animation package and the engine at this point in order to fine tune each animation. If the lead is happy with how an animation looks then the animator is done and can move on to the next creature on the list. In-engine creature animations. GameCrate We have a bunch of new interviews and articles out on Newegg's new gaming site, GameCrate! GameCrate visited our offices in February for a behind the scenes tour of the studio and got to take a firsthand look at Pillars of Eternity. Take a look at their article, The Factory Level: Obsidian Entertainment to see what they experienced. Check out what Josh had to say about the game in his interview here then take a look at an interview with Feargus here about the business side of Pillars of Eternity. If you're in a hurry and want to get down to the quick details, check out their article 10 Pillars of Eternity Details We Picked Up During Our Tour of Obsidian Entertainment. You can also check out their twitter account, @GameCrate, for updated news and articles about gaming. Kickin' It Forward We love tabletop games at Obsidian, and what better way to bring your campaigns to life than with some awesome modular cavern sets? The guys over at Dwarven Forge are releasing a brand new set of modular cavern tiles crafted from their new unbreakable Dwarvenite material. They've got some really cool stretch goals to add even cooler pieces, including a Lava Cavern Add-On Pack. Check out their Kickstarter campaign here! ARMing the MassesHey, guys. Brandon here. Here at Obsidian, we know that DRM can be a touchy subject so we got together with our friends at Paradox to think of a better solution, because you know, rights need to be managed. What came out of those discussions is... the Pillars of Eternity A.R.M. Pillars of Eternity A.R.M. (Analog Rights Management) Much like the code wheels of old, players will be greeted with a large, glowing question rune on the title screen. In addition to the question rune, ten smaller runes will also be displayed. Players will then have to use the Pillars of Eternity A.R.M. code wheel to decode the question rune and select the properly revealed rune. It's fast and (somewhat) easy. Be careful, though, because two incorrect selections in a row and your copy of Pillars of Eternity will become locked down for 72 hours while our customer service department investigates possible fraud. . . . . . . April Fools'! As we said from the very beginning, Pillars of Eternity is, and always will be, DRM, and ARM, free. That's it for now. Head over to our forums and let us know what you think of the update.

The expansion pack's budget isn't based on Eternity sales. We have already decided (and promised) that we are doing it. How it works is that Feargus gives us a rough budget/man month number for the expansion. I then play employee Tetris to find a combination of people, roles, and time that all make sense. Once I have a basic timeline and the overall budget, I show it to Adam and Josh so we can talk about any potential pitfalls that we may run into. I also show it to others that I trust to give it a good evaluation (like Matt Singh, for example). Once we all feel good about it, I present the proposed schedule along with all comments and concerns we have to Feargus. An example of a concern might be something along the lines of having someone run as a lead of a department that has never been a lead in the past. Once we lay everything on the table, Feargus tells me what his thoughts are and we modify (or argue our positions). Ultimately, this gives us a rough plan as to when we are starting and who will likely be on it. Like Adam has mentioned, we have started brainstorming. In the coming months the Project Director and Lead Narrative Designer will probably start talking more and more about what they want to do with the expansion. Once we get more concrete info, we will send it out to our backers. I wouldn't expect that for a long time, though.

One thing that was asked earlier that I didn't answer was about customer service once the game is released. I didn't want to answer until I had asked around and gotten the real answer for you guys. Paradox will be heading up customer service once the game is released.

The only thing we are going to give out to Paradox is information so they can fulfill your physical orders. It will only be used for that purpose and nothing else. We are very protective over the information that backers gave to us. Additional marketing will mean increased sales. While it is true that Pillars of Eternity can generate some of its own hype, Paradox will help us increase that. Trust me, they have already shown me personally that they have a good process for doing so.

We haven't had an in depth discussion, but what we offer to the backers is most likely what we will offer to non-backers. Though regarding the above, I can only hope PoE will be available on GOG for non-backers as well!! Our current plans are that we would release the DRM-free version of the game for sale on GOG to everyone.

Paradox will not have any direct control over any aspect of Eternity's development. They have some smart dudes over there and we have asked for their feedback on some of the areas of the game. Just because they suggest something doesn't mean that we have to implement it, but we would definitely talk about it internally. Same as if we saw good backer suggestions. As far as marketing goes, it won't play any more influence than if we were looking to do the marketing ourselves. All of the stuff we do for marketing is also structured in a way that it won't be wasted work. What I mean is that if we need to show off an area of the game for a demo, it will be incorporated into our schedule so that it doesn't cause much of a disruption to the team. The gameplay teaser took a few people on the team down for a few weeks, but all of the stuff that was being created or polished were things that the game needed at that point anyways.

Hold on... did I get a raise?

A cut from the sales after release of course. Well, that's not very specific, is it. And for the record, I'm not implying that I have any rights to know the details of the deal, I'm merely curious about dealings of my favourite game studio. You aren't the only backer that asked about the compensation. We do business with other companies and that is information that we don't necessarily want to spread around. That's all well and good, but you also did business with backers. It's chump change in the world of publishers, but its neither insignificant to both the individual backers and obsidian as a company. Many of the backers (including me) were excited for the possibility of a new, more transparent, business model as well as the game itself. It's wrong to have two types of transparency for two different groups that are both providing financial and advertising services. This is especially true since in the campaign the company said: "Plus, we don’t have to make compromises with a publisher. We make the development decisions, we market the game, and we don't have to answer to anyone but you – our fans. Our relationship with you can be even closer with Kickstarter. We can be more transparent with development and give you an inside look to what goes on day-to-day with the programmers, artists, and designers of Project Eternity. " It is not a sign of entitlement to ask merely that you describe business deals that do affect the outcome of this game development process. So now, I'm politely, without any sign of hyperbolic despair or anger asking "what does Paradox get out of the deal?" It very well could have been a good decision, but I'd like to know what the decision was. That's just basic politeness. We're not investors, we have no legal right to demand information. However, we did put our trust in Obsidian during the campaign, maybe you should put your trust in us by explaining the business side of things. We are more than happy to open up the development process to our backers. I feel that we have done a great job (you might disagree) in letting everyone see what it takes to make a game like Pillars of Eternity. That said, we can't really discuss the business terms of the deal. From a practical perspective, we work with other companies and we can't disclose our inner business workings in that way.

Darren just sent an article to me this morning about this. This should bode well for DRM-free Linux.

Well, if we took on all of the publisher responsibilities then we would become a publisher. That isn't something that Obsidian wants to do. We want to make games, not worry about warehouses, distribution channels, and packaging. I think developers aren't saying that they hate publishers, I think they just want a way to get their games funded without having to give over everything they are working on. That is why the Paradox partnership is great - we are fully funded for the project, we get to keep our work, and we get to focus on making the game.

QA responsibilities will be split between both companies. Obsidian has a dedicated QA lead for the project and will be hiring some additional QA in the coming months. Paradox will also be providing a slew of testers for the game. We are running the QA process on our side (including full control over the issue database). The main changes are that Paradox will handle the QA for things like localization and compatibility testing - things that Obsidian would have to outsource anyways. We are used to working with testing groups from around the world, so I don't expect that there will be many extra inefficiencies. Although, time delays always cause some inefficiencies.

We haven't had an in depth discussion, but what we offer to the backers is most likely what we will offer to non-backers.

A cut from the sales after release of course. Well, that's not very specific, is it. And for the record, I'm not implying that I have any rights to know the details of the deal, I'm merely curious about dealings of my favourite game studio. You aren't the only backer that asked about the compensation. We do business with other companies and that is information that we don't necessarily want to spread around.

I don't think the shipping costs will be lowered.

Yes... Let's just bring this out in the open. I'm a backer, and I have no interest in this crap right here! Download / Client Manager is required, including for gameplay User account creation is required Warranties waived (excluding physical merchantability warranties) Cover waived against any unforeseeable damages, disruptions of service Users must accept ALL changes to the Policy before playing the game. Difficult to read, understand and is inconsistently worded Drafted to only abide by the laws of Sweden1 Users not visibly notified of any changes made to the EULA / TOS Can’t review and query changes made to the EULA / TOS License to play the game only provided No refunds or exchanges for purchased games Circumvention of Steam DRM prohibited Not permitted to create “mods” Monitoring services / software are required to play Leviathan: Warship Warranties waivered (excluding physical merchantability warranties Class Action Waiver Cover waivered against any unforeseeable damages, disruptions of service Termination process dictated by Paradox Interactive Arbitration process isn’t freely-provided and is overseen by Paradox Interactive2 Note that 1 & 2 are just about a contridiction... Governed by the laws of Sweden & binding arbitration? I did not sign up and back this project for more publisher bullsh*t! If this is the way it's going to go Obsidian, you can take my signed copy right out behind the studio and toss it in the dumpster. I am GDS&T of publishers and their... crap. I have to deal with the atrocities of licensed commercial software all day long at work. I will not come home and deal with product activation and always-on bs and giving me crap about making mods. Seriously... I won't be back to kickstart anything you do, ever again. Don't make go pull Southpark off my wishlist. Obsidian is still controlling how this content is released. Our partnership with Paradox doesn't change that.

We are currently planning on localizing the game into Italian. We will not be doing VO specific to each language, though.

It isn't a specific issue that has come up, but the physical copy shouldn't require Steam. We are releasing DRM-free builds, so the physical disks will probably be DRM-free or have a CD key. Something like that.

I will need to double check with Feargus when he gets back from GDC, but I think Obsidian will still control the terms of the EULA.

Just so everyone is aware, I won't be answering any more questions tonight (Diablo III has a new patch and I want to check out the changes ), but I will take a look through the thread in the morning and answer anything that comes up.

We don't know yet.