Hello everyone, long-time cRPG player / fresh new Obsidian forum user here. English is not my first language, but it is my hope that you'll brave this wall of text - I'd love to know others' opinion on the matter be it gracious or inflammatory (within reason ).
First I'd like to say that Project Eternity is like a wish come true for me - the promise of an old-school cRPG that is being developed by the industry's finest, and is backed and funded by the audience, the consumer, and not by a big company or investors whose first concern is the paycheck at the end of the whole ordeal.
It also warms the heart that the project has achieved it's initial goal in a matter of, what, days? hours? And is now well on the way of doubling the funding from its' initial goal - and beyond (and we've yet to add PayPal into the equation.. whew!).
And even though the game is in such an early development stage the devs are already sharing quite a bit of info regarding the setting, lore and such. And they even go beyond that - they promise to deliver exact amounts of content, like how many companions you'll have, how many playable races there will be, and so on. Now - don't get me wrong, it isn't all bad, but past experience teaches us otherwise. Take a look at older cRPG's and their development cycles, what was promised and what was delivered in the end (Multiplayer for V:TM Bloodlines? Radiant AI for Oblivion?) also, take a look at unfinished content that usually games of this exact type suffer from (Unfinished business for BG2? All the missing content from KotOR 2 aka HK factory? Gothic's bandit questline? And PS:T?)
Now, granted that almost all games that suffer from this have had a fair amount of "lost" content restored - but it makes me wonder, if those traces of content that hint at "what might have been" left by the developers were only the tips of icebergs? And what about the truest meaning of how some of that content should have been implemented? After all, what the community patches in may not mirror the image of what the developers had in mind.
The sad fact is it's nigh impossible to meet all the goals you set out to accomplish at the start, because of constraints like time and funding, logistics and developer tools constraints - and it's PERFECTLY OK, and UNDERSTANDABLE. I just wonder how the community might react when it is actually the funding body in this project, and feels at least somewhat entitled to the amount of content this game promises to deliver - especially since Obsidian is quite forthcoming with information.
What do you think?