Malekith

On the other hand I would love love love MotB in BG2 engine. Pity it won't happen.

Oh please. Gabe Newell of Valve (who doesn't even run a public company) has definitely stated the exact same thing (and I'm dubious to the claim that we have said such a thing as well) - and Gabe is pretty much deified. Large parts of BioWare's customers don't choose female players, but we still add them in. Large parts of our players don't even finish our games for whatever reason, but we don't look to make it a 9 hour critpath (the median length of time someone typically plays one of our games). The overwhelming amount don't pick Renegade, but I can't see BioWare making an exclusively linear game. Given our justification for things like romances (heterosexual and now even homosexual) is explicitly because such things are considered optional content, I'm skeptical towards any sort of claim that we ever said we choose to not do optional content because people don't like to replay our games. Baloney. Everyone has to look at every feature, whether it be Obsidian, BioWare, or inXile, and go "is it worth our time to put this in?" Nothing is free, whether in account of direct actual costs, and even moreso in terms of opportunity cost. A horrible, loveless way to think about our game because we take a look at how people play our games and try to provide them with content that they want? As Brian Fargo joyfully talks up how much he loves "collaborating with the Wasteland forums" for the types of things to add into the game, I guess we can concede that you feel he's being equally soulless and loveless in the way he thinks about his game. BioWare hasn't made a transition to cinematic games simply because some number said "Hey man you'll get more money doing this!" They do it because a lot of the people wanted to. I know there are cindesigners that love love love love doing what they do and making well done cinematics is right up their alley. I see the passion and enthusiasm they put forth into creating them. By YOUR margin. THAT's the point that people so rarely get. You think that because BioWare doesn't make the games that YOU want to play, that obviously we're selling out and NOT making the games that we want to make. It's a complete utter fabrication of mental gymnastics concocted in your own head because BioWare no longer makes games that specifically cater to you, and that makes you sad. You can see it everywhere too. Multiplayer was so clearly added because some EA suit said "add multiplayer." Not because multiplayer has been a serious consideration in every BioWare game ever (including a last minute PvP mode cut from the original Baldur's Gate). We (since I like them too) don't consider Obsidian games to be great because of some nebulous, universal measure of quality. We like them because they provide quality for what we want. There's thousands upon thousands of people that think Obsidian's games are crap. Just as there's thousands upon thousands that think BioWare's games are utter failures. Just as there's those that don't even like Valve's games. I love a game like Alpha Protocol despite it having serious quality concerns. Or a game like NWN2 even, or even KOTOR 2. Many gave up on Obsidian due to stability issues with New Vegas. Many went "I like this better than Fallout 3" because they either weren't affected by stability issues, or the game provided them something more. The only thing I agree upon with your post is the implication that a smaller team has a greater chance of having all people being unified in their vision than on a team of 100+ people. Most people at BioWare love what they do, despite what you may think. Virtually any one of us could go and do something else in a similar field, and make much more money while having more stable working hours as a result. Ah, I see. So it's only legit if people are willing to sacrifice pretty much their entire lives so that you can enjoy a video game, right? I mean, how dare a company try to be accommodating to an employee that is about to have a child (or has a family in general). I can work late (and often do) because I like what I do, and I am currently single and able to do so. Because someone has a family and they don't want him working 16 hour days for a year straight though, I mean, that's why gaming is getting worse. Please. I guess you aren't a supporter of EA Spouse's blog though. Well, despite how it came, i wasn't bashing Bioware and i don't hate them. they are propably my second favorite company beside Obsidian. EA is another matter though. The comment for optional content was from Gaider about branching storylines and C&C. Also, i brought up the comment about BG2 working conditions because i wanted to highlight a simple thing. Love about what you do. Of course i don't think that this conditions are good. But let's bring another example, again from Bioware. The doctors started the company putting their own money. I have read somewhere that it was 100000$. When someone abandons a medical career and puts 100000$ from his own money in order to start a game company, he is either an idiot or he isn't in it only for the money. I don't say that the old Bioware or Black Isle didn't want or expected profit from their games,so they could keep their company and continiue to make games, but the difference is this: They made money too keep making games, not made games in order to make money. It's similar but it makes a world of diference. That's my problem with EA. IT cares only about the bottom line and it shows. That's why people hate them. Gabe Newell of Valve maybe the same, but he's better in his job. He somehow made his customers to love him,made them happy with the servise he provides to them, and made a lot of money doing it. EA makes money, but most people hate them, their customers feel ripped off, and one PR disaster follows another. Personaly, i don't care about Gabe's or EA's reasons for making games, how they treat their employes, or what working conditions they have. Almost all people are the same as me. What matters is if the customers are happy with the product or not. Valve's customers(i'm not one) are. EA's aren't.(most of the time)

^ This. Caring for profit isn't bad. It's a company. Of course they care for profit. Obsidian cares for profit, Fargo cares for profit, all of them do. But they still trying to make the games they would want to play, and care about their products. EA suits don't give a **** about the games. And why should they? They are not "theirs", they aren't the ones that make them and they get paid to count $ and bring profit, not releasing quality games. Take for example the talk from Bioware that they don't make much optional content in their games because the market analisis told them that a large part of the consumers doesn't replay games, so why spend hours working on a part tham many people won't see ? That is a very soulless and dispassionate way to look at your own game.Devs look at it from a purely investment vs reward point of view, why code this if only some people will see it? It's a horrible loveless way of thinking about your game. It means that you don't respect your product or your market enough to think that they might appreciate that kind of thing or that this might add replay value or other really tangible value to the product To produse a great game you have at some point escape from the mentality of profit and simply put something in simply because it feels right to you. That's the problem with the game industry becoming...well, an industry. In a 200 person team, most of them view it just as a job. Go, do your thing, go home. It's a long way from what i have read in an interview the Doctors describe the making of Baldur's Gate, when they were on pizza and sometimes slept at the studio under their desks.But somehow, BG1 and BG2 were the best games Bioware ever made by a huge margin, and some of the best RPGs of all time.Obsidian has retain something of that, as the conditions allow them. And that's why i'm happy with their decision to stick to a small team of 15-25 devs to make P:E.

http://www.formspring.me/GZiets/q/456125847317791014 Read the comments. I have told you you should read Malazan Book of the Fallen in a previous thread. Both Avellone and Ziets are fans. Hype increased to 99999999. Seriously, Ziets should be working as PR. In his formspring and in interviews he gives all the right answers.

The only addition i have is in your Fallout list. -Death Annimations -Killable children Otherwise, perfect list

I prefer BG2 way. Wilderness and dungeons black, cities already revealed. Where did you found a dungeon already revealed in BG2?

Exactly. And only seeing commonfolk housing districts from a distance and not being able to see them outside of that supports the notion of commonfolk housing districts as a generic form of non-significant city area rather than a unique city area in and of itself. So you admit that what you're arguing is rationalized by the close-minded stereotypes that RPG players have adapted due to the biases of past RPGs? I wouldn't say that it is close-minded. I have played both IE games and Fallout/Arcanum/TES games. I prefered IE cities by far. (Fallout cities were ok actually, because they made sense in the setting)

"Boring", "important", and "waste of time" are just subjective opinions, I will simply point out. Whether the NPCs are part of quests or not is another issue, but their actual IG existence doesn't suddenly make a game boring in any logical way. No one is arguing that PE or any game should have pointless and empty areas, so that is a straw man argument; rather people such as myself feel that there's a lot of potential content that gets left out when you explore 10% of a city. In a true role-playing mentality we'd only stand to gain from a more fleshed out city, but if we're talking about players with low attention spans who are obsessed with combat and want their character to be at the center of some supernatural spectacle, that's another thing entirely. The latter to me is more of an action/adventure mindset than a role-playing mindset in my humble opinion. But that's the route that most IE games and most modern "RPG's" take, and I expect PE to do the same. The sad fact is that RPG's aren't actually RPGs because the playerbase wants what I've mentioned above more than a world actually conducive to authentically role-playing. I simply ask you to consider whether what you're truly after is a role-playing game or action and adventure. It certainly seems to me that most of the people in this thread are more concerned with the latter than the former. Again, that's fine because we all know what we're going to get with PE to some extent, but let's not put it under the guise of a "more immersive" or otherwise better "RPG". RPG means nothing. I have seen people define "RPG" based on: how can you roleplay your character's personality, how much stats affect everything, how the game is strictly a dungeon crawl without dialog like the old "pure" RPGs, how "open" the game is even if it means the absence of story, how strong the story is,what C&C the game has or a mix of the above. Who is right? I have seen "What is an RPG" discusions and there is no answer. Having the player restricted in certain areas or free to roam the land has nothing to do with roleplaying mechanics or a better RPG. It's strictly about more immersion and a better game. And that is where people differ. For some people is importand to have the freedom to roam the land, fight random encounters everywhere and explore huge areas to find the few importand things in there. The whole "Skyrim approach". I have seen people say, even reviewers, that thay have played the game for two months and they have done... pretty much nothing actually (their words). They just explore in random directions seeing the vistas and killing things. And the have fun doing that. Thats why there are people out there having spent 800 hours on Skyrim in a single playthrough. The other approach is people who (for whatever reason) they don't want the game to waste their time. They like games and don't have problem to spent a lot of time(if they have) playing, as long as they doing something interesting. They want a map with defined areas (the importand parts of the world), with the filler in the backround for immersion purpose. Those people prefer Athkatla with the importand districts there and chokefull of quests, and the painted area in the map as "and here are the rest of the city but there is no reason to travel there". Or the houses in Athkatle that you couldn't enter because the game said in a message that "this is a fruit shop and there in nothing of inerest in there". What is more immersive and better design between the two approaches is a matter of preference. But none of the two affects how much "RPG" is a game.

Realism is way overrated in games. If someone makes a game with a realistic city, with thousands of NPCs and thousand houses, most of them non importand and most NPCs bland and not part of quests, it will be realistic and very immersive. But also very boring. BG2 approach is the best of both worlds. It provides a way to suspent your disbelief having the rest of the city in backround, and doesn't waste your time by allowing you to visit only the importand parts of the city.

Yes, it was the best campaign ever.

Good thing we didn't fund a sandbox TES type game but an IE game. And no, Skyrim is not an RPG. TES games stoped being RPGs since Morrowind, and GOOD RPGs since Daggerfall. Skyrim is an action adventure game through and through. Same as everything else from Bethesda the last years. Not that action adventure games are bad, but when we talk about RPGs Skyrim is the perfect example for how NOT to design one. If people here want something because other games did it, they're entitled to that. But to act like that thing is objectively more realistic or immersive entitles others to respond to those claims. I agree that Skyrim and other recent TES games are lacking in certain aspects of being an RPG. But in the same vein, so are IE games; it seems to just be seen as more okay with IE games because they're old. But seriously, tell me why IE games are better role-playing games than modern RPG's if you have reasons. Not why they are better games in general, but what makes them more a role-playing game? For me as I've said in the above posts the only thing that defines this is options and choice of roles, in additional to free-roaming and non-linear narrative, in my humble opinion. And it seems the point of this thread is to argue against having one or more of those in IE, in some way or another, whether the argument is presented as a realism concern or otherwise. And that's fine, because as I said people are entitled to that, but I just don't think it makes an objectively better RPG. In that you are right. There is no such thing as objectively more immersive. Games are about suspension of disbelief. What someone founds immersive is strictly personal. I for examle cannot be immersed in first person or OTS games, whereas i have no problem with top down isometric view. The same about graphics. The more photo realistic games become, the less immersed i become because they send me straight in the uncanny valley. And i become way more immersed in books than movies. Someone else can have completely opposite criteria. As for the IE games, except Torment, no they are not a paragon of roleplaying much more than modern games. Fallout 1+2,Arcanum,and Planescape:Torment are better role-playing games than modenr ones, and i hope that P:E follows PS:T in that aspect.

Seriously, tell me a game that does it better than seeing the Solitude arch or the Throat of the World towering in the distance and being able to walk right up to it without a loading screen. Optical illusions and societal sustainability aside, that's what immersive sense of scale is all about. Not to be that way - and I might be alone on this - but I'd barely call Skyrim an role-playing game. It has some of the things that define an rpg for me but is severely lacking when it comes to aspects that is important such as a immersive and deep world that changes based on the events that take place in the world, advanced and well thought out quests, dialogue that matters and interesting characters - which skyrim has none. For me it's more of an exploration-experience and this is something that skyrim does well, the elder scrolls world feels small in oblivion and skyrim because the maps in them are just too damn small. If I play a game that tries to mimic an entire continent I don't want that area to be as big as my hometown. The world in skyrim - for me - feels small. It has visually stunning places ofcourse but that is not what makes an rpg. Those places could be found in any game where you might explore. I suppose it all comes down to how you are experiencing role-playing games, what makes the world feel real for you. I'd say that Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 does a hell of a lot better job at immersing me into the world than Skyrim. Those games restrained where you had to go and what part of the world you could explore and the world never felt any less huge because of that. First, Skyrim isn't a continent, it's a region. The whole continent is called something else, I forget what. So again we have the gamer's assumption destroying his own immersion, not the game itself. And everything you mention is merely aspects of narrative, which both action/adventure games and RPGs have, as well as most other games. So while good narrative makes a game good, it doesn't define its genre. The thing that defines an RPG is options, choice, and lack of linearity. And I fail to see how Skyrim has less of that than IE games. IE games are good, don't get me wrong, but they're not necessarily any more an RPG than modern "RPG's" are. Unless you want to give me examples of what IE games have in a role-playing sense that modern RPG's don't. I enjoy the retro feel of the IE games, which is why I'm here, but it's silly to pretend they do realism and immersion things better than other RPG's without justification. Game world that reacts to your actions? Bethesda's worlds are ridiculously static, with the player existing outside the world. Nothing you can do is recognised by the game. Kill the emperor? it doesn't affect the rebelion against him etc. But that is besides the point. It matters not if Skyrim is an RPG or not. What matters is that whatever it is is completely diferent than PS:T, IWD and BG. And we paid for an IE game. You can like Skyrim. I loath it. The point is that the only common P:E backers have is that they love IE games. So the devs will use IE games as their model. If they deside to put a seamless continous world, you (and others) may like it, but at leeast half the backers will hate it. For example, in my opinion the whole free-roaming sandbox hiking simulator trend is the worse thing that happend in gaming.

Good thing we didn't fund a sandbox TES type game but an IE game. And no, Skyrim is not an RPG. TES games stoped being RPGs since Morrowind, and GOOD RPGs since Daggerfall. Skyrim is an action adventure game through and through. Same as everything else from Bethesda the last years. Not that action adventure games are bad, but when we talk about RPGs Skyrim is the perfect example for how NOT to design one.

I must disagree. In my opinion, New Vegas has an excellent story, as does Fallout 1 and 2. Fallout 3 has a very weak story, and is at the same time extremely linear. Notise i didn't even mention Fallout 3? It was intentional. That game was crap from start to finish in my opinion. Others may disagree. As for the other Fallouts, it depends to what you consider story in a game. Some people consider setting or atmosphere and characters part of the story. In these parts Fallouts were excelent. But story? No. The first Fallouts had good individual stories for each area, but the game's main story was... what? Find the waterchip, you find it and traces of an evil horde enemy, go kill the master, the end. The story is as basic as it goes. I don't mean that as a critisism as the game's focus was elsewere for the start. But i haven't seen anyone say that he played Fallout for the story, or that the story was the best thing about the game, as i have seen people do with PS:T and MotB. Okay, I take your point about Fallout 1 and 2. But then you can include BG in that list as well, the story was a very basic vengeance tale, combined with "fulfill your destiny". Regarding New Vegas I must still disagree. Yes, it ends with the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, no matter what. But how you get there, whom your allies is and why you fight, that is a great tale, and especially as the play throughs can wary so much, it's almost like a different game. MotB was epic as well, one of my all time favourites. PS:T ~is~ my all time favourite. But in my opinion, New Vegas was the proof that you could take a non-linear story with many branches and many options, place it in a sand-box world, and still create an epic tale. The best of two worlds. Oh, of cource it can. Or at least Obsidian can do it. But FNV was buggy. The more non-linear is the story, the most open the game, the more resources you have to spent to develop and then check and double check every single thing. I don't know if for P:E that is a valid approach.

I must disagree. In my opinion, New Vegas has an excellent story, as does Fallout 1 and 2. Fallout 3 has a very weak story, and is at the same time extremely linear. Notise i didn't even mention Fallout 3? It was intentional. That game was crap from start to finish in my opinion. Others may disagree. As for the other Fallouts, it depends to what you consider story in a game. Some people consider setting or atmosphere and characters part of the story. In these parts Fallouts were excelent. But story? No. The first Fallouts had good individual stories for each area, but the game's main story was... what? Find the waterchip, you find it and traces of an evil horde enemy, go kill the master, the end. The story is as basic as it goes. I don't mean that as a critisism as the game's focus was elsewere for the start. But i haven't seen anyone say that he played Fallout for the story, or that the story was the best thing about the game, as i have seen people do with PS:T and MotB.

For me the perfect solution is: FNV type crafting for potions and simple items(weapons,armor etc) BG2 type crafting for legendary items,artifacts FNV type crafting for alternative quests solutions as Iyanga said.

I hate this approach to games. I never liked a single Bethseda game, not even Morrowind which even Bethesda's critics say it were good. Personally i hope we get something like Torment, entirelly focused on the narrarive. It seems we won't,as they aim for BG2 type of game, but sure as hell i don't want something in the vein of TES or Arcanum-Fallout. I loved the latter 2, but this is supposed to be an IE successor, where all the games were about story. For an Arcanum successor i wouldn't had pay the same amound. Well, maybe I'm the only one who aspires to be able to make a choice with regard to what "role" I'm playing in RPG's. After all, if you can't play different roles, what separates it from another game, such as action/adventure games as I've been mentioning. Then it comes down to how superficial the player's supposed freedom to play their role is. Does the freedom end after character creation is complete if the narrative is linear, or do players continue to make meaningful choices to define their character's role throughout the game? As much as people like to talk about how modern RPG's have straggled away from the past greatness of RPG's, in some ways you can see the same trends in the Infinity Engine games that this game follows. For me it ultimately comes down to the fact that games either use the flawed DnD system or they streamline their mechanics to hell like with Skyrim. In terms of narrative though, I think that less linearity can only be a good thing, as long as it's not just choosing between "generic good option" and "generic evil option". From a strictly narrative perspective with regard to drama, sorry but there's nothing superior about Infinity Engine games in comparison to modern RPG's in my humble opinion. If you compair them with older games,sure. Black Isle were never a " hardcore" RPG company. Fallouts and Torment were too easy and had very small areas(minimal exploration). IWDs were completely linear. BGs set most of the trends that modern games follow like romances, the nonsensical "theme park" approach Bethesda follows etc. But for most people were the best RPGs ever created. If that is true or not does not matter. What matters is that people paid for a IE game. "From a strictly narrative perspective with regard to drama, sorry but there's nothing superior about Infinity Engine games in comparison to modern RPG's in my humble opinion" The only IE games that focused on narrative were PS:T and in a lesser extend BG2.(which are the two most popular by the way). From a strictly narrative perspective with regard to drama, tell me a modern RPG that can compair to PS:T. The closer is MotB, which is also semi-linear.

The specifics are hard to describe, so I'm going to give you a frustratingly vague answer instead: Some of my favorite parts of fantasy novels are those maps the really good authors put in the front pages of the book. If you do it right, you don't even have to do any work in trying to get the reader to care about the place. They just look at interesting spots on the map and say to themselves "Wow, I want to go there!" They're already invested and engaged in the work before even reading the first sentence. The best maps don't need a story to justify them; They justify themselves. Likewise, the best settings in video games are the ones where I don't need a quest giver telling me to go visit someplace or talk to someone: I'm interested because it's there. The setting justifies itself. Now, I'll be the first to admit, I'm a rather easy gamer to please. Give me a good setting, and I'll love your game in spite of basically all else. Bugs? Not a problem. Terrible gameplay? Don't sweat it. Vomit-inducing dialogue and voice acting? Meh, not a big deal. So long as you manage to keep me interested in what's over that next hill, I'll keep climbing over it no matter what it means I'll have to endure. It's why I'm such a rabid Elder Scrolls fan in spite of the series's mountain of flaws. And the worst settings in games are the ones where the writer comes up with a plot line in their head, then everything in the setting is built purely in subservience to that plot. No place exists unless something important happens there except to provide a buffer of endless mooks for the player to wade through as they move from A to B (or worse, back from B to A). Nobody exists unless they have some piece of exposition to deliver about what you're supposed to do next. Everyone just apparently stands around all day waiting for the player to show up, and nobody ever has any problems unless they're somehow directly relevant to whatever storyline the writer has intended. And everything matches convention unless the plot specifically requires otherwise, or the writer is trying to be clever by "subverting" a convention with something just as played out as the default, or just using the default with a different (usually stupid) name. Honestly? I'm worried this is the road Project Eternity's headed down. Maybe I'm being unfair because we really don't have that much info on the setting/story yet, but most of what I've seen so far has been a bad sign. The creative spark behind the Dyrwood seems to be "Well, 4/5 of the IE games we're using as inspiration were Forgotten Realms, so our setting can't be too different from FR. Also, there's guns, souls work different, there are cat people, we call bards 'Chanters', psions 'Ciphers', and Planetouched 'Godlike'." We're also told that the plot will have a big emphasis on "Moral Dilemmas", a fad that should have been discredited with Jade Empire. Furthermore pretty much all the updates we've received about the game, especially since the kickstarter ended, are about the mechanical and technical aspects of the game. Those are nifty and all, and it might just be that it's what they're focusing on in development right now, but I'm worried the reason they aren't talking much about the setting is because they think that nobody really cares about it. That's not to say it's all bad news: I think the colonialism angle has interesting potential. I'm also happy to hear they're implementing these "dilemmas" through a reputation system where you choose between multiple factions to support rather than a morality meter: I think this worked out really well in New Vegas. Also: I thought Planescape: Torment had an amazing setting. In fact, it was one of my favorite parts of the game. You don't have to be a TES/Fallout/Arcanum-like complete wide-open world game to have an interesting setting. Well, when you put it that way i almost agree with you. Yes, the setting is very important.Fallout,Arcanum,even Baldur's Gate were so good because of the setting. When i said that storis the most importand part of the game for me, i included setting.I put setting,story,characters,atmophere all together in the "narrative" part of a game, and that part is the most importand. I hate the TES games because except of the setting, all other parts of the narrative are bad. Story-no. Characters-no. Good writing-no. As for the updates, i agree with you. I think most people are interested in the story or the setting and not so much in game mechanics. But many things about those would be spoilers to have them revealed.

I hate this approach to games. I never liked a single Bethseda game, not even Morrowind which even Bethesda's critics say it were good. Personally i hope we get something like Torment, entirelly focused on the narrarive. It seems we won't,as they aim for BG2 type of game, but sure as hell i don't want something in the vein of TES or Arcanum-Fallout. I loved the latter 2, but this is supposed to be an IE successor, where all the games were about story. For an Arcanum successor i wouldn't had pay the same amound.

Skuldr looks great. Remember, P:E is high fantasy setting. In the consept art we had a tentacled cthulhu-like monster and zompies. Demonic looks are fine.Chances are there are demons in P:E world also. To me Skuldr looks bat-like, cave dwelling monster, and is similar with monster's found in Witcher. Backers asked and Sawyer said that a big beastiary will exist in P:E. There is no chance that all monsters will be natural predators or mutaded humans. Many will be clearly supernatural.

DS3 is the only one, but in that case I'd rather have bugs than the ****show of a PC port that game was. Also that game was a great deal more linear than AP and NV which were some of the most bug filled games I'd ever played. AP was bugged??? I know it has that fame but most people i know hadn't any serious problems with the game

It was a great setting. And it's not like Activision will ever use it.

Well, as I say Obsidian already made one first-person action-RPG and one third person action-RPG, isn't it? With publisher, yes, but hey, how many AAA-games go on market without publisher? Oh, and one more thing. Can you say, is my english readable? I do not know, may be I must just shut up and go learn language again... Your english are fine. As for AAA games without a publiser, i don't know many. Only CDPR makes the Witchers, but they have private investors to provide the money. Plus they are located in Poland where the wages are half from those in California. If devs could provide 20 - 30 million by themselves they wouldn't need publisers and the industry would be a much better place.

I never said that it must be a Skyrim clone. I said, that it's must be the first-person rpg. Same thing. First person or third person OTS require high quality 3D graphics in order to be competetive in todays market. So they are more excpensive than kickstarter has shown to provide for. The only way is for P:E to be a big hit, and maybe P:E 2 or Obsidian's next cRPG as well. Then they can take the profits and make a game that costs 20+ millions. In fact if their isometric cRPGs are successfull, i expect them to make their own action/open world/shooter/whatever AAA game at some point in the future. It only makes sense, and i really hope that they manage to became fully indipendent and even publish their own games. As long as they keep doing 2D isometric cRPGs, i don't see why they shouldn't make other type of games too.

First of all, Arcanum belonges to Activision, not to Tim Cain. Second, if Obsidian has the money from P:E sales to make their own Skyrim clone, more power to them. I will be happy that my favorite company is succesfull and become full indipendent. Having said that, i won't play it, and i don't think they can kickstart something like this. Too expencive, and the people that like these kind of games aren't the same people involved in Kickstarter in general. All of the succesfull projects until now were for the kind of games the market doesn't produse until now.