To all of our backers and fans...

[Monte Carlo]

 

I find it a bit weird that a lot of our information comes from other sites that posters have found and copied here.

 

 

Yes, that's really weird. Probably the weirdest thing in this whole situation. Sawyer makes so many "updates" via Formspring and he's active in quite a few forums, but not his own? (or at least the codex, for that matter?)

 

 

Yes, Ropekid likes chewing the fat with lots of people. Mainly the ones not on this forum.

[rjshae]

Blaming it on Congress...

 

 

j/k, of course. Looking forward to whatever you have in progress.

Edited October 16, 2013 by rjshae

[Aedelric]

I am completely fine with not getting an update, so long as the next one is a real humdinger.

[Ieo]

Obsidian uses Transform Disappointment From Having No Update This Week Into Increased Hype For Next Update!

It's super effective!

 

I want to see the power-up sequence and battle cry for that.

 

There's nothing commercially sensitive here. There's no obvious competition for PE. There's no publishers being asshats. There's Obsidian and there's us, the guys who backed it.

 

So, again, why can't you talk about it?

 

I'm hardly Captain Entitlement, in fact quite the opposite, but asserting you can't talk about part of the development cycle to your backers is (to put it mildly) nonsense.

 

Bearing in mind it's been a year and there still isn't even a skeleton backer's / fulfilment site or any meaningful content regarding same. My two cents (or, rather, hundred-plus dollars) is that you are beginning to behave like any other company with a publisher stamping on you, not in the original spirit of this project. Jesus, even a running dev blog would be a starter for ten.

 

Please take this criticisms in the spirit in which it is intended, which is constructive. I am a long-term friend of Obsidian, albeit an occasionally critical one, and wish you nothing but success.

 

But you are beginning to flag on your community engagement pledges of a year ago.

 

I understand the WIP argument elsewhere but I still agree with this. 

 

In my experience, and I know I'm missing some examples, there are a few specific cases for real corporate-level "NDA" (not alpha-testing product) being in effect--employees are coming or going (it's too late in this production cycle to do that, I think); company is being sued (yeah, not relevant); new products and services for retail competition (not relevant); or when a third party partnership is involved and the contract and public relationships tack are still being developed. So I wonder if it's an announcement about fulfillment partnership.

[forgottenlor]

Hmm. Maybe I'm easy to please, but I've supported a lot of early access games and kickstarters and find that Obsidian is doing a very good job. First they have fairly regular updates, some of which have alot of substance. Second they often reply to posts made about the updates.  Mr Sawyer posts in a lot of non update threads as well. In fact the number of threads, replies, and posters on this forum are some of the highest I have seen on anything I have backed or pre-bought in any way.

As far as the backer's site goes, I can't comment, as I'm only getting the game and not adding any special material.

Edited October 16, 2013 by forgottenlor

[gamer08]

thanks You obsidian for this awsome upcoming game

 

i hope backer site. ( wanna upgrade my pledge ) !!!

 

 

[milczyciel]

Obsidian uses Transform Disappointment From Having No Update This Week Into Increased Hype For Next Update!

It's super effective!

Very well said.

This enigmatic flavoured "information blackout" left me quite hyped. And that may pretty much lead to me having feverish, unreasonable expectations. And frankly they can't be met, because my imagination is running amok with a blatant disregard to the scope of "things possible in autumn 2013"

 

Oh well, maybe it won't hurt that much this time

[lolaldanee]

There's nothing commercially sensitive here. There's no obvious competition for PE. There's no publishers being asshats. There's Obsidian and there's us, the guys who backed it.

 

So, again, why can't you talk about it?

 

I'm hardly Captain Entitlement, in fact quite the opposite, but asserting you can't talk about part of the development cycle to your backers is (to put it mildly) nonsense.

 

Bearing in mind it's been a year and there still isn't even a skeleton backer's / fulfilment site or any meaningful content regarding same. My two cents (or, rather, hundred-plus dollars) is that you are beginning to behave like any other company with a publisher stamping on you, not in the original spirit of this project. Jesus, even a running dev blog would be a starter for ten.

 

Please take this criticisms in the spirit in which it is intended, which is constructive. I am a long-term friend of Obsidian, albeit an occasionally critical one, and wish you nothing but success.

 

But you are beginning to flag on your community engagement pledges of a year ago.

i agree

as much as the updates on the game so far have convinced me that obsidian is developing a game that i will not regret having backed, they sometimes can be very shy on giving out information about stuff they are doing

Josh giving detailed answers in the forums every now and then is a great exception from that though

however, in regards to giving out information, i've seen much better from other kickstarters (stonehearth developers being an example), what i have not seen is that this more open approach ever had caused any damage to any of those projects, quite the opposite in fact

 

i guess it all comes down to obsidian being a relatively established and big player, and being very used to having to shut up

embrace your freedom folks, just let it all out

[Amentep]

I find it a bit weird that a lot of our information comes from other sites that posters have found and copied here.

 

Yes, that's really weird. Probably the weirdest thing in this whole situation. Sawyer makes so many "updates" via Formspring and he's active in quite a few forums, but not his own? (or at least the codex, for that matter?)

 

Yes, Ropekid likes chewing the fat with lots of people. Mainly the ones not on this forum.

 

But...I've only met Josh in person once! And it was a short joking thing and then I played the NWN 2 demo!  It was totally innocent! 

 

Seriously, I assumed that they couldn't talk about it because it wasn't done and they simply didn't want to take the wind out of the sails by talking about something that wasn't ready to roll out to the backers (be it pictures, demos, poetry, whatever). 

 

And to be honest, as backers they don't have to sell it to us in the way that they might want to get people to support it on the backend who didn't kickstarter it, so I'm not surprised information and pictures come out in other places.

Edited October 16, 2013 by Amentep

[Monte Carlo]

OK 'Tep...

 

 

 

And to be honest, as backers they don't have to sell it to us in the way that they might want to get people to support it on the backend who didn't kickstarter it, so I'm not surprised information and pictures come out in other places.

 

You may well be right, but it's ass-backwards. Backers are treated like anybody else because there are folks who aren't backers. Huh?

 

This should be the primary forum for... everything. On Facebook, for example, PE is just... tumbleweed.

 

If the corollary of this is a site / content / forum for Backers, where the hell is it?

 

I remain baffled by the strategy. Except there isn't one.

[Amentep]

We get updates all the time here and through Kickstarter.  Josh posts here, in various threads too.

 

Since I don't facebook I can't really say much about that area.

 

What I'm saying is that I don't think its "wrong" that some information or screenshots find their way first to other areas because - the game still has to be hyped to potential buyers.

[Monte Carlo]

^ Yeah fair enough. My main gripe is what's (not) occurring on this site.

[Messier-31]

[C2B]

^ Yeah fair enough. My main gripe is what's (not) occurring on this site.

 

Mine is that communication in general seems to have suffered/is improvable. A nice, loose and honest atmosphere can do wonders between fan-dev communication. You don't have to follow rules dictated by marketing.

[Lephys]

I will second the "Hey, Team Eternity... if you've got something you want to reveal to ANYONE, you can totally reveal it to us" sentiments.

 

As for the being "unable" to talk about stuff... they have their reasons, and I trust those. I don't want them to tell us literally every single thought they have on the game, because then we're going to get all overly excited about mere ideas that need to be changed so much they don't ever even make it into the game.

 

But, yeah, I would love some kind of blog thing. Or even just "Hey, we don't have a single, organized, major update this week, but here are some little snippets from various peoples regarding little bits of systems they just wanted to talk about."

 

Some of my favorite things to read are the little answered questions and blurbs about systems by Josh on here. I don't read them and then say "OMG, YOU SHOULD'VE TOLD ME A WHOLE UPDATE'S WORTH OF INFO IN AN ORGANIZED FASHION, OR NONE AT ALL!"

 

I'd LOVE it if they just sort of went down a list of things that are okay to comment on/briefly talk about, and took about 10 minutes out of a handful of devs' time, and let them sit down and write a paragraph about something they're working on right now that they think is really cool or interesting. A concept artist could talk about an almost finalized concept for a creature or person, or one of the writers could talk about a faction or something. Or Josh or someone could just point out some nifty little system snippet. Or "Hey, look, we made shadows do THIS (screenshot) instead of THIS (screenshot) now! 8D!

 

Honestly, go look at www.playstarbound.com, and you'll see that, almost every day, they post a little update about what they've done. Even if it's "Here's a new sprite we made" and that's it, or "we had a lot of trouble today, but we're still working on stuff. We've found a lot of bugs, but we didn't kill as many today as we'd hoped to, thanks to a few troublesome ones. See you guys with more info next time!"

 

Just little things. Like... pretend all of us backers are some guy in the office, in a cubicle, and every day you just stop by, and have some coffee, and say "man, Defiance Bay is gonna be so awesome. I just got to do some more environment work on it. Check out these architecture samples! Yeah... alright, well, back to work I go."

 

 

I say that encouragingly. I'm fine with the fact there was no update this week. I simply wanted to emphasize (as others have) that you CAN provide us with more info on a more regular basis without it being all super official and organized in a color-coded project binding. We're not a publisher, and we're not the masses. We already love the project, and we want to get photo texts on our phones of it taking its first steps and making silly faces (figuratively... like it's a niece or nephew or something). ^_^

Edited October 16, 2013 by Lephys

[Monte Carlo]

Like I said, a rolling blog would be easy to do.

 

I detect the dead hand of control freakery.

[morrow1nd]

 

Hello, everyone. We aren't doing an update this week because the team is hard at work on a very special update for the near future. Can't really talk about it right now, but we think it's going to be cool.

 

On our one year anniversary, we really just wanted to thank all of the fans and backers that have allowed us to make the game of our dreams. When we asked for your help in getting Eternity funded, you responded by making it one of the most successful Kickstarters in the site's history. Without your continuous feedback and support this game just wouldn't be possible. So, from the entire Obsidian team we give our most heartfelt thank you to our fans and backers.

 

Stay tuned!

 

-The Project Eternity Crew

 

 

Actually we thank you too, it will be our pleasure to play your new master-tailored CRPG

 

(just one exception:  cipher should've been the sorceror type class  )

Edited October 16, 2013 by morrow1nd

[Nonek]

I'm fine with the gentlemen and ladies spending more time working on the game, and less making updates, i'd say let them have a week off and relax for their anniversary the same as the rets of us. I'm sure the game will be delivered and be of satisfying quality, which is what I payed for.

 

Then again i'm a big wet flannel.

[sarkthas]

I'm also fine with just sticking my head in once in a while, if there's an update cool, if not well it doesn't bother me that much.

 

I wonder how the development cycles for Planescape Torment and Baldur's Gate, felt for the devs involved, compared to nowadays.

Edited October 16, 2013 by sarkthas

[Hiro Protagonist II]

I'm thinking it's a demo. I very much doubt they'll have the backer site up which I give another couple of months. There's still about another 10+ differrent updates over various things I'd like to see so it's not like they don't have anything to update us with.

[Walsingham]

I detect the dead hand of control freakery.

 

Actually that's my hand. Sorry.

[rjshae]

 

[Monte Carlo]

As if to prove the point... no one from Obz has commented in this thread.

[mcmanusaur]

Hello, everyone. We aren't doing an uPdate this week because the team is hard at work on a veRy special update for the near future. Can't really talk abOut it right now, but we think it's going to be cool.

 

On our one year anniversary, we really Just wanted to thank all of thE fans and baCkers that have allowed us To make the game of our dreams. When wE asked for your help in geTting Eternity fundEd, you RespoNded by making It one of the most successful KickstarTers in the site's history. Without Your continuous feedback and support this game just wouldn't be possible. So, froM the entire Obsidian team we give our Most heartfelt thank you to Our fans and backers.

 

Stay tuned!

 

 

-The Project Eternity Crew

Project Eternity MMO confirmed.

[WorstUsernameEver]

Realistically speaking, this is one of the Kickstarters that updates more often among the ones I backed, so I'm not sure if much more could be asked in terms of regular (and meaty) updates. There have been faux passes, including this very thread and the handling of the fulfillment website, but on the other hand, I get the impression you're expecting a tad too much Monte Carlo.