Obsidian's ideas for a new Kickstarter (3rd Part RPS interview)

[Darth Trethon]

 

1. So you will wait while others like me will be playing the game. I'm sure your money will be appriciated later on as well. Different businessmodel means there's money coming out everytime a episode gets released and when a complete season is finished. Seems to be working just fine for Telltale with them working on multiple titles...

 

2. Yes, something like 10 people out of millions of gamers have said they would not buy episodic content. Or 10 people out of how many thousand users there are on this board... That hardly proves anything statistically. Feargus is a smart guy, he most likely has good solid information about episodic games that you and I don't have access to. That's his job after all..

Yes, this game got 4 millions. But this game was always designed to be a IE game that doesn't need to cut down to pieces to get the game out via Kickstarter, there's no reason to slice and dice Eternity and no one in their right mind would cut a game like this into episodes when you can create a huge game with just 4 millions. Open world game is a completely different beast though which is why Feargus is thinking about it.

 

3. Just like book series or tv series video games have followers as well, who will buy new content when it's out. Whether it's dlcs, expansions or episodic content. Steam etc. have made it possible to release that said episodic content since the game won't be out of the shelf after a month. It's still there, it will get featured every time on Steam when a new episode gets released (happens everytime with Telltale's games at least). The biggest Finnish gaming magazine has run reviews of each episode of Sam & Max for example.

And yes some people will wait for the season to be finished before buying. That's perfectly normal, it doesn't mean they will skip the whole game completely because it was released in smaller pieces.

 

4. Not really. Let's look Dragon Age as an example. It got an expansion. They had returning charachters from the expansion in Dragon Age 2 etc. So if you skipped the expansion, clearly you missed the "complete" Dragon Age experience from the 1st game.

 

 

1) Not really no. I might buy the game at base price or wait for a discount after all parts are out or I might as well not buy it at all. Still...it's no replacement for me giving them $200 or more during a KS campaign because I want the game to be better. So they'd easily lose quite a bit from each dedicated fan they lost here.

 

2) Sure but can you assume that the so called "silent masses" would all jump on episodic content? Not any more than I can assume they would all skip it but generally people take a dislike to investing in incomplete things they may well never see and end to.

 

3) Again once something is well past its beginning it becomes less likely for people to jump in due to no caring to catch up and having other stuff going on. And all the bits from number one above apply.

 

4) Inconsequential.....there's no acknowledgement of the DLC in DA2 and you play a different character so there's no recognition from their part. If you haven't played the DLC it's no different than meeting any other new character DA2 introduces. Beyond that the base DAO game has a clear beginning, middle and end with all the in-between quests having all their content....you don't hit any stop at any point that prevents you from pursuing the arch-demon to the end because you only bought a portion of the game and the rest will be released at an undetermined time. I have way too much to play and at least half a dozen games I bought but haven't got a chance to play on the short list.....once they lose my attention it's done. I may as well never buy the game at all.

Edited December 15, 2013 by Darth Trethon

[teknoman2]

this is somewhat unrelated to the topic but not completelly.

the biggest problem that fantasy settings have is staleness. 2000 years ago, a warrior with a magic sword did great things... and today you find the sword in a forgoten ruin. and you use it because the world did not progress in these 2000 years and everyone still uses swords. and in another 1000 years, someone will raid your tomb and find the sword and will use it because they will still be fighting with swords, bows and magic.

there should be differences if you put 2 games in the same world but with several hundred years separating the events

Edited December 15, 2013 by teknoman2

[Darkpriest]

this is somewhat unrelated to the topic but not completelly.

the biggest problem that fantasy settings have is staleness. 2000 years ago, a warrior with a magic sword did great things... and today you find the sword in a forgoten ruin. and you use it because the world did not progress in these 2000 years and everyone still uses swords. and in another 1000 years, someone will raid your tomb and find the sword and will use it because they will still be fighting with swords, bows and magic.

there should be differences if you put 2 games in the same world but with several hundred years separating the events

 

Considering for how long men were fighting in melee and with bows/javelins in our real world I do not find it that bad. Sure, some advancement could be there, but why would it, if there is magic around?

[Fade Lee]

 

this is somewhat unrelated to the topic but not completelly.

the biggest problem that fantasy settings have is staleness. 2000 years ago, a warrior with a magic sword did great things... and today you find the sword in a forgoten ruin. and you use it because the world did not progress in these 2000 years and everyone still uses swords. and in another 1000 years, someone will raid your tomb and find the sword and will use it because they will still be fighting with swords, bows and magic.

there should be differences if you put 2 games in the same world but with several hundred years separating the events

 

Considering for how long men were fighting in melee and with bows/javelins in our real world I do not find it that bad. Sure, some advancement could be there, but why would it, if there is magic around?

 

And why not? In the world of PoE firearms became sort of mage-killers.

 

On the current topic: Obsidian could use a different age in the same world of PoE, advancing it for 200 - 300 years, perhaps? What could we see then? I believe that would be sort of steampunk setting with magic which actually sounds cool to me. It's always interesting to see how magic could affect the technological advancement throughout the history. I would have definitely backed such idea.

 

"Skyrim" is a bad example of what open-world RPG should look like. New Vegas and even Storm of Zehir are far better examples. Episodic content? No way.

[Karkarov]

Personally I am not a fan of episodic content anyway but the reason so many are doing it these days is because it has worked for plenty.  The Walking Dead from Telltale was growing rabid fanboys like the plague and it was episodic as it gets.  Lionhead Studios even experimented with it on Fable 2 and it did okay at the time.

 

Also I don't know why any of you, or the writer, are latching on Skyrim so much.  The fact that he said "use the PE engine" already precludes it from being anything like Skyrim. 

[Irx]

I wan't a sci-fi rpg with this engine.

[JFSOCC]

Personally I am not a fan of episodic content anyway but the reason so many are doing it these days is because it has worked for plenty.  The Walking Dead from Telltale was growing rabid fanboys like the plague and it was episodic as it gets.  Lionhead Studios even experimented with it on Fable 2 and it did okay at the time.

 

Also I don't know why any of you, or the writer, are latching on Skyrim so much.  The fact that he said "use the PE engine" already precludes it from being anything like Skyrim.

likely true, but the unity engine is being used for a lot of different things, almost every indie developer these days is using unity for their project, and they vary wildly Edited December 16, 2013 by JFSOCC

[publicpwnerer]

I wan't a sci-fi rpg with this engine.

 I have to agree. I'd really love to see a deeply futuristic sci-fi down in top down RPG fashion.

 

Not Shadowrun / Cyberpunk, but deep sci-fi...tens of thousands of years into the future. I'd sell a kidney for KOTOR 3+. They could keep the D&D style system, or just go with realtime with pause. We all know EA / Bioware are now utterly incompetent.

[ikarinokami]

My dream would be a follow up to temple of elemental evil.

 

using the pathfinder rules, turn based

 

and one of the following obsidian enchanced adventure path

 

1.  curse of the crimson throne

2. wrath of rigtheous

3. king maker

4. jade regent

5. wrath of winter

 

 

all kinds of awesome

[Zeckul]

I want Icewind Dale 3, with new Jeremy Soule music. Jeremy Soule depicts the frozen north like no one else, as he's demonstrated in both Skyrim and IWD1.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1VreyJwMVM

Edited December 18, 2013 by Zeckul

[Zeckul]

Skyrim isn't even a good game (at least for me). Too much is getting lost in Open World games in terms of narrative, story, reactivity and Roleplay term is getting dumbed by infintie crafts, scooping infinite dungeons that are similar and boring, no character development, and very few meaningful choices.

I'm not sure how much of this is intrinsic to open world RPGs as opposed to the result of Bethesda's incompetence. The Elder Scrolls pretty much fails in every aspect that makes an RPG interesting - characters, combat system, leveling system, storyline, quests - but they know how to make a large pretty-looking world with sunsets and fill it with semi-random stuff. Who knows what might happen when a developer who knows how to do these things creates an open-world game? It never happened yet, so there's the possibility that it could be good.

[rjshae]

The overland map in SoZ felt open world-like without being anywhere near as detailed as Skyrim, and it was all from a fixed perspective. I would enjoy seeing an overland map used for a multi-world sci-fi setting, with the already mentioned isometric approach employed in tactical areas. That could be pretty novel.

Edited December 18, 2013 by rjshae

[rustypup]

The sci-fi thing can be tricky, (Space Siege, anyone?). 

 

Some form of steampunk derivative would be great.... 

 

turn based

 

Yeah, no. TB is archaic and the reasons for it existing in the first place ceased to be some time ago. I get that there is a solid core of nostalgia sufferers out there, but the market has moved on. Time to embrace the change and relish a fresh new dawn of multi-core processors and multi-GB machines. 

[Frenetic Pony]

Honestly? I really kind of hate where Bethesda has taken The Elderscrolls. Their storytelling has become generic and boring, their setting even more boring, their dungeons linear, and their games ever less interactive. This is the opposite of what I want. So kind of like what they're talking about so far.

 

Though, a huge open world game does not sound episodically possible, does not sound great for and overhead view, does not sound like it's going to work terribly well on Unity (which I've used for several little games myself) and honestly sounds like something you take to a big studio and say "We're going to do this using Unreal Engine 4 and thirty million dollars and 3+ years of development."

 

Then again maybe I'm reading in too much. It maybe could work a lot more like Divinity: Original Sin http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/12/09/hands-on-divinity-original-sin-2/

 

Which might be pretty neat. Though I'm not sure I'd like another throwback fixed isometric view. If you want to photoshop stuff away then just buy virtual texturing for Unity: http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/96280-Amplify-Virtual-Texturing-for-Unity-Pro-RELEASED!-Starting-at-99 Go in and bake all the photoshop stuff you want in full 3d!

Edited December 18, 2013 by Frenetic Pony

[Frenetic Pony]

To continue on the "Yeah open world non-linear games cost money." tangent.

 

Like, to have non linear modern feeling open world game, well first off there's the engine. This new generation of consoles is not going to make a 3d platformer play better or more interesting. It's not going to open up possibilities for 2d fighting games. It's going to be limited for what more power can do for linear first/3rd person shooters. But oh boy oh boy is more power and ram just the ticket for open world games. Every open world game programmer hates 512mb of ram on a 360, is slamming their heads against draw call counts, and is getting dirty looks from their AI programmers who want to use the CPU cores for more than just setting up graphics. Which is all to show how complicated these games can get.

 

This is not to mention competition, which has shot up enormously just over the past year. The Witcher 3, the pirate franchise spinoff coming from Ubisoft, the next gen versions of GTAV, even the next Metal Gear Solid is open world along with Red Dead 3 (it's the third oddly enough), Mad Max, Just Cause 3, Fallout 4, etc. etc. And as much as PR people might whinge about similar games not competing, you just know Call of Duty sales are going to start tanking heavily once people get a hold of Titanfall. And open world adventure/rpg type games that have a ton of money poured into them compete, even if you have unlimited money they compete for your time since they can take so much to complete.

 

This is not to say I wouldn't be interested personally. Nor that the sheer response to even mentioning that such a Kickstarter might appear isn't encouraging. Just that it's a much larger undertaking than Eternity, and being original and thus with no nostalgia factor might not be the best thing for Kickstarter. If Obsidian had the ambition, as in more ambition than they seem to have, and just said "we're doing the crazy do anything kill anyone open world RPG fantasy game everyone actually wants" and tried to go the crazy Star Citizen route... well not only do I think that would be entirely possible in succeeding, if a long shot still, but I might be even more interested. But they aren't doing that, so I'm skeptical until I hear more.

Edited December 18, 2013 by Frenetic Pony

[Jarmo]

I'd see open world with unity engine resemblin Storm of Zehir a lot more than Skyrim.

 

As for episodic, I'm not a huge fan but I could see it working.

The game world is necessarily limited anyway, as in, there are edges.

A new area could open up in a new episode, then later return to the original, but changed, area for the finale.

 

Anyways, proper old-skool sci-fi for me thank you.

Or make a dream come through and give me a historic RPG, 900AD or so. No magic, no zombies, no ghosts & goblins.

[DCParry]

The sci-fi thing can be tricky, (Space Siege, anyone?). 

 

Some form of steampunk derivative would be great.... 

 

turn based

 

Yeah, no. TB is archaic and the reasons for it existing in the first place ceased to be some time ago. I get that there is a solid core of nostalgia sufferers out there, but the market has moved on. Time to embrace the change and relish a fresh new dawn of multi-core processors and multi-GB machines. 

 

Ya, good thing they didn't go turn based with X-COM. 

[rustypup]

Ya, good thing they didn't go turn based with X-COM. 

Primary reason why I have yet to bother finishing the game.

 

It was acceptable back in its heyday, but right now its an artificial restriction employed to appeal to the neck-beards who would have had an apoplectic fit of epic proportions if anyone messed with "their" game. It's intrusive  game-play for the sake of nostalgia. 

[DCParry]

 

Ya, good thing they didn't go turn based with X-COM. 

Primary reason why I have yet to bother finishing the game.

 

It was acceptable back in its heyday, but right now its an artificial restriction employed to appeal to the neck-beards who would have had an apoplectic fit of epic proportions if anyone messed with "their" game. It's intrusive  game-play for the sake of nostalgia. 

 

 

It is not nostalgia. It is no more an artificial restriction than the restrictions on ANY OTHER SYSTEM. It is merely a different way of representing action in a video game.

 

Just because you personally don't like it doesn't make it backwards. I freaking hated the combat in Fallout 1. That doesn't mean I think there is something inherently in all TB systems. 

[Wintersong]

The sci-fi thing can be tricky, (Space Siege, anyone?). 

 

Some form of steampunk derivative would be great.... 

 

turn based

 

Yeah, no. TB is archaic and the reasons for it existing in the first place ceased to be some time ago. I get that there is a solid core of nostalgia sufferers out there, but the market has moved on. Time to embrace the change and relish a fresh new dawn of multi-core processors and multi-GB machines. 

Why do you support this game with its 2D backgrounds? We have the tech for 3D, right? At this point, 3D or bust!!! And with enviromental destruction (like in Firaxis' XCOM)!

 

You could have 400 cores, 20 top-of-the-line graphic cards and all the tech you want in a computer. Yet some people would still like 2D, turn based or any other "archaic" stuff you seem to selectively despise. You may as well say that TBS games should die because we arleady got RTS ones.

[rustypup]

It is merely a different way of representing action in a video game.

 

Because having to wait while my chars stand there getting punched in the face while the AI player works through its version of tic-tac-toe before I get to interact with the game again is not only anti-entertaining, it's pointlessly anti-entertaining. 

 

 

Why do you support this game with its 2D backgrounds?

Not discussing graphics. Graphics are always secondary to game-play and content.

 

Putting game-play on hold to satisfy a combat dynamic which came about because of hardware restrictions should never be applauded. I have never met a TB system which didn't intentionally kick immersion in the gonads for the sake of reminiscence. 

 

/de-rail>\dev\null 

[rjshae]

Yeah, no. TB is archaic and the reasons for it existing in the first place ceased to be some time ago. I get that there is a solid core of nostalgia sufferers out there, but the market has moved on. Time to embrace the change and relish a fresh new dawn of multi-core processors and multi-GB machines. 

 

Your assertion is invalid. Turn-based is essential when a game allows you to directly control a large number of units. There's a transition range in which turn-based and real time represent different tradeoffs, with real time being the most optimal for controlling a single figure. But turn based is not archaic and it will always have a place in gaming.

[Boox]

I'd like a squad/party based sci-fi RPG using a 3rd person view (maybe something like Wasteland 2).

[eimatshya]

As others have posted, I think the word Skyrim is causing people to view the possibilities for open world games very narrowly. Baldur's Gate and the first act of BGII were mostly just wandering around doing quests and running into random encounters. If Obsidian made a game focusing on this sort of gameplay, it could easily be seen as an open world game. Take BG1, take out the Serevok stuff, and focus instead on adding more random encounters and you have a 2D, isometric, open world game that is conceptually pretty similar to Skyrim.  

[decado]

Feargus' comments don't really bother me much.  Personally, I've never viewed Kickstarter as a viable, long-term solution for financing games.  I think if you are Kickstarting all of your games, that means your company has a real weakness when it comes to sustaining a business model.  

 

In that light, I am perfectly happy with Obsidian making a game that will have more mass appeal, if that game is what keeps them afloat in enough cash to make other games that are more interesting to me personally.  I understand that they are operating in a niche market, and I understand that if a game developer wants to stay in business nowadays they need long-term stability and clear milestones for "success" (here measured in dollars, because despite how much we might not like it, that's the only metric that matters to the industry). 

 

If anything, I am irritated with RPS for making it sound like some big announcement was coming.  That was bush league.

Edited December 18, 2013 by decado