Project Eternity - Various News Roundup

Couchpotato

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Chris Avellone has been very active with interviews, and previews for Project Eternity. So today I have three more to add.

Eurogamer-"Eternity, as a series, could run for eternity"
Project Eternity isn't a one-off trip down memory lane nor a mere Kickstarter curio for Obsidian Entertainment, it's a series in the making - a potential future upon which the studio could be based.

"We would like to keep it going for as long as…" What, eternity? I butted in, when I spoke to Obsidian's creative director Chris Avellone at Rezzed 2013. "Exactly!" He replied with his easy smile.

The plan was always to grow Project Eternity, or whatever it ends up being called, with expansions post-release - that was talked about during the Kickstarter campaign. But it's not a future that's set in stone.

"If the first game does well enough and generates enough profit beyond the backer amounts we got…" 'Well, then it will happen,' were the words Avellone intimated but left unsaid.

"We would need the same amount again."

But what if Project Eternity doesn't do very well, doesn't raise enough money through sales - what happens to the series then? "The way we structured the plan is I don't think there's ever an instance where it would be put on hold, because as soon as the first game is completed then we're still working on the expansion," he said.

"And during that time when we're working on the expansion, we have a good sense for how well Eternity is doing in the marketplace, and if it's doing well then we will have a sequel going on, and if it's not, no worries, at least we delivered what the backers were happy with."
Strategyinformer - "Project Eternity would translate to Pen and Paper"
“I think it'd translate very well to a pen and paper game, which was part of the intent. As for whether there'd be a core rulebook for the game, I don't know if that was always the destination as far as we're concerned, but the fact we wanted to create a system that felt very turn-based and pen and paper rules, that was important.”

Not that D&D has been forgotten, as some of the team get together and use it as a reference, “We do play Dungeons and Dragons actually, twice a week and sometimes over the weekend, in one of the rooms in Obsidian, just to get a sense at how the old-school pen-and-paper RPGs feel like, and some of the things we learn sitting around the table would be really good to incorporate into Eternity. I'm not part of those sessions, it's Josh and a few other designers and our Lead Area Designer Bobby Null, and Area Designer, Jorge Salgado. They all sit around the table and go through one of Bobby's campaigns which works out pretty well.”
Strategyinformer-"Chris Avellone would love to work on more established franchises"

Things get really interesting when he started talking about TV shows, such as crime programs like The Wire, and Sherlock, the latter of which “was really really good at creating really interesting dialogue gameplay mechanics without realising it, for how Sherlock analyses a crime scene, and I think that could lend itself to a game really well and I'd be really excited to work on, especially if Benedict was a part of that. He's awesome. “

Then there's Adult Swim's absolutely hilarious Archer, partly because of a game Obsidian have been working on recently, “Especially as we've been doing South Park, the way of creating game mechanics in that sort of high style comedic environment, especially with the 2D images, there's a lot of possibilities to explore in that space that Archer would be really good for.” There's also his previous work on Alpha Protocol which Avellone mentioned. “We had a lot of ideas based on what we learnt on the first one. I think those things could translate in to a brand new espionage game.”

However, there was one franchise that got him really excited about possibly working on, “OH! Doctor Who! Absolutely Doctor Who! Oh My God, it's so much dialogue conflict in that sense.”
 
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An isometric party-based Star Wars could be an interesting mix...
 
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