Obsidian Entertainment - Project Eternity Stretch Goals

Obsidian has updated with a "thank you" video and the first stretch goals:

We are excited to announce the stretch goals for Project Eternity!
1.1 million, Base Goal – Achieved!
Base game includes three races, five classes, and five companions. We have ideas for these, but we want to hear your opinions on what you'd like to see. Stay tuned to Kickstarter, our website, and our forums to join in on the conversation.
1.4 million, New Playable Race, Class, and Companion!
Expands your options for character creation and adds a companion of the new class.
1.6 million, a Mac Version of Project Eternity and The Story Grows!
We've listened and we’ll make a Mac version of the game at this tier. We're also going to add a new major storyline along with new quests, locations, NPCs, and unique loot (special histories everyone?).
1.8 million, New Playable Race, Class, and Companion!
The options grow for your main character and the roster of your motley crew expands with the addition of a new companion from the selected class.
2.0 million, Player House!
Get your own house in the game that you can customize, store equipment in, and where your companions hang out, or, as the elves say, "chillax".
2.2 million, a new Region, a new Faction and another new Companion! And, dare we say it… ? LINUX!
Great news, everyone! For the Tarball Knights of Gzippia out there, we'll be adding Linux support!
Also, the world of Project Eternity grows in a major way with the inclusion of a whole new faction and the territory it holds. This adds new NPCs, quests, magic items, and hours of gameplay. And yes, you got it, another companion.
We've been listening to your feedback, and have the following announcements:

• DRM Free: We are looking into it! Please check back for updates.
• Digital Only Tiers are coming!
• PayPal is coming asap. Please be patient!
• New $5k Tier. We are looking into a new $5k tier since it sold out so quickly! We are looking into equivalent alternatives.

Thank you fans!
Obsidian

More information.

Those are perfect stretch goals.

Congrats to Obsidian. Hope this is a huge success for them!

Not quite sure why Linux support is so much harder than Mac support.

A house? I wonder if this will be received as Skyrim's house DLC, and will lead to a SIMs comparison.

The house seems like a pretty major change of some gameplay dynamics, hopefully every class gets a unique one, BG2 style.
Also, that´s quite a lot of stretched companions, hopefully adding them "on the fly" won´t make them any less deep .
Anyway, judging by these stretch goals, it kinda seems like the guys weren´t expecting the initial goal to be reached so fast .

Originally Posted by Kostaz
Not quite sure why Linux support is so much harder than Mac support.

I'm as big a Linux fan as anyone, but its not about difficulty its about cost vs return. Making a Mac version will probably bring in an order of magnitude more people then a Linux version.

Those stretch goals might be more appealing and comparable if we had even an inkling more of what/how much would be in the base game.

They do sound like good sorts of things to have as stretch goals, but an extra companion NPC means a lot more if we're talking about a base selection of say 8 than 20. I think it would have been better if this list was released alongside a rough bulletpoint list of features including a range of regions they were shooting for and range of joinable NPCs (not a specific number promised but the rough range.)

Also bonus NPCs and regions could be made to sound more enticing if they provided even some general tidbits about them. That may be impossible at this extremely early stage, but even concept art to go with them would help sell the stretch goals.

Hopefully more details will come out in the coming weeks - I am confident in my support of the project but I think this would help them sell the stretch goals and reach even higher support levels.

The stretch goals seem like fun, and I'm pretty sure this will exceed $2 million, probably even more than $5 million.

But damn, $300k to add a playable race?

How about:

3 million We create and release a mod constuction kit ?

Originally Posted by HiddenX
How about:

3 million We create and release a mod constuction kit ?

I certainly hope they have something like that planned.

Personally, I'd prefer every cent went into expanding the game. Just my opinion.

Originally Posted by CountChocula
But damn, $300k to add a playable race?

Beyond an artist or two for creating all the model art and fitting the armour/weapons to a race's models, and a writer to write the dialogue for the new companion that comes with each race, I'd also figure that for every race they add they're probably committing to adding a couple of handfuls of npcs of that race to the game as well, thus expanding the storyline - unless you/your 1 companion are meant to be the only ones of your kind in the gameworld. Also if they plan on having a lot of race-specific reply text for the various npcs (eg "Greetings elf!" "Away, you disease-ridden human!", "I have a quest for you, my fellow Koala-Man, that I would not offer to any other inferior race!"), then I could see where the complexity (and therefore cost) could come from.

Originally Posted by HiddenX
How about:

3 million We create and release a mod constuction kit ?

I could subscribe to that

…

And damn, goal reached in less than 24 hours. Go Go Go !!!

Originally Posted by jhwisner
Those stretch goals might be more appealing and comparable if we had even an inkling more of what/how much would be in the base game.

Base game includes three races, five classes, and five companions.

It's listed right under the 1.1 million base goal.

It's a little bit disappointing that they still don't offer EFIGS

Originally Posted by Dhruin
Personally, I'd prefer every cent went into expanding the game. Just my opinion.

The few games I've played with official, supported mod tools were expanded beyond the wildest dreams of the developers.

Setting aside the Bethesda games, I recently had a chance to use the Grimrock dungeon editor and I'm confident that over time it will result in tens of thousands of additional hours of new content available for that game.

Am I the only one that feels a little bit nickel&dimed by these stretch goals? I mean 300k dollars gets you a new race/companion/class? And then another 200k gets you another race/companion/class?

We all know its quite hard to estimate what a sum of money can ultimately get invested into and what value it will return, so I would've preferred them to give a lot more broad strokes in what more money invested in the projects gets you. Something like, we'll be adding a whole new region and we'll put in as much content as the budget allows.

And I hope those initial 3 races are something different from humans/elves/dwarves.

Another thing I'm also a bit worried is, I hope this project will follow their unique vision for what it should turn out like. And not have a mish-mash of a lot of player suggestions, just to please your new investors. I mean I hope we crowdfunding this project means we want to let them do their own thing. And not pull in every direction as I'm sure the risk of it being pulled will be.

But to end on a more positive note. I like the Mac/Linux and DRM-less versions they plan to support.

Originally Posted by danutz_plusplus
Am I the only one that feels a little bit nickel&dimed by these stretch goals? I mean 300k dollars gets you a new race/companion/class? And then another 200k gets you another race/companion/class?

We all know its quite hard to estimate what a sum of money can ultimately get invested into and what value it will return, so I would've preferred them to give a lot more broad strokes in what more money invested in the projects gets you. Something like, we'll be adding a whole new region and we'll put in as much content as the budget allows.

I understand what you mean, it does sound a bit odd, but ultimately I don't think the goals are meant to precisely quantify the cost of each additional feature.

My guess is that considering how quickly they got funded, they are probably projecting somewhere in the range of several million dollars in total and simply needed to put together some short term stretch goals that would be fun for players and serve as sort of milestones for the funding.

Hopefully they will have some more exciting stuff as they exceed 2m and 3m, which seems very likely.

Originally Posted by CountChocula
The few games I've played with official, supported mod tools were expanded beyond the wildest dreams of the developers.

Setting aside the Bethesda games, I recently had a chance to use the Grimrock dungeon editor and I'm confident that over time it will result in tens of thousands of additional hours of new content available for that game.

Sure. Grimrock is a very, very, very simple product compared to what I hope they deliver. Whilst Obsidian obviously need to lay out the design with a minimum budget of $1.1M - in case that's all they get - I think around $3M+ is required to develop the sort of Baldur's Gate-meets-Planescape-Torment that many pledgers will have in their minds.

I already think the Kickstarter community expectation for a Linux version is a waste of time and money (yes, feel free to berate me) and an editor is another expense I'm dubious they can afford.

I pledged for the characters and stories of Chris Avellone and the design mechanics of JE Sawyer and Tim Cain (et al). That's my first interest. I can get community content from Skyrim and other places - I want content from Avellone.

Originally Posted by danutz_plusplus
Am I the only one that feels a little bit nickel&dimed by these stretch goals? I mean 300k dollars gets you a new race/companion/class? And then another 200k gets you another race/companion/class?

How so? Were you required to pay more in any way?