I pledged for the name Guido Henkel, for sure, big Realms of Arkania fan. But his name doesn't carry much clout, apparently not even here, and this Kickstarter pitch just wasn't very good. Will take quite a lot to pull it aright, they got waaay too little for a first day, and almost no coverage from gaming sites.
See the posts below. He is a retired developer who quit in frustration because he found himself between a rock (Interplay shortly after their IPO) and a hard place (a dev team which quite naturally didn't enjoy being pushed around by a producer who had to enforce company interests) during the Torment dev cycle. The result was a masterpiece, but Henkel didn't like the role he had to play at all. He even called it a "crap job" and remarks that it was not a position for making friends. He [paraphrased] "swore to himself after Torment never todo that [he means working as a producer] again".
Crediting Henkel for Planescape is like crediting Feargus for Fallout. Not that their work wasn't important, or that you don't need someone doing that job, but it doesn't make you the "creator", a tag usually assigned to creative driving forces. And those are usually more than a few people for a video game, Torment is kind of unique in having such an identifiable single driving force in Avellone, though people should probably recognize the work of others more.
Also, he didn't retire, he just made crappy mobile games with 3G studios for the last 10 years. I guess that's a form of retirement, heh.
I guess Henkel used the word "traditional" because he intends to add some innovation on top of the old school stuff. Which is quite natural. Why would he return to game development to do the same old thing again?! He wants to push a couple of things forward with some fresh ideas. That's quite risky though. Did you notice how both Obsidian and the Wasteland 2 guys carefully avoided even the slightest hint at innovation? They probably had every reason to do so.
I don't think this is accurate. They're all promising old-school games, Henkel just dislikes the term old-school. Henkel has talked a bit about re-inventing cRPG mechanics but he hasn't actually shown any solid design. That's the problem. Not that he's promising innovation where Obsidian/inXile did not, but that where Obsidian/inXile could set expectations by pointing to a set of games (Wasteland, Fallout, Infinity Engine) and going "we want to make it kinda like that", Henkel has just talked vaguely about his ideas and concepts. With Kickstarter further along you need to be more precise, have more solidified design to show, while Henkel has less, and that's why this is bombing so hard. He has less name recognition *and* less to show, that's just a killer combination.