CANBERRA: Bloodborne, Pillars of Eternity, Planescape: Torment and Knights of the Old Republic 2. Game of Thrones and Dontnod’s Life is Strange all are coming this week with a bang and developers hoped for big response from the gamers in this regard.
Obsidian Entertainment started releasing a making-of documentary series for their soon to be released game, Pillars of Eternity. The videos are roughly seven and half minutes long and seem to be releasing on a bi-weekly schedule. The series is called The Road to Eternity.
Obsidian Entertainment is most well known for games such as Fallout: New Vegas, South Park: The Stick of Truth, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II. The company was founded after the closing of Black Isle Studios in 2003. Black Isle is best known for developing Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, and the Icewind Dale games. Most of the key people at the studio, including Fallout 1 and 2 director Feargus Urquhart, went on to form Obsidian Entertainment. Since its inception, Obsidian has mostly developed sequels to existing games, and many of their games are based on licensed properties. Pillars of Eternity will mark the first time that Obsidian will wholly own an IP.
The video series highlights how Pillars of Eternity was first conceived and how important it was for Obsidian to crowd-fund it through Kickstarter. Throughout the first video in the series, it becomes abundantly clear that if Pillars had not been successfully crowd-funded, Obsidian Entertainment would probably no longer exist.
In 2012 Obsidian was working on a “next-generation console game” that got canceled, and according to Pillars of Eternity director Josh Sawyer,”With these larger budgets, when you crash, you crash hard. And for a company the size of Obsidian to have a project canceled like that, it had a big impact on us financially.”
Obsidian ended up having to layoff a good chunk of their staff due to their financial woes. CEO Feargus Urquhart admitted that the layoffs were “A public statement of failure.” He continued, “Having this happen makes it even harder to go get the next thing so that I can keep on paying the people and keep everybody employed that’s still at the company even after the layoff.”
Executive producer Adam Brennecke remembers, “We were all kind of just coming to work just to come to work, we weren’t actually working on anything.” Josh Sawyer added, “We were trying to get back into the rhythm of pitching to publishers and going and talking to publishers, but we had just been burned really badly, and it made it really difficult to go out and have high hopes for what we were going to do.”
Not all hope was lost at the company though. After seeing the success that Double Fine had crowd-funding their adventure game Broken Age, Josh Sawyer urged the heads of Obsidian to use Kickstarter to fund a game and potentially save the company. The concept for the game they wanted to create was for it to be a spiritual successor to games that ran on the Infinity Engine. Games such as Baldur’s Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Icewind Dale were made on the Infinity Engine in the late 90s and early 2000’s, and have a substantial cache of nostalgia for some players.
