Project Eternity Will Be DRM Free On GOG, Detailed
Watching the Project Eternity Kickstarter is a bit like watching a telethon for something like Children In Need, except instead of any of the money going to help boring sickly children, instead it goes toward making a game for me to play! The project that asked for an extremely ambitious $1.1m has already received $1.6m just five days in. It's an extraordinary site, and there are still 27 days to go. While the popularity has somewhat broken the methods of KS predictions, we could be looking at around $4m by the time this is up. But what will it all be spent on? Below I've gathered together all the information we have so far.
We already detailed the stretch goals announced when the $1.1m was reached. But much more has been talked about since, for the not-a-sequel-to-Planescape Torment RPG from Obsidian.
There are the basics. The party, characters and races. I shall elaborate.
At the start of the game, your character will witness an "extraordinary and horrific supernatural event that thrusts them into a unique and difficult circumstance." Heh, "thrusts". It is with the burden of these events that you begin, as you try to find out what happened, in order to free yourself "from the restless forces that follow and haunt them wherever they go."
And of course you can create your character from scratch. The boxes to tick will include name, sex, race, subrace, culture, traits, ability scores, portrait and class gear, skills and talents. He or she is intended to be someone who wasn't born to be in this role of a hero, a victim of circumstance they say. And this means - they're claiming - that you can approach the situation how you see fit.
"You can bear it with stoicism and restraint or fly off in a rage at anyone who gets in your way. The world will react to your choices, but the game is designed to give you the freedom to play your character the way you want to."
The number of races involved is up for grabs, depending on how much money the project makes. But they've confirmed they'll have humans, elves and dwarves, along with something more god-like, and others more strange. Then within each race there will be different ethnicities, subtypes and nationalities, and apparently all these aspects, along with their physiology, will impact upon how they relate.
You'll of course have a party, and it's a bigger one that RPGs tend to offer now. Along with your own character, you'll be able to have five other companions in tow. And there's still room for temporary buddies to join you. As you might expect from the lineage, you'll never be forced to have a particular character join your party, and you could even go the whole game alone. Those who aren't mad and take chatty chums along will then be able to employ tactical formations for combat tactics.
The latest news on the game comes as they tick over $1.6m last night (and are looking likely to be on $1.7m by the morning), which means a Mac version and a longer story. But they're also reporting some new news based on feedback from pledgers. And the headline would be there's to be a DRM free version. In a deal made this morning via Twitter, amazingly, Obsidian have agreed with GOG to have the game be published there alongside Steam, and that version will come without any form of DRM.
Also new are new tiers for the digital version of the game - it was a Kickstarter pretty heavily focused on goodies for a boxed version, and while it's a kick-back to the 90s that's perhaps a bit too far. Digital copies of books are now added in new tiers. And you can order additional digital downloads by adding on to your pledge total.
Finally, people who pledge at the hefty $140 level will now be getting beta access to the game, and they promise lots more additions to tiers over the next few days. Although, I'm not sure I really want beta access to a narrative single-player RPG. That sounds like it would spoil playing it rather a lot.