Winter Is Coming: Pillars Of Eternity Pushed To End Of 2014

When Obsidian put Project Eternity up on Kickstarter in September 2012, they dared to ask for a million dollars to make a classic RPG in the 90s BioWare style. And they hoped they'd be finished in a year and a half, in April 2014. People went and gave them four million dollars, and so accordingly their ambitions grew much larger. A release in April started to seem less realistic, and indeed it's understandably not going to be anywhere close.

New producer on the project, fresh from South Park: The Stick Of Truth is Rose Gomez, who updates on the Obsidian forums to say, "we are looking good to release Eternity by Winter 2014."

Eurogamer spoke to Eternity's lead Josh Sawyer about the unlikelihood of a Spring release for the game last week, and he explained why the game was taking longer than originally planned.

"It's understandable that people don't know this but when you start a Kickstarter, once it goes live, you can't change that [estimated release] date. You're not allowed to change to that date. When we started with a million-dollar budget and a relatively modest game with five classes, that was assuming if we get $1m we can make this game and we'll probably get it done by April. We got almost four-times as much money and that's a much bigger game, and that doesn't mean that immediately we just dump four-times as many people on it and it also gets done in April. There's a lot more stuff to do."

Obsidian are a company with a history of having had to release games before they would want thanks to publisher pressure, perhaps most notably Knights Of The Old Republic 2, for which great unfinished sections were found in the code after release. That's not something they're interested in putting upon themselves, with Sawyer telling EG, "Until we get really close to releasing the game we don't want a specific release window, because we're not a publisher, we don't have to! Virtually nothing good comes from us releasing a date before we're very confident in it."

Today's new update includes new character work and environments, as well as this silent video of "Death Godlike Heads":

So Winter then. Within 2014 they say. I think that's still unlikely - my bet would be Feb or March 2015.