Over Budget, Behind Schedule: What’s Up With Gaming’s Biggest Kickstarters?

Wired has recently published an article on the Kickstarter’s most successful gaming campaigns, and their current state, and it covers several RPGs, including Wasteland 2, Project Eternity and Shadowrun Returns. Here’s on Obsidian’s IE-like RPG:

“We’ve tried to always stick to what we talked about in our Kickstarter pitch,” Project Director Josh Sawyer told WIRED via phone. “We’re making a game that’s essentially about exploring a big beautiful world with a lot of tactical combat and a cool story with cool companions in it. Every so often we have some crazy idea for something neat that we could add, but we know that there’s so much to do already that we don’t really need to throw more difficulty on it for us.”

Much like Double Fine Adventure, Obsidian’s initial expectation was to make a modestly-sized Infinity Engine-style game with a very small cast of characters, classes and not a whole lot of extra features.

“But with the Kickstarter,” Sawyer said, “the fans basically said ‘please give us these extra doodads, we want them.’ So we’re making a game that is much larger in scope both in terms of size and also the variety of characters you can make and interact with.”

The team, which shifts around in size but currently consists of around 20 people, is now deep into production developing the core game. But while everything is going relatively smoothly, Sawyer is reluctant to discuss a release schedule.

“We’re really trying to really focus on making this game the size that our fans expect it to be, as deep of an RPG system as they really expect it to be, and as polished as they really need it to be,” Sawyer said. “We’ve had games come out that have not been very polished, and we don’t like that reputation. We’ve been improving it over time, so with something where the release is entirely under our control, we’re going to make sure that is absolutely as good as it can be.”