Project Eternity - Update #11, Interview

Adam Brennecke has posted a quick Project Eternity update, promising "something fun and special" when they pass $50k backers (currently $2.1M, 48,666 backers as of writing):

It's been an amazing week and we are getting close to doubling our initial goal of $1.1 million. The next stretch goal at $2.2 million adds a new region, faction, and companion along with French, German, and Spanish translations.

We are also getting close to 50k backers! We have something fun and special planned for all of our backers when we hit this milestone, so keep a look out for an update on Monday about it.  

There's also a new article / interview at Gamasutra. Here, Josh Sawyer discusses text versus cinematic animation:

Sawyer recalls a particular element of 1992 MicroProse RPG Darklands, whereby interactions were only subtly illustrated via text against loose watercolor illustrations. The images were enough to suggest key elements, but it was the text that carried the imagery.

Older games with technical limitations had to get very creative about how to immerse players and capture their imaginations, says Sawyer, since they didn't have the option to be literal -- and that's something Obsidian wants to keep in mind through the old-school visuals and interface of Project Eternity.

And when it comes to the idea that today's audiences don't like to read text, or that communicating a story through prose rather than through gameplay automatically represents some kind of narrative failure, Sawyer isn't sold. The idea that all players should like the same things, or that players can be segregated into "ones that like story" and "ones that like combat" seem equally fallacious to him.

"This has been bugging me a lot lately," he says. "In the past few years there's been a trend toward designing games with mechanics for people who don't like those mechanics, and it blows my mind... I look at a lot of mechanics, like 'hey, let's write dialog for people who don't like to read!' You were writing with the assumption that they do want to read some of it, right? If people don't want to read, why are we writing? And if people don't like combat, why do you have combat in it?"