The "previous credits" list for the lead developers behind Obsidian Entertainment's Project Eternity reads like an excerpt from a list of nominees for "best classic PC RPG." Between them, Feargus Urquhart, Chris Avellone, Josh Sawyer, and Tim Cain have played major roles in developing franchises including Fallout, Icewind Dale, Planescape: Torment, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Arcanum, and Temple of Elemental Evil. So this isn't exactly a group of unknowns trying to get attention for some indie game startup.

That wide range of experience gives the team an intimate knowledge of what works and what doesn't work in a classically inspired PC RPG like Project Eternity, which is aiming to "pay homage to the great Infinity Engine games of years past" according to its Kickstarter page. Sawyer tells Ars Technica that means things like "tactical combat, exploration, [and] text-based story development" will feature heavily in Project Eternity, while eliminating some of the "translating rulesets, degenerate/annoying game mechanics, [and] clunky user interface" that plagued some of the older titles.

Still, even with the big-name talent and old-school sensibility driving the project, it was a bit shocking when the Kickstarter effort reached its funding goal of $1.1 million in just over 24 hours after its launch late last week (as of this writing the game has brought in $1.8 million with 25 days left to go). Even the developers themselves were a bit taken aback by the outpouring of support.

"I was stunned. There's no other way to put it," Sawyer told Ars Technica. "Before we went live, I figured we had a 50/50 chance of hitting our funding in a month. To hit it in a little over a day was something I never thought would happen."

Kickstarter wasn't the first choice for Sawyer and his colleagues, though. The team at Obsidian turned to the crowd-funding service only after finding it was "almost impossible to get funding through traditional methods for a game like this," as the project page puts it. Project Eternity's quick Kickstarter success could easily suggest those publishers were missing out on the big potential market for the kind of old-school RPG revival Project Eternity represents, but Sawyer thinks the concept is still just a little too niche to attract major publishing support.

"I think it's because many publishers are focused on high returns, not just percentage-wise, but dollar value overall," he said. "Publicly owned companies, especially, have to mind the bottom line because investors expect a high return on their investment. We're talking about something that is relatively low-risk compared to a 'triple A' multi-console title, but one that's also unlikely to generate hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. In short, I think most publishers would consider this 'small fry' stuff."

Building their own world

Luckily for Obsidian, going through crowd-funding has allowed the company to make the game they want without trying to sell a publisher on the idea. That has given them the freedom to create a new fantasy world from the bottom up, basing their game around the idea of the soul and the implications of a world where those souls are routinely manipulated.

"If souls are a real thing and souls really get reincarnated and folks can really use the power of their soul to do superhuman things, that's kind of a big deal," Sawyer said. "When we start to bear down more on individual cultures and the characters in them, we should be able to easily create a bunch of ideas for conflicts because we have a solid basis for how the world works."

Not having to start from a well-established game franchise or outside license has been quite freeing, Sawyer says, but has also introduced its own difficulties into development.

"I think it's important to establish the reality in which everyone is operating. ... With an established world, you sort of don't have to worry about the idiosyncrasies or logical conflicts in them. Fans have probably already ignored them, accepted them, or mentally contorted around them. When you put something out for new eyes, there's a lot more pressure not to misstep."

Being free of publisher constraints and things like the ESRB ratings system will also allow the game to delve into more mature subject matter that fantasy worlds normally ignore, Sawyer said. Things like "slavery, hostile prejudice (racial, cultural, spiritual, sexual), drug use and trade, and so on" will all help flesh out the story and add a believable core to the highly fictional world, he said.

"I think the reason a lot of fantasy storylines feel hollow is because we don't treat the worlds like real places nor the characters in them like real people. I believe the existence of fantastic elements is an opportunity to ask, 'How would this change things?' When we see how the fantastic changes our reality, and how it does not, I think it can help us consider why we are the way we are."

In the great RPG debate between real-time action and turn-based battles, Obsidian has decided to split the baby for Eternity, going with a real-time system that allows for the option to pause the action to set party positioning and coordinate attacks. Sawyer said that a purely real-time system was out if the team wanted to keep the feeling of classic "Infinity Engine" games like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment. But going with a purely turn-based system would have also felt off, he said.

"Because we also wanted to emphasize more open map exploration, with combat taking place in the same space as that exploration, pacing-wise it felt better to use real-time with pause than turn-based. In talking with Tim Cain (who's doing a lot of the system design), most of the problems we've faced with previous systems came from adapting turn-based tabletop systems in real-time with pause. We believe we can eliminate a lot of those problems by designing the system for real-time with pause from the start."