Obsidian Entertainment’s new, old-school game

Yet another video game has begun and already completed a massively popular Kickstarter project as of last weekend.

“Project Eternity” is the tentative title of the new isometric role-playing game (RPG) from Obsidian Entertainment that broke its Kickstarter funding goal in a single day. Obsidian Entertainment, if you weren’t aware, is the creator of incredibly popular Western RPG’s such as “Fallout: New Vegas,” “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2” and the upcoming South Park game, “South Park: The Stick of Truth.” The company is famous for its rich worlds and often bizarre characters and perhaps infamous for released incredibly buggy final products.

More important to this discussion, however, is the fact that many of the company’s employees also worked on classic isometric RPG’s such as “Icewind Dale,” “Neverwinter Nights 2” and the greatest isometric RPG of all time, “Planescape: Torment.” And yes, “Planescape’ is still better than Baldur’s Gate.

The Kickstarter fund for “Project Eternity” (which probably won’t actually be called that when it’s released) started with a goal of $1.1 million and a deadline of 31 days.

The project was fully funded in less than 24 hours and currently sits just shy of $1.4 million at the time of this writing.

Kickstarter, for those unfamiliar with the suddenly, massively popular company, is a public funding service through which aspiring creators can request money from the public to help fund their projects. If the creators’ specified monetary goal is reached within a 31-day time limit, they are allowed to keep the money (with Kickstarter keeping a small amount for itself) and (hopefully) put the funds towards creating their promised product. If the creators are unable to reach their end goal, they receive none of the money which immediately returns to the backer. Each person that funds the project is then promised a reward based on the amount of money they pitched in to be delivered to them after the Kickstarter fund is completed.

The service has been around for quite a while, but only recently garnered major momentum after Tim Schafer’s video game development company Double Fine initiated a project for a new game that earned $3.3 million -- more than eight times its required amount – before hitting its deadline.

Now that Obsidian has reached their required amount with the better part of a month to spare, they’ve begun implementing “stretch goals.” Stretch goals are secondary funding goals that allow for additional features to be added to a product. For instance, even though Project Eternity has been fully funded, if it reaches $1.4 million (which seems entirely likely), the developers will add an extra playable race, class and companion. Further stretch goals include Mac and Linux versions of the game, new quests, areas, storylines and so on.

So, if you’d like to throw some money towards Obsidian and purchase yourself some backer rewards ranging from a digital copy of the final game to being able to create your own, in-game, non-playable character, just head over to Kickstarter and search for “Project Eternity.”