Chris Avellone on RPG design, PROJECT ETERNITY and too many great games to count

At the Rezzed gaming conference this weekened, Obsidian developer Chris Avellone did a presentation on CRPG design. You can check it out here.

Avellone has a CV that is interesting. At Black Isle back in the day he was the project lead on Fallout 2 and Planescape: Torment (probably the greatest Western CRPG of all time) as well as working on Icewind Dale and its sequel. At Obsidian he was the lead designer on Knights of the Old Republic II, Fallout: New Vegas - Old World Blues and Alpha Protocol. He also worked on Neverwinter Nights II and its expansion Mask of the Betrayer as well as the main game of Fallout: New Vegas. He has also been hired out to inXile to assist on the upcoming Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera. Avellone is a noted proponent of player choice and including more complex thematic, and philosophical elements than is normally found in games, not to mention more complex characterisation.

Some of those things are discussed in the interview, along with progress on Project: Eternity, some interesting info on how they made Planescape: Torment and Fallout: New Vegas, and on the merits of Kickstarter as a business model. He also namechecks Brandon Sanderson and Patrick Rothfuss in a discussion of magic systems, though he doesn't mentioned Obsidian's planned Wheel of Time CRPG (which is still on hold until Red Eagle raise the funding for it).

TORMENT update: Rothfuss and Avellone in

The Kickstarter for Torment: Tides of Numenera is roughly halfway done, with 14 days to go before the end of the appeal. However, the game is already funded: having asked for $900,000, inXile Studios have actually received $2.9 million. The game is now deep into what Kickstarter calls, 'stretch goals', that is additional incentives for people to keep funding in the form of added content to the game.

First up, if the game hits $3.25 million then the writing team will be expanded to include bestselling fantasy author Patrick Rothfuss (The Name of the Wind, The Wise Man's Fear). Rothfuss will be adding about 10,000 words of content to the game in the form of dialogue and characters. He won't be doing any more because of his commitments to finishing off The Doors of Stone, the third and concluding volume of The Kingkiller Chronicle.

Much more enticing (to this blogger, anyway) is that at $3.5 million, inXile will add Chris Avellone to the writing time. Avellone was the primary writer and designer of the original Planescape: Torment (to which Numenera is the spiritual successor), as well as Fallout 2, Neverwinter Nights 2: Mask of the Betrayer and the forthcoming Project: Eternity. He also worked on Icewind Dale and its sequel; Fallout: New Vegas (including leading the design of several of its DLC episodes); and Alpha Protocol. He has also done some writing for inXile's previous Kickstarter game project, Wasteland 2. He is often cited as the finest writer of Western CRPGs. Exactly why Avellone still hasn't written a novel, I don't know, as I suspect it would be awesome. Avellone will be creating a new NPC character for the game and writing their dialogue, but will also be serving as an editor and a fresh pair of eyes on the work of the rest of the team as well.

With still two weeks to go, I suspect this Kickstarter will breeze past both targets and probably end up somewhere on the other side of $4 million when all is said and done. It's shaping up to be a very interesting game.

More detailed plans for PLANESCAPE: TORMENT successor emerge

InXile Studios may be hard at work on Wasteland 2, the crowd-funded sequel to the seminal 1988 computer RPG Wasteland, but they have already announced their next project. With most of the writing and concept art completed for Wasteland 2, those teams have started work on a game that may be called Numenera: Torment. This game will be a spiritual sequel to the classic 1999 RPG Planescape: Torment, widely-regarded as the finest (and most literate) computer roleplaying game ever made.

The new game will not involve any of the characters or situations from Planescape: Torment (which is copyrighted by Atari and Wizards of the Coast), but will share a similar focus on characterisation and philosophical matters, such as the nature of life, death and consciousness. The setting will be Numenera, a new roleplaying setting created by Monte Cook. Cook is a highly respected RPG game designer and worked extensively on the original Planescape setting for the Dungeons and Dragons game in the 1990s.

The game itself is being worked on by Colin McComb, one of the main designers on the original Planescape pen-and-paper setting and a key creative force on Planescape: Torment. The director of the game is Kevin Saunders, who has joined the team from Obsidian, where he led the Mask of the Betrayer team. Also on board are Torment designer Adam Heine and Dana Knutson, the concept artist whose work on Torment was crucial.

The game will use all-new rules for skills, character creation and combat. Full-scale work on the game will begin after Wasteland 2's planned release date (still scheduled for October 2013). There will be another Kickstarter campaign further down the line to help fund the game ahead of time.

Since Planescape: Torment is one of my favourite RPGs of all time (the computer game equivalent of Gene Wolfe), this is a project that I'll be watching with great interest.

Creators of the greatest RPGs of all time collaborate on new game

Obsidian Entertainment have announced their next big RPG: a fantasy game called Project Eternity (working title). This game will be an isometric, old-school RPG that draws heavily on their old D&D games using the Infinity Engine (the Icewind Dale series and the legendary Planescape: Torment).

However, tired of working for publishers who either don't do proper Q&A on their games (resulting in the bug-filled mess of Alpha Protocol), rush them out in an incomplete state (Knights of the Old Republic II) or refuse to pay them a bonus by failing to hit a ludicrously arbitrary Metacritic score by one point despite selling millions of copies (Fallout: New Vegas), Obsidian have decided to take this one to the fans. Via Kickstarter, Obsidian are asking for $1.1 million to help fund the game. They're already at $300,000 less than a day after starting the project.

The creative forces behind the game include Chris Avellone, the writer of Planescape: Torment; Tim Cain, the creator of the Fallout franchise; and Josh Sawyer, the project lead on the excellent New Vegas (who infamously disapproved of the game being somewhat 'softened' for console players and released his own, more hardcore mod for the PC version of the game). They hope to release the game in early 2014.

Kotaku interview Avellone here about the project, whilst GameBanshee talk to Obsidian studio head Feargus Urquhart here.

UPDATE: As of 24 hours later, the amount raised stands at $1,083,000, and should hit the target within a few hours (with 31 days still to go). Obsidian have already said that any money they make over the $1.1 million will go to making the game even more impressive, and some projections are now suggesting they could make upwards of four times the amount they asked for.