Obsidian Entertainment and our legendary game designers Chris Avellone, Tim Cain, and Josh Sawyer are excited to bring you a new role-playing game for the PC. Project Eternity (working title) pays homage to the great Infinity Engine games of years past: Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape: Torment.

We talked a lot about the genre and to be honest we kept on coming back to fantasy. With all the experience we have had with a lot of varied fantasy settings, we are really looking for to taking our unique approach with factions, characters and mature themes to the setting. Ultimately, we really feel that what an RPG is about is the characters and the story – not the setting.

If the Kickstarter succeeds, this will be a franchise. "It means we FINALLY have a world of our own that we can build upon, not just for this title but for future releases down the line. We've wanted to do our own RPG world for a long, long time, and it's been hard to pursue outside of existing franchises. Project: Eternity is our chance to take all the RPG knowledge, mechanics, lore, and characterization we've learned over the years and turn it into the game our fans have been hungering for."

For those who haven't pledged yet, the current paypal option http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/357646, after that it won't be possible to donate higher amounts for special pledge rewards like a boxed copy. But there will still be the option to pledge $29 for a digital copy of the game (the current price for that is $25) so that's basically a digital pre-order.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUleDEFkUtE

Welcome. Today's update is a big one, though not by volume of text. Today we’re showing you our game in action. Specifically, we're showing what we've been doing for our exterior environments. The Infinity Engine games were known for their art, and we wanted to hit the high standard of visual quality established by games like the Icewind Dale series. We also wanted to introduce dynamic elements into the environment that were mostly absent from the classic games, like dynamic water, movement in foliage, and dynamic lighting of the scene.

In a 2D game, this required our programmers and artists to come up with some creative solutions. What they came up with surprised us initially and it continues to amaze us. While we are still working on refining some of the dynamic elements, we're very happy with the progress we've been able to make and hope you feel the same way. Special thanks to Hector Espinoza, our lead environment artist, and Michael Edwards, our rendering programmer, who did a lot of amazing work to bring this environment to life.

Thanks for reading, thanks for your feedback, and we'll see you next week.

http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/63633-update-49-water-trees-daynight-lighting-all-that-jazz/