In the wake of Double Fine's success with Kickstarter and the drive to crowd-fund their next adventure game, RPG developer Obsidian Entertainment took suggestions from community to do the same, and called upon RPG fans to submit their proposals for the company's next venture.
Chris Avellone, creator of Planescape: Torment and a lead developer at Obsidian tallied the suggestions. He wrote:
– Pursuing Kickstarter was a question of personal interest on my part. It doesn’t guarantee that Obsidian would do a Kickstarter project. All I know I’d love to do one, and while I have games I’d love to do, I was more curious as to what you’d want to see.
– Some people asked why we would seek funding at all. In short, our cash largely stems from publisher financing. If a publisher doesn’t believe a title is worth the investment (adventure games, old school RPGs), they will not support the endeavor.
– What excited me about Double Fine is that it skirted asking the publishers and pitching to publishers in the first place and changed the pitch focus to the folks who want to play the game. They had a means of going directly to the public and asking if they’d support a project, which they did. And as a developer, getting such a reaction from fans for a seemingly "dead” genre is welcome.
– If interested in the results, the most responses concerned in order of preference (note that there’s likely bias here considering the author of the Twitter and the blog post below):
1. Planescape 2/Planescape Spiritual Successor.
2. An Isometric turn-based/pause RPGs in general.
3. The “other” category – this fell into game suggestions and mechanics and genres that were only suggested by 1 or 2 folks. I read all of these.
4. Make whatever you want, we’ll support you.
Unsurprisingly, everyone wants to see a sequel, or at least a spiritual sequel to a game widely considered as one of the best-written games of all time. Whether it comes to pass remains to be seen.
