I really hope the beta ISNT a Steam exclusive. Not good for those who want the final game as DRM free and have to use Steam to get beta access.
Physical soundtrack would be neat :).

I've now chosen to completely ignore this project. It still smells to much like Baldurs Gate and mass market for me.

Anyway. For all Obsidian did for my gaming life, they still earned the 165$ from me the highest digital tier warrants. It is Obsidian, I need to have faith.

Wake me up in two years.

I'm a little bummed it's interconnected, rather than like Icewind Dale or Fallout where you travel to various locations through an unseen world. That's so much more believable to me.

As much as I love games like Skyrim the idea you can walk across an entire province in an hour is so silly. I know it's all scaled, but I don't like thinking of it that way. It worked okay in Morrowind because Vvardenfell was supposed to be a smaller wilderness type thing, but in Oblivion it's just stupid.

With the old isometric games it was always nice to think you were seeing small portions of the world or city. Hopefully they remember that in PE.

We're past $ 2,9 million, even without the Paypal pledges. Got a nice pace going on there. Let's see how far they come until Tuesday.

Mighty fine gesture from you, Simon. Rep given.

Funny, we both have faith on them going in the direction we want, yet the two of us seems to hope for directions 180 degrees apart.

I miss RPGs that had a proper overworld.

No. It smells like Baldur's Gate.

I don't understand how people today think Baldur's Gate , KOTOR or NWN were not mainstream games. Bioware was ALWAYS a mainstream company.

Hey I loved DA:O despite the fact the game has less freedom and consequneces, and IMO Dragon Age: Origins slightly more like Neverwinter Nights.

Also well not many people knows what Baldur's gate was, I admit I never heard of bioware until I saw KOTOR on Xbox so that sort of shows consoles are more mainstream than PC :(

I know them since shattered steel. And lets say people where a bit worried when they suddenly announced that their RTS was going to be a RPG. With a Forgotten Realms license no less. I still remember the massive marketing campaign they ran. Everybody was psyched, because it looked in the magazines a lot like Fallout, which was the RPG sensation back then.

Then the demo came out, and we were all WTF?! This is it? It looked and played like a step back in every way from Fallout. The full version wasn't really better, just more. Fallout 2 came and went and I pretty much ignored all the BG clones that popped up everywhere. Until I one day stumbled on that weird blue face in my local VG store (there were still stores back then). I noticed that this company also did F2. The game was already on discount and I thought, heck, why not.

Boy, was I in for a game. Ever since then, I held Obsidian/Troika/Black Isle group in the highest regards.

This is why Obsidian deserves every penny I give them. If only to support them in the long run to make a game worthy of the Obsidian name.

Baldur's Gate was both kind of niche and mainstream. Not 100% mainstream, otherwise games like it would still be made. Baldur's Gate, Ultima, Fallout, Arcanum, Might and Magic, Wizardry - it's mostly the same audience, imo. You could see EA/Bioware tried to tap into that market with Dragon Age but they had to compromise a lot of things to broaden the appeal.

Honestly, I don't think the traditional CRPG is really that niche to begin with. Not as broad an appeal as games like Skyrim perhaps, but they still have a sizable audience.

You want to know whats niche, my kind of Survival Horror, Space Sims like Tie Fighter, Tactical Shooters, and now pure stealth like Splinter Cell and Thief.

I don't think so. "Mainstream" was a very different market back then compared to now. Being a computer game to begin with was niche (though it had begin to grow), it was geeky, a "mainstream" computer game just tried to encompass a lot of that niche.

Today, computer games are not niche anymore, and as such, to be a "mainstream" game, it must appeal to a much larger - and different - audience than they had to then (if a '98 game tried to appeal to today's "mainstream" gamer audience, it would barely have sold at al, because that audience weren't adventurous enough to play computer games).

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Epic.