And yet, Black Isle was but the publisher of Baldur's Gate. Bioware made the game.

Pretty sure that was largely an Interplay thing. BIS were a group of in-house developers formed to work on Fallout 2 around that time. Brian Fargo would know the situation better than me though.

Going public on NASDAQ and getting bought out by Titus\Vivendi seemed to be the main reason that Interplay is now an empty shell of its former self - making Wii and mobile shovelware under Herve Caen's leadership.

Yeah, but those were the days when publishers and devs really cooperated in game development. So the people at Obsidian probably didn`t write the code for BG but they certainly knew how it was developed and what was the core systems and elements of the BG series. ;)

That reminds me.

Brian Fargo ‏@BrianFargo
"Interplay was right when they said that Black Isle is back..in the form of inXile and Obsidian."

Could be, we can't know for sure. But this is not important in any case.
My point was that they are credited for more than they actually did. That doesn't change the fact that they are very talented and personally PE is the game I'm awaiting the most. There's no need to glorify them further.

You know, he might be 100% right but it still makes him sounds bitter.
They are not *back*... they were never gone.

For what I've read, the last days of each KS receives an important bump on donations. I guess that there is always a lot of people waiting to see how it goes until the last days.

I want this sucker to beat 3 million sooooo bad.

I say he has every right to be bitter. And so do the guys at Obsidian. Fargo, Avellone, Urquhart, Cain, Sawyer, etc. are responsible for developing some of the greatest CRPG's out there and now this shell of a company is using the name and reputation that they built to lure in potential nostalgia-hungry costumers. It's dirty and low and they'll never live up to the Black Isle Studios of the late 90's / early 00's. It's the people that made that studio.

That's what I meant but didn't word quite accurately. Of course he has the right, of course the Black Isle revival is unadulterated PR bullshit. The bitterness is showing quite a bit and I'm afraid it will not lead to any good.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/313192?ref=activity

TL;DR

They have decided to use Unity as the engine for Project Eternity instead of using their in-house engine Onyx. The linux port is no longer a stretch goal because they'll do it regardless of the money raised.

Good choice, Inxile and a lot of other kickstarters are also using it

Well, after a slow day, they're almost at 1,8 mio. :)

I haven't played any games that utilize Unity engine but a quick peek at their page it looks great. I'm glad they didn't use Onyx, it felt way to consolish/UE3 like but that may have been their choice of art design when they made Dungeon Siege 3.

is it a good choice, though? I've only seen indie games use it so far except for Tiger Woods and that got slammed for being a "cheap" Unity game. For $2-3 million, I'd expect them to use their own customised engine so I'm not sure I'm all that glad about this news. From what I've seen, Unity games look pretty dated as well and while I'm not a graphics whore, that doesn't mean that we should get a game that looks old. I'd rather have them stick to HD 2D art then than 3D that looks 5 years out of date.

Updates both of Obsidian and Inxile about choosing Unity: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity/posts/313192 and http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inxile/wasteland-2/posts/228226

Edit: they just achieved the 1.8M stretch goal.