Another Kickstarter project has popped up this time by the guys of Obsidian! They call it Project Eternity.
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.
Project Eternity aims to recapture the magic, imagination, depth, and nostalgia of classic RPGs that we enjoyed making - and playing. At Obsidian, we have the people responsible for many of those classic games and we want to bring those games back… and that’s why we’re here - we need your help to make it a reality!
They want 2.2 million to do the Linux version, they are already over funded so either way the game will happen but you need to dig deeg again if you want it on Linux, considering it has 30 days to go it's quite likely this one will come.
Sad to see another one have Linux as a stretch goal and not an initial goal. The fact that they will do it if they get the money they want is good though, better than nothing i say but still pretty insane...
I made a few lengthy posts in the Linux thread on the Steam forums about why this trend of unrealistic stretch goals and stretch goals in general for cross platform support are likely to breed unhealthy perceptions and behaviours. If anybody's interested they can [URL='http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?p=32832464#post32832464']read them[/URL].
One thing I would like to highlight (as an example of unhealthy behaviour) is that there's [URL='http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/60178-why-are-resources-being-spent-on-a-linux-version/']a thread[/URL] on the Project Eternity forums made by people who feel that Linux support is a waste of the the project's funds - an attitude that would be much less likely to have existed if Linux support were added to the project directly rather than associated with a stretch goal.
At the end of the day, I think there's more benefit to either adding Linux support to the primary target, or just adding Linux support to the project after the minimum value that the developers feel they need to be able to support Linux is met (and not confirm it beforehand). This way, people on all platforms are aiming for the same things with regards to stretch goals, which creates better community synergy, and promotes equality.
QuoteIn fact, our experience with Unity so far has made us confident enough that we have decided to remove Linux support from the stretch goals and just commit to providing a Linux version right here and now!(Unity is the engine they'll use, not Ubuntu's desktop. Can be confusing...)
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