Obsidian's Digital RotR

[MAJBrown22]

Is there any chance we'll see a release or playable demo of Obsidian's digital adaptation of RotR at Origins or GenCon? I was hoping for a snippet at Paizo Con, but any information would be great. I'm moving this summer and will have to stop my game mid-campaign for a couple months and I'd love to have RotR on my iPad.

[Vic Wertz]

Obsidian has made no announcements regarding dates.

[MAJBrown22]

Vic Wertz wrote:

Obsidian has made no announcements regarding dates.

I know, I've been waiting for one. They demo'd at Paizo's GenCon booth last year and I was hoping they may have coordinated for something similar this year.

[hfm]

It looked like it was in a decent place last year at GenCon, I would imagine they've made some great strides in the last year. Hoping to see something at GenCon as well.

[I'm Hiding In Your Closet]

MAJBrown22 wrote:

Is there any chance we'll see a release or playable demo of Obsidian's digital adaptation of RotR at Origins or GenCon? I was hoping for a snippet at Paizo Con, but any information would be great. I'm moving this summer and will have to stop my game mid-campaign for a couple months and I'd love to have RotR on my iPad.

Are we talking about the next step in the tradition of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights? I've been barking hopefully up this tree for quite some time!

[Thotiel]

I'm Hiding In Your Closet wrote:

MAJBrown22 wrote:

Is there any chance we'll see a release or playable demo of Obsidian's digital adaptation of RotR at Origins or GenCon? I was hoping for a snippet at Paizo Con, but any information would be great. I'm moving this summer and will have to stop my game mid-campaign for a couple months and I'd love to have RotR on my iPad.

Are we talking about the next step in the tradition of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights? I've been barking hopefully up this tree for quite some time!

That would be awesome, but given the sub-forum this was posted in...

[Parody]

I'm Hiding In Your Closet wrote:

Are we talking about the next step in the tradition of Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter Nights? I've been barking hopefully up this tree for quite some time!

Nope. That's Pillars of Eternity. But you can find out more about the iPad conversion of the first PACG set at:

A Look at Obsidian's Adventure Card Game (Paizo Blog)

Obsidian's PACG site

[Borissimo]

I was INSANELY excited when this game was announced. I have a gaming channel on YouTube and was chomping at the bit to record 5- and 6-player runthroughs of RotR and spread my love for one of my favorite games of all time.

By now, though, it's pretty obvious that the game is suffering a tortured development.

The game was announced almost 10 months ago. We were told it would be released in Q1 of this year. Then, total silence. No updates, no trailers, no preview videos, nothing. Q1 of 2015 came and went without a word. Obsidian finally broke the silence with a blog post in April filled primarily with information and even pictures recycled from the original (by then 8-month-old) Gen Con announcement.

And of course, in the 2 months since then, we've had more silence.

When a gaming studio says a game is nearly done and over half a year later they can't even come up with a new screenshot, something's clearly going wrong.

Obsidian is an incredibly talented studio. Pillars of Eternity was wildly ambitious, yet Obsidian amazingly delivered on every promise and produced a game that rivaled one of the top masterpieces of gaming history. Clearly, "announce a game and then miss your deadline while saying nothing for a year" is not a marketing strategy that a talented studio like Obsidian would choose deliberately. You can bet that if Obsidian knew a year ago what they know now, they would never have announced the game at Gen Con 2014. What we're seeing with the marketing of Obsidian's PACG is the kind of thing that happens only when a game's development runs into major unexpected problems.

PACG has a lot of finicky parts and complicated rule interactions, and turning it into a video game is nothing short of a major challenge. But the hardest part of RPG creation -- the game mechanics and balance -- has of course been taken care of, so the game should be relatively easy to develop compared to something like Pillars of Eternity, which required mountains of art, animation, story, class, item, and spell design, among other things. My guess is that Obsidian made a prototype, underestimated the difficulty of completing it, announced the game, and then discovered some (or a bunch of) fundamental design errors that turned out to cost a lot of time to correct.

I want to be clear that I'm not in any way angry with Obsidian. They are undertaking the creation of a digital version of one of my favorite games, one which begs for a digital version, and one which I will spend an unlimited amount of money on and play for hours if they successfully release it. And if they don't successfully release it, then I'll still be grateful to them that they even tried. I just think that they announced the game way too prematurely and ran up against some difficulties -- difficulties that I hope they overcome, however long the overcoming may take.

But to those who are (like me) super excited for this game and can't wait for it to come, I suggest you try to forget about it and distract yourself because it isn't coming for a long, long time. Expect many more months of silence. Expect the game to arrive no later than the second half 2016, if we're lucky. If anyone has evidence to the contrary, oh god please prove me wrong. I just can't fathom what that evidence would be.

[Vic Wertz]

Borissimo wrote:

When a gaming studio says a game is nearly done and over half a year later they can't even come up with a new screenshot, something's clearly going wrong.

They did show their current build at PaizoCon, and it was quite a bit more advanced than what they showed at Gen Con.

[Borissimo]

Vic Wertz wrote:

They did show their current build at PaizoCon, and it was quite a bit more advanced than what they showed at Gen Con.

Whoa, that's great news! Thanks for sharing, Vic. I'm happy to be wrong. :)

[MAJBrown22]

Borissimo wrote:

Vic Wertz wrote:

They did show their current build at PaizoCon, and it was quite a bit more advanced than what they showed at Gen Con.

Whoa, that's great news! Thanks for sharing, Vic. I'm happy to be wrong. :)

That is great news, I wonder why no one covered it. The April blog post didn't sound like the game had gone awry, I'm keeping my fingers crossed it will release this year. It would be a pleasant surprise to hear something at Origins or Gen Con.

[Vic Wertz]

There are a couple nice photos of their demo in this flickr gallery which is associated with this blog, though he doesn't say much about Obsidian in his blog. His associate says a bit more (but still not much) here.

[Mike Selinker]

FYI: The Obsidian PACG game is really, really, really good. I will certainly not speculate on when it will come out, but when it does it will rock your world.

But if you can't just wait for that to happen, check this out.

[CockyRooster]

Mike Selinker wrote:

FYI: The Obsidian PACG game is really, really, really good. I will certainly not speculate on when it will come out, but when it does it will rock your world.

But if you can't just wait for that to happen, check this out.

But PoELotER doesn't ship until 2/2016...

[Mike Selinker]

Right, but your pledge to them ships in June of 2015.

[Troymk1]

Vic Wertz wrote:

There are a couple nice photos of their demo in this flickr gallery which is associated with this blog, though he doesn't say much about Obsidian in his blog. His associate says a bit more (but still not much) here.

Agreed that looks nice!

I believe they took a page from Elder Sign for tablet which to me is greater than the sum of its parts (Via Music, Graphical segues and scenes, and intuitive gameplay)

[hfm]

Troymk1 wrote:

Vic Wertz wrote:

There are a couple nice photos of their demo in this flickr gallery which is associated with this blog, though he doesn't say much about Obsidian in his blog. His associate says a bit more (but still not much) here.

Agreed that looks nice!

I believe they took a page from Elder Sign for tablet which to me is greater than the sum of its parts (Via Music, Graphical segues and scenes, and intuitive gameplay)

I love Elder Sign, I think I've bought it on four platforms now.. :) The Art is fantastic.. I went so far as to rip all the art out of the Unity package, run the 16:9 ones through imagemagick to fix the aspect ratio and I have them on my desktop background switching every 30 minutes. :) Can't get enough of the art in that.

[MAJBrown22]

Mike Selinker wrote:

FYI: The Obsidian PACG game is really, really, really good. I will certainly not speculate on when it will come out, but when it does it will rock your world.

But if you can't just wait for that to happen, check this out.

I'm a day 1 backer for that game, as well as Epic. If it releases when it's supposed to, it should fill my time between WotR and Apocrypha :-)

At any rate, I'm enjoying the heck out of S&S right now and the new Arctic Scavenger reprint comes out next week (solo modes added!). It would still be nice to have some digital PACG to take with me when I move next month.

[Karloch]

Borissimo wrote:

The game was announced almost 10 months ago. We were told it would be released in Q1 of this year. Then, total silence. No updates, no trailers, no preview videos, nothing. Q1 of 2015 came and went without a word. Obsidian finally broke the silence with a blog post in April filled primarily with information and even pictures recycled from the original (by then 8-month-old) Gen Con announcement.

And of course, in the 2 months since then, we've had more silence.

One of the developers (Nathan D.) confirmed here this will be out in 2015. Wait and see....

[MAJBrown22]

Karloch wrote:

One of the developers (Nathan D.) confirmed here this will be out in 2015. Wait and see....

Great news, always nice to hear from a member of the development team. I can't imagine the complexity of turning PACG into a mobile game. I simply cannot wait to play this on my iPad! A July release would be most excellent, as I'll be on the road moving for several weeks and without my game boxes for a month or two.