Obsidian Entertainment announced today that their throwback RPG will be running on the latest Unity Engine from Unity Technology. It's been a choice engine so far from a lot of the Kickstarter heavy-hitters due to its flexibility, top-end graphics capabilities and easy-as-pie porting options. So does this mean we could see Project Eternity on the Wii U? It's up to Nintendo.
Just recently Nintendo and Unity Technology joined forces, with the Unity Engine becoming a premier frontrunner and supporter for the Wii U console. This has opened up a massive floodgate of potential for both big and small developers. Of course, this has also led to a ton of speculation regarding which developers and which projects could appear on Nintendo's new console.
Meanwhile, over on the official Kickstarter page Obsidian breaks down the announcement of using Unity and why they chose the engine over some of the others out there. CTO Chris Jones notes that...
We do intend to use some of our in-house tools in conjunction with Unity where it makes sense, such as in the case of creating conversations and editing some of the RPG-specific game data. Unity makes it very easy to extend not only the game engine but the development tools as well, and we feel integrating some of the tools that have already proven effective on previous Obsidian games will get us off to a great start on the development of Project Eternity.
It's almost funny because it's like he's repeating what Unity's CEO David Helgason mentioned to us during the interview. Perhaps then gamers can take all talk of Unity at face value and not as PR talking points, eh? Although, the proof will be in the pudding.
As for porting...many gamers quickly jumped to the platform to ask the most obvious question since Wednesday's announcement: Will Project Eternity get ported over to the Wii U?
The obvious answer is probably. I doubt Obsidian would pass up the opportunity unless the royalty and console distribution fees are ridiculous, which kind of ties back into “it's up to Nintendo”. We specifically asked this same question to Unity's CEO, and in the interview he stated that...
So...that's kind of up to Nintendo and the developers. We don't have any sort of control over that. But it will definitely be easy and very doable. We think it's going to happen and we'll do our very best to make it happen.We have a great toolset, a great engine, it's very scalable – we're getting that all the time. But what we have delivered, what this creates is the amazing cross-platform economics that we have. As well as bringing one thing from one platform to another in a matter of days.
A matter of days, eh? Well, we'll have to try to get in a word with Obsidian to find out how viable an option it is to use the premier engine for indies to port the game over to Nintendo's latest console and possibly find out from Nintendo how viable it will be to have a bunch of indie games potentially make the jump to their console.
Project Eternity is already scheduled to make the jump to Mac and Linux in addition to launching for PC. I'm just hoping we can squeeze a "Wii U" tag in there sometime soon.
You can pledge support to Obsidian's Project Eternity over at the Official Kickstarter Page, which has accrued more than $1.7 million over the course of a couple of days and is aiming for the $2.2 million stretch goal mark to make the game as big as independently possible.
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