Project Eternity’s aim is to bring back the style of the old Infinity Engine games. Games such as Baldur’s Gate and Icewind Dale. However, there’s one aspect of those games that Eternity will be very different in. It won’t be based on the Dungeons and Dragons Rule set.
So Obsidian are creating one from scratch, which Chris Avellone explained to us at Rezzed, “The two people heading that up in the studio are Josh Sawyer, the Project Director and Tim Cain, one of our gameplay programmers. Tim was Arcanum, Fallout, Temple of Elemental Evil , and Josh was New Vegas and Icewind Dale, among others. They both really like designing systems and that’s been proven throughout both their careers, so the idea of creating an RPG system like that from scratch is an idea they’re really excited about, it’s been pretty amazing to watch.”
“I think it’d translate very well to a pen and paper game, which was part of the intent. As for whether there’d be a core rulebook for the game, I don’t know if that was always the destination as far as we’re concerned, but the fact we wanted to create a system that felt very turn-based and pen and paper rules, that was important.”
Not that D&D has been forgotten, as some of the team get together and use it as a reference, “We do play Dungeons and Dragons actually, twice a week and sometimes over the weekend, in one of the rooms in Obsidian, just to get a sense at how the old-school pen-and-paper RPGs feel like, and some of the things we learn sitting around the table would be really good to incorporate into Eternity. I’m not part of those sessions, it’s Josh and a few other designers and our Lead Area Designer Bobby Null, and Area Designer, Jorge Salgado. They all sit around the table and go through one of Bobby’s campaigns which works out pretty well.”
