Project Eternity Kickstarter nears $2 million, new gameplay details discussed

Project Eternity is fast approaching $2 million in Kickstarter funding, marking a win for developer Obsidian Entertainment. The team has posted up new gameplay details including the importance of souls and non-combat skills in the world.

Eurogamer reports on Obsidian's latest update post, which starts with a run down on the game's non-combat skills.

Non-combat skills sound similar to Skyrim's skills, such as sneaking and crafting. Here's what Obsidian had to say:

• Learning new things. This includes finding out previously unknown information, like the location of town or a hidden door, or uncovering secret knowledge, like a potion recipe or the true name of a demon. Or maybe you just want to know a good place to gather materials like ore or herbs. We will make abilities that let you find things out.
• Traveling around the world. You will want to improve your movement capabilities (such as sneaking around some ruins), or traveling across the world map faster or more safely, or even teleporting directly to your destination. And sometimes movement requires removing barriers like locks or traps, so you will need some way to unlock and disarm. We'll add abilities for these actions.
• Getting new items. If you are not going to kill a creature to take its things, then we will give you the means to make new items, buy them, or steal them. Or maybe you will choose to support NPC's by bringing them the materials or the recipes needed to make new items for you. We congratulate you on your non-violent and cooperative plans of wealth acquisition, and we'll give you the means to do it.
• Interacting with companions. Once we have added many interesting and useful NPC companions, we will have to give you ways to recruit them, improve their usefulness, and keep them from dying (or even worse, disliking you!). We will make non-combat abilities that interact with your companions, so you can keep them alive and filled with a grudging respect for you.

The post goes on to explain the importance of souls in the game's world and why Obsidian feels that Unity is 'the best fit' for Project Eternity.

We also interviewed studio head Chris Avellone about Project Eternity, check out what he had to say on the plot, world and skills here.