Good News: Pillars of Eternity Makers Just Delayed the Game

Pillars of Eternity, one of the handful of crowdfunded games notable for blowing the ceiling off its asking price, has been delayed (briefly) until early next year. It was due at the end of this one, but apparently feedback from the beta test period prompted the studio to hold back a few more months.

“Since the very beginning of this project we promised our fans and ourselves that we would release this game only when we knew it would be absolutely ready for the best experience possible. We’re very close to that point, but not quite there yet,” wrote Obsidian CEO Feargus Urquhart on publisher Paradox Interactive’s forums. “The feedback we have received through our playtest process has been invaluable to us. We are coming into the home stretch but are pushing the release out just a bit to make sure we honor that promise we made originally.”

The game–a roleplaying adventure in the vein of Baldur’s Gate, targeting Linux, OS X and Windows PCs–was originally projected to arrive in spring 2014 (the Kickstarter page lists “April 2014” for funder rewards), but was delayed last February to “winter 2014.” It’s starter budget was a million bucks, but Obsidian managed to quadruple that by the time the funding campaign wrapped in October 2012.

I usually feel a little relieved when I see a studio announce that some game’s been delayed. Not always. Sometimes you have debacles where a studio’s quietly dragging its feet, running out of money, still fumbling around with an inchoate project and dragging heels down spiraling tubes.

But when it comes to self-starter projects like this one (Obsidian didn’t sign on with Paradox to publish until March 2014), you want the studio’s full faith and credit behind whatever it winds up stamping “finished.” I couldn’t have been happier to see stuff like Dying Light, Batman: Arkham Knight and The Witcher 3 bumped to next year. Take your time, I want to tell every publisher and studio lead. These things are too important to screw up. We’ll wait.