Obsidian’s Pillars Of Eternity Documentary Starts With Layoffs

Like any good story, Obsidian’s Pillars of Eternity journey started with failure. And not any kind of failure, but the worst kind that game developers experience – layoffs.

It’s called The Road to Eternity, and it’s a 83 minute look into how Obsidian Entertainment recovered from a cancelled project. That project wasn’t mentioned by name in the documentary, but it was set to be an Xbox One launch title called Stormlands, the remnants of which Obsidian used to create last year’s Tyranny.

But from there, emboldened by the success Double Fine had with Broken Age, Obsidian began the Kickstarter campaign for Pillars of Eternity. Road to Eternity then covers what the development process for Pillars was like: the pre-production process, how small the team was in comparison to modern projects, the challenges that faced the original prototypes, what elements were introduced in different prototypes, and how the Obsidian production process in general works.

Road to Eternity is a fascinating look at modern game development, especially the problems that crop up that gamers often don’t think of. There’s a great section in the middle of the video about what happened when Obsidian switched out their modelling suite to Maya, which brought up problems of efficiency and problem solving.

The entire documentary is available to watch on YouTube for free, and is also embedded above. For what it’s worth, Jason wrote that Pillars was “a great RPG, and it’s one worth your time, even if you don’t know what a Bhaalspawn is”.