Yeah they've recently been very cautious to avoid saying PoE2 will use crowdfunding of any kind. A close-reading of their post-release comments suggest that Josh at least thinks that PoE's production was negatively affected by feature creep due to overpromising during the Kickstarter.
I agree this is probably what has been his conclusion from the campaign. Their whole Kickstarter campaign sounds like it was running on improvisation and it's a miracle that the game got released at the level of quality at which it was.
Josh has said more than once that they were making up goals on the go. I'm pretty sure they got into a vicious circle of "Promise a feature to attract backer money -> Try to estimate implementation of this feature with Unity, which you haven't yet researched properly -> You can't make a good estimate -> Promise a new feature to ensure your being able to deliver on a previously promised feature..." and so on.
From looking at the game, my impression is that the Stronghold and the "Second big city" were never supposed to be there.
I guess the combat system could have also been improved if its problems didn't surface (in the Backer Beta) at a point when it was already too late (read too expensive) to revise its underlying principles. Too much man-hours were tied to changing anything at the base level.
In the end it was very fortunate for Obsidian that the game was received so well despite all this.
I think Obsidian's takeaway has been that running a Kickstarter for a project of such complexity affects the end product's quality negatively. I just found this quote from Feargus where he says how they are definetly not going to Kickstart more games, but they are kickstarting the Eastern Reach card game:
For our next games, absolutely [we won’t use Kickstarter]. But to be clear, we just worked with another company to do a board game. We did the Pillars of Eternity card game. That would still be something we’d use other crowdfunding sites to do, just because it’s not what we do, but it’s connected. I don’t want to say we would never do anything affiliated with any of the other crowdfunding outlets. But for games, this is why we’re getting together to do this together. And I’ll say together once more.
By the last "this" he means Fig. I imagine they will run with the story "Kickstarter is for starting, a franchise an IP, and for those who have been successful the first time, there is Fig. We were successful, hence we are going for Fig this time." I guess Fig's main selling point to developers would probably be saving them this "stretch goals" buildup that PoE suffered from.
