marelooke

3D RPGs have been made for far less, it all depends on what expectations you have (Consortium gathered a bit over $70k, for example) Ah, but that's where I think their savings might come from, most RPGs are a lot of work because one has to script a huge amount of possibilities (and then test them all...). If they manage to make their improvisation engine do what they're envisioning most of that scripting work would disappear I'd think. Then they (the project promoters) need to start disclosing it, and how much. With a 600k minimum, I'm not sure what to think. KS supporters are starting to hold projects at greater levels scrutiny than ever before. They have said they are keeping $200k of the studio's funds aside as a contingency measure in case their estimates are off (or there are unexpected setbacks). Not sure if there is any other funding. (though 1/3 of their estimated budget is a rather nice buffer, imho)

I used to play MMOs rather intensively, besides the fact that I just don't have the insane amount of time to spend that I used to back then there's also the fact that the communities seem to have changed quite a lot, and for the worse imho. People are a lot more competitive, a lot less helpful and a lot more rude than they used to be. As for co-op, I just don 't have anybody to play with: playing with strangers doesn't appeal to me and most of my irl friends also have little time for gaming, trying to get our schedules to align on top of having limited time just doesn't appear to work. So the last years I've basically been playing solo (or with PUGs, in the few MMOs I still "play")

Looks like the first stretch goal will be achieved, would be really nice if the 700k goal is also met. I ended up upping my pledge by more than I probably should have, but I'm curious as to what they can achieve and the responses in the Codex interview kinda helped alleviate some of my doubts.

I tried playing it once, the lack of subtitles in the intro is a pretty big bummer as I, for some reason, had trouble following the dialogue.

Okay but realistically who doesn't use Microsoft as the the foundation of there IT infrastructure ? How many companies do you know of that don't have a Microsoft desktop OS and use Active Directory? And I am talking about SME's here and not your 10 -100 user companies ? Ehm, most companies don't use Microsoft as the foundation of their (business critical) IT infrastructure for various reasons (going into those would, I'm afraid, take us waaaay off topic), those are often *nix machines or mainframes (usually a combination of both). Among our developers more and more are switching away from Windows (even though Linux is officially an unsupported OS, but running it is tolerated and even encouraged by the operations people...) Active Directory is just a proprietary LDAP implementation with some bells and whistles and afaik can be presented to UNIX systems as one (and vice versa, it's not all that uncommon for the "Active Directory" in a company to be a Samba server backed by LDAP). I've also never seen the appeal of Exchange, it's too closely tied to Outlook (which as an email application ought to be taken out back and shot and the remains incinerated) though I have to admit the calendaring component is rather nice and as I've understood rather harder to replace by other solutions, unfortunately. But even if you want to (or "need" to) use Exchange (which has IMAP support, so you can use Exchange and still be free of Outlook) why would that suddenly mean you need to Microsoftize your entire infrastructure? I never understood why it has to be "or-or", there's no reason why one cannot run Exchange without AD, or have Exchange and AD for desktop use while leaving people free to use whatever they want on their own laptop/workstation, with the advent of smartphones it's become nigh impossible to entirely lock people into a single vendor ecosystem anyway. Not to mention that the number of Mac users tends to go up and quite often among the higher ups in corporations resulting in a more heterogeneous working environment anyway (company policy or no, you ain't gonna tell your boss to get rid of his Mac...or iPhone...), so slowly I'm seeing the MS-only shops disappear in favour of a more "whatever makes you get your work done"-attitude, which, in my book, is a lot more healthy anyway. "No really, you have to use the hand-saw using a chainsaw is against company policy..." Sure there are still companies clinging to total control of their IT infrastructure to the detriment of their employees, but hey, that's their problem. They'll get to catch up with the times eventually, or become obsolete.

Aha, now there's a reason for me to up my pledge above the minimum (I have a rule for myself that I never pledge more than the minimum to get the goods for any game that doens't provide a version for an open platform, so basically Linux as I don't expect game companies to start caring about the BSDs anytime soon ) Time to work through the updates to see if they said anything yet to alleviate the technical concerns I had concerning the feasibility of what they want to do with the budget they have. I have never understood why people really choose Linux over Windows, my basic argument being " why change something that is interoperable and works " But I respect your decision to base your KS funding on support for multi-platforms Well that depends on what you use it for, as a software developer I've never seen the appeal of using Windows, the platform is just terrible for any development that isn't tied to the Microsoft ecosystem (I've done some of the latter as well and I'd argue that even then it's not great). So the only real reason I have to keep Windows around is to play games, it would be great if I wouldn't even need it for that anymore.

Aha, now there's a reason for me to up my pledge above the minimum (I have a rule for myself that I never pledge more than the minimum to get the goods for any game that doens't provide a version for an open platform, so basically Linux as I don't expect game companies to start caring about the BSDs anytime soon ) Time to work through the updates to see if they said anything yet to alleviate the technical concerns I had concerning the feasibility of what they want to do with the budget they have.

Still haven 't gotten Mesa, such a horribly time consuming and RNG frame to get *sigh* I probably also should start to care about the Void some more, really wish you could just grab randoms for there without having to go through the annoying recruiting chat (or make a decent market so I can juts buy the stuff I care about rom the void). Oh well...maybe one day.

NWN was one of the biggest disappointments I've ever had with a game and it seems I got the worst of it too by trying to play a wizard (as I generally do). In other news, I picked up my year old XCom: Enemy Within playthrough, the game's still fun though I think I really should have started my second playthrough on Classis or so because after the initial few months the difficulty rather plummets. Now I'm trying to decide whether to drag it out to get the "shoot down 40 UFOs"-achievement or just use the Gollop Champer and get this playthrough over with...

I think the Molyneux thing is kinda sad, really. He obviously likes what he's doing (I cannot imagine anyone sticking with such a demanding "job" if they hate doing it and are rich to boot) and I don't doubt that he's got some great ideas. I think he should just have people in the company that can slow him down, I think that's the main issue at 22cans, that he is the sole founder, so his will is the law, this wasn't the case at Bullfrog nor at Lionhead (where they were two and four, respectively). I've seen it before where an "idea-guy" gets to basically run a project without interference and while ignoring the feedback of the other people on the project, it tends to not end well for anyone involved.

Here's to hoping that the "pretty difficult" isn't anything like The Wichter 2's "pretty difficult" aka "frustrating" (I am, of course, referring to the difficulty at release, not the current state of the game).

Still playing Guild Wars 2, found out I'll need to do a Dungeon to be able to complete the personal storyline, which kinda sucks as it ruins my idea of playing this as a semi single-layer game. Meh Also rediscovering a lot of the other annoyances that made me quit the game at launch now that I'm back in areas that pose somewhat of a challenge. So figured I'd go back to Bioshock, which didn't last long. The hacking minigame seriously gets on my nerves, I mean it's bloody everywhere! The level I'm in (the theatre place) also just screams "filler content!", I mean, I really don't see the point of it storywise, so adding those up my motivation to continue was pretty much nihil. Still gonna try to finish it at some point, I mean, everybody's raving about the game so I guess I must be missing something...right? Oh, and I made it to the final boss in WH40K: Dawn of War: Chaos Rising, which is so horrendously overpowered compared to *everything* that came before that I'm just not going to bother (the way I built my squad doesn't allow for some of the cheap tactics people found to deal with him, unfortunately). Too bad because I really really enjoyed that game too, but they just had to ruin it with the final boss. I just hope Dawn of War II doesn't have the same issue, that would suck.

I suspect you're probably right. Has anybody successfully completed and released a Kickstarted FPS game? Consortium was a first person RPG, but the scope was rather different when compared to UA, the graphics style was also rather stylized. Judging by the "slow" backing (compared to say, Shadowrun: Hong Kong) I suspect quite a few people have their concerns about how they'll be able to pull off what they're trying to sell, at least I doubt there's that many who doubt there are cool ideas here. I'm hoping they go into the *how* in one of the next updates, if they can convince people that what they're proposing is actually feasible with the budget they have then I'm convinced the speed at which contributions roll in will go up rather a lot.

How does it compare to the player housing in EverQuest 2 (still my measuring stick when it comes to player housing in MMOs...how I wish that game wasn't left to wither like it was by SOE, *sobs quietly*) Anyway, still playing through Guildwars 2, made it to level 65 or so with my Sylvari Thief, currently I'm just exploring and completing areas to make it to level 70 (though I have a bunch of level up scrolls from rewards chests and such) to get access to the next bit of Personal Story content. Looks like my Bioshock playthrough might have stranded in the theatre level once more... I'd say it is better. While it doesn't have the absolute freedom that Everquest 2 had, it has a ton of hooks for items and you can change the templates to mix up small, medium, and large objects. The houses themselves are brilliant, they are big and scenic with a lot of rooms. It's also very easy to have all your characters access your houses, so I have an Imperial room with all my NPC's from that side, and a Republic room with the others. Glad to see that at least some MMO developers are still considering player housing as more than a checklist item (though, actually your ship was supposed to be your house iirc from SWTOR launch, and it was rather a failure in that regard). Guildwars 2's player housing sort of feels like one (a checklist item I mean), while it has some nice features (it evolves based on your personal quest) it ultimately isn't a place where I *want* to be with my character (at least not my Sylvari, maybe other races' are better, though I sort of doubt it) whereas in EQ2 I *always* logged out in my house if I had the chance. I loved in EQ2 how your house was really *your* house and that you could display your conquests there (including some rare weaponry you acquired through sometimes very long and arduous quests even though the weapon itself was of no use to you, it was still a status symbol), it also made for a rather convenient way to keep players doing "stuff" without it feeling like a real grind (not to mention, that combined with a form of level scaling it managed to keep quite a bit of the "old" content interesting and avoided that certain areas ended up being entirely dead, a problem that WoW suffered from to a major degree before the Cataclysm revamp) Anyway, looks like I'll have a deeper look into SWTOR's player housing, if that stuff is done right I might even install the game again.

How does it compare to the player housing in EverQuest 2 (still my measuring stick when it comes to player housing in MMOs...how I wish that game wasn't left to wither like it was by SOE, *sobs quietly*) Anyway, still playing through Guildwars 2, made it to level 65 or so with my Sylvari Thief, currently I'm just exploring and completing areas to make it to level 70 (though I have a bunch of level up scrolls from rewards chests and such) to get access to the next bit of Personal Story content. Looks like my Bioshock playthrough might have stranded in the theatre level once more...

I'm afraid I have to agree with the other sceptics here, while I never played any of the Underworlds (or any other Ultima, for that matter) having a much improved TES-style game certainly appeals to me (so sue me for comparing Underworld to TES), but as a developer I can't help but feel that the scope they've set for themselves is pretty much impossible with the funding they are aiming for. If they would have the budget of a modern Elder Scrolls game, then maybe I'd be more willing to accept that it can be done, but as it stands: nope. There are also some other things that I have my reservations about (aside from the ones already voiced by other people): linking a single player/co-op game to what seems to basically be a MMO (which is why I didn't back it back then), how the hell is this going to work? Practically as well as technically (I mean, how are they going to manage the complexities involved with the small budget they have?). And how will this impact modding, or does this just mean no modding (which would be bad imho and is in my mind also one of the huge shortcomings of DA:I when compared to TESV: Skyrim)?

The problem with ME isn't necessarily the binary choice, but the fact that, at least in ME2, there isn't really much of a choice. You either play the shining knight or the douche, the game mechanics actively punish you for not sticking to one or the other (there is a mechanism in the "alignment" system in ME2 that decides based on a weighted percentage of paragon/renegade choices you've made whether you will be allowed to use persuasion/bluff so if you don't stick to your chosen "alignment" you at some point will no longer be able to persuade/bluff your way out of any situation). I must say that I was quite disappointed when I found out about this... Also note that the above only applies to ME2, it wasn't the case in ME1 (because persuasion etc. were actual skills iirc) and I have no idea whether they did something about this for ME3. And really, this is the general problem with "moral choices" in games. There are usually mechanisms in place that "force" you in one direction.

Yes, but skills were only redundant due to their ineptitude, different builds used to be possible but Blizzard pretty much killed that option with Wrath of the Lich King (Arcane Power/PoM/Pyro anyone?). And a lot of the "redundant skills" would more accurately be described as "situational skills", cutting those killed the flavour of a lot of classes (but that's another discussion entirely). Quite a few other games actually manage to do skill "trees" (they don't have to be trees at all) perfectly fine without the need to entirely revamp the skills and their associated tree with every expansion, Everquest 2 for example, were skills (or entire skill trees) are added with expansions and the tuning of abilities was generally fairly minor. Their splitting of "skill XP" ("AA" for Alternate Advancement) and "leveling XP" was also pretty neat imho. Judging by how my class still plays the same (though I wasn't exactly that high level when I quit GW2) it seems ArenaNet also got things right, at least to a fairly decent degree. Blizzard just did a bad job imho, and instead of fixing it they scrapped it, because apparently they assume their players are too dumb to handle anything but a cookie-cutter promoting skill system.

It definitely sounds interesting! What is this fascination with open worlds lately? I miss the days of tighter and narrower sprawly environments, like say the Spencer Mansion in Resident Evil, or even more recently, the Asylum in Arkham Asylum. It carries the good parts about backtracking, where familiarity with the environment felt nice and intuitive.. the place environment became home. Most open world settings as of late feel very unforgettable and unnecessarily padded.. to keep it on topic in regards to Levine, I'd say BioShock 1 had it right with Rapture. I hope this open world thing is just another phase the industry is going through before the next big thing arrives. You know, Skyrim happened, and now everyone wants slice of this pie. Same like it was with MMOs few years ago. Every single open world game I played was so boring after a while, and as you say, the setting of them and story is completely forgettable. http://www.thejimquisition.com/2015/01/the-jimquisition-we-need-more-spencer-mansions/ He might be controversial sometimes, but this episode is exactly taken from my mind... I sometimes wish, that we could again get new Final Fantasy with HD prerendered backgrounds and static cameras. FF IX-2 made this way in collaboration with Sakaguchi-san would satisfy most of my wet dreams... Unfortunately this will never happen There's a new Resident Evil: Revelations coming up, these games stick to the old formula a lot more (eg. Revelations 1 is set for 90% on a single big ship). I hope Revelations 2 will do the same (and maybe tone down the obnoxious bossfights, or at least give us filthy casuals a way to get past them without too much frustration without making *everything* a walk in the park.

I saved one of Keyrock's friends!

Trying to finish Bioshock (never made it through and I'm back in the area where I usually quit, so we'll see if I make it to the end this time...). The story isn't really grabbing me, but I gotta finish this, then move on to 2 and Infinity, my gamer cred is at stake I also hit Mastery Rank 17 in Warframe, they changed the test in one of the previous patched so my preparation was wrong, which means I needed two tries instead of acing it the first time around. Aaand, I also picked up Guild Wars two again, my lvl23 Veggie Thief was still patiently waiting for me after two years (I got two "anniversary gifts" on login). One thing I noticed is that my build still played like it used to (in as far as I still remembered anyway), in World of Warcraft I probably wouldn't even have recognised the skill trees anymore after that much time... (*adding* to a character is imho *much* preferable over redoing entire classes with each bloody expansions. Did ya hear me Blizzard?). Edging closer and closer to lvl30 though I feel rather purposeless, I finished the last story mission I had at lvl23 and now I feel like I'm just grinding (by completing map objectives) to lvl30 so I can get more story...

I enjoyed DI1 co-op with a friend, not sure if I'd ever have finished it solo though. The game also suffers from a pretty boring (and pretty long) first area, the game only really got fun in the city and it became even better later in the jungle. Never got around to playing the DLC or Riptide though. Can't say I'm very impressed with the graphical direction of the sequel. Curious to see how it turns out (same for Dying Light, which, at first sight appears more interesting than DI2)

Tried to get through Scourge: Outbreak, a third person cover shooter. Pretty awful imho, characters too similar and horribly bullet spongy enemies. Meh, uninstalled. Still trudging through Wasteland 2, made it to Canyon of the Titan. Can't seem to really get invested in the game for some reason. Having fun when I fire it up but can't say I feel any urge to make it to the finish. Shame. So after a bit of lugging through Canyon of the Titan I went back to my WH40K: Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising, game is still good fun, apparently now has steam achievements too (though it appears I lost all the GFWL achievements I had).

2.5 million stretch goal - Scrap the game and make a linear first person shooter with massive setpieces and an overabundance of QTEs instead. Nah. Action FPS-RPG with TWO branches. Dating simulator with qte sex scenes and plenty of SJ issues. so new game from David Cage I think you got your Davids mixed up Trololol

I don't think they use Amazon anymore if that is why you are waiting for PayPal.. still need a CC though Ah, that's why it's asking me for my credit card info instead of allowing me to click through to PayPal. Kind of annoying.