What PoE would look like if it only reached the $1.1 mil goal.

[Sven_]

 

More than that. Obsidian put a quite a bit of their own money into it as well. The figure of $6M has been floated but not confirmed.

 

I hope they made enough money from sales.

 

 

 

According to Brian Fargo, with their games, which seem a similar scale (and backed by Kickstarters just as big), they'd be fine and could continue making those by selling an additional 100,000+ copies. Which PoE has easily surpassed already, for what it's worth. It'd be interesting to see how Double Fine do with theirs though. That doesn't even compare, they initially asked for but I think 300,000 Dollars, and in the end the couple million they got wasn't enough. To top that off, adventure games don't sell as much as RPGs, their in-built audience certainly isn't as big. Unlike the Kickstarter RPGs, which are successful considering their budgets and no to little publishers taking any cuts, this one probably won't convince as many business people about the viability of adventure games who weren't already convinced before (there's much more commercial adventure games being made than hardcore RPGs, by the way -- in particular the end of the first decade of this century saw countless of games).

 

Budgets alone don't tell the story though. There's a huge discrepancy depending on where a game is actually being made. It seems that the upcoming Witcher by all accounts appears to become just as big as Skyrim, just as pretty and full of latest tech, but if anything is to be believed, will contain even more hand-crafted content, from dungeons to no-generic-fetch quests to everything and cities with far more individualized NPCs and banter. However, developer CD Projekt is located in Poland, where games are significantly less expensive to make than say in the US. That's stretching it, but California, where Double Fine and Obsidian and inXile are hailing from is almost a luxury to afford for someone running these companies in some ways. Whilst projects such as the Armed Assault series earn a good deal of money by their ultra-realistic and high-fidelity engines also being the core of simulations that are actually sold to real military, there's probably a reason why those mostly come from Europe, Eastern Europe in particular these days. There's even a series of Sherlock Holmes adventure games made that can afford to license the latest in Unreal Engine tech -- even though there's a chance you likely have never heard hugely much about it. There's an article on this on Gamasutra, though it's ten years old an in terms of total numbers very much out of sync. http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130582/the_state_of_game_development_in_.php This might exclude marketing, but The Witcher 2 reportedly cost 10 Million Dollars to make, too, if this is to be believed. http://n4g.com/news/1342740/the-witcher-2-cost-10-36-million-the-witcher-3-and-cyberpunk-will-cost-2-82-million-in-h1-2013

 

Similarily, those 300,000 asked for initially by Double Fine may have been a modest budget, but that's actually the budget most bigger modern adventure games have to deal with, but they're made in Europe. Such as the more recent The Book Of Unwritten Tales 2, which was developed in Europe too, and all of its speech (easily hours of it) being professionally dubbed and localized all the same. Those are considered real hits by their respective publishers if they sell 50,000 units+ during their first run. And they keep on being made, although that has slowed down significantly. I like to cite it as, unprofessional and a bit childish as it was, one of the publisher guys joked on social media about that they could have afforded to make a series of multiple adventure games had they been given the Double Fine Kickstarter money. However, that is short-sighted as obviously the lower costs don't only come off the lower costs of living and "upkeep", but also of the kind of staff you can attract and hire. The US has by the far the biggest pool of talent and developers, and as such it's the biggest talent also moving there. Part of the appeal of all those Kickstarters was that, after all, it is proven genre and industry legends returning to their grass roots rather than indies filling in the blanks.

 

Not sure what PoE would have looked like. But reportedly for just about any commercial game, (it's the same for niche adventure games, reportedly) a good deal of the budget goes straight into producing art and art assets. I think for a 2d game with 3d characters PoE has some tricks up its sleeve that are very advanced, such as the lighting and stuff. I'd expect there to be cuts that may have been made first, ditto everything else audio/visual, such as the score, the animations, and all the extra stuff "hardcore CRPG players" who after all are the target audience would gladly neglect in favour of finally getting a CRPG like in the old days from some of the greats of the old days; one that only really works as it does on Macs and PCs (sadly) and whose design isn't as heavily dictated by publisher, huge budget and focus group testing demands. But naturally, as RPG design is rather complex, a lot of the quests and maybe even systems (dialogue, personality system, general world reactivity, quests, allignment/factions) wouldn't be too. And character classes.

Edited April 30, 2015 by Sven_

[Zwiebelchen]

I think many of the items in that list could have been left out without hurting the game. To the extent they drained development energy which could have been used to strengthen core gameplay, they may have actually made the game worse.

 

This is not how it works. The game would have been rushed out with only the minimum funding. The extra 3 million didn't go only into the extra content; half of them also went into polishing the game systems and art and increasing the possible production time.

 

And I definitely wouldn't want to see PoE without those extra millions. You can check youtube videos of early backer betas to see how much the animations and effects have been improved in just the last 3 months alone.

 

Art, mechanics, content, dialogue depth, ... everything would have suffered.

Edited April 30, 2015 by Zwiebelchen