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Planescape: Torment Successor Funded In 6 Hours
New submitter abuelos84 writes "Just a few hours after the Kickstarter project was opened to the public, Torment: Tides of Numenera, successor of the legendary Planescape:Torment, had been funded. In the dev's own words: 'Our heads are still spinning at the incredible response we have had from today's support of our Kickstarter campaign. We had plans to roll out our stretch goals and to write our Kickstarter updates but never in our wildest dreams did we think we would fund this quickly!!! We are joyfully scrambling right now to get a longer update and some stretch goals in front of you as soon as we can. We should have more to say later today.'"
People are DESPERATE for a game with meat and depth like the old RPGs of yesteryear. There are too many games with more concerned with quicktime events and cinematics than there are with story and character development. The big publishers seem to think that fluff is enough, but a gamer cannot survive on fluff alone.
Raenex is a dickhead
That seems a bit like crowd sourceing a successor to the Lord of the Rings.
Getting the money is easy, but getting a product out, after all the time and all the dispersed talent, that does not suck in comparison to the original, that is a challenge
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
It's like if million of voices screamed "shut up and take my money" at once.
On the one hand all these games being funded by Kickstarter are great because it means that they get to know they have a natural audience before they've made it. And it effectively lets people act in some sense like very small time investors but getting a product back as the result of the investment. The same goes for a lot of the other fun Kickstarted projects. But at another level, what ends up being successfully Kickstarted seems to not reflect well on people as a whole. Games, webcomics and other entertainment projects routinely get quickly Kickstarted, sometimes a lot over the funded level. However, at the same time, science projects and other genuinely helpful for humanity research projects struggle with their Kickstarters and almost never have this sort of response. Apparently when it comes to actually seeing where we'll spend money we'd all prefer fun games to actually learning about the universe or fighting disease.
I think I'll wait for the reviews, I don't really know much of about the developer and the one game of theirs I've played didn't impress me. Maybe it was because they sucked at humor I dunno or maybe I'm just not the humors sort. Kickstarter is nice but you got to be careful any charlatan could promise you the moon and stars and deliver you nothing or worse a pile of shit.
I'm not really a huge kickstarter fan I've backed only two projects which were books by one of my favorite authors. Someone who had earned my trust. That said I'm not against it and will most likely end up buying Wasteland II soon after it comes out.
Do you hurt your loved ones when giving them hugs?
Y'know, being this edgy and all?
Perhaps i'm attempting to draw conclusions from a too small set of anecdotal data, but it seems like in some ways it's easier to kickstart these things than it is to get people to buy a published game that's already been through the development process.
I've contributed to Wasteland 2 and several other smaller game projects that looked particularly interesting to me, and i'll probably contribute to this too. Several of the games i've contributed to have already come, either in full or demo form, and i don't think i've played more than about 5-10 minutes total of all of them. Not because i'm not interested, i've just been busy.
Ni No Kuni is an awesome game. Or at least it sure looks awesome, and i've heard good things about it from friends. I've been interested in it for quite awhile. After the usual long wait for Japanese games it finally came out in the US about a month ago. Have i bought a copy yet? Nope. I don't have the time to play it right now, and it will still be there a few weeks, or a few months, or even a few years from now, in used format if nothing else. And the odds are it will only get cheaper as time goes on. I realize that i probably ought to buy a new copy sooner rather than later, just to encourage the development of those kinds of games, and maybe that motivation will manage to overcome the apathy about performing a task for which i will receive no immediate reward, but maybe not.
On the other hand the Kickstarter games require an up-front investment. If i want to be sure the game will exist for me to play in the future i need to put money down _now_. Even if the goal has already been met there are usually stretch goals, or at the very least one can generally calculate that the higher the funding the higher quality the game will eventually be.
And it certainly doesn't hurt that you can usually jump into a Kickstarter at a very low level. It looks like for Torment i can get a copy of the game for just $20. But if the tiers are structured intelligently then once i've decided i'm going to pledge _something_ it's often easy to talk myself up the ladder. "If i just add $5/$10/whatever more then i can get this extra cool thing!" And of course it's much easier to feel a connection with the developer when you're contributing to their campaign, unlike when you hand some cash over to a random GameStop employee. That's a pretty intangible benefit, but it does exit.
I realize that a big part of the "problem" here is just my own laziness at putting off buying new games, but Kickstarter definitely seems like a very neat solution to the "problem" in my particular case.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
http://eternity.obsidian.net/
But can't we all also go and pump money into Dreamfall: Chapters so they make a sequel to The Longest Journey?
Maybe then we need to make the science people "into a game". Hold on, before we get to shouting "dehumanized". While discouraging the practices of a certain specific game company, make what those guys do into a "sim(ulation) game". Pick your favorite doctor! Follow him as he dispenses medicine! Or works on a solution to a problem! "14% progress... 15% progress...". Count the lives saved/restored to health!
The graphics are "simple" in that top down 2D is an easy first level implementation.
But I bet someone will holler about the security risk so it might not happen.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
This is great of course, but there's another Kickstarter going on for Dreamfall that hasn't gotten as much money in a month as this has gotten in a day:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/redthread/dreamfall-chapters-the-longest-journey
It's not too late, and the game is funded so this is hardly a tragedy, but it would certainly be nice if Dreamfall could get a similar level of support.
The writing is really what made Planescape so great.
Are the writers of the original game onboard?
The are so many RPG's on kickstarter that it's difficult to decide on which ones to back. Everyone seems to go for the big names of yesteryear re-writes/sequels, but not so much for the new, smaller systems or the actual Role-Playing Games (i.e. - non-computer ones). Personally I would like to see more spread of the funding across the board (no pun intended) so that more games in general get built instead of just having focus on rewrites (not that I mind the rewrites for the most part). Heres a small random-ish selection of other smaller stuff that can be backed on KS: http://kck.st/13CtsPV (Vaccum Shadows) http://kck.st/YU2uOi (4KINGDOMS) http://kck.st/12dCceE (Hull Breach!) http://kck.st/XeW1eZ (Ultimate RPG Toolkit) But it's best if everyone takes a good browse through lots of KS projects - theres some really good stuff in there.
It's nice to see what will surely be a quality game get funded.
I've seen too many garbage products getting pledges (heck, there's even one where the "developers" pretty much tell people outright that they are going to fleece them with a non-product and it's on pace to get funded...) while quality games (like this one put together by a friend: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dyskami/upon-a-fable-a-fairy-tale-board-game or this other one put together by a different friend: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1780208966/freeport-the-city-of-adventure-for-the-pathfinder ) struggle to get funded. Good products need our support so they can make more good products!
Can we please get a kickstarter going for System Shock 3 before EA decides to console-ruin it?
I wonder if this project will be able to connect with the next generation, the ones that were just too young to enjoy the former Planescape: Torment. If so, contributing to this Kickstarter can be a good way of passing down the token. Maybe I will not play it, but for me it is important enough just to make it happen.
It's worth pointing out that this is not set in the same setting as Planescape: Torment (i.e. Planescape).
Numenera is completely unrelated to D&D, at least flavor wise (it's made by Monte Cook, who was heavily involved in D&D 3rd Edition. I don't think he had any involvement with AD&D, including Planescape...).
Not saying this is a good or bad thing, just saying, so that people are aware.
I went back and tried to play to this game (btw there are lots of mods to up the res etc), because I lamented the fact that I missed it first time around. It would be much more approachable if most/all the character dialog was voice acted. I'd pay for that.
Fallout 2 less so, by quite a lot, but the ending of Fallout was tragic.
Planescape: Torment for very much the same reasons: the protagonist you played and got into for so long had a tragic ending, yet one you could see "fit" the story and wasn't done merely to create a downer ending.
The ending of Shadows of Amn was good too, but in this case seeing Irenicus (and the actor they got to do that character was an inspired choice) get his Just Desserts, yet he was still a psychopath and still went down fighting (with a different motivation from The Unnamed One from Planescape which was more resigned to their fate and faced it) made it.
I think the endings were a large reason why people still love these games. A crappy ending like at the end of Half-Life Opposing Forces killed that, when HL had all those poor alien leves but a decent genuine cliffhanger ending meant people forgave it.
This campaign was mentioned with great enthusiasm in a recent Project Eternity backer update email. Since both game projects target the same kind of audience, I wonder if this hasn't had some impact on the result...
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
Message to EA - FUCK YOU.
These are the games we want, and our money is talking loud and clear now.
Take your always-on internet DRM and your micro-transactions and stick them up your ass.
That's how good the game is... 13 years of marriage and almost all RPGs that came out in that time under my belt. But Torment was the only game where instead of giving me evil looks when I was playing for a long time she was egging me on to play so that she could learn the story unfold.
Some of the dialoge has become staple household phrases. Who can ever forget: "Like a shadow I am..." or "Can I hold it - with my teeth?" ;)
Would it have killed you to mention that it's an RPG? The summary doesn't even explicitly state that it's a game. Yes, it's pretty clear from context, but it's poor journalistic style not to slip these things in.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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