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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.
Do you hurt your loved ones when giving them hugs?
Y'know, being this edgy and all?
My take is that about 50% of these Kickstarter Games will deliver on their promises to a reasonable degree. That is a great rate! Not only does that mean you pay the standard price for a good game, but these will be good games that would otherwise never have been made. Or to put it differently, a 50% chance of this working out is very, very reasonable at the price asked!
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
And hey, for us Aussies, we're paying about a third of the standard price, since Kickstarter doesn't discriminate based on region, whereas we're gouged hard for traditional software purchases. Not to mention, if you're careful about what you back, you'll probably avoid a lot of the 50% failures.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
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.
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