InXile CEO Brian Fargo got quizzed by NMA on his planned Wasteland 2 kickstarter project.
Brother None reports:
In an interview with No Mutants Allowed, InXile CEO Brian Fargo talks indepth about his plans regarding the crowdfunded Wasteland game his company is planning. Mr Fargo explains how the game will be top-down, and notes that it being party-based with turn-based combat "is an absolute critical requirement to me". Among other tidbits, he also reveals none of the money raised on Kickstarter will go to his personal salary, only to the team and outside contractors.
Here's a snippet from the interview:
Does a Wasteland project being an RPG create any problems since RPGs are generally more complex and expensive to make, or does it being a hardcore RPG make it more similar in budget and niche appeal to DoubleFine's Adventure project?
There is no question that RPG's are on the more difficult side of the scale to create on a tight budget. It isn't a real RPG if it doesn't have deep cause and effect and true re-playability and that means you create more assets than a player will see in a normal session. We do have the advantage of this being a top down game which saves tremendously on the art creation which in turn allows us to script out numerous outcomes without the concern of creating graphics for every possible situation. Artists can spend months on a single 3D model in a 1st person game and that would make a lower budget title impossible. We also have the advantage of knowing the base mechanics from the first game which saves trial and error but the real key will be in the pre-production. We need to design out every locale, conversation, item and NPC before we start coding... and I mean EVERY detail. This way the game is ensured to be deep and production is kept efficient and focused. We will also use that time to solicit feedback from key hardcore players such as yourself to question us hard on the design decisions. Changes are free at the writing stage so ideas can be changed and incorporated without fear of making the budget become impossible. Also the original Wasteland team was pretty small so efficiency was key then also.
I'm happy to provide a comprehensive Mass Effect 3 pre-release info bundle.
If you really don't have anything better to do, you can take part in the hunt for your very own Mass Effect 3 Space Edition.
To celebrate Commander Shepard’s war to take Earth back, Mass Effect 3 will be the first console game launched into Earth’s upper atmosphere on a historic voyage. And you have a chance to take home a piece of that history.
Starting February 23rd, various cities across the globe will host their very own Space Edition launches. Starting with San Francisco, CA and ending in Berlin, Germany.
Track the packages on their flights and be the first to arrive at the landing zone to win an early copy of Mass Effect that has survived space travel. Each Space Edition also comes with an on-of-a-kind fan prize package. Other prizes will also be given out to runner-up participants (subject to availability).
Check back soon for rules and contest entry.
In other fantastic news it became known that, in a very generous gesture, BioWarEA decided to offer the first DLC on day one. Only $10.
It seems Microsoft mistakenly published information about first piece of downloadable content for Mass Effect 3 online.
Dubbed "From Ashes," the content costs 800 Microsoft points. The content could not actually be downloaded, and has since been removed from Xbox.com. The add-on weighed in at a hefty 628MB.
The description read:
Unearth lost secrets from the past and recruit the Prothean squad member in Mass Effect 3: From Ashes.
BioWare producer Mike Gamble said this:
We're happy to confirm that Mass Effect 3: From Ashes DLC will be available at launch for all platforms. For those of you who have purchased the N7 Collector's Edition (including the PC Digital Deluxe Edition), you will get this content at no extra charge.
We'll have a lot more details for you later this week! Stay Tuned!
With Mass Effect 3, we now have to pay for content that's been developed concurrently with the rest of the game, but released separately for extra profit—and to make the Collector's Edition look more attractive to buyers.
It's understandable for DLC to be released separately and sold for an additional cost when they're developed as extensions to a pre-existing game or as 'added value items' impertinent to the core experience. However, it's unacceptable for core elements (in my very subjective opinion, this content has been vital in the past) of the game to be stripped out of the main game just so they can be sold separately for an extra price.
To draw an analogy, it's like selling a watch with one hand missing.
There has been a lot of discussion about the DLC offering but we wanted to clarify a few things...
- “From Ashes” includes the Prothean squad mate, an adventure on Eden Prime, a new weapon, and an alternate
appearance for every squad mate. Note that these alternate appearances are in addition to the ones already advertised in the CE.
- The Collectors Edition has been advertised from the beginning as containing a bonus character/mission, but we were not at liberty to provide the details. The Prothean is optional content that is certainly designed to appeal to long-time fans, which is why he is part of the CE offering (the version many fans would be likely to purchase). Mass Effect 3 is a complete – and a huge game - right out of the box.
- The content in “From Ashes” was developed by a separate team (after the core game was finished) and not completed until well after the main game went into certification.
- The Collectors Edition has been sold out in most places for some time now, and is becoming very hard to find (many players prefer not to purchase the digital version). As such, we wanted to make this content available so that SE buyers could also incorporate the Prothean into their game.
If you were hoping to find major gameplay innovations in Mass Effect 3, you'll be disappointed, if its initial stages are anything to go by. And who can blame BioWare for that, since Mass Effect's gameplay (bar the ill-conceived vehicles in the first game, long since abandoned) has always been spot on. There is, of course, the shoehorned-in voice recognition support for picking conversation choices via Kinect, but the likelihood of that working for anyone without an American accent lies between minimal and non-existent at best.
Visually, though, it did look like it has taken advantage of every last drop of graphics processing power that the Xbox 360 (on which we played it) possesses. Story-wise, it looks nicely set up to reach more epic heights than ever before, particularly with Earth taking centre-stage for the first time. And then there's the added excitement of a new multiplayer element coming to the franchise.
CD Projekt RED has sold in 2011, 1.5 million copies of their games, the company said in a statement. This number consists of 1.1 million copies of "The Witcher 2" and 400 thousand copies of the first game.
"In the seven months since the release of The Witcher 2, the PC version sold in quantities of 1.1 million copies, 24% of the units have been purchased via digital distribution. The first game sales amounted to 400 thousand units, although the the release was in 2007". GOG.com - part of CD Project group - sold 40 thousand copies of "The Witcher 2".
Earlier, the company announced that the world premiere of "The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition" for Xbox 360 and PC will take place on 17 April 2012.
"The Witcher" is based on the bestselling series of stories and novels by Andrzej Sapkowski.
In the I-III quarter of 2011, CD Projekt RED had 25.22 (8$,6€) million zł of consolidated net profit with the income of 106.49 (33.6$,25.4€) million zł.
Unfortunately that's still spare change compared to real AAA titles.
Recently, I was asked about Wasteland, and the answer became complicated enough that I decided to respond to here.
In short, I’d kill for another Wasteland.
Not just because it was a post-apocalyptic RPG, but because it did so much that was refreshingly new with conventional tech, something that Fallout did as well, and there’s a big lesson to be learned there.
I’m a big fan of using non-video-card-and-non-engine-innovations to drive development, and sometimes it only requires stepping back a second and taking a fresh look at the game to pull it off – as an example, my favorite example of non-tech innovation is low-INT dialogue options in Fallout. Brilliant. Wasteland did the exact same thing, except with skill progression and location setting – it allowed your character to grow in new ways, and it took you to places in its low-rez world that I haven’t seen rivaled or done half as well in contemporary games.
So the whole Kickstarter model, Double Fine’s adventure game, and now the hopes of Fargo bringing Wasteland on-line is amazing. It’s probably no secret after Old World Blues how much I enjoyed Wasteland and giant scorpions and proton weapons, but Wasteland has a lot of my childhood tied up in it. To explain: I was in early high school, I was coming off of the Bard’s Tale series and needed another fix... and from what I saw of Wasteland on the back cover of the package, it seemed to fit the bill. I was wrong.
Why? When I booted it up, I found it confusing and not like Bard’s Tale at all - (well, beyond the combat), and the navigation especially threw me off a bit at first. Separate the party? What did all these skills exactly do? Where was I supposed to go? I was prepared for several more hours of disappointment and thought I’d wasted my money. I was used to the faux-3D corridors and environments... then a number of things happened that woke me up to what this title was doing, and I realized Interplay had made something different and well on par with Bard’s Tale.
In any event, hats off to Fargo and InXile, I’m definitely putting my money down when they start up their Kickstarter fund, and I’ll donate just as much as I did to Double Fine. Give me Wasteland 2 already.
Matt Barton video-reviews Kingdoms of Amalur, Reckoning.
In this special episode, I review Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, a new game from 38 Studios and Big Huge Games. A nice combination of action and RPG, Reckoning rises above the fray to offer something truly worth playing.
Learn, over at a site called PopBioEthics, why the Mass Effect universe is better than StarTrek, StarWars and the Dune Universe combined. Also, this other universe, with the foundation and Hari Seldon and in the end it was the robots who planned this all the time. Anyway, apparently the Mass Effect universe is more important than any of those.
Mass Effect’s deep decision-making system is finely tuned to draw out realistic responses from players. During an interview I had with Daniel Erickson, lead writer for Star Wars: The Old Republic, he revealed two key elements of BioWare’s process that makes their games ideal for ethical exploration. The first is that quality voice acting triggers complex emotional responses in players. The second is that allowing players to choose their next line in conversation based on emotion, not the precise words written down, creates a huge level of investment by the player in the main character.
Jesus, this Erickson dude is a fucking genius.
I’m not saying that Mass Effect provides any answers. The value of Mass Effect as a science fiction universe is that it is a critical starting point for discussion about the purpose of humanity in a materialistic universe. Without an answer to that question, there is no real reason for Ender to defeat the Buggers, or for humanity to seek out new life and new civilizations, or for us to not let non-organic life be the torch bearer for intelligence in the universe. Mass Effect confronts us with a female hero of our own creating, with the deepest implications of diversity, with the most dramatic questioning of the value of what it means to be human. Whether you are a feminist, a transhumanist, a theologist, a proponent of space exploration, a pacifist, a human exceptionalist, a bioethicist, a scientist, or a philosopher, Mass Effect demands you rethink your world.
The big plot reveal of Mass Effect 2 was (spoilers haha) that those pesky Collector guys were abducting humans to turn them into DNA pulp to—you guessed it—build a human shaped Reaper—one of those giant robo squids—out of that pulp. Let me tell you my reaction to that big reveal of what Mass Effect 2’s suicide mission and all that buildup of tension was all about. First, I yelled “what is this bullshit?” at the TV. Then I paused the game as the giant Terminator / boss from Contra fight came up. Then, again, I yelled “what IS this bullshit!?” at the TV.
It couldn’t have been worse, had that “Human Reaper” sported a big, red clown nose. That shot one-hit-kill attacks.
I felt betrayed. Mass Effect 2 had its moments, I won’t deny that. A lot of the side stories which made up almost the entire game were pretty well done in and on themselves. And then that. That was the best the BioWare writers could come up with? Really? This reduced to entire main mission of Mass Effect 2 into one giant pile of utter rubbish. It couldn’t have been worse, had that “Human Reaper” sported a big, red clown nose. That shot one-hit-kill attacks.
Exactly how extensive is weapon customization? Will it be available in multiplayer mode?
CG: “If you love the M-8 Avenger you can level it up and mod it to be a competitive end game weapon, the choice is in your hands.” Players can literally handcraft their favorite weapons around their playstyle, build and preference in both MP/SP. With over 40+ weapons and 50+ weapon mods in Mass Effect 3 we pushed very hard to ensure there is zero difference between weapons/mods in Single Player vs. Multiplayer, they are the exact same.
Why yes, it must have been one hell of an effort to make the weapons exactly the same. They pushed hard.
Tomes of Mephistopheles is a first-person, action-RPG dungeon crawler. With its fast-paced fluid combat, a multitude of medieval and magical weapons, an in-depth custom spell system, and randomly generated persistent worlds, ToM is a pinnacle of the genre.
This is an alpha funding project. By purchasing Tomes of Mephistopheles right now, you will be getting it at the lowest price possible, you will be able to download early alpha version immediately after the purchase and will be granted all future updates for the title for free, including final release of the game.
It looks like skeletons are the order of the day. The game even has breakable walls. Which umm... look more like dent-able walls than actually being breakable.
Part III of R. Scott Campell's editorial on the origins of Fallout is up over at NMA. This time he sheds some light on different design decisions and cut content.
The Deathclaw. The horror of the wastes.
Was it always a big scaly lizard thing? Nope. My initial design for this terrible creature was a the apex predator of the wasteland, a mix of wolverine and brown bear, mutated by the FEV. It could survive any environment and feared nothing; a legendary force of nature that struck terror into the hearts of men! Unfortunately, the artists took one look at my concept sketch and said, “Dude, that’s way too much hair.” It was true. The Wolverine-bear was very furry, and there was just no way around it.
So here’s what happened: the newly formed Black Isle started work on what would be Planescape: Torment. One of the first art pieces was a monstrous creature called a Terrasque. It was sculpted in clay and was then point-by-painstaking-point digitized into a 3D model. As Planescape moved forward, it turned out that the Terrasque wouldn’t actually be featured in its design – leaving that tasty model in disuse…. Thus, the furry wolverine-bear became a hairless reptilian biped. (Take a look at page 339 of the D&D second edition Monster Manual. Holy cats! It’s a Deathclaw!)
Part 2 of No Mutants Allowed's epic editorial on the origins of Fallout is up. This time topics include the origins of the setting, design principles and conflicts with GURPS. Must read.
The post-apocalyptic genre is still very dear to my heart. The idea of humanity destroying itself is one of the darkest themes in all of literature. However, the archetype of the Survivor – the lone hero who does not succumb to the anarchic world or his base desires; who is his own justice and treats people like he would like to be treated – no other heroic figure is stronger. He is literally one man against the world, and no matter the cost to himself, he remains the paragon of the best aspects of humanity, carrying the hope that the idyllic and prosperous world of his past – our world – will eventually be revived.
The world after an apocalypse is fraught with danger and adventure; it brings out the worst – and best – of humankind. It is a brutal world, full of savagery and devoid of honor. There is only Survival. That and a distant dream of lifting themselves from the ashes. Few genres can elicit that level of primal emotions from an audience.
As the team gathered for the upcoming Christmas break, we all shared our ideas of where a GURPS: Wasteland could go. We liked the idea of setting it in Southern California; close enough to the Las Vegas of the first game where we could still use some characters, but different enough where we could tell our own story. Our player would be a member of the Desert Rangers dispatched to So. Cal. to investigate a mutant uprising, or a robot uprising, or something. . . but it was going to be great!
As we were about to end the meeting, Interplay’s legal counsel stepped in to say “have a good holiday!” And, just as he was leaving, he said, “Oh yeah, it turns out that EA still retains the rights to Wasteland. Merry Christmas!”
Sadly it was true. We wouldn’t be able to use the Wasteland license. Even though Interplay created the game, Electronic Arts had published it and still retained the rights. The worst part? EA had let the Wasteland license die, since it was seven years since the product had been released. However, because Interplay had released Wasteland as part of Interplay’s 10th Anniversary collection (and had given EA money for the right), it was as if EA re-published the game, thusly securing the Wasteland license for EA for another seven years.
Bugger.
So we all left for our vacation completely adrift. The genre and the story we had settled on were now gone, and it was back to the drawing board. Not a good start to the project.
Interestingly enough, I later learned that EA didn’t even care about the Wasteland license at the time. Apparently there was still some animosity over Interplay becoming its own publisher; competing with EA when only years before they were publishing through EA (and making them fat money). I had also heard that after denying Interplay the right to use Wasteland, EA asked their internal teams if anyone wanted to use this license. Apparently one did. Years later, after Fallout had shipped, I was pitching a game at EA Redwood Shores. I remember walking through their development cubicle-farm and seeing lots of wild-west-meets-Wasteland concept art and was hinted that this was to be a sequel to Wasteland. Although it never was released, that game was prompted by that phone call to deny Interplay the use of Wasteland.
GC: How will Soldak’s brilliant dynamism come into play in Drox Operative?
SP: The dynamic galaxy works similar to how it does in Din’s Curse where all of the interactions between the environment, monsters, races, and the players actually matter. Actions and inactions from all of these sources have real consequences, sometimes good and sometimes bad. These consequences can in turn cause more problems and so forth. That’s not very specific, so let’s walk through an example.
A ship named Nighthawk has been causing problems in the Regor star system. Since no one has been able to destroy it, Nighthawk has enough time to launch a strange Giant Pod at the planet Corvi, inhabited by the Hive. The Hive, their allies, and the players all fail to destroy the Giant Pod before it impacts the planet. After the impact, everyone finds out that the pod contained Mutant Ants that are huge, eat just about anything, and are immune to all known pesticides. The Mutant Ants seem to be unstoppable and destroy huge portions of Corvi’s crops. They even manage to stow aboard a freighter and spread to another local planet, Pallas, inhabited by the Lithosoid. Over time all of the population of Corvi starves to death because there are no crops to feed anyone with any more. Will the Lithosoid on Pallas fall to the same fate or will someone finally do something about the Mutant Ants?
The cool part about this example is that none of this is set in stone; all of it is completely dynamic. The players, the afflicted race, allies, and even enemies have many opportunities to stop the chain of events. More importantly, each time the events will be different. Next time, Nighthawk might launch an Invasion or build a Cosmic EMP Device instead of launching a Giant Pod. Or maybe the Giant Pod contained Stalkers instead of Mutant Ants. Or maybe next time they will be really nasty Mutant Ants that spread to every Hive planet and destroy their entire race. Or maybe next time a Lithosoid fleet happens to fly through the area and destroys the Giant Pod before it impacts Corvi. Or maybe the player will listen to planets when they beg for help the next time.
No Mutants Allowed put up the first part of an editorial on the history of Fallout, written by no one else but R. Scott Campbell, Lead Designer of Fallout. Great read, brimming with anecdotes about different RPG devs and Interplay.
While I struggled with Sim Earth, Tim had proposed the idea to management to make a new RPG based on the GURPS license. Yes, from what I hear, “What’s a GURPS” was actually asked by someone. Tim sold them on the idea that because GURPS is a generic system, once we make one game, we’ll be able to reuse the core mechanics to make any other kind of RPG. Somehow they said “Yes.”
Steve Jackson, a legend in the pencil-and-paper gaming world, created and owned the rights to GURPS. However, Steve had been burned by games before. In the past two of his great IPs were turned into Apple II games: Autoduel and Ogre. Ever since, Steve Jackson games had been inundated with developers wanting to turn their beloved IPs into computer games – and failing miserably.
When Interplay approached Steve Jackson Games for GURPS, they were extremely skeptical. They were told of the long line of great RPGs that Interplay had made. No response. They were told that they would have creative control over the game. Still no response. Then they were told the up-front license money they would be getting. Suddenly, there was a response.
With GURPS given a green light, Tim assembled a team, and (because SimEarth was just canned) chose me as the Lead Designer. It was a bit of a rocky start, as much finagling was needed to secure people for the team from other projects.
Once the contract was signed, Steve Jackson came to the studios for a meet and greet with the team. I remember him being extremely cool with our overall ideas about handling the game. One pointed question was, “What do you think about blood and violence in the game?” With a smirk and a wave of his hand, he answered, “The more the better!”
For quite some time now the bros in Jaesun's super-secret bro forum concerned themselves with a hobby-project of theirs. It was an interview about a Dungeon Siege mod, Ultima 5: Lazarus. Now, having a new, fancy homepage, we might as well put it online. I'll give you a snippet:
-What were your primary motivations for recreating Ultima V in a modern engine? How did the Lazarus project come about and how did you get involved with it? Why did you choose to remake Ultima V as opposed to one of the earlier or later games in the series?
The first motivator was simply a love of Ultima. After Ascension came out, I was incredibly sad. Partially because I was disappointed by Ascension itself, but more because I hated for the series I loved so much to finally be over. The idea of bringing it back to life (i.e. Lazarus) in some form was very appealing to me.
The next motivator was that Ultima V itself seemed to me like it had so much potential to be an amazing "modern" game experience. It had this story with shades of gray and this giant cool world to explore and an interesting, dark atmosphere…but all of those things were hinted at more than actually there—after all, the game was from 1987! NPCs had tiny snippets of dialogue, the graphics were archaic, the music was beautifully crafted but sounded very dated in midi form, etc. I wanted to take that core idea and spirit that made Ultima V so cool and bring it back to life with all that 15 years of technological advancement afforded us. (this is also why I didn’t choose to remake one of the later games—I felt Ultima V had the most potential, plus I thought Ultima VII was still playable enough that it didn’t “need” remaking)
The third motivator was selfish: I knew from 6th grade onward that I wanted to be a game designer, and as I was preparing for college I knew that I needed to make a game of my own to learn the skills and "prove myself," because class-work alone was not going to get me into the incredibly competitive games industry. I figured I needed a project and, well, Lazarus was it! Starting my first week of college, I began to sketch out the early designs for Lazarus and start trying to get fellow students and some Ultima fans online to join me in working on this crazy project, and eventually it started to build up steam. A long 5 years later, we finished!
Pondering bringing Wasteland back through this crowdfunding. It's a world I have longed to work with again.
and moments later
Very encouraging to see all the love for a new Wasteland. Crowdfunding might be the perfect way to make it a reality...
Matt 'Matt Chat' Barton followed up on this, with Fargo confirming his interest in the idea of crowdfunding a sequel to the predecessor to Fallout:
"I thought you all might be interested to know we are seriously looking at bringing a new Wasteland back with crowdsource funding. If we get enough support it could finally happen. Nothing would make me happier."
Fargo's Wasteland 2 vs. Avellone's RPG. Who will start a funding project first? Who will raise the most money? Place your bets.
I have been informed that cRPG afficionados everywhere may go to this site to grab the Mass Effect 3 demo. Only until February 17th.
The demo for 2012's most anticipated game is here! Experience two spectacular levels from the single-player campaign, along with intense four player co-op multiplayer matches. The multiplayer section of the Mass Effect 3 demo will feature an early access period running from February 14 to February 17.
Should games even bother trying to tell a meaningful story?
Interview - posted by VentilatorOfDoom
on Tue 14 February 2012, 13:02:46
Ars Technica have an article on whether games should concern themselves with storytelling at all. Should they?
Jaffe thinks the industry obsession with telling grander stories started in the early '90s, when CD-ROM and consumer-level 3D technology allowed for cinematic camera angles and voice acting. At that point game makers started to get "seduced by the power and language of film" he argued, thinking that "because they started to look like movies... they should feel like movies."
But in chasing movies, games lose something that's unique to the medium, Jaffe said. The biggest successes in video games—titles like Modern Warfare's multiplayer, Skyrim, Guitar Hero, and Angry Birds, make a huge impact without ever pushing a developer-driven story on the player. The game industry should respect the success we've had in entertaining the world, he argued, and stop trying to force more from what has historically been the worst medium for expressing complex narrative ideas.
"It's like the world's best chef, instead of working in a fine restaurant, decides to start working at McDonald's," Jaffe said of the constant effort to try to force strong developer-directed narratives into games. In other words, if you think you have something significant to say about philosophy or human nature, stick with the media that have proven they're suited to imparting that message effectively.
Gamebanshee offer a review of Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Here's their conclusion:
Reviewing a game like Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is tough. It is a massive experience and very hard to capture in the span of even this much text, and furthermore, in trying to hit so many markets (action gamers, RPG fans and everything in between), there's always going to be someone who's disappointed, or something that I failed to touch on. Encapsulating it in a nutshell for a final verdict, a "buy or don't buy" statement is going to be hard simply because everyone's going to want something different out of it.
Reckoning is one of the strongest mainstream RPGs in some time when it comes to its core mechanics, and brings together some excellent combat with a genuinely interesting, if somewhat generic, fantasy universe. However, its own sheer size gets in the way of it achieving its potential, with too many filler quests, and too much time spent running around empty expanses of terrain hunting down level-scaled loot. If you can force yourself to stick to the main storyline and the faction quests, Kingdoms of Amalur provides a great 40 or so hours of gameplay that fares far better than most other open-world RPGs. I just wish it wasn't wrapped up with an extra 60-odd hours of less-than-stellar content.
All that said, the world of Amalur is an interesting one, and I'd love to see more of it explored in the future. Reckoning is, despite its flaws, still a very solid RPG from a studio that has never put one out before; given this fact, I'm very excited to see where Big Huge Games and 38 Studios will take their universe and gameplay in the future.
Swen Vincke blogs about the hardships his company went through back in the day before the first Divinity was released.
Back in 2001, Divine Divinity was in serious trouble. Several people at our publisher, CDV, wanted to kill the game because it was late, and our publisher’s producer needed help defending the game at an important internal publisher meeting. The goal of that meeting was a re-evaluation of their entire portfolio, and I was asked to write up a list of what I considered to be the strong and weak points of the first Divinity.
Being quite the idealist in those days, I made what I thought was a fair assessment of our own game, not realizing that it’d actually be used against us afterwards.
I figured it might be interesting to share the mail I sent to the producer with you.
It’s quite long, but it reflects a lot of the hopes and aspirations we had at Larian in those days. Re-reading it, I recognize the idealism that drove us, as well as the hope that the publisher was going to forgive us for being late and give us the extra fuel we needed to finish the game the way we wanted to finish it.
For the record, it didn’t work out that well – several months later, just after the release, I had to downsize my team to 3 people from the original 30, because I refused to accept that I had no budget anymore, and spent everything on trying to finish the game as good as we could . My thoughts were that if the game was good, money would find us somehow. It didn’t of course. I caused quite some traumas with that attitude, and to this date I have regrets of how I handled the situation back then, but that’s another story.
Community - posted by DarkUnderlord
on Mon 13 February 2012, 07:25:08
Well, it seems everything went all right and we've finally been able to bring the front-page back online. If you'd like to read more about the sordid story behind our month and a half offline recently, follow the link at the bottom.
In other news, gallery images will be brought online shortly. The actual gallery itself will take some time. We are enabling file uploads for patrons though, so that you can upload images directly into your posts (which should make updating LP's a breeze). For the time being, that will replace most of the functionality of our gallery.
Our spiffy new Tag feature is also still under-development. Expect that to come online over the coming months. Content Search and News Archives are also still on the to-do list. And then there's TCancer... which I still have to write a bunch of converters for and solve a rather major technical issue before I can bring that back.
Until then, enjoy your New iCodex 2.0 and feel free to complain about missing features / make new feature requests. Hopefully it doesn't over-load the server...
In one way or another we got our hands on the Age of Decadence demo beta and decided to pen a preview. This article, too, will be added to the new and improved content system as soon as it is up.
Those of you familiar with Vince D. Weller’s (a.k.a. Vault Dweller) take on how an RPG should be like, probably have certain expectations when it comes to how The Age of Decadence ticks. Let me immediately put it this way: judging by the demo it looks like the game does indeed deliver on the promises. The demo was hooking enough for me to play it several times in a row, trying out different backgrounds and fiddling around with an array of different combat builds, having fun. Bodes well, does it?
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