Pantheon kickstarter

[Itap]

I donated my life's savings

[Swish]

Originally Posted by Itap [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

I donated my life's savings

It barely moved?

I've put $20 in (gonna be trolling those forums hard), I've heard reports that it's more fun than DOTA2 even pre-alpha.

[Rec]

I think the idea of someone spending 10k to keep the allmighty Estate of unrest alive for another 20 years is wonderful. We can call it The Mansion of Discord and improve every aspect of the original dungeon.

Now if the only dungeons in the game were the ones made by the 10k tiers then i would be sensitive to the lack of entirely new concepts but no way that's happening!

[stormlord]

Ain't going to make it. That graph being posted shows the story.

Brad is proposing a game that has to start another way. Even if he changed the game to be more casual he'd still struggle because others may have lost faith in his ability to run a project of this sort. Granted, a more casual offering would probably get a lot more backers. They're turned off by the heavy linkage to EQ because they remember the corpse runs and downtime associated with it. While Brad has somewhat distanced himself from those extremes, he still hasn't removed himself completely from the idea of enforcing downtime to produce social relations. On his kickstarter page, you read "A mindset that Designed Downtime should be a part of the game to ensure players have time to form important social bonds." Although in his Q&A video he uses less strong language to describe his goals and states something on the level of "We want difficult, not tedious."

This is why these kinds of less casual games have to start open source or by small indie times who work another job to pay their bills (or just happen to be fortunate). They build a prototype of the game and that's how they grab investors. If they don't find investors they better plan on paying for it themselves and getting plenty of other people to pitch in and have the expectation the graphics and other effects will be low quality.

This reminds me somewhat of Wurm Online. It had terrible graphics when it started. It did not have the time or development resources to produce high level graphics or effects. It had to focus on things it could do, like the sandbox environment or the designs for the game or the renderer or some of the textures. Many of the kinds of players which played it did not play for the graphics, but for the sandbox (much deeper than Ultima Online). Since it's less casual than average, its population has always been low. It has had several graphical updates over the past several years, but these came after the game produced some profit to pay for them.

A lot of open source (or non-commercial) games have low populations. I'm thinking of planeshift right now. The bonus is they get to do a lot of risky things they couldn't otherwise do. It frees them up.

Think about Minecraft. This JAVA game was made by one man and released in 2009. By 2013, it had sold over 12 million PC copies and over 33 million across different platforms. This is how much one person can do and it's impressive. The thing about Minecraft is it's not an mmo and it can be tailored to both casuals and non-casuals by allowing players to change how the game plays and thus it can increase its audience more. Minecraft also adopted a stylish blocky graphical style which reduced the demands. Another technique it used to reduce the demands was to procedurally generate most of its content. People who ended up playing Minecraft played it because of its sandbox, not so much its graphics. There're also now minecraft servers.

Minecraft is the World of Warcraft of single player sandbox games and even holds its ground on servers. It did all that mostly because it did what it could do, not what it couldn't do. Its creator did not start making the game with the goal of producing something on the level of a 100 million dollar production.

And that's the thing about World of Warcraft too. While it DID have millions of dollars to spend, it wisely used all of its resources to produce something that exploited every nook and cranny.

[whitebandit]

I pledged 100, will probably jump to 150 if something new and exciting pleases me...

that 250$ option for 1$/year sub is soooo tempting..

[Rec]

Originally Posted by stormlord [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Ain't going to make it. That graph being posted shows the story.

Graphs mean nothing genius when graphs can't account for the surge every kickstarter gets in the last days.

[SamwiseRed]

one of the 10k donations was a player from red.

[stormlord]

Originally Posted by Rec [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Graphs mean nothing genius when graphs can't account for the surge every kickstarter gets in the last days.

That's a big surge you're expecting. Look at the possible pledges and look at the numbers. There will have to be a lot of new backers coming into the fray for it to be successful.

I just don't see that many new backers showing up. I believe there're enough people in this world to want a game like this, but I don't think it's going to happen this way. I'd be happy to be wrong.

And even if it does work do you think Brad can do better than he did with Vanguard? He's already had his chance to make a game like EQ and it barely got off hte launch pad. Prospects aren't good.

[Rec]

You are not prepared

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[Treefall]

Anyone know if the $250 stand-alone's previous tiers includes the non-stand-alone $250 tier?

I just want to be sure before I dump $250...because I would take the $1 a year sub over super early access.

Brad did let me down for Vanguard, but I have some damn hope that's he's straightened himself out and can deliver a game that is a close, spiritual successor to EQ.

PS Someone in China please remake EQ in a modern graphics engine, k thanks.