Cav's Place

As the title suggests, this post will deal with multiple recent events that have to do with gaming, even though they may not necessarily be directly related to each other. Most of them are connected through the use of Kickstarter, but I’ll also mention the latest announcements coming from GOG.com, since they were only made yesterday.

If you have any interest in the matter, I’m sure you already know that Project Eternity has become the most funded Kickstarter game, raising $3986929, which is $650558 above the previous record, set by Double Fine Adventure back in March. In addition, in the last Kickstarter update they mentioned that by 8:30 PM GMT the next day, which was Wednesday, they had been sent $176279 via PayPal as well, making for a grand total of $4163208 from a total of 77667 pledgers, and that amount may still increase, since they still accept money through PayPal.
What this means is that all stretch goals have been reached, including the crazy four million dollar one that they had put up mere hours before the deadline, so the game is scheduled to be released in April, 2014, on Windows, Linux and Mac, in English, French, German, Spanish, Russian and Polish. It will feature a large game world with a longer story and more areas and factions than originally planned, a second big city, six playable races, eleven playable classes, many customizable difficulty options, several companions with their own personalities and stories, the Adventurer’s Hall, where players will be able to recruit mercenaries to customize their party as they see fit, a house and a stronghold that the players will be able to obtain, crafting and enchanting, live instruments for the soundtrack and a dungeon with 15 levels, 16 if they’ll get 40000 fans on their Facebook page… And Chris Avellone will be forced to play Arcanum, since he somehow hasn’t so far.

Largely in Project Eternity’s shadow, a couple of other pretty well known game designers have started a Kickstarter funding drive for another ambitious RPG, called Shaker. Unfortunately, at first the page offered basically no information about the game other than some common RPG features which it was supposed to include, so it was entirely expected for it to have a hard time gathering any funds. At the moment, when we’re about halfway to the deadline, it has obtained about a quarter of the minimum goal of one million, but it may yet reach that target, seeing as Project Eternity’s funding drive has finished and some information has been added to Shaker’s page, starting from the name, since it didn’t even have a working title at first. It’s quite clear that it won’t get anywhere near any records, however, so their announced plans of funding two related games at once, if they’ll obtain at least 1.9 million, will certainly remain only on paper.
Edit: They just announced scrapping the project, saying they’ll come back with something stronger at a later time.

One game that clearly won’t reach the goal, on the other hand, is Nexus 2: The Gods Awaken, seeing as it has only obtained slightly above a fifth of the minimum goal of $650000 despite being three quarters of the way to the deadline. And that’s probably not particularly surprising, because the first game, which is actually still on my list of games that I should get around to playing someday, seems to be a largely forgotten gem from what I could gather, but I do find it rather sad, seeing as this idea of tactical space combat involving massive ships is very interesting and, strangely enough, rarely explored.

At the same time, the attention of gamers who enjoy space combat is probably grabbed these days by Star Citizen / Squadron 42, which is gathering funds both with and without Kickstarter. The Kickstarter page was actually only launched yesterday, so I have to wonder how much did Project Eternity’s success factor into it, because the original plan seemed to be to make a funding drive that works more or less the same way but is managed directly by the developers, who were staying away from Kickstarter on purpose.
Still, the project is extremely ambitious, the minimum goal of two million being by far the most I’ve seen for any such project so far and the top stretch goal of six million being utterly insane, but the scale of the project and the level of detail certainly justify all of it and then some. Unfortunately, the development of Squadron 42, which will be the single-player campaign, seems to be largely left for the stretch goals, the initial plan seeming to focus much more on the multiplayer “living universe” that Star Citizen aims to be, so I fear that the result will be more along the lines of a multiplayer game with something that amounts more or less to a single-player tutorial unless new funding records will be set.

And to finally move away from Kickstarter projects, I must point out that GOG.com seems to have taken a liking to the “pay what you want” model, because after a somewhat failed attempt at something like this for the Divinity series, they now did it more than right for their entire Interplay catalog. I can’t say that I’d personally have any interest in any of those games, but if you do then know that you can get eight of them for as little as one cent, if you pay above the average, which at the moment I’m writing this is $13.60, you get 12 more, and if you pay at least $34.99 you get all 32 of them. Granted that the most notable titles are in this last group of 12, but each of these games is normally sold by them for $5.99, so the total value is $191.68 and you only need to want six of them to say you’re better off purchasing all 32 while this offer lasts.
Of course, even if I was interested, none of this would do me any good as long as they won’t add any payment methods that I’d actually be able to use to buy anything from there, so it’d sure have been nice if something along these lines would have been included among yesterday’s announcements instead of Mac support. Actually, if we’re talking about supporting other operating systems, even if I’d have no use for it myself, I’d sure have liked to see Linux support first, seeing as that would seem to go with what GOG claims to support, while the strict controls and insane prices promoted by Apple, as well as their tendency to sue at the drop of a hat, go completely against those ideals, so I’m really quite bothered by this move.