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.

The latest studies I heard of state that, on average, human bodies start to degrade, both physically and mentally, at the age of 28. Supposedly sustained training can make this degradation practically unnoticeable until around 35, and mental abilities that have been developed at a young age and rely on performing repetitive actions are an exception and can continue to be improved even well into the 60s, but either way I guess I can now quite clearly say that I’m getting old. I mean, it’s not going to be getting any better from a physiological point of view, so there’s something else to add on top of why I won’t be able to do shit anymore, seeing as I can’t even now.
But who the fuck cares? In truth, it just marks the end of one year of suffering and of being “undead” and the start of another. You can say that September 27 should mark that, or August 15, or that day in November that I’m not sure about but is probably 16 or so, but this actually has to do with me and is near enough to the others, actually being between those dates, plus that it actually implies the passage of time while the others largely only imply static memories, so it is how it is.

So, unless you’re Andra and by some miracle actually intend to make sure it will be a happy day for me, kindly take anything, traditional or otherwise, that you may want to wish me today, and shove it, all right?

Even though I’m clearly not up to making enough sense to participate myself, so didn’t register this year, I would like to remind everyone that Blog Action Day is tomorrow and that this year’s theme is “The Power of We”, so it makes perfect sense to participate if you think you’re able because, well, being a part of a greater movement is precisely what it’s all about. Just register your blog and then pick an example where a group of people gathered together for a cause and accomplished something, or perhaps better yet one where you wish they would, or be more theoretical and write a guide about making a group of people who don’t otherwise know each other but have gathered together for a common goal more efficient; it’s your choice.
Personally, I favor the idea of small groups, a few people who realize that they have a common goal and work together to reach it, even if they may well be opponents on other issues. When it comes to the masses, it’s generally an issue of which small group, or even which individual, manipulates and uses them better. You may still say that even that’s the power of the group, but I think it’s more like how the general who could afford to send enough troops ahead as cannon fodder tended to win the battle, so a matter of the power of the numbers that can be mustered and directed, which I say is somewhat different.

But I said I can’t make enough sense to get involved this year, and at this rate it seems unlikely that I ever will again, especially considering the date. I only wanted to remind everyone that it exists and that this year it has a very interesting and fitting topic, so go ahead and register if you think that you have something interesting to say on the topic.

I need to wake up someday and find her next to me, holding me close and telling that it was all just a terribly bad dream. Can’t just keep being certain that it’ll happen for that instant while I’m probably still asleep but aware of waking up, only to realize that I’m still alone and nothing has changed each and every time. Can’t just keep waking up only to either stay in bed or get up just to pace around the room, thinking for hours of might-have-beens.
Anything else, or at least anything bar perhaps an even greater miracle, can’t make much of a difference anymore. Or at least not much of a positive difference, since of course things can always get much worse.

There are things I want to do, things I feel I have to do, countless ideas I need to let out of my head, either to give them a more “real” shape or simply to put them into words and leave them out there… And none of that can ever happen when I’m so crushed by missing her that it truly feels like a physical weight pressing down on me and making it so very hard to even breathe, much less think properly or actually do anything else.

I was saying that I wanted to make it to the end of the year without breaking any of my major “rules” for this blog, before giving up on one of them in January, but at this rate I can only say that I should make it to the end of this month, and even that will take some effort. What I’ll do for November and December, I have no clue at the moment, but I guess I’ll somehow think of something by then and struggle along as I always have. Admitting that I can’t keep this up in any way anymore is bad enough; have to at least try to make the switch at a “proper” time…

At least my entry for Materia Magica was just approved on MobyGames. That was a real pain to write and I worried and tinkered with it for a few days before eventually thinking that it might just be, if not necessarily good enough, at least not particularly bad, but I had to take advantage of this moment when the topic of such games was brought up on the forums. I had to submit it as a browser game, listing a launch date that’s a decade after the actual launch date, but there’s no platform-independent “platform” and it doesn’t seem like there will be one in any foreseeable future, so it was the only way to get this game that I played for some six years listed at all… And now I’m hoping that some who are still playing it may come and fill in the missing information or make whatever corrections may be necessary, since I largely wrote that description from memory and was forced to largely ignore all the features added since I quit.

Otherwise, I have quite a cold, but for the past two days I’ve been feeling much worse than the cold itself could account for because on Friday I also sprayed something in two areas in my room where I had noticed mold starting to appear again and that irritated my nose terribly. I thought it won’t be much, so just quickly sprayed without even wrapping anything around my nose and mouth and then didn’t even leave the room immediately afterwards, instead relying on the open window to take care of the worst of it and sitting here to talk to Tiel, since it seemed that, for the first time in months, we were having something of a real conversation, but I sure paid for that.
It was most likely due to the fact that this irritation was added on top of the existing cold, but until last night I kept feeling as if there were bugs crawling up my nose, plus of course the fact that it was very stuffy and I had long sneezing fits whenever I tried to do anything about that, and sometimes even if I wasn’t. Now that finally seems to be over, but now there’s of course some crap that made its way down my throat and perhaps a little into lungs as well and I’m feeling slightly feverish, so it may be a while yet.