As Double Fine’s Kickstarter Nears an End, Wasteland 2’s Begins

@Jumanji said:

@AssInAss said:

@Jumanji said:

@Paul_Is_Drunk said:

I like the idea that somebody wants to make a game out of passion, and it just happens to be the type of game that I enjoyed playing 20 something years ago.

Why do you believe that Brian Fargo is making a game out of passion? He's been churning out genuine shovelware for 15 years. He BANKRUPTED the last publisher that made the Infinity Engine games that hardcore RPG fans so love. Again, look into his background a little. What kind of "passion" do you think he really has for games? I'll share an anecdote found at a better forum than this one.

The reason Brian Fargo greenlighted the original Fallout was not because of the mechanics... or the SPECIAL system... or the grayscale morality... or the interesting premise/setting... it was GORE. Brian thought that GORE sold games. So the dev team that pitched him Fallout promised him that yes, it would be VERY bloody. That was his -sole- motivating factor to greenlight the game. He is a consummate suit who has lived his life according to the Peter Principle.

Can I get a source for that? I'm just interested for history's sake, I wasn't young enough for knowing about the politics about the original game.

Sure... http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/wasteland-2-the-wastelandening.1350/#post-65788

An unsubstantiated internet comment. Why am I not surprised?

@Jumanji said:

@AssInAss said:

@Jumanji said:

@Paul_Is_Drunk said:

I like the idea that somebody wants to make a game out of passion, and it just happens to be the type of game that I enjoyed playing 20 something years ago.

Why do you believe that Brian Fargo is making a game out of passion? He's been churning out genuine shovelware for 15 years. He BANKRUPTED the last publisher that made the Infinity Engine games that hardcore RPG fans so love. Again, look into his background a little. What kind of "passion" do you think he really has for games? I'll share an anecdote found at a better forum than this one.

The reason Brian Fargo greenlighted the original Fallout was not because of the mechanics... or the SPECIAL system... or the grayscale morality... or the interesting premise/setting... it was GORE. Brian thought that GORE sold games. So the dev team that pitched him Fallout promised him that yes, it would be VERY bloody. That was his -sole- motivating factor to greenlight the game. He is a consummate suit who has lived his life according to the Peter Principle.

Can I get a source for that? I'm just interested for history's sake, I wasn't young enough for knowing about the politics about the original game.

Sure... http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/wasteland-2-the-wastelandening.1350/#post-65788

An unsubstantiated internet comment. Why am I not surprised?

@Jumanji said:

@Hailinel said:

@Jumanji said:

@AssInAss said:

@Jumanji said:

@Paul_Is_Drunk said:

I like the idea that somebody wants to make a game out of passion, and it just happens to be the type of game that I enjoyed playing 20 something years ago.

Why do you believe that Brian Fargo is making a game out of passion? He's been churning out genuine shovelware for 15 years. He BANKRUPTED the last publisher that made the Infinity Engine games that hardcore RPG fans so love. Again, look into his background a little. What kind of "passion" do you think he really has for games? I'll share an anecdote found at a better forum than this one.

The reason Brian Fargo greenlighted the original Fallout was not because of the mechanics... or the SPECIAL system... or the grayscale morality... or the interesting premise/setting... it was GORE. Brian thought that GORE sold games. So the dev team that pitched him Fallout promised him that yes, it would be VERY bloody. That was his -sole- motivating factor to greenlight the game. He is a consummate suit who has lived his life according to the Peter Principle.

Can I get a source for that? I'm just interested for history's sake, I wasn't young enough for knowing about the politics about the original game.

Sure... http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/wasteland-2-the-wastelandening.1350/#post-65788

An unsubstantiated internet comment. Why am I not surprised?

hmm, it's not like the guy is posting under his real name or anything. it's not like the guy's real name will get you hits on mobygames or anything.

It's not like the guy is necessarily telling the truth, or anything.

@Jumanji said:

@Hailinel: ok mr. internet anon, go register at brokenforum and call him a liar to his face. why are you wasting time with me?

Because you're here using his word to speak for you.

@Jumanji said:

@Hailinel: ok mr. internet anon, go register at brokenforum and call him a liar to his face. why are you wasting time with me?

Because you're here using his word to speak for you.

@Jumanji said:

@Hailinel said:

@Jumanji said:

@Hailinel: ok mr. internet anon, go register at brokenforum and call him a liar to his face. why are you wasting time with me?

Because you're here using his word to speak for you.

What do you want me to do? Go issue him a polygraph and then post timestamped .pdfs of the result? It's an anecdote. If you want to verify it, go talk to him yourself, or read more posts that he's made under that name. You don't think he was at Interplay in the 90s? You don't think he knows Chris Taylor or Tim Cain? You think he has some ulterior agenda that would motivate him to post on a backwards forum that gets no outside traffic and that's unassociated with a commercial frontpage? Believe what you want I suppose.

I'm not saying that your wrong or that he's lying, but every argument you've put forth has been with the eloquence of a troll. You fail to cite sources and only provide cursory links when asked, you constantly speak as though you hold a very personal vendetta against Fargo that I'm not sure exists, your arguments are in general poorly constructed, and you behave in an appalled, belligerent fashion when people don't agree with your poorly constructed arguments. I'd also note that not everyone shares your views on Fargo, and that coins tend to have more than one side.

Either way, your general inability to argue your point in a sufficient manner is of no help to you, nor does it matter because people are not pledging money because of Brian Fargo. They are pledging money in the hopes of seeing Wasteland 2. Whether the game turns out well or not is a matter of discussion for another time, but I've already put money down because I want this game to see the light of day.

Whether the game turns out well or not is a matter of discussion for another time, but I've already put money down because I want this game to see the light of day.

@Jumanji said:

@Hailinel said:

Whether the game turns out well or not is a matter of discussion for another time, but I've already put money down because I want this game to see the light of day.

Great. It's great that you are so liberated from material concerns that you can throw your money around uncritically and be totally indifferent as to the returns. For everyone else, who may actually care about they get out of the Kickstarter, I've tried to provide a critical counterpoint so they can make a fully informed pseudo-investment decision. If anything I have said is false, please feel free to correct me and I will amend the erroneous post(s).

Oh, I care what I get out of Kickstarter. I only contribute funds to those projects I care about.

We did it! Wasteland 2 is going to exist!

We did it! Wasteland 2 is going to exist!

Man, if you've become so cynical, so sapped of life that you can look at what's happened this past month and not take any joy from what Double Fine and others have achieved, then I feel a bit sorry for you. Everybody wins... except you, sitting there and crowing about how unfair it all is, on our behalf. Please.

@SurplusGamer said:

Man, if you've become so cynical, so sapped of life that you can look at what's happened this past month and not take any joy from what Double Fine and others have achieved, then I feel a bit sorry for you. Everybody wins... except you, sitting there and crowing about how unfair it all is, on our behalf. Please.

I really couldn't agree more with this. What's happened on Kickstarter in relation to video games in the last month has been an incredibly positive development, one that gives me hope in the face of my ongoing fears about the video game industry and how businessy business has dashed a great deal of creativity and risk-taking, and how publishers have so often stolen a creator's, well, creation, for no other reason than to be useless sugar daddy middle men. These Kickstarter events have been small victories for niche gamers and consumerists, but they've still been encouraging signs that, even when publishers and businesses have more rights and power than ever before, we can still strike back on our own and protect some things from extinction.
 
To see someone like Jumanji, or any others, to become so twisted and corrupted by their desire to be contrary, that they find a way to pretzel themselves around into opposing things that are good for everybody, is literally pitiful. It's really just sad.

Sweet, I might even pitch in for this. I loved Wasteland back in the days.

This Kickstarter thang's quite neat.

@Milkman said:

Yeah, sorry but this is going to fall flat on its face. You're not Double Fine, inXile. Also, your name is dumb.

This needs to be quoted on every page.

While not as negative about it as @Jumanji I do share some of his skepticism about how these projects will turn out. Tim Schafer is a cool guy but his game development track record is spotty at best. A lot of his games are interesting but not necessarily super fun to play. Grim Fandango was a super stylistic game that was incredibly innovative and interesting at the time - but the puzzles were insane at times. I'm hoping a modern day point and click won't fall into the old trappings of completely unorthodox puzzle solutions - wrap this pipe in your hotel towel then cover it with egg and bread crumbs and now use this Bird Feeder stick to get pidgeons to knock the key off a windowsill.

I'm hoping they all succeed because why wouldn't I - but I'm very curious whats going to happen roughly 18 months from now and how half of these projects will end up.

IF this first run of Kickstarters completely fall flat on its face - then the whole notion of supporting dev's and donating money will completely backfire.

I'm also curious to see how the studios perform without outside publisher pressure. I know a lot of people, myself included, kind of need that authority to keep you in line and do your work. I do graphic design work and I could never work from home because I just wouldn't get anything done.

@Jumanji: It really doesn't matter if the project fails to deliver. I think given the track record the team has (every adventure game project led by Tim Schafer has been one of my favourite games of all time), the chances are very slim that the project will be a total failure, but even if they don't deliver, people pledged money because they were willing to see them try.

It would, of course, be a disappointment if the game is rubbish or fails in some other way, but we're all aware of that possibility going in. We choose exactly how much money we're willing to gamble on the game being good, and if we win that gamble we get an awesome game. Most people backing this project see it as a pretty safe bet.

So yes, if it all falls apart, that will be disappointing, but hey - we'll still have the documentary to see how and why it went wrong, and... and...

Even that is irrelevant, if this one project fails it doesn't mean that everything of this kind is doomed to failure, it would just show that this model is a very risky one for consumers. But I don't see that as a very good reason for just not doing the experiment in the first place. Let's flip the question around... what if the project succeeds, massively? Double Fine make a game that not only pleases all the fans that backed them but finds a good audience outside of the original backers, is critically acclaimed and so on? The internet loves funny things, and Tim Schafer makes funny games, so it could happen, just like how Portal surprised everyone.

The point is, it doesn't mean that the whole model is bad because sometimes it might go wrong. I'd rather trust my own judgement on which games to lay down $15-100 on than most publishers' judgements about which games I should be playing. For every great published game out there, there are plenty more that I maybe would have loved, but just never found a way to get made. And that's not because of some hokey 'publishers are evil' rhetoric. It's just that publishers have an inherent motivation to fund safe, bankable games, and so they're not the best people to go to when trying to appeal to the niches that I love.

@Jumanji said:

@Marokai said:

@SurplusGamer said:

Man, if you've become so cynical, so sapped of life that you can look at what's happened this past month and not take any joy from what Double Fine and others have achieved, then I feel a bit sorry for you. Everybody wins... except you, sitting there and crowing about how unfair it all is, on our behalf. Please.

I really couldn't agree more with this. What's happened on Kickstarter in relation to video games in the last month has been an incredibly positive development, one that gives me hope in the face of my ongoing fears about the video game industry and how businessy business has dashed a great deal of creativity and risk-taking, and how publishers have so often stolen a creator's, well, creation, for no other reason than to be useless sugar daddy middle men. These Kickstarter events have been small victories for niche gamers and consumerists, but they've still been encouraging signs that, even when publishers and businesses have more rights and power than ever before, we can still strike back on our own and protect some things from extinction.

To see someone like Jumanji, or any others, to become so twisted and corrupted by their desire to be contrary, that they find a way to pretzel themselves around into opposing things that are good for everybody, is literally pitiful. It's really just sad.

Nothing has been delivered yet... why don't you wait for some results before you make your judgment?

Hypocrisy

@Humanity: I only couldn't figure out a puzzle on three occasions in Grim Fandango. Two of those I feel I should have been able to work out but wasn't patient enough, and one of them remember thinking was a legitimately poorly done puzzle, though I can't remember what it was. People make too much of adventure game puzzles being crazy. I'd be the first to admit that many of them are, and in every good adventure game there's probably at least one example of a puzzle that doesn't quite work. But then again most good FPSes have levels that aren't quite as good, or a monster everyone hates fighting or a weapon that doesn't feel as satisfying as it should, so it's not like Adventure Games are alone in making poor design choices.

The other thing that's often misunderstood is that occasionally getting stuck is part of the deal, with adventure games. You're supposed to sometimes not know what to do, and have to think about it a while, mess around until the elements all fall into place and the satisfaction of having that great idea dawns on you. Usually being stuck for what to do next is a bad thing in games, but with adventure games it's part of what makes them rewarding. But there's being stuck because puzzles are hard and being stuck because puzzles are unfair - the design challenge is making sure it's the former, and the best adventure games generally rise to this challenge.

So there are a lot of excellent puzzles, and I generally find adventure games very satisfying as games as well as stories. People remember the ridiculous puzzles but tend to forget the ones that were just 'fine' and often fail to mention the ones that are really fun and satisfying (for example, I really like the puzzle to change the boss intercom message at the beginning of Grim Fandango). I think adventure games are a much maligned genre, and often unfairly so.

@SurplusGamer: Well I think in all other types of games, poor design decisions are a hinderance or small annoyance you deal with. In puzzle games or adventure titles a poorly designed puzzle will literally stop you dead in your tracks. Not being able to progress in a time is felt a lot stronger than those annoying enemies with shields you hate. I won't pretend to be able to even remember most of Grim Fandango but I have clear memories that I struggled with a lot of the puzzles in it. Maybe that just means I was bad at adventure games, who knows. Recently I played Beneath a Steel Sky on iOS which is a port of an old point and click. There was one puzzle where you came up against "an old fashioned door lock" or "door with a classic lock" something of that variety - mind you the game takes place in the future. In your inventory you had a crowbar and various tools along with a recently picked up card. Previously in the game you made often use out of cards to ride elevators and access data terminals. Turns out you were supposed to use the card to open the lock like they used to do in the movies. Now this isn't an example of a TERRIBLE puzzle - but it was something that had me stuck at that point in the game for a long time, and that time spent clicking on everything with every item, combining things etc was not fun at all - which is the biggest weakness of those sort of games in my opinion. When things don't click, the fun goes literally from 100% to 0.

Dang that Razer CEO \m/

http://kotaku.com/5893290/10000-worth-of-wasteland-2-is-brought-to-you-by-razer

@Humanity: Well, not necessarily. Most adventure games aren't served up one puzzle at a time. Usually there's at least two or three puzzles you can be thinking about at any one time, so you can always switch back and forth. And if the world is rich enough, then you can just explore it a bit more, talk to some people and so forth in order to take your head away from whatever puzzle you're stuck on. Eventually you'll have to confront the puzzle, but often it's not the dead-stop you describe.

Anyway, I'm not saying it's a perfect analogy, just that bad puzzles are generally the exception, rather than the rule, and the people involved in this game are all-too-aware of what makes a good puzzle and where they've failed in the past. Check out the video conversation between Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert on youtube, and read the article Ron Gilbert wrote called 'Why Adventure Games Suck' before he even made Monkey Island. A lot of that is still good advice today. These designers very much know what they're doing, and I think adventure games don't get enough credit for the amount of good, honest, game-design work that goes into the puzzles.

@SurplusGamer: Personally I wish they could integrate Myst style puzzles into adventure games. I love the plot and storytelling that adventure titles have going for them, but I prefer the logic based Myst style puzzles which feel rewarding when solved. Myst IV: Revelation was such an amazing game at the time.

@Humanity: They sometimes do. Machinarium, for example, had lots of examples of this kind of puzzle, and there are plenty of adventure puzzles that go beyond simple object combination.

But the reason I like inventory/dialogue puzzles is that they always feel to me to be much more connected to the game world. There's less of a line between gameplay and story. When I am digging up bones and wiping spit off walls in Monkey Island 2 to build a voodoo doll to run Largo off Scabb Island, that's what's happening in the story. When I'm playing a Myst game, it's less like that, and more like a series of challenges are being placed between me an exploration but aren't themselves doing very much storytelling work.

There's nothing wrong with that approach, I just think it's a sort of layer of abstraction that adventure games don't need in order to be successful. And that it's actually sometimes a problem with adventure games when puzzles don't feel connected enough to the story and the world. Sooo I guess what I'm saying is that I don't mind that approach, but it comes with its own set of problems.

Damn, it's well on it's way to a million!

@Jumanji:

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. If Double Fine manages to sustain a dev pipeline based solely on Kickstarter contributions, then of course I will eat crow.

Just caught up with this... I don't know what is so difficult for you to understand about this. Nobody thinking about this seriously, and certainly not Double Fine, is predicting that Kickstarter is going to be THE way they make games from now on. They haven't even said for sure that it's a thing they'd try again although based on their success it doesn't seem like an awful idea for the right project.

It doesn't matter if this particular model will work for them in the future or not because we already know it's been very successful for funding THIS project at THIS time, and seems to be successful for funding other projects too, like this Wasteland 2 one (which I'm currently not funding, by the way, just because it doesn't interest me so much). For future projects they'll have to revisit and see what approach they think is best. Suggesting that the only way that you'll turn out to be wrong is if Double Fine "manages to sustain a dev pipeline based solely on Kickstarter contributions" is a pretty egregious example of shifting the goalposts. Unless you meant for this one game, in which I heavily suspect you'll be eating crow.

Nobody sensible is saying this The New Model, or The Future or however you want to put it. What's being suggested is that this is one a few viable paths towards getting niche games made, in a world where publishers are very unlikely to be interested in taking that risk. And it seems to be a path that is capable of raising quite significant sums of money, under the right circumstances.

mob @Jumanji said:

@Hailinel said:

@Jumanji said:

@AssInAss said:

@Jumanji said:

@Paul_Is_Drunk said:

I like the idea that somebody wants to make a game out of passion, and it just happens to be the type of game that I enjoyed playing 20 something years ago.

Why do you believe that Brian Fargo is making a game out of passion? He's been churning out genuine shovelware for 15 years. He BANKRUPTED the last publisher that made the Infinity Engine games that hardcore RPG fans so love. Again, look into his background a little. What kind of "passion" do you think he really has for games? I'll share an anecdote found at a better forum than this one.

The reason Brian Fargo greenlighted the original Fallout was not because of the mechanics... or the SPECIAL system... or the grayscale morality... or the interesting premise/setting... it was GORE. Brian thought that GORE sold games. So the dev team that pitched him Fallout promised him that yes, it would be VERY bloody. That was his -sole- motivating factor to greenlight the game. He is a consummate suit who has lived his life according to the Peter Principle.

Can I get a source for that? I'm just interested for history's sake, I wasn't young enough for knowing about the politics about the original game.

Sure... http://brokenforum.com/index.php?threads/wasteland-2-the-wastelandening.1350/#post-65788

An unsubstantiated internet comment. Why am I not surprised?

hmm, it's not like the guy is posting under his real name or anything. it's not like the guy's real name will get you hits on mobygames or anything.

http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,24719/

His story seems to hold true, he worked at Interplay on MAX 2. Good searching.

I would say that asking to be funded by fans entails an even bigger risk than funding the project with his own capital. Putting out a mediocre game after all the inevitable hype to come would be career suicide.

My god, 14 pages of people arguing and nothing being said.

here is hoping this type of funding leads the industry towards an EA-EULA-free world.

Bernie Madoff would love the Kickstarter program.  Seriously, what's 
to keep these guys from just walking away & keeping the cash?  Or 
they could "Duke Nukem it"...basically spend the next 10 years working 
on that one game & never get complete..then go back to Kickstart & ask 
for another million or two to keep it going. 
 
I mean hell, if somebody wanted to pay me a million up front to write 
some fuckin' games, I'd happily take that million & start hacking, albeit 
at a very slow pace. Need to make that cash last thru to retirement 
after all.

We cry about the lack of creativity and original ideas in videogames, yet we are now activley voting to just "remake" even more of our past "cool games" concepts in an "modern mainstream" way.

It's like ideas cost money, and only those ideas with alot of money are "good ideas".

Sadly that's not how creativity works :(

Imho this is just the next step from "reselling HD remakes" on consoles.. now we are reselling "HD gameplay" to a broader more mainstream consumerbase as whole. Selling games based on "past cool memories" rather then on what they actually are or had been at their time.

I believe in Anime and Manga this is called "Fanservice" ;)

But who knows, maybe we will get something really cool and unique out of this.

Including the donations through PayPal, we've hit $1,500,000. That means cross-compatibility between Windows, Mac and Linux. Also, Brian Fargo has pledged 5% of the profits of Wasteland 2 to "Kicking It Forward," his Kickstarter project pledging initiative.