KestrelPi

I just listened to the first 10 minutes of teddie's story mode. He sounds fine. Very similar, actually. He's not doing an impression, but he's clearly playing the same character. Chie's voice is harder to get used to, because it just is very noticeably a different sort of timbre, but once you hear that the mannerisms are intact, it's fine. I guess what I'm saying is that I'd rather have 40% extra voice in the game with these new guys, than the same amount with the old guys.

I think it'll be fine. In fact, to me it's another reason to play through the game again, I'd love to hear a different take on those performances I know so well. And I was never SO in love with the performances of those two characters that I can't bear them being replaced. The only actor I think I'd really have trouble with being replaced is Kanji, because there's just something about that performance that I think would be so difficult to get right again.

In any case, I don't think this should discourage anyone from getting the game - clearly, they wouldn't have spent hours and hours of studio time re-recording those performances if they didn't have to. They tried, it didn't work out, so they re-cast the parts. Let's not over-react.

Getting somewhat tired of the 'should have made the game work the first time like in the old days' bullshit. Games were much simpler then, and fewer things could go wrong. Now they have a lot of moving parts and it's difficult to know what'll happen until lots of people are playing it. Even with testing, some stuff always gets through.

I can't think of ANY recent release that hasn't had to go though some level of patching. Having a simple, inexpensive patching process means that developers can continue to support their game after the release (which they really want to do, because they don't WANT the game to have any serious issues!) which is a fucking win for consumers, but some of us choose to complain about it anyway.

When we released the last patch for our game, we made a small fix to the game to help out a tiny minority of people who have their windows font set to something other than 'black' who were having some problems reading the text in the game. Mainly affecting visually impaired people using high contrast desktop themes. It was an oversight by us, and cleaning up the code to make sure everyone saw black text made sense, even though the problem could be fixed by users changing their windows font colour while playing. After we released the patch, we started getting bug reports where in a very small number of cases, people were now unable to see text at all. Weird! We didn't experience this on any of our computers and couldn't reproduce it, but apparently it was a thing, and it couldn't be fixed by the user, so we had to reverse that small change we made and just tell people to make sure to set their windows font to a dark colour before playing. If we'd had a problem of a similar scale on an XBLA game, we'd be down $80,000 by now for finding that out.

@Branthog: What conflict of interest? I don't see how it matters to Metacritic what scores sites give their games, they only exist to report the scores.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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.

The other thing that Jumanji is conveniently forgetting is that while Double Fine MAY have been able to scrounge up 400k by risking their staff and their business, they definitely wouldn't have been able to make the game they can make having raised 3.3 million via Kickstarter. What Kickstarter can do, which self-funding can never do, is allow your customers to tell you, in advance, just how much they want your game, and allow you to set your goals for how ambitious to make the game accordingly.

But I mean, who the hell cares about any of that? We're not idiots, we know what we're doing with our money and it's frankly patronising to tell us otherwise. We haven't been deceived, we know that ultimately Double Fine as a company want to not just make games, but make money from games, we're well aware that the whole idea behind a project like this getting kickstarted is that it is a chance for us to put our money where our mouth is and make a statement of how much we really want a game of this kind, and we know the price of this is that we afford them a certain amount of trust that would normally be the job of a publisher, mitigated by spreading the cost over tens of thousands of pre-orders. And we know it could all go wrong and not be what we hoped for. And we're okay with all that.

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.