I'm really curious if the people funding these projects have a good idea what they're going to get.
I know that creative and inspired teams can do great things but ... for example Wasteland asked for $900k which is barely a budget for a SNES game. What I assume people expect though is a Fallout 3 level game. I'm guessing Fallout 3 cost $10-15 million to make.
I don't know what the original Lucas adventure games costs to make in the early 90s. Double Fine asked for $1mill? I suspect that's close to what those original games cost. Things have changed. I'd argue it would be challenging to make those same games but at today's expected quality for the same price.
Of course I hope they all do great and the games all rock and there's certainly plenty of smaller awesome games to be made. FTL for example. But, for certain games, sequels, or games that are supposed to be very inspired by older games there are expectations I think the developers will have a hard time meeting.
I backed Wasteland, and I'm expecting a game similar to Fallout 2 with modern graphics and probably little to no voice acting.
They're using unity so they making big savings right away, but are constrained with what that engine can do. And that's fine. I think most people who backed it want a game that's true to its roots rather then has the latest graphics etc.
Finally Kickstarter doesn't preclude additional funding sources. $900k might have gotten them half way there with the assumption that they can get additional sources of funding after that point. bear in mind that they will be getting sales to people other then current backers after they release.
I think the key thing though is that a small focused team, using an engine like Unity can get a lot done, and the constraints will be excepted by a community who is far more interested in a classic RPG then the latest graphics.
Actually I think that people pledging there know exactly what they will get. Especially if you bring FO3 and a SNES game into the discussion - then I'm affraid that Fallout 3 has less depth than many SNES games.
As I have personally pledged to some projects there I can tell you what I'm expecting from the projects. I want them to deliver good gameplay - and good gameplay equals good ideas - not great AAA visuals - and those cost a lot.
I've also backed Elite:Dangerous - they wanted 1.25kk pounds - a massive amount of money - Have you seen what did they manage to do with Frontier First Encounters? Check how many people worked on it, I estimate that given realistic expectation of what we might get - we can have massive value for our money out of kickstarter.
Final fantasy, chrono trigger... any rpg basicly. Fallout 3 was a very bad game and was really dumbed down - New Vegas was way better.
Hell... Another World (one of better games of all-time) was on SNES - and it cost the fraction of what Wasteland raised.
Fallout 3 is just a shadow of the glory of previous games.
One good example of an RPG made with a "modern engine" that would give a lot of freedom to the player would be Vampire:Bloodlines - although it had a fair share of bugs - it's one of best examples on how a great gameplay and story can be.
Er...not sure if your definition of depth is the same as the commenter's...knows Square games may have been better games...but they were pretty linear with nlittle room for any deviation from the script or any real tactical challenge
This is ridiculous. Final Fantasy 4 did not have "more depth" than Fallout 3. Go play it again. Go roam a town. What's that, an entire kingdom capital has 6 single story buildings and a castle with 10 rooms?
Most of the NPC's have 1-2 lines of dialogue with NO interaction with the PC?
You are viewing those old RPG's with MASSIVELY ROSE TINTED GLASSES.
Seriously, just go play one of the old games. Look at how little character customization you have. How little story option you have. There is no variable dialogue, no choices to make, it's simply a story on rails.
Not sure why bring FF4 here, there were many games in the series ;-).
Sorry man, stories in old games were MUCH better, the plots were much longer - i don't even have to go to SNES.
Fallout New Vegas is a prime example of how a game can play - on same engine - I believe that last good game from Bethesda was Morrowind. And please, seriously Fallout 3 is supposed to have deep story or dialogue? Compared to fallout 1 or 2 it's a very poor attempt (note. I have finished Fallout 3 and New Vegas).
Also character customization has litte to do with game depth - i could still argue that few Final Fantasy games had way more customization. Hell even bethesda's Daggerfall was way more customizable than Fallout 3 - also Fallouts 3 story is a very small main quest on rails as you have put it. It's really weak compared to New Vegas - I bring this reference multiple times to show you how bad fallout 3 is compared to New Vegas on same engine.
The attitude you present here is precisely the reason why developers want to use kickstarter to fund their games compared to publishers - they have the same worries about how games are.
Also you raised some interesting points:
- What's that, an entire kingdom capital has 6 single story buildings and a castle with 10 rooms?
- Most of the NPC's have 1-2 lines of dialogue with NO interaction with the PC?
Agreed, but i fail to see how abundance of dialogue options are supposed to make up for good gameplay? - it is in reality a lot more complicated. Bethesda style sandbox games got really dumbed down - the plenthora of options is really a meaningless facade.
Take mass effect as an example - its a shooter with fairly linear gameplay (although it manages to hide this fact well), but it tells a really really good story - It is not a sandbox game by any means but its really good - because it managed to deliver great experience overall.
This is what old games did really well, they delivered massive gameplay - and this has nothing to do with graphics, choice options - its the experience that counts - and for me personally Fallout 3 was a very poor experience - your story might be different obviously.
Having variable story choices is not the sole part of gameplay. Being a sandbox is not the sole part of gameplay. Having a great combat system is not the sole part of gameplay. Having AAA graphics, having many side missions, having complex locations, having complex characters, having lots of different combat styles, having stealth, having character growth, etc., etc.
Gameplay is made up of all those things and you're taking one tiny part of what makes it up and calling FO3 terrible because you didn't like its gameplay mix. It's without a doubt one of the greatest games of the last 5 years. It's just that you don't like it.
Personally I found NV tediously linear. It's a big loop that you go from start town and follow the road round to the dam. Every part of the main story was 'urgent'. End of exploring. Add to that I never felt any attachment to the courier. To me NV had very few unique large locations and was unfinished. Camp McCarran, Caesar's camp, Forlorn Hope, the casinos and the Nellis AFB all felt characterless and empty, as if they'd meant to put a lot more effort into them but hadn't had time so just filled them with unscripted NPCs. Even Novac needed more character. There were so, so many NPCs that were just nobodies. The arena was a total waste of space, a great concept that hadn't been fleshed out.
Conversely I thought FO3 was amazing, you had to roam all over the map. It felt as if you should set up in certain locations for a while, so you got to know them. Every place was packed with unique NPCs and there were practically no areas just crammed with 'anonymous' NPCs apart from areas you'd actually expect them not to talk to you like the BoS compound. You got a house. There was no constant urgency to follow the main mission until the late stages. I loved it. I like being told a story as I play and having too many choices means the story and characters inevitably become extremely shallow, to me, the NV story was shallow.
So based on two totally different aspects of game play we have two totally different opinions. I still enjoyed NV. It was just very shallow and didn't give me the wasteland survivor vibe that FO3, imo, did so well.
Yes it all boils down to peronal taste. But i would try to restrain myself from statements like "one of best games of last 5 years", because clearly most of "fallout folks" that liked fo1 and 2 just didnt like it - so clearly you are the target audient - I am not. Also, there were a lot more interesting quests in New Vegas - and more side quests in general - maybe you didnt explore the game enough ;-)
Then again nothing beats Vampire:Bloodlines which is one of best examples of how a modern RPG could look like.
And back on original topic - this is what some of kickstarter games are about - made for an audience like me :-)
When I think about depth, I think about things like: finding people to talk to. Side quests. Fleshing out cities and industries. I think about a deep world -- something SNES games almost never gave.
I think about exploration and emergant gameplay, something SNES games almost never gave.
I suppose if your definition of depth is purely story based and can be fulfilled through a linear, one-story-fits-all game, then those SNES games can be deep.
It seems there is a disagreement as to what constitutes depth. If you want a "Sandbox" then most old-school RPGs will feel very shallow. You have numerous choices, but exploration and interaction outside those choices is limited.
On the other hand, if you want control over the story, many sandbox style games will feel shallow. Batman: Arkham City gave you a great sandbox with tons of things to discover and the story was fantastic. But your control over the story was minimal, limited to pretty much whether to do a side mission or not. You had absolutely no choices that affected the core story at all. Infamous 2 was similar. You had a lot of area to explore and interesting side missions, but you had only about 3 real choices and they lead to only 2 endings. The story was deep, the sandbox was wide, but your control was minimal.
I think there are great games on both ends (and in the middle) of this spectrum, but "sandbox depth (or width)" is very different from "story control depth".
There's also a lot of nostalgia based on the options available, and our expectations were much, much less. If we'd been given the option to play both, Fallout 3 would have been considered the more "immersive" experience without question.
The structure of Oblivion/FO3 is this: there are hundreds of cookie cutter dungeons strewn through a landscape. Wander the landscape, entering each cookie cutter dungeon and clearing it mechanically.
Also, there is a story on rails. Whee.
Yes, there are hundreds of those cookie cutter dungeons and there are towns to roam, but the same is also true of panning over Google Maps and nobody is saying that is a deep game.
Ahh memories. I recal wondering the wasteland in FO3, and coming across a radio distress. Locating its source, a long dead family, feeling...sadness.
In skyrim challenging an NPC to a drinking game, passing out and waking in another city having desecrated a temple, a quest opening from this.
In skyrim again, finding an abandoned lighthouse, a mystery as to what happened to the occupants, sadness again upon finding their fate.
In morrowind a quest for the thieves guild, steal an elderscroll, for what reason? That quest was great, well written, engaging. Nothing cookie cutter there.
And of course FO1/2 or Arcanum have great moments like this, and all the games mentioned have their failures, boring and quests, dungeons of limited scope. But the modern Bethsesda games have depth, they may be deeply flawed, grand experiments perhaps doomed by their scale, but dismissing them as shallow seems a mistake.
"The structure of Oblivion/FO3 is this: there are hundreds of cookie cutter dungeons strewn through a landscape. Wander the landscape, entering each cookie cutter dungeon and clearing it mechanically."
So what classic RPGs differentiate themselves significantly from this?
I guess it's a matter of what you consider a classic and whether you want the same open-world game type. Fallout 1 & 2? Baldur's Gate? Shadowrun from the Sega Genesis (my memory's a little hazy on that one, I just remember it being pretty good :), even the old SSI D&D games weren't terrible at this for their day. When you went somewhere it was for a reason or when you got there there was something interesting to do.
In FO3 in particular the cookie-cutter nature isn't so much that everything looks the same, it's that while there might be half a dozen emails to read on terminals in a ruined building, there's barely any context and almost never any resolution.
With a lot of the open world RPGs now we have the illusion of depth in that the scope for exploration is vast, there's a lot of variety in the visuals (because we have lots of memory and storage now), but limited variation in flavour. If we had significant effort invested we wouldn't have stuff like the 'took an arrow to the knee' meme.
Obviously we can't hold everything up to be something which it isn't here. Even Fallout 2, which I count as being one of the best games ever I've played (once they worked out all the bugs anyway), had lots of repetitive wilderness encounters along with all the great special stuff. I think the key differentiator here is that didn't try to give the player a massive world with relatively little content, they gave enough to make you feel like you were exploring, but not enough to make it tedious.
On topic, I'm glad people are putting themselves out there to pitch game ideas to the public. Even if of the half dozen games I've backed on Kickstarter none make it to production I can't say I'll regret having put money into them. I've gotten my money's worth just from the updates which have come out of some of them (particularly Project Eternity and to some extent Clang).
I think about the thousands of "books" and scrolls and story to experience, hours of voiced dialogue and just reams of unvoiced dialogue...
And I compare it to the "Hello Traveler! (Push X to Continue)" diaglouge that 98% of NPC's in SNES games provide, and I'm just shocked that people think those old games had depth.
They spent years writing the surrounding material for Oblivion.
Just because you steam rolled the main story and chose not to explore, to read and experience that world doesn't mean there wasn't depth.
The difference is, in those old SNES games -- there is no depth to experience outside of the linear story. It's the story...and that's it.
Both of you are being a bit ridiculous here -- the other poster is pretending his opinion on Fallout 3 is objective fact, and you've got a very limited definition of depth.
A game doesn't have to offer narrative choice, or customization, to somehow be "deep". A story on rails can be an amazing game if the way you interact with it deepens your engagement with the story. (I'd say that's very much the case with ChronoTrigger.)
That's fair. I'd still bet that if you counted up the amount of writing and world building that went into Fallout 3 and compared it to any SNES RPG, you'd find dramatically more "worldbuilding" and "depth" in Fallout 3, but I don't have data to back that idea up, so it is what it is.
>for example Wasteland asked for $900k which is barely a budget for a SNES game
>the original Lucas adventure games costs to make in the early 90s. Double Fine asked for $1mill
I'm just curious, why are you comparing game development 20 years ago to current day standards? Is it just because games were much simpler back then?
One of the guys from Hello Games did an AMA on reddit a little while back (creators of Joe Danger) . While he didn’t give a dollar amount, he made it seem like it cost several hundred thousand to develop. For what it cost, I'd say those guys did an awesome job.
'Quality' is something different for different people.
For the big studios is about huge and complex environments that are indeed very costly to do. That's what sells in consoles for $59 a piece.
But they refuse to try to make any other kind of game that does not bring the same profits.
The end result is a series of similar games and no innovation in new genres or no new titles of other not so popular genres, because we want that but we are not profitable enough for the studios. Only Halo after Halo and Madden after Madden. We don't want that.
This is a dedicated group of people voting with their wallets to get something that the big AAA studios will not give them.
Different and engaging gameplay at a smaller scale than big budget games.
Of course the environments will not be as detailed as the big budget games. But the gameplay will be different.
The rules will be broken. We will get something like Braid, Limbo or Bastion. We will never get that with the Big Studios.
And I get the impression that a lot of people think game dev is just plugging a bunch of graphics into a game engine and a little bit of scripting, with some level design.
[1] Interesting to see that paypal froze a payment until they could be assured that a game was actually being released. There's not much information on the pre-order page (http://www.winterkewl.com/games/yogscast/) (and the forums link has an expired certificate).
"Mom/dad, can I please please please have Minecraft? All my friends have it and it's only $15 and blah blah blah"
Depending on the household, what follows is probably either loads more whining, the parent arranging some kind of deal involving chores and vegetables, or the parent acting as a broker ("give me $15 and I'll use my credit card"). In the end, the kid ends up with their copy of Minecraft, and promptly begins either building things or setting other peoples' things on fire.
Imagine that scenario, but instead, the kid believes they are preordering a game that their heroes are making. Perhaps if they are a bit older but still naive, they understand that the game does not yet exist, but they cannot fathom the possibility that their heroes will not follow through. I can easily see that scenario playing out almost the same: "Mom/dad, can I please please please have the Yogscast game? All my friends are ordering it and it's only $15 and it's going to be amazing and blah blah blah..." The parent probably won't read far enough into it to understand that it's a Kickstarter for something that doesn't exist yet, and will do whatever they usually do in these situations.
Sure, I can see that. The parental filter comes into play there, I don't really think that unfiltered expectations of childhood should affect Kickstarter any more than any other geek excited about a new gadget that may not materialize.
There are disappointments for kids of all ages on Kickstarter :)
As long as everybody doesnt develop its own engine and tech i think alot of stuff has changed today that makes game development cheaper.
There are alot of good engines (Unity3D for example) that can get you going pretty quickly and still have a mighty set of features and possibilities.
I backed Wasteland 2, and if I see voice acting with lip-synced animations I'll be disappointed at the waste of resources.
Like the other guy said, I'm expecting a play experience similar to Fallout 1/2.
However, if I end up getting nothing, that's OK. Backing a project on Kickstarter is a gamble. This is obvious to me but the rest of the world doesn't seem to get it. I can only hope that people adjust their expectations a little after a few spectacular splats, rather than, say, throwing around lawsuits and ruining the whole idea for everyone.
I know that creative and inspired teams can do great things but ... for example Wasteland asked for $900k which is barely a budget for a SNES game. What I assume people expect though is a Fallout 3 level game. I'm guessing Fallout 3 cost $10-15 million to make.
I don't know what the original Lucas adventure games costs to make in the early 90s. Double Fine asked for $1mill? I suspect that's close to what those original games cost. Things have changed. I'd argue it would be challenging to make those same games but at today's expected quality for the same price.
Of course I hope they all do great and the games all rock and there's certainly plenty of smaller awesome games to be made. FTL for example. But, for certain games, sequels, or games that are supposed to be very inspired by older games there are expectations I think the developers will have a hard time meeting.