| Title | Bloodstained is not getting a promised roguelike mode |
| Author | Nick Diamon |
| Posted in | News |
| When | March 3, 2020 |
ArtPlay raised over $5 million for their Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night crowd-funding campaign in 2015, and successfully launched the game in June 2019 to critical and commercial success..
Where the hell the second character is at? That’s what I want to know.
Man, if only they’d known early on that was a feature they’d need to support. Just having it randomly show up on their to-dos two weeks ago out of nowhere must have been such a huge shock to them.
I don’t follow Kickstarter culture, does this sort of thing affect backers? Is this considered par for the course and an acceptable loss in an otherwise successful project or what? To me, forgoing on a goal stated at the outset of the project backing period seems fairly egregious.
Also - I was really looking forward to this roguelike mode!!
Usually, I think it is accepted if it’s dealt on early with. The band-aid principle.
But Japan’s traditional disdain for customers (be it upward or downward) makes it impossible to acknowledge this.
For worse, in my experience in the Japanese Kickstarters’ case, those are are all downard relations, which usually collides with foreign culture.
Good question. Early Kickstarter folks learned some tough lessons, and I imagine that individually, there are funders that will never do it again, but people still back WIP games all the time.
I know a lot of people were upset (and IMO justifiably) when Elite: Dangerous dropped offline/solo play despite having made a big deal about it on the KS.
Heh.
For my money, this was a dumb stretch goal to have in the first place. Randomizing layouts and enemies and such isn’t some trivial logic to build that you just throw your existing content at. For a “roguelike” mode like this to be any good, you almost certainly have to keep it top-of-mind in both design and code. That’s…not what Bloodstained is.
This is the problem with stretch goals (and I see it coming with implementing mounted combat, for example, in the upcoming Pathfinder sequel) - a lot of design with gaming is ideas, and iteration and sometimes (often) it’s deemed an idea just isn’t working, or worse, just isn’t fun. So it’s cut. And it’s why we don’t hear a lot about mechanics in games until they are closer to release - until something is finalized as in, working, and ready, publishers are loath to talk about something. Look at Pillars 2- I love that game, but the ship to ship combat, while much improved over launch, is still not very fun or interesting. I don’t know if this was a stretch goal or not, but I would rather they abstracted that aspect of the game and focused on other things, instead. Without it, think of where they could have put all that effort first to make it, then to make it fix it, then to make it decent?
Anyway, it’s one of my big issues with Kickstarter type projects - the greater fanbase doesn’t understand that, so when mounted combat (for a possible example) turns out to be janky garbage and they have to throw a ton of resources into making it work half-decent, it’s going to mean potentially fewer spells, feats, classes, quests, art assets, and etc. we could have had everywhere else, all because it was a stretch goal and not something they internally thought “let’s try this” and could discard if it’s not working. Instead, they have to get it implemented now, and it has to work at least sort of, or the backers will be up in arms.
Elite was a bit different (worse) because they specifically added the offline feature in response to community request when it looked like they might not hit the funding goal. Then they cut it just before ship and indications are they never really planned to do it in the first place. It’s a lot more bait-and-switch than this is, although neither case is particularly good. I don’t think a roguelike mode was the reason to support the game for too many people.
