Yes, in further Kickstarter-raping-your-treasured-gaming-memories news, they’re remaking Rainbow Six as a free2play micropayments-monetized mobile match-3, Master of Orion has been licensed by Perfect World to be remade as a mobile fashion/celebrity B2P MMO where you play as future Kim Kardashian, and Tie-Fighter is being re-released by Disney completely remastered in stunning 3D “with gameplay completely intact”, but exclusively on the Apple Watch.
Why Perfect World and Disney decided to kickstart these exciting new revisits to classic game franchises has been unclear to many. It’s the Marketing. Doyyyyyyy!
Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of Petersen and the pedigree of others on the team. Conquest: Frontier Wars and Klingon Academy rank amongst my all-time favorite games of their types.
That said, I don’t think I’ll be backing this, the more I think on it.
Descent 3 was really great. Definitely my favorite of the series, even though I ran into a brick wall in the single player campaign and just couldn’t get past a certain point. Multiplayer was soooooo good. And it was the first one in the series that didn’t require Kali95 to play over the net, so I played a lot more multiplayer than I did Descent 2.
That said, this new one is a MOBA? Can I still back out of my kickstarter pledge? I’ve never done that before, but I’ve never played any kind of MOBA that I enjoyed even a little tiny bit. It’s the only genre that’s less fun than MMOs for me.
EDIT: And pledge canceled. That was refreshingly easy to do. I even got to tell them how much I hate MOBAs as the reason for cancellation.
That’s where I’m at as well. I thought Descent was awesome back in the day because 6DOF was novel in a shooter. This concept just doesn’t do anything for me, not when there’s games like Elite out there right now.
I don’t think you guys know what MOBAs are. Here are the modes in the new Descent:
Capture the Asteroid – Secure and defend five strategic beacons in the asteroid.
Capture the Ore – Mine resources and ferry them to your harvester. The first to reach their mining quota wins.
Deathmatch Destruction – Kill all your enemies’ drones before they destroy yours.
Mining for Minerals – Find and mine a special resource and return it to your harvester. But, watch out! If you drop the “ball,” your enemy will swoop in and snatch it away.
Perhaps it’s how comfortable one feels with the definition of a “battle arena” being broad enough to encompass traditional FPS game types such as CTF, deathmatch, or territory control. All of which are indeed TF2 gametypes.
Or maybe it’s just trying to ride the current “hot” buzzword.
The kickstarter now says it’s not a MOBA. Obviously they got a widely negative reaction. Of course that message, alongside their initial disdain for a single-player campaign (which they also reversed direction on) completely fucked their kickstarter, and now it’s up in the air if they’ll meet their goal.
This is an excellent example of the wrong way to execute a videogame kickstarter. It’s not quite as bad as Wildman, but it belongs in the same sentence.
Yeah. It mystifies me a little that when you’re courting nostalgia and “resurrecting” franchises from eras long-past, you wouldn’t take a little time to reassure the very grognards who played that stuff and are your most likely audience. Particularly before the launch, via polling or even just informal conversations.
I wish 'em the best–I really do; Descent was fucking awesome–but to let those opinions (correct or not) fester so long is a bit “silly.” I don’t want to say “they should know better,” but I kinda feel like guys who spent so long in the midst of the Star Citizen rat race really should.
If it’s not a MOBA, don’t call it one and vice versa. You just confuse the shit out of the customers. To some people MOBA means something positive, while others hate it.
Regarding the rest of their new FAQ, I’ve come to distrust promises of no DRM. I can’t count the number of “no DRM” Kickstarters that have eventually buckled and just went with Steam as their client platform because it’s the easiest way to update and leads straight to early access development. I like Steam, but I wish people would realize that it is a form of DRM.
Exactly. The only reason to use the Descent IP is to connect to the history of those games. Which were primarily single-player, at least in my experience. Some folks had the benefit of LAN parties and decent connections back in the day.
And then you ask for upfront, no-refunds money for a multiplayer-only product. Swing and a miss. Then you pitch it as a MOBA, because that’s the multiplayer genre that’s making bank right now. Strike two, new MOBAs are failing right and left right now. Not much margin for error left at this point.
I don’t know how long they let it sit-- they talked about the game having single-player on day 2. I can’t find any references to the multiplayer not being a MOBA except in that checklist at the top of their kickstarter page. They simply haven’t elaborated further, or I just missed it somehow.
Thing is, you need that initial pitch to be strong. Plenty of people saw MOBA and no single-player and decided not to back it. They’ll never think about it again. They won’t come back. Those people are lost.
Even if they did come back for a look, I’m not sure how much value they’d find in the new information. The single player game at launch sounds like a slap-dash affair being made to appease objections. The actual campaign is still a vague promise.
Descent: Underground’s initial release will include a single-player mini-campaign that serves as a prologue to the full campaign.
As we continue to raise funding and can grow the studio, our plan is to deliver a full-blown single-player adventure worthy of the original franchise.
Hmmm… this exact thing happened with that that “Motorgun - Return of the Autoduel” KS. Old franchise resurrection: you had fucking better put that single-player campaign out front and foremost.
