I loved AC over the years. I should be the target market for this. Trouble is, it seems to be produced by a group that made another, semi-failed KS, Serpent’s Tongue, a few years back. They’ve pretty much abandoned that project, started a new company, and are working on this. They did get the base ST game out, but none of the stretch goals, the card-redemption system (it’s a CCG, it was meant to mitigate that), or the promised co-op RPG campaign (particularly disappointing, as that was a primary reason myself and many people backed the project).
On the one hand, these kickstarters kind of annoy me. I feel that DVG are big enough to just print a damn game and sell it. But no, they have to kickstart it!
Still, at least they’re doing away with early bird special stuff, which I hate. This map stuff applies to all backers, which is a much better idea.
They don’t mention shipping cost. I imagine 50kg of cardboard is expensive to ship overseas?
It was $30 to Oz, auto-added when I pledged, fwiw, which is honestly not too bad compared to many KS I look at or indeed many US shippers in general.
I also think with boardgames it has certainly become en-vogue to use Kickstarter to fund printing of a game that is ready for publishing. I don’t mind too much, it certainly helps them manage risk a whole lot better, which means more games and less publishers go belly up. I just dislike it when some publishers see the need to deviate from their design intention too much - minis for the sake of minis, huge stretch goal expansion upgrades, super special edition dice, etc. I’d rather they just concentrate on getting a decent product to completion without making a project more complicated than it should be. DVG have been pretty good in this regard.
They also apparently changed the name to remove the Armored Core IP, supposedly to make sure they could make the game without having to go through the required approval processes with the license holder. Weird, and I’d imagine a little annoying if you backed as a fan of the IP in the first place.
Yeah. I was out of town camping for most of last week, and started to get caught up on hobbies today. I just saw this a few hours ago. So, they’ve cleared up some of the ownership/producer/designer stuff, and now it seems they don’t actually have access to the IP? Man, some people.
Well, it’s not like they were just claiming it without permission. It sounds like they were talking to From about the license and having language barrier issues that caused them to give up on it on their end. Which has probably killed the project, I would think.
First, we have decided to change the name of the game to “Mech Command RTS”. Here is why:
The license holders for the game franchise have final approval authority over everything that is produced. We have reason to be concerned that our planned stretch rewards and other game content will be delayed as it goes through a complex approval process. We also underestimated the degree of miscommunication caused by the language barrier as we work with the license holders in Japan.
Sure sounds to me like they had permission and a deal of some kind in place and they decided to back out of it because they wanted more control over the project and communication with the license holder was proving tougher than they liked. I wouldn’t call it a great decision but it doesn’t seem to me that your scenario is representative of the facts. On the other hand, without From’s side of the story we only have their word for it.
I thought everyone gets the mounted board, and the expansion gives you a second board of an enlarged central map area? Or did they not reach $10k in the first 24 hours?
Did anyone back the High Frontiers 3rd Edition kickstarter last year? I jumped in because holy shit look at that map. They seem to be working with someone from the community that’s updating and fixing things, but there’s been absolutely no mention of Phil Eklund’s involvement. The kickstarter itself is running behind, which isn’t really that surprising (a lot of them do) but the updates have been really weird and passive aggressive lately without actually providing any real info on what’s going on.
I did back it on the strength it is a really amazing game.
But already during the campaign there were a lot of warning signs that the publishers didn’t really care too much about the product (I think partly because it’s not their IP) and that it was far from a priority for them.
Also reading between lines it seems Phil is not in the best terms with them. He should have done the KS himself, imho, and he could have reached much higher revenue and retain more control over the game.
I do think they’ll ship in a couple of months from now, and I’ll be happy to get my copy, but this project could have been much more.
Ah, interesting. I haven’t been reading the comments on any of their updates but I believe it. As a casual observer I feel like I’ve seen a number of other boardgame kickstarters that have had trouble but were more communicative without sounding like they’re always blaming someone all the time. Every time they mention “who would have guessed this would have sucked for us all so much” in an update I feel less and less bad for them though.
This arrived in my inbox today, probably because I backed a previous MCG kickstarter, ‘Numenera’ at the ‘all pdfs’ level- I’ve long since passed the point of wanting a physical library of RPGs, as digital content to read on my tablets does just fine.
Monte Cook did brilliant work on Planescape back in the day, so much so that I do pay attention to whatever he produces since going independent, even though I know I’ll probably never play it. Numenera turned out to be largely mediocre- while on the surface trying to tie itself to source material like Gene Wolfe’s ‘Book of the New Sun’ (fucking amazeballs, as the kids say these days) it turns out to be just set-design for science-fantasy adventure. That’s fine, they’re fun books to pull up to read every now and again, but not the crazy I’d hoped for.
After perusing the contents of this latest project, these are my thoughts.
Surreal, weird, interesting, mysterious, urban fantastic setting? Right up my alley.
No digital-only option? Um. Ok. That’s surprising, but I’ll see where this goes, based on the strength of my affection for things in the style of #1. Pros of this approach: the game is a physical mystery-object, and you have to work with what they give you. Cons: well…
~$200 is the minimum buy-in? Whoa. And you don’t even get all the info about it? Upgrade (downgrade?) that to a ‘Wow!’. Yeah, at one point in the description they reference going in with a group of your friends, to perhaps mitigate the cost. Still, that’s… highly unlikely- I’m one of two people in my gaming group that buys RPGs, and the other guy has fairly different tastes (though he actually gets a paycheck from his (works for Chaosium), so I don’t begrudge him that at all) I haven’t had an actual RPG group in years. Even if so, that’s about a $40-50 buy-in from everyone in the group (depending on whether there’s 4 or 5 of us). On the other hand, people with actual ‘skin in the game’ would probably be more inclined to play the damn thing. Probably. Maybe.
17 people have already backed at (and sold out) the ~$1500 level (where you get all the info)? I’m being to realize I’m not the target market for this.
They’re acknowledging different ways to play, with 1 on 1 games, driven by their ‘app’, etc. Cool.
Ultimately, I applaud their ambition, and willingness to try to break out of the box of classic RPG design and marketing. Like a weird, boutique, mystery, freeform interactive story you and your friends build yourselves into. On the other hand, I have a dozen probably more interesting indie systems I’d rather play right now, that I’ve paid less than 1/10 the cpcost of this project for. Perhaps when I can buy digital copies for $20 two or three years from release, I’ll look it up again.
Yeah, I’d be mildly curious if there were an affordable digital route in but $200 minimum for a physical game (full of tchotchkes, at that) is crazygonuts. I think you’d really have to be into Monte Cook’s particular style and design sensibilities and I gotta say, that’s not me. Numenera’s got its points, as do some of his other things, but he’s still very much coming from the traditional RPG design space and I’m not there anymore.
It certainly wouldn’t be the first setting of its type - things like Over the Edge and Unknown Armies went there long ago. And are way more affordable.
