The only part of Ultima 7 I remember vividly is when our party would take shelter from thunderstorms in the local tavern.
Pretty much everyone that runs a business will, if they have the capital for it, make the company form so that they aren’t personally liable in case the company should fail. In Denmark this is called an A/S, I think in Germany its GmBh, and in England its…Limited? This way you ensure that even if your business dies, you still have a personal home. This is risk management and has nothing to do with whether you believe in a project or not.
As for why it should fail - There are millions of possible reasons that are outside of the companies own control, as we’ve seen the past 5 years, so it really is nothing to do with whether you believe in the project or not.
I’m not a fan of Hickman, but I don’t think that the quality of a novelist bears much relation to the quality of a game story they are are asked to write. For starters it seems to be a different skill set, a good novelist can write a poor game scripts and vice versa. Also the quality of the writing is hostage to the game design process, and when and how the writer is involved. A game like Bastion delivered the story well because the writer was involved all the way through. But often when known novelists are brought in they write the script fairly isolated from the game design process. I guess at least getting a real writer means we won’t have to put up the kind of cheese-fest dialogue that Blizzards in house writers produced for Wings of Liberty.
None of this is really a criticism of Hickman or SotA in particular.
it’s becoming obvious that RG hasn’t planned in advance, or learned much from other highly successful kickstarters. the stretch goals (so far) are quite sad.
Tracy Hickman isn’t just a novelist - I primarily know him as the designer/writer of many great classic D&D modules (Ravenloft, etc), so he definitely has a gaming skill set.
This is where the Kickstarter updates failed again. If there were more descriptive of Hickman’s resume, it would capture more attention. Unless he’s really targeting the oldies!
Richard Garriott: “Most Game Designers Really Just Suck” http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/03/19/richard-garriott-game-designers-suck/
Honestly, comments like this make me want to reduce my kickstarter contribution, because they just highlight how stale and out of touch Garriott is. I had a related twitter exchange with Tyler, who indicated that Garriott didn’t have much to say about recent RPGs like The Witcher and Dragon Age Origins – I told Tyler that he might as well have asked in runic, because there’s an Iolo-chance-in-hell that Garriott has even heard of those games, let alone played them. I doubt he’s put more than a handful of hours into gaming at all over the past decade, and most of that would have been in MMOs. Probably primarily WoW.
That all said, I’m o.k. with Garriott being a little “stale” – having someone contributing design ideas without feeling constrained by recent trends (or even influenced by them) is fine. I’m perfectly o.k. with him picking up basically from where he left off on Ultima and ignoring anything else, and just producing the game he wants while taking advantage of modern tech. But I’m engaging in some serious logical and Orwellian gymnastics to basically conclude “ignorance is strength,” and would rather Garriott sounded more like he knew what he was talking about, or just avoided making goofy pronouncements that trumpeted his myopia.
Speaking of which, did Fargo not make good money by founding a company that not just developed, but published video games? Garriot does have a poor track record of late, though. Fargo does too, but to his credit he’s promising something very specific: sequels to beloved oldies no modern publisher would touch. I’m sure some people view the Wasteland sequel as the real Fallout 3.
Desslock, you put a lot of faith in RG :) Me? I appreciate the memory he gave me which inducted me into gaming. But I can only backed him at the minimum because I see that the higher pledges are all non essential, gaming related stuff. It’s almost like he’s the big kid that still put a lot of values on trinkets and clothe maps and then taking advantage of our memories. I’m still not pleased at the pets and weather as stretch goals.
LB, you can have my $25 even though I was a fool to buy UO and U9 Dragon Edition. But that’s all you are getting from me.
I figure I can wait for the game’s release – and subsequent reviews – before I put any money into anything he does.
Just like I did in the 1980s and 1990s.
Dude thinks pretty highly of himself, don’t he? Wow! Does he actually have any friends in the industry?
And just saw this, courtesy of our own (and Runic’s I guess…) tbaldree:
Wow, I just had time to finish the PC gamer article and I can’t believe such arrogance! I’m even considering unbacking his project. The nerves!
Travis makes a strong point there. Garriot’s criticism is accurate, most games simply iterate on successful predecessors. Torchlight2 is another example of that. The Avatar game is Garriot’s attempt to innovate on Ultima from the year 1998 or so.
I think Garriot has a general point about the lack of innovation but that hardly means that game designers just suck at their jobs. Not everyone is so lucky to be self-published and sitting on millions of dollars. Even if that’s his belief, he should have more fucking tact than that. Jesus.
Just canceled mine entirely. Was originally on fence about contribution, this article was proverbial camel’s backbreaking straw.
Yeah, but not every game has to innovate, plenty of games fail because they try too hard to innovate and end up not coming together coherently. I am sure plenty of designers are pressured to be innovative, rather than purely iterative, but haven’t the recent spate of successful throwback kickstarters demonstrated that that is not always what the consumers want? Many of them are not planning on being hugely innovative, but instead delivering an experience that is familiar to players - heck DF Adventure, Wasteland, Project Eternity and Torment were basically pitched as such.
Jim Sterling on innovation for innovation’s sake.
Yes, but what does that have to do with backing? His ability to produce a good game is completely independent of his manners.
Well, if he’s dissing modern game design and you like modern games design, then it’s reasonable to get cold feet about the project.
Plus, one of the few powers you have as a customer is to buy or not to buy. If you disagree with someone’s opinions, manners, or choice of breakfast cereal it’s totally within your rights to choose not to give them money. Maybe you’d rather they not be a cock than play their game.
True, but if you prefer modern game design I don’t know why you’d be wanting to back 95% of these Kickstarter projects anyway. Modern game designs get funded by publishers, Kickstarter seems mostly there for new/innovative designs or nostalgia projects/genres that today’s publishers have no interest in. Not that it’s impossible to enjoy both, obviously.
Because you want to see a project that draws upon a cool IP or concepts from when you were younger, but hope - APPARENTLY AGAINST ALL LAWS OF GOD AND REASON :) - that it does so without ignoring the last 20 years of great games and design experience.
Fingers crossed, Garriott’s comments are just media-bait. But they make me feel better about not backing the project, because while I loved the Ultima games back when I was 12, chunks of them always have been rubbish (if I was feeling snarky I’d say “badly designed” but I think it’s about as useful a phrase as “immersion”). Mostly the combat, which was just turgid, like a lot of the classic RPGs. What was great about them was their ambition and unique sense of exploring a world, rather than the gameplay.
Argh! Flashback!
NAME
JOB
HEALTH
MANTRA
Eight hundred million times.