I look forward to reading the post-mortem one day, but I feel like I already know most of it. I imagine you felt the need to live up to the past and ambition ruled over pragmatism. What I don’t get is who made the decision to release in such a state if finances didn’t force the decision.
As for decision choices, this mistake happened before, and it’ll happen again. Kickstarters resurrecting classic franchises run on pure distilled nostalgia. If you make a Kickstarter promising Grim Fandango II, and tell everybody you got the IP and Tim Schafer is writing it, and it ends up being a third-person shooter with limited narrative elements, well, peeps are gonna be perturbed even if it’s a good bug-free third-person shooter.
My guess is different. Once the new project came along, with more funding, they didn’t really have people who wanted to work on the old project with minimal funding. They had to wrap it up quickly, and that meant gutting a lot of stuff, including the save system and a more cohesive world in favor of mission-based design. Kickstarters that run out of funds have to stretch every dollar to make it work and finish up what they have as best they can, but this is a different situation – a kickstarter where the funds dried up, but suddenly there was a new project for which they had plenty of (possibly time-sensitive) funding. The will to finish up that game for which you have no funding is suddenly gone, and you can justify moving on by saying you’re preparing the ground for the funded project, that there was never really enough money for the first project, and that the next one will be much better. So you can let that old project languish forever with nobody wanting to work on it, or you can just cut it loose.
Why not just give the game the absolute slating it deserves now it’s on sale? Because I feel like something must have gone really wrong, somewhere on the way. I’ve no insight whatsoever, but this reeks of one of those situations where an investing publisher has demanded the delays end and some sales come in. Yet I’m mystified why it’s not been released as Early Access.
I really could go on. I’ve no idea what happened here, but to me it looks like Otherside just released an alpha build of a long-from-finished game, and called it done. Which you just can’t do. Especially not at £25. If that’s because they ran out of money or time, then there’s maybe hope they can use money from sales to return to fix it. There’s a much worse theory, too, of course. That they bit off waaaay more than they could chew, made ludicrous promises about ecologies and actions impacting upon the universe, and then just lacked the skills to deliver it. So made this instead. And released it anyway.
That is impressively low. I can’t even recall the last time PC gamer gave a score that low.
It will join the honored low score ranks of gaming gems like Wall-E , Terminator 3: War of the Machines , Britney’s Dance Beat , and Star Wars: Battle for Naboo.
From the RPS Review: “It looks like Otherside just released an alpha build of a long-from-finished game, and called it done”.
Congratulations, Otherside. You’ve just joined the “developer I will never buy a game from” list along with Double Fine (thanks to their DF9 “slap a 1.0 on it and call it done” debacle). I guess I’m lucky that I was exhausted with KS and other EA failures, too.
I’m also thinking that folks are forgetting that LGS devolved into Mad Doc Software, among whose titles included the broken and unfinished Janes’ Attack Squadron
I love me some System Shock, but I’m old/wise enough to realize that it, and its sequel, are probably “lighting in a bottle” titles, created by talented, passionate guys at the beginning of their creative life cycle (as opposed to the end of that cycle, which is where were are now).
There’s a cynicism in the creation of UA (we were promised kittens and a UU clone; we got a dead cat in shoebox and Dark Messiah clone) and the horrible, broken, no-goodrelease of UA (we’re now told that we should have expected a dead cat and a Dark Messiah clone). That cynicism in a dev, especially an indie dev, is a big YOU NO BUY sign pointed in my direction
I wonder if their publisher Starbreeze will be in a position to see it through to release? Their recent Walking Dead game didn’t seem to garner much of an audience, and if Psychonauts 2 gets delayed, things could get grim. Shock and Psychonauts weren’t ever big sellers, but attracted an adoring cult following over time. Backing followups to both is pretty risky, so hopefully System Shock 3 will have a killer hook to get people interested.
Looking back at the kickstarter funding campaign, I am wondering if they had their base goal set too low, and then when it didn’t hit the 1.2 million + they really wanted the snowball of failure was already starting to form.
In hindsight what they asked for , yet alone what they got, doesn’t seem like enough for the game they suggested making.
Geez, calling them washed up old fogies is a bit much! I’m sure there is a fascinating story behind UW:A development and ultimate failure, and I very much doubt the major contributing factors will turn out to be they’re all lazy and uninspired.
Trying to remember why I even backed this in the first place; I’ve never kickstarted a video game before, and this is a prime example of why I’ve avoided it in the past. Scrolling back to the beginning of this thread invokes a pretty heavy nostalgia hit, which probably had a lot to do with it.
The saddest part is I actually kind of like what’s underneath all the half-baked parts, and I’m not sure if that makes me feel less, or more, disappointed. It’s easy to slag on all the obvious stuff, but I think there might be something underneath the mess. Doesn’t seem likely we’ll ever fully see it though.
The problem with making a system shock 3 is that it’s just about impossible. If you try to replicate the RPG system from SS2 – that thing was extremely unbalanced and had no slack, as in, you had to know what to get and what was junk, but it still somehow worked. It was black magic. If you do an RPG system but give it more slack, it’d feel too easy and nothing like SS2. And if you ditch the RPG system and go the SS1 route, you’d have SS2 fans complaining.
No to mention that SS1/2’s “everyone’s dead and we only have audio logs” has now been done to death. You simply cannot do that again. Which means the only option you have is to go for something new and revolutionary, and your chances of success are extremely low.
I was going to post the same thing. a 600k goal for an ambitious fantasy RPG seems pretty low. I think some devs count on a Kickstarter that’s going to blow the doors off their funding goal, and then a modest success leaves them trapped.
Not to mention it was 2 years overdue.
Compare to Divinity Original Sin, which earned about 100K more, but they were pitching the game as “Mostly done. Just want to make it better!”
Well, I think it all worked until you had to battle the Many near the end of the game. That’s when certain builds didn’t hold up. The solution to that is simple. Don’t have a battle against The Many like you did in SS2. In fact, I’ve replayed the game many times, but I never do the battle against the Many on my replays. I’m not interested in replaying it past that point, but it’s still a wonderful game before that.
I would definitely be disappointed to not have the RPG system, but if it can be atmospheric and retain the tone, I’d still be interested. But I hope the RPG system makes a return.
What? I mean, I agree it’s been done a lot since then, but so many games do it so poorly. Remember Doom 3? It was terrible, the audio recordings were crap and added nothing to the game. They were great in Bioshock 1 and 2 and Gone Home. But those are just a few rare exceptions I think. I love me some Dead Space because it’s a great action horror title. But the audio logs didn’t really pull me into the world and immerse me in it, so I don’t count that as a success in this context either.
So I really do hope they go the route of “Everyone’s dead and we only have audio logs”, and do it well, because it really hasn’t been done well enough times since System Shock 2.
Bioshock Infinite tried the route of “people are still alive, and yet, we’re not really going to let you interact with them, because they’re all crazy or will turn crazy in an alternate universe”, which was a terrible option.
I don’t disagree that SS3 is doable – it’s just really, really hard. I think you need to mix the formula up a little; have some live people as well as dead ones for example. Tight RPG systems take a lot of detailed design and play-testing ie. it’s not just a matter of cranking out levels with enemies. It’s very difficult to produce a sequel that lives up to the combined reputation of 2 great games – especially ones that are as different as SS1 and SS2. Look at the Thief sequels post 2 as an example.
For obvious reasons I can’t comment on much of this.
For projecting to other projects is well, wrong. they all live with their own budgets and design teams.
As for a post mortem…its a cautionary tale…
