Friday, May 25, 2012. Report 3

[Blackdog_kt]

Originally Posted by ATAG_Colander

Sometimes I wish UBI and 1C returned the money to every one, disabled the game on steam and started a new sale with the following warning:
"THIS GAME HAS ISSUES, BUY ONLY IF YOU HAVE THE WILL TO HELP AND THE PATIENCE TO WAIT WHILE WE MAKE A GAME WE WILL ALL LOVE"

But I doubt even this would stop the constant whining and complaints on this forum as some people just love to hear (read) themselves talk (write).

Please, Please, Please, stop. You all read the reviews before buying it and if not, you should have had to.

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If i ever win the lottery i'll pay for the refunds personally, just to improve the signal to noise ratio here

I'm not too thrilled about waiting myself, but i think it's worthless worrying about things outside my direct control. The way i see it, i just paid some money to keep the development going and get a finished game at some point.

It's all a matter of perception really. Small companies of well known developers in specific gaming genres have taken to starting kickstarter projects to fund their games. People literally rush to support not a game or franchise, but a mere intention to develop one, just because they love the genre and the developers happened to work on a few really good titles in the past.

Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Full Throttle, Grim Fandango) and Ron Gilbert (Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island) are two people who were working for Lucasarts games, making adventures back in the day. They wanted to get half a million dollars or so to fund a new adventure game project, but they didn't want to go to a big publisher company, get a loan and then effectively be held hostage over what the game will include and what kind of copy protection they would have to use.

So they started a fund raiser on kickstarter (google it up if you are unfamiliar with it), asked the fans to contribute and implemented a reward system. So, someone who donated $15 will get the digital download version of the game WHEN it is complete. Someone who donated $30 gets the boxed edition, $50 gets you a collectors edition, signed autograph or something, $100 gets you all the previous rewards plus maybe a t-shirt and the soundtrack on CD, etc, etc...The rewards i mention are not exact matches for the prices quoted, but it's close. You can even get your name in the credits of the game if you want.

So, they did this and collected, wait for it... more than $2.7 million.

Because their fans know that nobody else will make an old school adventure game today.
Nobody asked when, what or how, nobody assumed the rest of their developer team is worthless because it will take time that their money will be sitting idle with no finished game in their hands, nobody started any conspiracy theories about them taking the money to fund a stereotypical, to the point of racism, unhealthy American activity. "OMG they will take our $2.7 mil and buy supersized McDonalds burgers with ALL of it i tell you!"

All these fans did was put a bit of down payment on a dream.

Then some guys who used to work in Interplay and had the first post-apocalyptic RPG (way before the first Fallout game) did the same. Now some people are doing the same to resurrect Carmageddon.

Meanwhile in flight sim land, another of the "days of glory past" gaming genres, the only reason our sims are not up to spec is that the developers took our money to buy vodka, not that a lot of features were aimed for by the devs (but also asked for by the community) and have to be implemented under tight hardware and financial constraints

I think the proverbial " 'nuff said " is how i should close this post, but it really needs to be spelled out a bit further to sink in.

The average flight sim fan has his head so far buried inside his heap of performance charts that has lost the ability to dream, has forgotten the time when he was building plastic model airplanes with his father, or dreaming about having a way to get in a pilot's shoes once a day, holding a P38 model on one hand and a Fw190 model on the other and playing mock dogfights in the living room while making funny sounds with his voice to simulate engine and gunfire sounds and thinking to himself..."how i wish i could hook some electronic game to my TV and be able to step into that cockpit in some way".

That is the real pity here and not the state of this or any other sim. It's the lack of magic that is going to kill this genre, if it happens, along with the fact that dreaming is a punishable offense in this community.

Just because it has to be realistic, it doesn't mean we can't dream of better realism or features though