Yesterday we heard that The Longest Journey saga was to continue with Dreamfall Chapters. Games storyteller and best-named-human Ragnar Tørnquist was leaving Funcom to start a new studio, Red Thread Games, and pick up the adventure series for which he is best known. Red Thread would be licensing the name from Funcom and sailing through pre-production on a grant from the Norwegian Film Institute – but it wasn’t clear how the rest of the game would be funded.
“We will be doing a Kickstarter,” says Tørnquist, clearing things up somewhat.
“Not right now, but we will be doing it in the near future,” Tørnquist told RPS in a frank and illuminating interview.
“Simply because although we received a grant from the Norwegian Film Institute, which was announced today, that is only for the preproduction phase. That allows us to get started on a prototype but in order to fully develop Dreamfall Chapters we’re going to need more money and we will be going to Kickstarter.”
Later in the interview, Tørnquist said that now is the “right time” to go independent.
“I think with the way the – I’ll use a boring word – market is going, people are looking toward more meaningful games maybe. Games that aren’t necessarily huge and massive and expensive, games that are more personal, more emotional, more spiritual. Games that have soul.
“Also, games that can be independently funded. This is the right time to do that as well, to make a smaller, cheaper game. To do that using crowdfunding and in our case also getting funding from the Norwegian Film Institute, which will help to get us started. It’s time to make exactly the game that we want to make.
“This is the time to be completely independent, this is the time to make something that is so personal. Not necessarily super-small but so focused.”
Tørnquist has spent the last half-decade as creative director of quite-brilliant MMO The Secret World. But he’s moving on. Does that make you excited? Upset? Ambivalent?