Chris Roberts’ return to games has resulted in the highest crowdfunded game ever. Star Citizen has surpassed $10m from a combination of Kickstarter and pledges made through the website directly.
And it’s not even close to stopping yet, either.
I’ll fetch the rake. With twenty-three days left on the clock, Double Fine have collected all the funds necessary to put their high fantasy X-Com-alike into full production.
Double Fine are easily the most recognised success story when it comes to gaming Kickstarters. Somewhat inevitably they’re at it again, before their previous project has even got out the door. This time no 90s point-n-click nostalgia is required, since Massive Chalice is not a spiritual successor to anything, but a brand new concept entirely: an epic, generation-spanning fantasy tactics game. It sounds ambitious, fantastic, and totally worth your curiosity.
A point’n’click adventure centered around a young girl’s fight against a flock of birds under the hypnotic spell of one Baron Widebeard, Nelly Cootalot: The Fowl Fleet! fills all the criteria for an insta-post on PCGamesN. That there are beards, puns, and jokes in the pitch video only works to seal the deal.
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Well, that was a close-run thing. Despite a strong early showing, for the last few days we’ve been reduced to watching for signs of movement on the surface of Kickstarter, wondering if Flashback was ever going to surface again. And it did! As a consequence, Full Control’s fully-independent and faithful sequel to the venerable strategy RPG series will enter production before the end of the year.
Reboots are seriously vogue right now. They’re happening every day. Only yesterday we reported that 1984 classic Deus Ex Machina was being revived. Now mech arena shooter Heavy Gear is being reassembled with a new game based on the Unreal 4 engine. Stompy Bot Productions are looking for $800,000 to make Heavy Gear Assault.
Deus Ex Machina was something of a gaming experiment when it came out in 1984. A ZX Spectrum game, it also shipped with a tape heavy rock soundtrack that you played on a stereo to get the full experience. That full experience also contained narration by Christopher Lee and the voice work of Ian Dury. Mel Croucher and his development studio Automata Source are reimagining the game and looking for funds on Kickstarter. Work has already been underway for a couple of years, and you can see the utterly bizarre results in their video.
Indie biking-and-booting sim Road Redemption has secured a future for itself after passing its $160,000 Kickstarter goal by a chain’s-length.
Camelot Unchained has ended its Kickstarter Campaign today, collecting an impressive $2,232,933 in donations from 14,873 backers.
Dogs are great. I love dogs. So it was while idly clicking on dog-related links over and over again that I discovered this Kickstarter for a dog sled racing game called Dog Sled Saga. It's not just a straight up racer, but a full on dog management simulator in which you must care for your team of dogs lest they become disillusioned or overworked and begin to slack. Creators Dan Fitzgerald and Lisa Bromiel take cues from Pokémon and XCOM when it comes to the caring for and bonding with individual dogs, as well as the "semi-random circumstances" of adventures like FTL and Spelunky when it comes to your mushing career. This intriguing concept has given me paws for thought. Hah! PAWS.
Taking its cues from films like My Neighbour Totoro and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind and games like Ico, Atomhawk Design hope The Realm will be an engaging point’n’click game that will ensnare you with its wonderful artwork and the relationship between its two protagonists.
Of course, as is the style of the time, they’ve taken to Kickstarter to achieve this.
“What happens when you mix a child’s perspective and imagination, with the surreal nature of dreams?" - that’s the premise of Among the Sleep. It’s a first person horror game in which you take control of a two year old, who quite possibly needs to stay off the cheese before bed. It’s currently just hit Kickstarter, and has already raised $15,000 of it’s $200,000 target. If it hits its target, it should be due out sometime in Q4 this year for PC, Mac and Linux.
Despite failing its Kickstarter, falling £180,000 short of its target, Death Inc. is not going to to its grave quietly. Ambient Studios have followed the path set by Prison Architect and Starbound, launching a tiered pre-order system that lets you buy a copy of the game (once/if it’s completed) and get access to the game’s alpha for just $10, or pay more to get a variety of extras (including naming a cow in the game).
With 15 days left on the clock (a clock that has surpassed its simple hour-totting brethren to climb into the domain of the calendar) Divinity: Original Sin has stormed through its $400,000 target and is running headlong into its stretch goals.
The Torment: Tides of Numenera crowdfunding effort came to a juddering, money-soaked end three days ago, raising over $4 million dollars for inXile and breaking the record for most money ever raised on a videogame Kickstarter. Not only does that prove beyond all doubt that people really, really would like to play a single-player isometric RPG quasi-sequel to Planescape: Torment, it also shows that inXile's Brian Fargo has something of a knack for Kickstarting his projects. His last campaign to revive the decades old Wasteland series was met with similarly sized piles of backers' cash — the man's got the Midas touch when it comes to lightening the wallets of PC gamers.
I spoke to the inXile founder during GDC, around breakfast time. The Torment campaign had blasted through its $900,000 target and was accelerating towards its four millionth dollar, hitting stretch goal after effortless stretch goal. He was eating some toast.
Richard ‘Lord British’ Garriot’s re-entry into the games industry, Shroud of the Avatar, a free-form MMORPG that seeks to go against the strict quest structure of modern day games, has finished its Kickstarter campaign, far exceeding its original goal.
Starting up 30 days ago, Shroud of the Avatar originally sought $1 million in funding. More than 22,000 backers came together to pitch in $1.9 million through the crowdfunding website (with a further $140,000 through the game’s website), doubling that original target.
Shut it down, boys: the dream is over. Those selfish folk over at InXile have gone and sucked all the money out of the internet to fund their pseudo-sequel to Planescape: Torment, Torment: Tides of Numenera. Reports of empty wallets the world over are already flooding in. There have been sightings of the money flying across the night’s sky to land softly on the pile at InXile’s door. Our resident economist Bill Dollarmen estimates that the pile is worth exactly $4,188,927.
If his estimate is on the money (a little fiscal humour there) then if would mean that Tides of Numenera is the highest funded Kickstarter project thus far.
Now you’ve gone and done it. Such was the weight and velocity of the money thrown at InXile’s Torment: Tides of Pneumothorax on Kickstarter that the game’s been knocked into 2015. Guess what year it isn’t right now?
When I talk to Larian Studios founder Swen Vincke about his influences, it’s like I’m being thrown back to my childhood. He’s just shown me both Dragon Commander, the developer’s forthcoming strategy/RTS/RPG hybrid, and Divinity: Original Sin, an open-world RPG. As we talk about the inspiration behind these games, the titles they draw upon, the same phrase comes up over and over again: old school.
It’s not that Vincke wants to mine nostalgia for the sake of it, he doesn’t want to remake the games of old simply as a gimmick. No, it’s about the roads never travelled, the ideas that were abandoned by a PC games industry that gradually became increasingly homogenous and is only now starting to embrace the variety that gaming once championed.
Rarely has co-operative play been very much of a feature of any open-world roleplaying game. While the Diablo series has always pushed its multiplayer aspect, those games were always far more about combat and collection, about pushing your stats up ever-higher as you bashed your way through another dozen beasties. Meanwhile, the RPGs that were more focused on exploration, on decision-making and on good-old-fashioned questing never leant themselves as well to multiplayer. We tend to adventure alone, choosing our own paths and forging our own destinies.
Divinity: Original Sin wants you to take a companion with you. It wants you to travel together, to share the road, to argue, to disagree, to fight and perhaps even to die alongside one another. While it can be enjoyed as a single-player game, developers Larian are as much pitching it as a chance for two buddies to enjoy the road in an adventure that’s as much high fives as it is high fantasy. They’re even throwing something really rather special into the mix.
