Swords & Wizardry Light - Forum

Sunday, October 14, 2012

Updated: Kickstarter - Old School RPG (Now "SHAKER")

It's about a week later, and the Old School RPG Kickstarter is, to be very honest, a huge distance from reaching it's 1 million dollar funding goal. I'm not surprised, as folks pointed out earlier that there was a lot of flash but little substance accompanying the initial Kickstarter page.

Ah well, my initial view was through rose colored glasses and the distance of time.

That's changed now as they've added some game details, but I do believe they are suffering from the "Too little, too late" syndrome. It's hard to get folks interested in a project if you fail to connect coming out of the box, and I'd mark this one as a failure to execute.

Even the name change - SHAKER - doesn't instil confidence in me, nor does the game's change to a sci-fi type setting (which you wouldn't know by the main imagery).

Ah well, I'm only in for $15, and it doesn't look like that will go through.

Guess I get to save $15 bucks ;)

4 comments:

  1. A 1 million dollar funding goal?!?!? For a RPG? Perhaps they should have been a little more realistic? Hhhmmmm?

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  2. A million is what Wasteland 2 basically asked for, and Obsidian's project eternity as well. Shadowrun Returns was only 500,000, but that was meant to be a mobile game (albeit ported to PC)

    I think the problem is they didn't mention Wizardry enough. They should have something like "An old school Wizardry style game from the designer of Wizardry VIII and some other guy that did a CRPG once"

    Brian Fargo probably didn't have a better track record or name recognition than Ms. Brathwaite, but he constantly brought up Fallout.

    Then again, RPGs from 15 years ago are now deemed "old school", while games from 30 years ago like Wizardry seem to be forgotten. Except in Japan.

    I was going through a Wizardry manual the other day, and I'm pretty sure the guy who did the cartoons in the DMG did some for the manual. Sure looks like his artwork.

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  3. I think that Shaker's goals and what it offers were brought up bit too shallow way in presentation. I got the feeling there's something nice coming out of this perhaps, but I didn't get clear picture enough, or wasn't hit by nice vibe of the upcoming game world like in case of Wasteland 2 or Project Eternity, which both make clear statement what they will offer (at least a promise).

    I think Shaker just doesn't have clear enough image to present of itself, thus it may fail to impress.

    I also noticed I do not find Shaker on first pages of Google when putting in search words "Shaker kickstarter" - one more problem? Kinda wished this would reach the minimum budged required though just to see what they'll bring out.

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  4. What I mean is presentation didn'y paint clear image of the game. It was bit messy.

    It's bit like saying: you get a great car that has big engine. Propably enough for some buyers.

    What I would had liked to hear was:
    you get a great sports car with 3.0 liter turbo engine from Ferrari painted in red with top speed of 320kmh and acceleration of 3.8s from 0-100kmh.

    Well I don't know if Ferrari actually has turbo or not ;) but you get the picture. Shaker presentation kinda failed and I agree with Jeremy that the name is not perhaps the best.

    Now who would make kickstarter for Might & Magic (RPG)? :-)

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