KickStarter Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption - adventure-RPG from the creators of Quest for Glory

At this point I will buy their game just to support them, had a great time playing their games, they were great games, hope this one will be enjoyable too. I always liked when RPGs and adventure got mixed together, this maybe the last chance I will get to see it.

Hope there is some future and the sales pay their debts, maybe after all the tech in place, it won't be this painful to make more games... I dunno, hard to stay positive. There is much potential for blending puzzles, combat and RPG stuff together.

 

For me it was painful to hear they were taking a loan against their house to complete the game... that's scary stuff. I hope they at least break even/manage to pay off the loan.

 

I really feel for them.

In this thread I had a brief discussion with Corey Cole himself. This being the Codex, naturally I got to "meet" one of the architects of my childhood nostalgia only in the midst of people (myself included) saying mean things about their Kickstarter.

It's been going on five years now. Fuck's sake, the time does fly.

 

Oh come on, dont be sorry. They needed a reality check and the codex was there to give them that. I truly wish them the best tho.

 

I'm not sorry and I stand by the things I said back then, and Corey seemed to genuinely appreciate my points. I phrased what I said for Codexers' ears only though, not realizing the man himself would find it here on the Codex. It's all fun and games between Codexers, but normies aren't prepared for shitposting flamelords, and computer game legends like the Coles don't deserve the additional grief.

No doubt Corey used the power of Google to search for mentions of Hero-U, and the Codex actually does show up fairly prominently given certain search terms.

 

Replay Games - closed? Regardless, nothing in future for LSL. Al Lowe done with games.
Pinkerton Road - closed. Jensen likely done making games.
Two Guys Spaceventure - vaporware? Hard to say where they are.
Hero-U - clawing its way back from vaporware status. May get released this year.
Precinct - Kickstarter was a laughable failure.
new King's Quest - mediocre reception and sales. Activision back to not giving a shit about Sierra.

This is what we disturbed and exhumed the Sierra corpses for...

 

Hadn't heard from Spaceventure since they released that chicken minigame on steam some 3 months ago. Did they just cut contact with backers?

 

As ever, it was lightning in a bottle.

Good new adventure games continue to be developed occasionally though, such as Primordia, so the failure of Sierra veterans to get their shit together is something of a mystery.

 

Well to be fair both Lowe and Jensen delivered their games on the schedule. Problem was Jensen's games(moebius and gk remake) weren't quite up to par and didn't sell well.

Lowe's LSL reloaded sold well enough, but he had a pedophile shitpusher on board who wrecked all shit he could after the game was out. Amazing how that guy singlehandedly stirred enough shit up to put the old man in retirement for good.

 

Maybe people here are not aware of a plausibly good veteran strike back but if you liked Legend Ent, go there : http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...ame-by-bob-bates-kickstarter-now-live.112936/
If you don't, play the games.
If you still don't, uh...

 

new King's Quest was an abomination.

Interesting that you didn't mention DoubleFine

 

Reading is hard huh.

I still hold out irrational hope for this game, mostly just because of how great QFG was, and because I feel that the Coles are genuinely good game designers. Hopefully we'll see whether or not that translates into something playable in the next few months.

 

DoubleFine suffered worse problems than not "completing" their """""game""""".

 

It's not that I disagree with you, it's just...

 

The last update was in November. We'll probably hear from them before the end of March.

I think many of them underestimated the challenge of managing an entire project on their own. Most of the Sierra alumni hadn't worked in the gaming industry for many years.

Agreed. Jensen and Lowe get credit for delivering their games in reasonable time.

My post was only about Sierra-related kickstarters, plus the new KQ.

Regardless, Double Fine obviously went way over budget with the animation and art. It's a good looking game but they would have been better off scaling the production value back and focusing more on the gameplay (Act 2 does have much better puzzles because they could reuse the backgrounds and most animations). At the end they still delivered a finished game, even if half of it came out a year after the other half.

 

Looks like gay cartoon excrement.

 

Looks like a libtard's idea of art.

Re: why couldn't Sierra vets make awesome games after Sierra, well... I think some creative people work well when they're driven to work well, having restraints and constraints is a good thing and forces people to come up with solutions to problems. Can't take that for granted.

I partly agree with the lightning in a bottle sentiment too - these people shared a creative environment and this kind of work feeds off of other people doing similar things.

Trying to attribute a QfG game being good solely to the Coles is a mistake. Same for any great adventure game of that period.

 

Having developed and released a Sierra-Like game in the great Kickstarter Craze of 2012, I can say there was a lot of excitement then. It's sad how it turned out for a lot of these projects. I hope Hero-U ends up being fun and enjoyable, I really do. I don't know if the market is there for them to recoup their money, as they dipped into their primary audience twice with Kickstarter. We didn't make near enough money to produce a sequel to Quest for Infamy, but we don't have their pedigree/name. There was a time, as a dev and a fan, I was excited about things, but it didn't turn out like any of us hoped.


Bt

 

I'm still proud to have bought your games and having a Demon lore book in my name at the Fairy Realm's library.

 

The adventure game genre is tough. Not even the very best adventure games will ever have mass appeal, regardless of how awe-inspiring the artwork, how excellent and challenging the gameplay, how fantastic the atmosphere and tone, nor how good the writing and characterization. Their heyday was in the late 1980s through the middle 1990s, when only well-off nerds and professionals could afford computers and to pay $60 each for adventure games that could be completed in 2 hours.

There aren't a lot of enemies to blast (with few exceptions), there's not a lot of loot to collect, they rarely if ever offer co-op or online, you can't build your own forts out of voxel blocks or go digging around, there's no ranking system, no deathmatch mode, and often there's a lot of reading... adventure games have three strengths, in my opinion: the ability to tell a narrative that actually feels like a living story, puzzles, and exploration and discovery in the sense that there's something completely new to discover around every corner.

They're just not for everyone.

As for the aftermath of the 2012 Kickstarter craze (in which I was a participant; I finally bothered to register here at the 'Dex because of it), everyone bears some responsibility. A fair bit of it lies on the shoulders of all the developers who ran out of money while taking years longer than they really should have to develop their games. Tim Schafer is the poster boy for this phenomenon. It turns out that a corporate suit to count the beans and crack the whip might be more useful to have around than everyone thought, too-early releases notwithstanding.

 

Yeah, I've always accepted the fact that Adventure games are now niche, and I actually like it that way - it does make it hard at times, financially, to make a go of it, but it can be done. I mean, Wadjet Eye is doing well enough for themselves to keep making games, so I have to remind myself of that as I slog through making the games I'm currently working on. In a perfect world, we'd make games, sell enough to pay bills and fund a new game, and keep going. That'd be fine for me, a little indie - larger companies that demand a large profit margin won't suffer the niche nature of Adventure Games, for sure. Which, as I said earlier, is fine - I think it tends to keep the Adventure Games made these days of a decently high quality. I mean, when I look at the indie Adv. game work in the past five years, there's some awesome damn games out there.

As for some gaming conventions, ranking, score, etc - with Quest for Infamy, for example, I thought the achievement system was a fun way to add that kind of value - in QFI, there were many different little achievements to win, discover and find, and some were class specific. From a design standpoint, I enjoyed that. We also had a totally optional cave side quest, in which you could explore and loot, collecting all kinds of items. In future games, I'd love to explore both of these mechanics more, making for a more fun experience and replay experience. These things are easier to implement, however, in a hybrid RPG/Adventure Game rather than a straight adv. game, for sure.

I think from the 2012 Adventure Game Kickstarter craze, in addition to the many, many lessons I learned as a designer and as a "leader" of a development company, I definitely agree with you that sometimes having a more stern, bean-counting producer to oversee creative types is beneficial to game development. In a perfect world, creative people would run naked, free and crazy, creating whatever their little hearts desired, but the truth is you need direction and structure in order to succeed.

Bt

 

Never understood the deal with achievements. A bit hard to take it seriously, you know? It's like it thinks you're a special needs kid and the game is patting you on the back and giving you the thumbs up for remembering to put your crayons back in the box. If a game is challenging, and the challenge is surmounted, I already know. That's satisfying enough, don't need the game to blow me for it.

 

Yeah? Well, rpgdude19 begs to differ.

rpgdude19 is 19 years old, and he knows what's what. Buying shit games that offer hundreds of easy achievements and leaving them running all night to get trading cards is the future of gaming. You just don't like change, you fucking retard.

 

Keeping score was mainly a holdover of the days when practically every game kept score for the player (though calling it a "holdover" is a stretch, since that was still pretty common in Sierra's heyday). By your yardstick, points in bowling and golf are also sort of like achievements.

A more apt comparison would be between healthy cells and cancerous cells. They share more similarities than differences, yet cancer is unclean and must be purged.

Your insidious attempts to indoctrinate innocent people into the decline by way of line-blurring have been noted.