KickStarter Mage's Initiation - A Classic Sierra-style Adventure/RPG

[MRY]

I doubt there will be a next time, but you never know.

 

[Blackthorne]

Yeah, it's honestly hard to say what you can do right in the adventure game world. What works sometimes doesn't other times... I'm glad there's still devs out there making games, and I'm glad Unavowed, Lamplight City and Whispers of a Machine have been received well. I don't think I'll ever get to do another game as large as QFI, but dammit, I'd like to make the sequel.

 

[MRY]

It's really weird to me that with an average simultaneous players of .8, they only discounted 15% for Steam Summer Sale. I would think that this would be a great opportunity for a really deep discount -- 75%, 80%, maybe even 90% -- enough of a jolt to maybe bring the corpse to life. 15% seems unlikely to move the needle at all.

 

[newtmonkey]

Even 30% probably would have been enough to convince some of those sitting on the fence to buy it. A 15% discount during a massive sale might as well be no discount at all.

 

[MRY]

"Some of those sitting on the fence" can't save a game that has had single-digit maximum simultaneous players for three of the five months since its release. You need a game-changer at that point -- a big celebrity endorsement, a Humble Bundle, something like that. But a super steep discount can do it if enough players like your game and leave reviews because their reviews show up on the friends' Steam homepages, and you can start a chain reaction. If I were them, I probably would've priced it at 99 cents, or maybe $1.99, begged Dave or Ron Gilbert or Schaffer or someone for a live stream, and crossed my fingers. It's hard to break out of the rich-get-richer paradigm on Steam these days. Every WEG customer gets a blast when WEG releases a game; Primordia gets referrals from ~2000 Steam reviews, but a new release like Fate of Yandi sells 20 copies and disappears.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

a lot of indie developers still seem to be in the mindset of "if it's on steam that's enough exposure"
the market is massively saturated, you have to do serious legwork advertising your game to make an impact now

 

[Blaine]

Adventure games in general are a hard sell these days, even for guys like me who worshiped Sierra On-Line and LucasArts developers as gods throughout my formative years.

Speaking only for myself, there are quite a few relevant factors. Possibly the biggest is my puzzle-solving ability, which has come an extremely long way since I was 9, yet I still wish to be stumped while playing. My bar for puzzle difficulty is therefore far higher than it used to be, yet modern adventure game puzzles tend to range from relatively easy to practically nonexistent.

Additionally, the writing, humor, and especially pop culture references rarely measure up to the classics. Let's face it: 90s pop culture was a whole lot cooler than today's, even at the time. The 90s had OJ Simpson, Pogs, MTV, Beavis and Butthead, MST3K, Jurassic Park, Aladdin, Beanie Babies, Tupac Shakur, the Spice Girls, and Pearl Jam, while we have Bernie Madoff, fidget spinners, PewDiePie, Rick and Morty, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the Emoji Movie, Frozen, minions, Katie Perry, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift.

Even setting the substance of the decades aside, creatives in the 80s and 90s seemed to have a certain special something when it came to producing works of imagination, games being no exception. Today, the best that can often be hoped for is to desperately attempt to recapture that lightning in a bottle.

Another factor is politics, particularly identity politics. I don't want a gay and transsexual pride parade marching through my fucking adventure game unless it happens to be an adventure game about a gay and transsexual pride parade. "Inclusive" shoehorning is painfully obvious, cringe-worthy, and off-putting, and no amount of downdoots from Codex socialists will change that fact (or encourage anyone to buy more copies of adventure games that suffer from this affliction, for that matter). By the same token, I genuinely don't want to hear about Mormonism, fiscal conservatism, nationalism, secure borders, freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, or any political platforms associated with right-wing politics, either. It's fine for characters to be gay faggots or redneck doomsday preppers, but if you're virtue-signaling, you know it—and so do I. I want to play a fucking game, not read a moronically "disguised" pamphlet outlining your precious political beliefs, you fucking goofball.

 

[Darth Canoli]

There's also the fact that adventure games improved their graphics from pixelated to beautiful 2D back in the days which may have been a huge boost to sales, there's not a lot of room for improvement on that area anymore.

Worse, players having fond memories of their favorite adventure games won't settle with mediocre games, specially adventure RPG, the mix is good but the combat didn't evolve in the right direction so you get an average adventure game and a lame combat system, not really enthralling ...

Fans are still there, they just want something amazing, i bet the first one releasing a great adventure game (NPC, story, puzzles) with a good combat system (why not a good party based combat system, either blobber like, good T-RPG or even KotC-like ?) is going to get rich.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

we have Bernie Madoff, fidget spinners, PewDiePie, Rick and Morty, Keeping Up with the Kardashians, the Emoji Movie, Frozen, minions, Katie Perry, Lady Gaga, and Taylor Swift.

My dude, I am deeply out of touch with the pop-culture consciousness, but Bernie Madoff pleaded guilty over a decade ago. I don't think he's having too much of an impact on the kids these days.


As to why Mage's Initiation flopped... well, it had no marketing (even less than Hero-U for Christ's sake) and more to the point it just wasn't very good. There was no way for it to succeed by word-of-mouth because the word-of-mouth consensus was a giant "meh". I mean I played the game twice through when it debuted and I barely remember it aside from the hilariously janky cutscenes and stupidly easy difficulty.

It's funny, because I think 8 year-old me would have loved it, but nearly 40 year-old me found it pretty tepid. In essence, Himalaya pitched a nostalgia project to 30 and 40 somethings and then (perhaps fairly) made a game for children.

 

[Blackthorne]

Oof, the reaction to this game made me a bit sad. I had hoped it would be a good Role Playing Adventure Game, and maybe stirred up some more interest in games like that. Seems to me it's been received not badly, but not good either; getting a "meh" about something is a kiss of death.

Those cutscenes. Honestly, I would have ditched them. I know a lot of work went into them, probably, but... damn.

 

[fantadomat]

I know a lot of work went into them,

My paint shitposting art is better than this garbage! If you don't believe me,here is an old example!

Spoiler

Also the game is meh,if they want better reception,then they should made a better game.

 

[<3sRichardSimmons]

Yeah I honestly don’t know how the cutscenes made it through a single review pass. They are at the Ed Wood level of “so bad it’s good”, but that’s clearly unintentional which means you’re laughing at it, not with it. What’s even more baffling is that the rest of the game looks pretty good (uncanny valley 3d character models aside).

 

[DeepOcean]

It is a pity, their remakes are really good stuff, I recommend all of them. It is a pity that the game passed through development hell, strangely enough, there are a few scenes on the Quest for Glory and King's Quest remakes that honestly look better than their own actual proprietary game, I really don't know what happened. Maybe they bitten more than they could chew and instead of cutting stuff like those expensive cutscenes and focusing all their time into polishing the core game, they insisted and the end result was a huge delay and degrading the quality of the whole game.

 

[MRY]

There were a variety of obvious missteps: the way they did high resolution (which massively increased the animation load while, IMO, decreasing the charm); the lip-syncing (which added next to nothing while apparently requiring months of work); the combat (which required them to do a whole new combat engine rather than just recycling the QFG2 one they had already made). I haven't played it, though, so I can't gauge beyond that. It just seems to me that the Coles (under the tutelage/management of the Ken and Robert Williams) were really great designers. Matching QFG's design was never going to be easy.

 

[Blaine]

One thing I clearly remember about Himalaya Studios (I lurked on their forum once, ages ago) is how perpetually butthurt they were about the fact that pretty much no one bought Al Emmo and The Lost Dutchman's Mine. Personally, I always put that down chiefly to the artwork being sub-DeviantArt tier, truly hopw roewur ne. Graphics may not be important, but artistic skill actually is.

 

[MRY]

My best friend from high school started dating this girl in college whose dad held himself out as a "published novelist" (self-published, it turned out), and on hearing that Ryan had a friend who wanted to be a fantasy novelist, sent me a copy of one of his books via Ryan. All I remember from the five pages I made it through was that the protagonist's name was Tewa Gar, and there was a footnote, and the footnote said that the author (a professor at some fifth rate college) always taught his students to ponder why the author might have picked a name, "sometimes even reading them backwards." So, I read the name backwards, and it was "A Wet Rag." Truly, a Werdna of words.

Anyway, Al Emmo has a certain isomorphism to Tewa Gar, in that it's a very weird stretch that doesn't go anywhere. Get it? The Alamo? Like that famous landmark in Texas! Al Emmo! Eh, eh?

-EDIT-

Amazing, a Google search for Tewa Gar reveals he's still at it! https://www.amazon.com/Kiva-Part-One-Adventures-Tewa-ebook/dp/B005D2X8CC

 

[daveyd]

I backed this so I played it a bit. It's not complete shit, but definitely not great. The visuals are alright. Basic premise is fine. Haven't encountered any totally illogical MacGuyver style item interactions yet. You can tell it was made by people who love the classic P&C adventure games.

But I also agree with criticisms that the puzzles are too easy, the combat isn't fun, and it's just kind of boring so far. They shouldn't have wasted all that time lip-synching; it adds nothing, most people will read ahead / skip VA anyway, and they could've released nearly a year earlier & be already working on a new game by now.

Based on what I've played, I'd recommend HQ & QfI over MI.

 

[Tavernking]

Can you play as a woman in this game?