Vault Dweller said:
Disappointing.
It seems like he put in a lot of effort to attract the casual crowd. The "casual" difficulty mode for people who are "new to fantasy RPGs"? As if these people would be interested in a Spiderweb game. Sure, he updated the graphics and it's the nicest looking Jeff's game to-date, but still...
It seems like he threw away everything he's learned and built over the years and started from scratch: a linear, easy-breezy Bioware adventure with a Diablo-like character system. Yay!
Precisely. The last time I actually had to think about marketing was studying it as an undergrad many many years ago, but you're in marketing (from what I gather) - would the principle still be that this is a pretty dumb move? I.e. that if you're an indie going up against much wealthier competitors, you're best off going for an avoidance strategy by taking a niche that the big guys can't/won't cater to, rather than going for the mass market where you're always going to be the 'less shiny'' cousin?
I just can't see why the casual crowd would want to buy this game, unless they have literally run out of other casual story-based Biowarean crpgs to play. And they won't have done that, because...they're casual.
It would be completely different if he was a superb writer, as opposed to someone with a talent for intricate factions and C+C. If he was a great writer, then that could be the selling point in itself - 'like Bioware games, but hate the goddawful romance writing and the perpetually teenage characters? Here's a game for you!' But the dialogues and immediate plot the games (as opposed to themes and choices) have never been his strong point. He doesn't suck at it, but it's not something you'd buy a game for if you were relatively new to crpgs and tossing up between Avadon and Dragon Age. And it isn't like he charges hobby-game pricing either - he makes full-size crpgs and he charges an appropriate price for them. But that's not a price that uni students and kiddies who would appreciate the simplification are going to throw at him just because they've run out of similar games to play. His customers pay his prices because they're used to getting more value than they get out of the average AAA title, not because they want to pay 2/3 of an AAA title (or more than a second-hand AAA title) for a game that's 2/3 as good as an AAA title.
It's like he just crossed the line from 'only guy around who targets a niche market, and serving it reasonably well', to 'guy who makes products that are good for a one-man-company, but aren't good by any objective standards'.
Maybe I'm just being too harsh because of the contrast with his previous games. But even G3 - easily 'the stinker' of the Geneforge series, never made me feel like I was wasting my time. Every demo in the Geneforge series (and those demos were often fricken huge) would have me playing right through to the demo-cap, trying different options and different builds and getting excited as hell for the full game. This is the first time that I'm in absolutely no hurry to do so. I'd probably be a lot more positive if I just found this randomly on the web, with no back-catalogue to compare it to.
