Company News TSI's Gateway will let you transfer characters between Seven Dragon Saga, Torment and Shadowrun

[Infinitron]

Tags: David Klein; David Shelley; Kevin Saunders; Mitch Gitelman; Seven Dragon Saga; Shadowrun: Hong Kong; Tactical Simulations Interactive; Torment: Tides of Numenera

Just when you thought things couldn't get any weirder. The Tactical Simulations Interactive guys sent out this press release today about a new initiative that they're launching:

March 2, 2015 - Los Angeles - Tactical Simulations Interactive (TSI) today unveiled "Gateway" – a system that allows players to transfer their favorite characters across supported RPGs. The initiative will be rolled out in TSI’s debut title, Seven Dragon Saga – an original fantasy RPG for PC, Mac and Linux, based upon an original pen and paper role-playing system designed by former Strategic Simulations Interactive (SSI) alumni Keith Brors and David Shelley. Developers inXile and Harebrained Schemes have also announced support for Gateway, with more set to sign on in the coming months.

With Gateway, TSI is inviting RPG developers to take part in an initiative that hearkens back to the days of classic RPGs like The Bard’s Tale, Ultima and Wizardry -- a time when players could fully transfer their characters and parties into different games, without having to create them from scratch for each game.

"Gateway goes beyond being an import/export feature -- it represents a development philosophy that I enthusiastically endorse. By proposing and developing a data standard for game characters, TSI is establishing a stepping stone for independent CRPG developers to collaborate and share content and expertise. It is very much in the spirit of crowd funding and independent game development. As a fan of SSI's titles, I'm thrilled at their return through Seven Dragon Saga and am excited they are spearheading this initiative through Gateway,” said Kevin Saunders, Project Director, Torment: Tides of Numenera - inXile.

"I think there are a lot of gamers out there who've put a lot of time and effort into building their RPG characters and would love Gateway's export so they can continue their relationship," said Mitch Gitelman, Co-Founder, Studio Manager - Harebrained Schemes.

“We are really excited about the initial reaction to Gateway from the development community and, as gamers ourselves, we love the idea of carrying across our characters and adventuring parties into different RPGs," said David Shelley, Producer/Lead Designer, Seven Dragon Saga. "From a technical standpoint, we are proposing an independent app that avoids any issues with an existing game's user interface and makes it a quick process for developers to add to their games."

Developers wishing to support Gateway in their games should contact Tactical Simulations Interactive at gateway@tsi-games.com.
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No, I have no idea how this will actually work. Though I imagine coming up with a bunch of approximate conversion algorithms for these wildly disparate systems could be a lot of fun. Anyway, it's nice to see evidence of the Kickstarter RPG cartel alliance in action!

Oh, and speaking of Kickstarter, there's another part of the press release that a lot of people probably missed:

About Seven Dragon Saga

Seven Dragon Saga takes place in a high-powered fantasy universe, revolving around the Empire of the Seven Dragons, and TSI has today launched a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the game’s development. Eschewing traditional RPG tropes, Seven Dragon Saga provides the player with effective heroes right from the start, with TSI aiming to provide the next step in meaningful player experiences in the same way that SSI's ‘Gold Box’ titles did during the 1980s and 1990s.
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Wait, what? Guys, guys...you have to stop doing this. I wonder if it means the Kickstarter is coming soon, though.

Update: TSI's David Klein spoke to VentureBeat about the Gateway system earlier today, revealing more information about its technical workings:

“… We envisioned this as something that could be a real boon to players. We also wanted to keep things simple for developers and add greater utility to ‘Gateway’ over time,” TSI president David Klein told GamesBeat this morning. “Gateway creates a standard character format, so importing games don’t need to know the details of which game the character came from. If they see gaps between the character and their own format, they can use a query UI to allow the player make selections. And, as an example, if the Gateway format has the stats for strength and health, the importer could use them to derive unique stats like willpower; say the average of the two existing stats. The whole goal is to allow importing games to use as much or as little of the incoming characters as they feel comfortable.”

As for importing characters from games with different settings — say, steampunk to fantasy — Klein said that it wants to allow “your characters to continue their adventures in a new setting — while ensuring they can be imported without breaking game play or immersion.”

The studio told GamesBeat this could just include basic details, like the name, gender, age, or race of a character. But Gateway can also bring over classes, stats, and skills, and TSI said that this could even extend to equipment and currency.
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Interesting.

 

[Blaine]

If Pillars gets in on this, the algorithms will have a devil of a time telling the difference between fighters and wizards.

 

[Infinitron]

Zed asked about the Kickstarter "announcement": https://twitter.com/TSIGames/status/572498508042924033

TSI Games‏@TSIGames
@dphanto Stay tuned for more announcements. But no, we wouldn’t just drop something like that without warning.

 

[Bubbles]

If Pillars gets in on this, the algorithms will have a devil of a time telling the difference between fighters and wizards.

Why? They are both pre-defined character classes that could simply be read out from the save file.

 

[Dorateen]

 

[Infinitron]

Updated OP.

 

[Zed]

Will it just transfer like Character name... or what?

Torment's skills and effort stuff will obviously not work in other games. Shadowrun's tech stuff doesn't fit any of the other game. Portraits are not very much alike. I don't think any of the games have a character backround text.

 

[Infinitron]

Will it just transfer like Character name... or what?

Torment's skills and effort stuff will obviously not work in other games. Shadowrun's tech stuff doesn't fit any of the other game. Portraits are not very much alike. I don't think any of the games have a character backround text.

It's not so much a "character transfer" as it is a "character system converter". See the VentureBeat quote.

 

[Ismaul]

Who's even asking for this?

 

[Bubbles]

People who hate character creation?

 

[Athelas]

Then why didn't they include PoE?

 

[Raapys]

Meh, waste of time. Besides, character creation is supposed to be fun.

 

[MRY]

This seems like one of those games that coverts music into a race track or whatever. But if they add in Madden and NBA Live, I'll throw some extra change into their Kickstarter. I'd love to see what kind of a running back the Cold Calculating Jack would make.

 

[Helly]

Isn't Torment's main character supposed to be a single, specific character?

 

[roshan]

Seriously.... This is just stupid and retarded. Who the hell even wants this shit? Decline of Kickstarter developers.

 

[zero29]

the day the earth stood still...

 

[Dorateen]

Those fortunate heroes, who might chance be exported to a real computer role-playing game.

 

[Zdzisiu]

I can't understand the real use of it. Why would somebody want to skip character creation? Creating a decent, interesting and balanced party is great fun and I often spend way too much time on party creation alone.

I would understand if that was about simply taking your party from MegaRPG V to MegaRPG VI, but between different games with wildly different systems? Well, it will be interesting to watch.

 

[Infinitron]

All these RPG developers openly coming together and cooperating in various ways to solidify the new age of RPG incline, and on the RPG Codex, bitching, bitching, bitching.

I guess the reference to "skipping character creation" is triggering people.

 

[AwesomeButton]

They've got it the wrong way around - creating and customizing a character may be one of the few fun parts of an otherwise bad CRPG but coming up with a unique character and its identity can be a long and complex process in a PnP RPG.

So this feature seems a bit out of place in cRPGs - what's there to transfer when people don't compose unique personalities for their characters anyway, because they know in advance they wouldn't be able to roleplay them due to constraints coming from the medium - the adventure being pre-generated, instead of improvised like in PnP, and much of your chances to roleplay being cut off? The only thing left to transfer is base attributes.

On the other hand - who wants to just import a set of variables from one game where this character worked, to another game, which may favor a different type of character because it's not balanced towards the character build that worked in the game you are importig from? It really sounds like a half-baked idea.

 

[Tigranes]

All these RPG developers openly coming together and cooperating in various ways to solidify the new age of RPG incline, and on the RPG Codex, bitching, bitching, bitching.

I guess the reference to "skipping character creation" is triggering people.

No, people are triggered by stupid, pointless effort?

 

[Kem0sabe]

I think any collaboration between rpg devs is a very good thing and can only bring the genre forward, but of all the things they could have done, this one is the least interesting.

Rpgs with vastly different character systems having those characters ham fisted into each other is not fun, you end up loosing what are those characters unique and getting some kind of Frankenstein thing.

Also half the fun of playing an rpg is creating your character.

 

[Infinitron]

Rpgs with vastly different character systems having those characters ham fisted into each other...getting some kind of Frankenstein thing.

Or in other words, the perfect gimmick character for your second or third playthrough of a game, which is exactly what this sort of thing is meant for. And plenty of people have fun with those.

 

[Monkeyfinger]

Intuitively this feels like the kind of thing which requires a lot of under the hood concessions which would weaken the overall game. Analogous to designing a UI to be playable on both a keyboard+mouse and a controller.

If you want a character growth system to be gateway compatible you're restricted to having it include only abilities and powers which have a close equivalent in other gateway games.

 

[DarkArcher]

Folks clearly don't remember how many games you could import your Wizardry party into. Transferring them and finalizing them in character creation sounds great.

Strange how nobody worried when you had bishops and ninjas to bring into Ultima III or suddenly had choices to create a Druid or Conjurer in the next RPG. inXile and HBS simply wouldn't do it if it was going to lead to broken experiences...