Game News Seven Dragon Saga Kickstarter is LIVE

[Infinitron]

Tags: David Klein; David Shelley; Edwin McRae; Paul Murray; Seven Dragon Saga; Tactical Simulations Interactive

A few hours later than expected due to technical issues, the Seven Dragon Saga Kickstarter campaign from Tactical Simulations Interactive has gone live. Here's the pitch video (which includes gameplay footage!) and an excerpt from the fairly detailed pitch text:

Character Design

You get to choose race, class, specialty, and can customize even further as you create your team of six player characters. And once forged, you have complete control of your party's actions and development throughout the game. At certain times, you will be able to opt to have an NPC join the party in addition to your core six characters, but your party design will always remain fundamentally yours.

Core Gameplay

The party moves through the regions in real time, switching to turn-based combat during encounters. Core gameplay revolves around turn-based tactical combat, quests and navigating factional politics.

The Chaos Touched

The Touched are forces to be reckoned with, both personally and politically. They have been recruited from all corners of the Empire, provided with equipment and training, and a mandate from the Emperor to be his elite troubleshooters. Touched by 'the winds of chaos', these individuals are as feared for their unpredictability as they are respected for their power and status.

The Use of Power.

As representatives of the Emperor, your party of adventurers has significant power within the Empire. It's up to you to choose how you wield that power, how you shape the world, encouraging order and peace or exacerbating the forces of disruption.

• Goals. At creation, the you select a Goal for each character. When resolving quests, you will often be presented with difficult choices. If your choice aligns with one or more character Goals, then those characters receive a bonus that improves them in some significant way. While no character will ever leave a party if their Goal isn't met, they will be slightly weaker. It's up to you to decide if you want your characters to have uniform Goals or a mixture of Goals. Uniform goals lead to bonuses for all from some types of quests yet absolutely none from others. Mixed goals can produce a wider range of bonuses from a broader selection of quests. It's up to you how you wish to manage this precarious balance.
• Borderlands. Some territories remain unclaimed and languish under the control of monsters, bandits, or hostile humanoids. If you are able to clear such regions, you will have the opportunity to plant the flag of one faction or another – or perhaps your own – granting the recipient faction greater power and resources. Once conquered, Borderlands become Frontier and a town or trading post will appear, giving you another place in which to buy, sell and quest. Through questing you can go one step further and make the region Settled, therefore providing the associated faction with further benefits. A neglected Frontier will fall back into Borderland status and be lost to the faction.
• Left to Sleep. Within the ruins that dot the landscape, beings and artifacts lie silent and waiting. Some are powerful tools, others are self-aware entities with their own agendas. Should you awaken them, leave them be, or seek their destruction? Your choice. Your consequences.

The campaign's funding goal is $450,000, and I'm happy to report that it repeats few of the Underworld Ascendant campaign's foibles, although there is an exclusive item for Shroud of the Avatar backers (the only exclusive item, actually). A minimum pledge of $25 will get you a copy of Seven Dragon Saga if the campaign succeeds, but I'm afraid they won't make it if it doesn't get a lot more media coverage fast.

 

[MRY]

The "goals" concept seems neat, and I always like the "answer questions" approach to character design, though it often ends up requiring metagaming. Otherwise, things seem a little bit dodgy at the moment -- to be honest, the combat looked considerably less fun than Gold Box games: slower, and further slowed by vanities like close-up camera shots, smaller numbers of enemies, harder to tell positioning and spacing. The tiers seem too rich ($5 for wallpaper!?) and the video has some baffling issues like poor sound quality that don't make any sense for a pitch that they clearly spent a long time working up to. I get that substance should trump style (to quote Horton Hatches an Egg: "It should be, it should be, it should be like that!") but at the same time, it seems like they've spent considerable resources on some style (like spell effects), but perhaps not the right style.

Still, I'll back it, if only for the endless hours I spent in FRUA and DS:SL as a kid.

 

[MicoSelva]

They might have shot themselves in the foot with that gameplay video. Kickstarter sells dreams mostly, and sometimes having no prototype (but good concept art) is better for funding than having a bad-looking prototype.

The $25 entry price is also too high for many people, which will scare potential backers away. There even is no early bird tier to encourage people to back immediately and provide that first-day money influx which marks the project as a 'winner' in people's heads.

 

[Vault Dweller]

The Goals and Borderlands sound pretty cool. Eagerly waiting for more clarity and updates.

 

[Morality Games]

I take it from the silence of the press that they didn't talk to the press ahead of time?

 

[Infinitron]

I take it from the silence of the press that they didn't talk to the press ahead of time?

Or they were ignored by a press already shell-shocked by Shadowrun and Underworld Ascendant.

They might have shot themselves in the foot with that gameplay video. Kickstarter sells dreams mostly, and sometimes having no prototype (but good concept art) is better for funding than having a bad-looking prototype.

As I said in the other thread, the prototype footage looks pretty cool to me.

 

[CryptRat]

I have done my civic duty.

 

[Morality Games]

As I said in the other thread, the prototype footage looks pretty cool to me.

I have to agree. Short and colorful death scenes are an effective use of cinematics in games (think Fallout).

Although being honest I hope they opt to re-design the dragons into more of an Eastern concept.

 

[Siveon]

And I thought 2013 was the year of the kickstarter.

Will back if I have dough.

 

[MicoSelva]

As I said in the other thread, the prototype footage looks pretty cool to me.

For me it looks ok, especially for something done in such a short time, but I think most people will not be impressed.

 

[karnak]

They might have shot themselves in the foot with that gameplay video. Kickstarter sells dreams mostly, and sometimes having no prototype (but good concept art) is better for funding than having a bad-looking prototype.

I was of the same oppinion as you.
I still shudder when I remember Rock Paper Shotgun's post informing of Underworld Ascendant Kickstarter.

There were dozens of gaming hipsters there complaining about the lack of quality in the video.
In fact it seemed that most of the guys posting were simply crazy about the idea of having a co-op RPG.

For many people who don't remember SSI a video like that may seem as another indie developper trying to emulate Heroes of M&M or something like that.

 

[Zed]

System design seems solid, as does the prototype.

That said, the KS video is
*does unstable airplane motion with hand*

 

[Murk]

Gameplay footage looks legit; I'm in. Will hold off pledging for a few more vids just in case some batshit silly nonsense comes out, but I doubt it.

 

[Pony King]

I'm here for the TB combat - backed.

I have a few reservations before I back with more than 25$ though:

The combat is needlessly slow. I like clarity, but that was dull.
Fuck cinematic crap. I hope they allow you to turn it off. Like the other guy I wouldn't mind some cool death animations.
Goal system sounds dumb, they should explain it in further details. Right now it sound like it's gonna require unfun metagaming.

Gameplay footage looks legit; I'm in. Will hold off pledging for a few more vids just in case some batshit silly nonsense comes out, but I doubt it.

You are aware that you can retract your pledge?
Backing early helps give them momentum and you can always take back your money if they act retarded.

 

[Aenra]

The ingame footage brought HoMM to mind..just looking at the opposing parties all nicely lined up in the two opposite extremes like that, first thing that sprang to mind;
cannot know if that was their intent or not, but it's not what i was expecting, vibe-wise

unimpressed/so-n-so, and nothing to do with the graphics. Have long since forced myself to contend with today's "standards"

edit: Goals' bit was a nice touch, coming up with an alternative to "C&C". Even if only for obvious hyping purposes, it does show some creativity

 

[Jedi Master Radek]

We should open The Codex Department of Kickstarter Marketing and force every developer to accept our advices on running successful kickstarters. We will need a secret police for that. I volunteer to be The Head of Torturing and Mutilation Division!

 

[MRY]

For many people who don't remember SSI a video like that may seem as another indie developper trying to emulate Heroes of M&M or something like that.

Other than the props and the captions, there's nothing about that video to trigger SSI recollections for people who do remember the games. The video looked like a somewhat less attractive version of Stormfront Studios' Pool of Radiance "sequel" (or whatever it was), not like the Gold Box games: no pixel art, no first-person view, no hordes of enemies being mass killed by a fireball, etc. There's nothing that says you can't change your style -- though to be honest, a faithful Gold Box style game would be much more appealing to me than this engine -- but these kinds of KSers trade very heavily on nostalgia. Unlike with, say, Broken Age, none of these guys is a recognizable name; unlike with, say, PoE or TTON, the game doesn't resemble the classic they're invoking.

I can't, off the top of my head, think of any KSer where an old "brand" was pitched as, "We're taking a couple of the core elements, but largely modernizing it." (Star Citizen, maybe?) It's true that a lot of projects ended up there (Broken Age, Hero-U), but that's now what people though they were when they backed. This is basically, "A few of the guys involved in some games you really liked as a kid are making a new game that also has turn-based combat."

Gonna be a tough road, I think. Still, I hope they get there.

 

[Infinitron]

I can't, off the top of my head, think of any KSer where an old "brand" was pitched as, "We're taking a couple of the core elements, but largely modernizing it." (Star Citizen, maybe?)

Ahem: http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9141

Unlike the high-end adventure Kickstarters, the successful cRPG projects, particularly the top three, and most particularly the top two, are extraordinarily faithful to the classics: Project Eternity might as well be Baldur's Gate II and T:TON might as well be PS:T. Wasteland is a slightly different creature

 

[MRY]

"... but it is clearly backward looking in its inspirations and aspirations." (That said, how did you have that quote at your fingertips?!)

I am plainly senile (for example, I wrote "lunch" rather than "luck" in a post earlier today, and I wasn't even hungry), but I actually did think of Wasteland II and discarded it. I don't really remember the pitch that well, but there wasn't a ton of detail in it, was there? Like, there wasn't even concept art until halfway through, right? Anyway, it was a direct sequel, and I would say that it took more than "a couple of the core elements" of Wasteland. By contrast, what from the Gold Box games do you see in 7DS other than a six-character party and turn-based, top-down combat? Wasteland (as a KSer pitch) invoked its classical elements everywhere (Godfather of RPGs and so forth), whereas I don't see any of that in 7DS.

 

[Dorateen]

And, pledged.

Gotta get me that physical box copy to place on the top of the glorious pyramid of 9 AD&D Gold Box games.

Also, I'd like to have that pnp version of Seven Dragon Saga.

 

[felipepepe]

Backed, hope they fare better than Underworld... although a successful campaign would already be great.

But one ruleset nit-pick: "dual-wielding is more precise"... wut?

 

[himmy]

I wish them the best, bless their hearts, but I really don't see how anyone looked at that pitch video and went "yeah, that should work". If I didn't know anything about these guys, which is how most people will feel, I would just assume it's a motley crew of well-wishing amateurs trying to make a game.

I'm not talking about turning yourself into a snake oil salesman or selling your soul for marketing cred, but for fuck's sake, watch some of the successful pitches, look at your pitch and tell me what differences you see. Not every studio can have someone who is effortlessly cool, like Fargo or Swen, but that doesn't mean you have to fill the screen with people so awkward I feel like punching them for their lunch money through the screen. I'm sure they're fully competent people in what they do, but have someone who seems like they can pull this thing off talk most of the time.

 

[Marquess Cornwallis]

Backed at the $40 level, which for me is basically equivalent to "thank you for all the fun I've had with the Gold Box games, and if this actually turns out to be good I certainly won't complain", but the pitch really is kind of bland. Even if I leave aside technical annoyances like bad editing and bad audio quality (which btw is something I totally don't get in any project that supposedly involves dedicated audio and cutscene experts), the biggest problem is that the only way I'd say anyone can get excited about this is if they already know the Gold Box games and use this knowledge as a sort of point of departure to make a lot of assumptions about the project that are otherwise not communicated at all (which is exactly what himmy said while I was typing this).

 

[Cosmo]

But one ruleset nit-pick: "dual-wielding is more precise"... wut?

Translates to : "two weapons = more chance to hit".

 

[Kem0sabe]

Looks nice... But does it taste nice?

Spoiler