#4
Brian Speaks, First Stretch Goal Added and...oh yeah, One Million Dollars!!!
Posted by inXile entertainment
Thanks to all of you we passed the
$1.1 MILLION mark over the weekend! This puts it at the 23rd most funded video game Kickstarter of all time after less than week! We can’t thank you enough for your support. It is so inspiring to see so many of you continuing to join the RPG renaissance and prove the party based dungeon crawl genre is far from dead!
The reception of our in-engine video of The Bard’s Tale IV was also absolutely phenomenal. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch it now, and if you did and loved it, share the word with your friends! ! The more that you share it, the bigger our budget, and the better the game we all get.
We cannot do it without your help and involvement!
The in-engine video walks you through a level built in Unreal Engine 4, using our in-game-quality art assets, with no pre-rendered bits anywhere. This kind of prototype serves to give you an early look at our game, but also for us to familiarize ourselves with running these environments in Unreal engine 4 and to get a feel for our goals and atmosphere. But a video can’t answer all questions, so over the weekend in the project comments, we asked you all to let us know what topics you want to hear more about.
Brian has recorded a video to answer those questions.
Stretch Goals
Another question was regarding stretch goals. Where are they? We certainly have a number planned and ready but we like to see where a Kickstarter is going. Now that we’re comfortably heading to being fully funded we can no longer resist giving you a sneak peek!
At $1.3 million, we will add an enhanced companion NPC system and add 2 more CNPCs, including
Lioslaith the Shadow, a legendary Spear Daughter of the matriarchical Fichti people, the dark haired, woad-painted nature worshippers who live in the deep forests far to the northwest of Skara Brae.
With this
enhanced companion NPC system, all recruitable NPCs will have
unique personalities and backstories which will open up interesting side content and add rich and surprising reactivity to your adventure. In addition, these CNPCs will voice their thoughts and asides, giving their take on the people, places and events that you encounter as your party moves through the world. No two CNPCs are alike and they carry their own reputations with them. While they can add some additional firepower to your party, some might even get you into more trouble than you were expecting…
Spread the Word!
Your amazing support has led us blazing past the $1 million point and on the path to reach our initial funding goal, and we’ve got some great stretch goals cooking. Beyond your pledges alone, it means a lot to us to hear from you and see you spread the word on our campaign. Every post you comment on, link you provide, hashtag you use, goes back to us and helps spread the bard's song far and wide. Together, we can make a difference!
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/BrianFargo
Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/TheBardsTale
Tumblr:
http://thebardstalerpg.tumblr.com/
Add-Ons
We’ve also been listening to feedback regarding our campaign, and we have heard you! We’ve now opened up a number of digital add-ons with ideas to add more moving forward. You’ll find the current ones listed on the Kickstarter page:
$5 - Guilt Absolution Letter/E-mail from Brian Fargo
$8 - Digital "History of The Bard's Tale" Novellas (3 novellas spanning TBT 1-3 lore)
$8 - Digital The Bard's Tale IV Novellas (currently 3 novellas on TBT IV lore)
$15 - Digital Novella Compilation (all available novellas)
$20 - Extra Digital Copy of The Bard's Tale IV (PC, Mac, and Linux)
Add-ons give you more flexibility to get exactly those rewards you’re looking for, for instance supplementing a physical tier with a few of the digital extras.
To add an add-on: click the blue "Manage" button at the top of the Kickstarter page, and increase the amount of your pledge to match your add-on choice. Later on after the Kickstarter campaign, when we open our backer web site, you’ll be able to specify which add-on you intended to choose.
Example: You pledged for a $105 Premier Collector’s Edition +$8 shipping, but would like to add a digital copy for a friend and a Guilt Absolution Letter to pardon your buccaneering ways. That would be a total pledge of $113 (base tier and shipping) + $20 (extra copy) + $5 (Guilt Absolution letter), for a total of $138. Click the blue “Manage” button next to your pledge, and manually change the amount pledged to $138. You do not need to change anything about your tier selection.
Shout-Outs
With our own Kickstarter going strong it’s time for us to share the love with some of our friends and fellow crowdfunding hopefuls.
The first project has less than a week to go, an open world action RPG titled Umbra. It takes place in a corrupted world that is falling apart, where you play a former soldier forced to flee a death penalty for your magical powers, expressed in the game by the unique Apocalyptic Form mechanic. It’s a gorgeous-looking isometric game that has funded but has some juicy stretch goals that will make it that much better.
Second, Fallout 1 Lead Designer Chris Taylor and Fallout/Planescape: Torment designer Scott Everts have teamed up with Obsidian to create a strategic card game based on Pillars of Eternity, entitled Lords of the Eastern Reach. We’re very excited to have this card game be available for our board/card game nights, and this project too has some very enticing stretch goals open to us!
Thanks!
Chris Keenan
Project Lead
