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KickStarter Isles of Adalar - open world fantasy action-RPG with co-op and level editor - now on Early Access

HarveyBirdman

Arbiter
Joined
Jan 5, 2019
Messages
1,044
>Co-op
Pack it up boys. The combat will be woefully unbalanced.
 

AlsGaming

Novice
Joined
Sep 10, 2019
Messages
14
Looks like it could be fun, Bethesda isn't doing a swell job with TES so I'll take the indie alternative instead. Will probably release with less bugs than a Beth product somehow too. Although I hope the game releases with a bit more colour, some of the interiors just look like grey brown blobs.
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
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Messages
13,582
Codex 2014
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1112620/discussions/0/1628539910028459225/

FAQ

Q: Modding?

Yes. From the very beginning we have designed the game to support large scale content mods. We actually add and build content through the same interface that a user has access to through the integrated editor.

Q: Multiplayer?

Yes. We have co-op multiplayer for up to 4 players. Limited to 2 players for the demo. No PvP support is planned at this time.. The player that starts the game hosts multiplayer through peer-to-peer connections. We use Steam matchmaking for WAN and we also have a LAN server option.

Q: Microtransactions?

No.

Q: Do you support playing both in first person and third person?

Yes. The default key to switch between first and third person is F.

Q: Can you make your own campaigns?

Yes. You would make your own module and then create a new campaign inside it. Any campaigns that are found in any of the modules on the local computer will show up as campaigns you can pick when you start a new game.

Q: Can you extend the existing campaign?

Yes. We have objects called ports that you can use to go between islands and dungeons. If you make your own island or dungeon and “register” it with a port in the existing campaign then players can travel to your island or dungeon if they download your content. When we update the game this will still work as long as we don’t delete the port that you are registered with. If we do you will have to pick another one.

Q: I see there are islands, oceans, and docks. Can you sail ships between islands?

No. Getting the ship sailing working well and have it be fun would require a lot of effort. We would rather spend that time making the core game better. The reason we have islands is that we can add different biomes and they would make sense on separate islands. We also want the game to be expandable so we, and players can add new content. You technically will use ships but it will be a loading screen and not represented in gameplay.

Q: Do you have horses and can you ride them?

Not initially and potentially never, we aren’t sure yet. We have fast travel checkpoints that you can travel between once you discover them to travel within islands quicker. The problem with horses is that our map sizes are currently limited to four square kilometers due to memory restrictions so they would be extremely unnecessary. We are going to be doing research and development into level streaming and if we can simulate a much larger landmass then horses will come into the development plan.

Q: Do you have dungeons?

Yes. We have several different dungeon types and plan to add more during early access to give a wide variety of dungeon types.

Q: Is this is a survival game or do you have survival mechanics?

No. There are no hunger or thirst meters and you do not have to sleep. Food and drink is used to restore or give boosts to stats.

Q: Ultra widescreen support?

Not at the beginning of closed alpha but we plan to add it during closed alpha. We have to do some UI work to support different aspect ratios so right now we just support 16:9.

Q: Resolutions?

We do support several 16:9 resolutions but we do not go below 1920 x 1080 because at that resolution the editor interfaces are very difficult to read. There are still some UI issues we need to workout for higher resolutions like book pages scaling down so we recommend 1080p for now until everything is worked out.

Q: Controller support?

Not currently. We support only mouse and keyboard but we do support rebinding of keys. Before we go to console we will have controller support for the PC.

Q: How long is the campaign?

It’s hard to quantify right now exactly how long it will be at the start of early access and we plan to expand it through early access. It will probably never be as big as a AAA RPG but it will definitely be replayable. This is why we have spent a lot of time developing the integrated editor and will continue to improve it throughout early access so that players can expand our campaign or make their own campaigns to share with others.

Q: PVP?

No. There are no plans to do PVP. The idea of this game is to play through adventures solo or cooperatively with a few of your friends.

Q: Stealth?

We do not currently have stealth mechanics but we want to add them before early access.

Q: How big are the islands?

Our biggest islands are 4 square kilometers. We can fake larger landmasses by using loading screens. We are going to be doing research and development on level streaming, so this number might drastically increase later but we don’t want to promise it yet. We want to keep our memory footprint less than 8 GB so that we can run on current gen consoles.

Q: Will you be on consoles?

Hopefully. Early access will have to earn us enough money so that we can do a port and the port will probably not happen until we feel the game is complete. Which console(s) we will port to we do not know yet.

Q: Can I add my own models, animations, sounds, weapons, armor, characters etc?

Yes. We try to add everything to the game through our in game editor and that is also available to anyone that has the game. We will make our standard humanoid rig available to download so modders can add new armors and skins onto the standard rig. That way they can use all of the animations we have already created or create their own animations and have it compatible with the character systems. You can also add your own rig and your animations but if you want to use your character as a player then you will have to create all that animations for your rig which is over 400 and will be an enormous amount of work. We would recommend only using a new rig for monsters and not player characters.

If you are adding new assets like meshes, sounds and animations then you will need to download the free version of Unity, import your assets into unity, create the materials if needed, and then create an asset bundle and add your assets to this asset bundle. Then you can reference these assets from inside the in game editor.

Q: Can I do a total conversion?

No. We try to expose everything possible and have it all configurable through the in game editor and we try to do as much as we can through the same interfaces that players have access to but there are limitations. The UI is not customizable(yet). We use a third party asset to create the UI and we have a license to use it in the game but not to distribute it. We would have to develop a UI system on top of the one we are using and that probably will not happen. We also cannot distribute our project because we use multiple third party assets that we only have a license to use in a game but not to distribute. We do have a lot of support for visual scripting inside the in game editor that you can use. You can set up your own NPC brains, conversation trees, and triggers.

Q: Is stuff in the game procedurally generated?

For the most part no. You can procedurally generate an island with different biomes randomly generated. This gives a starting point so that you don’t have to manually place every tree and rock and terrain texture. After that you can change anything you want. When you paint biomes the biomes will automatically choose what objects from that biome to place and where. Other than the biomes everything else is handcrafted including NPCS, quests, buildings, and dungeons.

Q: Languages other than English?

Not at the start of early access and maybe not at all. We will probably never translate our audio speech to other languages. For text we will have to do a lot of work to allow for the ability to do localization. Not sure when or if that work will get done.

Q: Can you change FOV and other quality of life settings?

Yes. We have separate 1st person and 3rd person FOV settings. We have several quality levels and you can modify a lot of different settings independently. We have separate volumes for music, sounds, and chat.

Q: What is the combat like?

You can attack, power attack, block, parry, dodge, and kick to break blocks. There is also ranged combat and magic. Imagine something similar to dark souls but tweaked to not be as brutal and faster, and then add on the ability to hotkey spells weapons and consumables like an MMO.

Q: Integrated editor documentation?

We have started but not even close to finished editor documentation at:

Documentation [isles-of-adalar.fandom.com]

Q: What is planned in future updates?

Stealth mechanics, more biomes, more monsters, more assets, improving character models, weather, more story, expanding on magic and abilities, lots of bug fixes.
 

HoboForEternity

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
the built in co-op is surely gonna attrack some sizeable followers. outward, remnant: from the ashes are both successful because there is a demand for co-op campaign games, not all, but partly
 

HoboForEternity

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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Anyone play the demo yet? Thoughts?
played it. impression is not bad so far considering it's WIP

so you basically are on a ship, some earthquake happened, leaving you stranded in an island with several other survivors. the first quest involve you trying to kill or shoo the savage natives outside your cave.

+aesthetics definitely morrowind inspired. i love the monster design
+there are already more skillchecks in the cave compared to the entirety of of fallout 4 (exaggeration, but the dialogues mostly have skillchecks so far, some minor, like i picked up loremaster trait, and the character can make an educated guess of what happened and he deducted something magic related) i think you can intimidate the natives, but my game froze in loading screen.
+crafting seems to be deep. you can craft weapons, armor, runes, enchant. i dunno about spellcrafting yet.
+spells works in quickslot, and you can learn spells from books. there are several schools, i picked electromancy with shoots out bolt of lighting. there are fire, ice, lighting, decay and some other
+the armor looks varied
+dedicated dodge button (well, button combination space+directional button)

- inventory is list based
- alot of the UI is very convoluted which is obvious because it's WIP
- first person movement and jumping especially looks weird. it looks like character just teleported several centimeters above instead of gradually rising up
- spells hitting enemies isn't really clear. melee is surprisingly responsive, but ranged and magic half of the time you dont know if your spells hit or not
- health regenerate
- mana and stamina is the same
- attributes and skills are rolled into 1 category instead of attributes + skills + perks

tbh it's too early to tell, but it have potential
 

ironmask

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Joined
Jan 12, 2019
Messages
416
How do they expect to get the budget for this game; Kickstarter? I really doubt that they are going to get the money they need to make an Elder Scrolls like game. Skyrim's budget was over 80 million dollars and it's still a glitchfest. The reason we got kingdom come was because Warhorse studios got a publisher, and Warhourse got a publisher because they had well known game developers. This is a project being made by 3 newbies that nobody ever heard of. I respect people who try to make the games they love but they really need to scale down this project, if they want to exceed. Make it the size of Gothic or make it dungeon crawler like Ultima Underworld or Arx Fatalis.
 

HoboForEternity

sunset tequila
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
How do they expect to get the budget for this game; Kickstarter? I really doubt that they are going to get the money they need to make an Elder Scrolls like game. Skyrim's budget was over 80 million dollars and it's still a glitchfest. The reason we got kingdom come was because Warhorse studios got a publisher, and Warhourse got a publisher because they had well known game developers. This is a project being made by 3 newbies that nobody ever heard of. I respect people who try to make the games they love but they really need to scale down this project, if they want to exceed. Make it the size of Gothic or make it dungeon crawler like Ultima Underworld or Arx Fatalis.
It will probably be like outward, which is a flawed gem. The difference is with the mod support and co op, if they can build a strong modding community, it can be an amazing game. At the very best we could see something on the scale of enderal, and realistically mods would add some content where it is barren in the vanilla
 

LESS T_T

Arcane
Joined
Oct 5, 2012
Messages
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Codex 2014


Indiegogo campaign, with very ambitious goal of $275K: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/isles-of-adalar-co-op-rpg

Note that it's flexible goal scheme.

Short Summary

Peakway Software LLC is a small independent game studio located in North Carolina. We love computer role playing games and playing with friends so we wanted to make a game that combined both of those. We also love games with modding support so we wanted to make games that are as easy as possible to mod. The studio is run by Kevin Nelson, an industry veteran with credits on games such as Fallen Earth, Savage Skies, and Dinotopia.

We've decided pursue crowdfunding via Indiegogo in order to expand the team and give us more time to polish Isles of Adalar for an early access release in Summer 2020. Feel free to try our STEAM DEMO to see our work for yourself.

STEAM PAGE

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Game Design & Features


MULTIPLAYER

We've always wanted to experience this style of RPG with a few friends. With that in mind, Isles of Adalar will support up to four player co-op on release. However, we know multiplayer isn't for everyone so we will manually scale the difficulty of every encounter to keep the integrity of the single player game design.

MOD SUPPORT

Our vision is for Isles of Adalar to become known over time as a nearly endless RPG experience rich with narrative driven content. With this in mind we've designed our game to support mods and user generated content from the very beginning. Everything that exists in game is created using the same level editor that ships inside the game, so the modders have access to all the tools we use ourselves to create campaigns.

Just shipping tools for modding is not enough to realize our vision. We are going to be actively working to build up a creative community around our game. This starts with making tools as user friendly and efficient to use as possible so that small teams of only a handful of people can make large scale campaigns. But in addition to the tools we will also be giving players extra content that is not used in the base game so that their campaigns can feel unique. This will range from environmental biomes, to different styles of architecture and even new enemies.

ROLE PLAYING AND REPLAYABILITY

Choice and consequence is at the core of our dialogue system. We use a hybrid (mostly) text based system that features non specific voice lines for NPCs. This allows us to have in depth dialogue with the characters in the world but also gives the player necessary feedback to reflect the NPC's general attitude and response to the player. For example, you may try to intimidate a bandit and if you fail the speech check you may get a voiced response saying something like "I won't stand for this!" but the text can be more in depth and context specific.

Instead of using a speech skill to determine dialogue choices and persuasion success, the player can assign multiple personality traits to their character and these traits will give unique responses. The success or failure of a persuasion attempt is determined by both the player character's level and if a specific type of persuasion logically makes sense in the context of the situation.

reiuhx70ghho1mh6pega.png


What We Need & What You Get


$275,000

bsqfxiypnonanopwe4pm.jpg


We want to keep the rewards simple and straightforward:

  • Digital game downloads via Steam keys.
  • Access to private discord server and discord roles.
  • Name in credits.
  • Digital soundtrack.
  • Closed alpha access.
If we do not reach our entire goal the order of work and staff cut is as follows :

  • Soundtrack (Reward item will still be delivered sometime after Steam release)
  • Voice Acting
  • Additional Staff
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Risks & Challenges


The biggest challenge ahead of us is improving our tech, game optimization, and memory management. We've already developed most of the foundation and core gameplay features to a functional state. This game has been in development for the last four years. We've learned a lot in that time and are confident that we can finish what we started. Upgrading to Unity 2019.3 and using the High Definition Render Pipeline is going to be a key part of our plans moving forward.



Other Ways You Can Help


Even without financially supporting Isles of Adalar you can still help by :

  • Wishlisting Isles of Adalar on Steam.
  • Following us on YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook
  • Telling your friends about the game.
 

Max Heap

Arcane
Joined
Jul 21, 2011
Messages
617
Not unreasonable in the light of their goals but probably unattainable without a (good) reputation.
 
Joined
Dec 24, 2018
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1,783
I hope it succeeds. Would be nice to see some more competition in the genre. I'm not optimistic, but I'll be happy if they do well. Might give Bethesda the kick in the pants they need to make better products, or tempt other studios into trying their hand at the genre.

Skyrim's budget was over 80 million dollars and it's still a glitchfest.

I think that speaks more to Bethesda just pissing away money (especially on advertisement) than it does to an open world game costing tens of millions of dollars to make. I don't know what Morrowind's budget was but I very much doubt it had anything close to Skyrim's budget - yet it had more content and fewer bugs, and was much better out of the box than Skyrim is capable of being, mods or no mods. Many games these days have massive budgets, but they aren't reflective of the actual cost to make a game, they include things like advertising or payroll, which may or may not be necessary (payroll is obviously necessary to an extent, but how much you actually benefit from paying the dev well is questionable - it's more about getting the right people than paying them more for a better game) or for big famous/successful companies they can be just flat out waste like some of the shit that's going on at Chris Roberts' office.

Can these guys make something comparable to a TES game on the budget they're currently looking for? Probably not, but I don't think it's as far off as you're suggesting.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I think that speaks more to Bethesda just pissing away money (especially on advertisement) than it does to an open world game costing tens of millions of dollars to make. I don't know what Morrowind's budget was but I very much doubt it had anything close to Skyrim's budget - yet it had more content and fewer bugs, and was much better out of the box than Skyrim is capable of being, mods or no mods. Many games these days have massive budgets, but they aren't reflective of the actual cost to make a game, they include things like advertising or payroll, which may or may not be necessary (payroll is obviously necessary to an extent, but how much you actually benefit from paying the dev well is questionable - it's more about getting the right people than paying them more for a better game) or for big famous/successful companies they can be just flat out waste like some of the shit that's going on at Chris Roberts' office.

Can these guys make something comparable to a TES game on the budget they're currently looking for? Probably not, but I don't think it's as far off as you're suggesting.

Agreed. Just look at all those survival games with store-bought assets made by single guys or teams of 5 people. They don't have stellar budgets, instead they range from shoestring budget to mid-tier budget, and the quality of the games also varies highly. Many are derivative turds, while some are actually quite good.

Examples of decent to good games in the open world survival genre with hand-made worlds (rather than procedural) would be Planet Explorers (not great but decent and has actual quests and a storyline, basic as it may be) or The Long Dark (very good survival game with a large hand-made world to explore, and a story mode to play through). Neither had huge Bethesda-tier budgets, both have hand-made worlds rather than proc gen.

If you remove the crafting shit and focus more on the exploration and RPG elements, you can easily turn a game like that into an Elder Scrolls clone. The production cost would be roughly similar, except that a TES clone would need more quests and writing I guess.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
The Long Dark
wait, i thought it was like minecraft but with actual graphics. it's handcrafted? and have story mode? how does it compare with subnautica? (which is one of the most fun game i played this year)

I haven't played Subnautica yet, but it's on my wishlist.

The Long Dark has a handcrafted world and very strong survival elements. No major crafting like other survival games, here you don't build your own house, you just try to survive in the Canadian wilderness in winter, the things you can craft are tools, weapons, clothes, medicine. There are three game modes: survival (you are dropped into a part of the world of your choosing, and have to survive as long as possible), challenges (you are presented with a specific challenge like "find a signal gun and go to the high lighthouse to fire it"), and story mode (three chapters of story to play through, with quests and shit).

It's one of the better survival games I've played since it actually focuses on the survival aspect. Find enough layers of clothing to put on ASAP so you don't lose body temp when outside. Don't go outside during a storm even when you have two layers of thick jackets because the wind is gonna cut into you, visibility is complete shit, and you won't be able to spot predators coming at you. If you see a bear, fucking run because it'll maul you. Don't get cocky. I had several well-going games where I died due to becoming overconfident. "I have a gun and a handful of bullets, enough canned food to last me for days, and three layers of clothing keeping me warm. What can go wrong?"

Story mode is pretty good, too. You play 2 chapters from the perspective of Mackenzie, gruff bearded guy, and one chapter from the perspective of Astrid, the chick who convinced him to fly into the area in the first place.

Definitely worth playing if you like survival games, but it's not a crafting game. It's actually about surviving in a hostile wilderness.
 

V_K

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Well, KCD has a reported budget of $36 mil, and Witcher 3, $81 mil, roughly 1/3 of which were production costs. And they both were produced in Eastern Europe with its cheap workforce.
 

Alpan

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Grab the Codex by the pussy Pathfinder: Wrath
"Adalar" means isles/islands in Turkish. A weird coincidence for what appears to be an American indie studio.
 

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