Wadjet Eye Old Skies - time travel adventure game from Wadjet Eye - coming Q2 2025

[MRY]

http://www.wadjeteyegames.com/games/old-skies/




https://af.gog.com/game/old_skies?as=1649904300

Spoiler

BOOM!

DaveGilbert finally reveals Old Skies, "a huge part of my creative journey," and the future of WEG-style: https://gamejolt.com/games/oldskies/420836

It's only going to get better from here, because Dave "didn't involve [his] staff at all," and in the meanwhile, Ben Chandler has been completing his transition to 3D.

I haven't had a chance to play it yet, but from the Twitter buzz, I gather a worthy successor to Unavowed, especially given the development constraints of working in a two-week game jam.

 

[Alpan]

This is, at best, deserving of the immortal Ira Glass taste quote. No doubt Gilbert is not 16 and knows this himself; yet here it feels like his emotional investment in the grueling learning process has led him to believe he has something appealing at hand.

It's only going to get better from here

Great things happened the first time adventure games attempted a transition to 3D -- they will happen again now that it's the indies' turn.

 

[MRY]

Nice write-up in PC Gamer:

Wadjet Eye's Dave Gilbert is one of the best adventure game designers around, and together with artist Ben Chandler he's responsible for the likes of the Blackwell series and Unavowed. ... Wadjet Eye is known for its 2D adventure games, both as a publisher and developer, but it's starting to dabble in 3D adventures. ... Old Skies is a brief sci-fi yarn where a time-traveller from the future has been sent back to our era to stop someone from messing with the timeline. There are a couple of very simple puzzles, a city street to explore and you'll be done in five or ten minutes, depending on how much time you spend just wandering around. ... It's the writing and world-building that made me gloomy when the credits rolled. With only a few minutes and just the basics, Gilbert's managed to create intriguing characters and a time travel conceit that, while extremely familiar, has promise. I would absolutely play more Old Skies.

Sounds like the birth of a franchise. A lot of people forget that Technobabylon also started out a small freeware games, and Dave may be following up his success there with this.

 

[Alpan]

A difficult development process and two weeks of work resulting in ten minutes of barebones gameplay.

This is a sustainable method of adventure games development that has not already spectacularly failed and sparked a return to simpler principles many years ago. It would appear Gilbert needs to travel back in time himself.

 

[MRY]

The Act 3 twist is that he already has! "No, Dave, you are the old skies."

In all seriousness, say what you will about how Telltale ended, it made a boatload of money en route and spectacularly enriched the principals in involved. Dave has said a thousand times he doesn't want to make retro games, he wants to make successful story-telling games, and Telltale provides a model to do that for at least a few years, after which, there's always walking sims and then a return to 320x200!

 

[Alpan]

My objection has less to do with Telltale's fate than the fact that Telltale is the sole representative of its model.

And for all their faults -- Telltale at least had the sense to roll their own tools, because they recognized that the mastery of tools was a prerequisite for rapid prototyping and development. Dave Gilbert's struggles with Unity will not end.

 

[Infinitron]

My objection has less to do with Telltale's fate than the fact that Telltale is the sole representative of its model.

Not quite. Dontnod Entertainment, the Life is Strange devs, are a more successful Telltale than the actual Telltale.

 

[Alpan]

You are correct, I overlooked Dontnod. Still, both companies operate at a scale quite different from Gilbert.

 

[Dualnames]

Imho, technologies and everything regarding 2d 3d etc. If a game is great it will be great where it's meant to be great at. For instance, Stardew Valley is a 2d game, yet it's more succesfull than a lot of higher budget, higher production value projects out there. If a game has heart, it has everything. That's what I think, I'm a hopeless romantic tho, and probably would be the first to die in a full scale war of any kind. So I'm a wimp, spit on me.

 

[MRY]

I'm a hopeless romantic tho, and probably would be the first to die in a full scale war of any kind.

Not so fast! This presidential candidate has something to say:

 

[MRY]

You are correct, I overlooked Dontnod. Still, both companies operate at a scale quite different from Gilbert.

Don't be too quick to dismiss Dave on this. As he said earlier, he now has a full-time "staff" working on his games, though he did not deploy that manpower on Old Skies (yet).

 

[Alpan]

I'm not dismissing him at all -- I enjoy a good downfall as much as (if not more than) a success story, so here's hoping he doesn't change course.

 

[taxalot]

Unavowed was a game that was bankrupt idea wise and gameplay wise.
This is what he needs to fix instead of focusing on graphics. At the rate he's going, his future path is glorified walking simulators.

 

[Atrachasis]

I just took the bullet for all of you. These were painful five minutes.

At the rate he's going, his future path is glorified walking simulators.

He's halfway there, this IS a walking simulator, except it's not glorified.

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt: surely production values are going to be better for a commercial game that he is committing full resources to, than for this freebie, which stands apart from the early 3D era only in its choice of a garish color scheme.

I fear, though, that the gameplay design choices seen here may be more indicative of a philosophy that might carry over to his commercial projects. There's no inventory, and the left mouse button serves as a generic "interaction" key that automatically executes a pre-defined action determined entirely by the game state and by the object you're pointing at. No player agency, except in moving around until you find the right object to click at. And there's a Witcher sense, too (disguised as a "tracking device") that tells you where the three items you can pick up are located. There's two dialogues with multiple answers, but in the first one, I was simply able to exhaust all the "wrong" answers without any negative consequences. The second and final dialogue seems railroaded as well; I actually replayed the thing to see if I could get an alternate ending by picking another option, but no luck. Even though this is so close to the end that it wouldn't have taken any significant additional resources to provide one.

It's probably dangerous to extrapolate from this little freebie done with extremely limited resources to his future commercial offerings, but it surely does not bode well either. There are plenty of walking simulators around that at least look a lot prettier than this, so I'm not sure what his future games are supposed to bring to the market as USPs.

But, hey, maybe he's just trolling his detractors with this little gem, and his first proper commercial 3D game will feature branching dialogue and inventory puzzles galore. One can still hope!

 

[MRY]

The thing is, Unavowed has had >10 average simultaneous players every month since its release. To put that in perspective, Primordia, which is the most consistently played Wadjet Eye title other than Unavowed and the only other one that wasn't put in the Humble Bundle, has had 13 months in which it averaged >10 players (out of 79 months of release). So Primordia matches Unavowed player numbers only during its most extravagant successes; Unavowed puts those numbers up rain or shine; and most WEG titles never put them up (Blackwell Epiphany had >10 average simultaneous players once, in the month of its release, for instance). Dave finally figured out a formula that works for WEG, and now he's refining/distilling that formula.

Ultimately, he's a prime example of my instinct to defer to the successful as to what is likely to succeed. He's been making commercial adventure games for over a decade; he's made well over seven figures off of the titles he published (vastly more than any retro adventure game developer has); he's a renowned public speaker on game narratives; etc. Pretty much, if Dave Gilbert jumped off a cliff, a fair surmise would be that either there's a wildfire at the top or a pot of gold at the bottom, and only someone stubborn / hobbyist enough to not care about fire or fortune wouldn't follow him over. If I had to make my bread on adventure games, I'd probably take the hint from his success and make "glorified walking sims," too. I'm lucky enough that I can make the games I want without chasing the market. Dave is lucky that the games he wants to make are the games rewarded by the market (i.e., narrative-focused, puzzle-lite, focused on current norms and trends, etc.).

 

[bertram_tung]

Well, if that is the case, it's just such a disappointing plot twist. After everything he has done to help pioneer a renaissance era of adventure game incline, his ultimate dream all along was to make shitty walking simulators. How ironic. Life is endless suffering.

 

[Dexter]

Not quite. Dontnod Entertainment, the Life is Strange devs, are a more successful Telltale than the actual Telltale.

Shouldn't you wait for some actual data confirming such a thing before trying to make an unqualified statement like that? To me it very much looks like they're following in Telltale's footsteps, having one breakout hit and gradual diminishing returns as people don't even want to touch their Free offerings to the same amount anymore e.g. Captain Autismo:

 

[bertram_tung]

Big Bad Wolf would have been a better example of "telltale done right" than Dontnod. With "The Council" and their upcoming Vampire the Masquerade game, I think they may do a good job of making Tell Tale style games the right way - with at least a modicum of interactive puzzles, literary substance, and abstract thinking involved to advance the narrative. Not sure how the financials compare, though.

 

[MRY]

Well, if that is the case, it's just such a disappointing plot twist. After everything he has done to help pioneer a renaissance era of adventure game incline, his ultimate dream all along was to make shitty walking simulators. How ironic. Life is endless suffering.

His ultimate dream was to tell stories to eager audiences. [Edit, or maybe more precisely, the get rich telling stories to eager audiences -- unlike idiots like me, Dave likes to get paid for his work!]

 

[Atrachasis]

Dave finally figured out a formula that works for WEG, and now he's refining/distilling that formula.

Not really. Gameplay-wise, yes, he's converging on the walking sim formula. Good for him! At the same time, he's doing a radical switch to 3D, but to bad-looking 3D (unless he and his team manage to pull off a whole lot of catching-up from what has been circulating as screenshots so far - and in that case, releasing this freebie may not have been the smartest marketing move).

Good-looking walking simulators will find their audience. Say what you want about Unavowed, but it looked pretty. Good-looking 2D walking simulators with decent writing, that's a market niche that I understand going for.

But walking simulators with bad 3D graphics and clunky controls? That is quite a cliff to jump off.

 

[Alpan]

Dave finally figured out a formula that works for WEG, and now he's refining/distilling that formula.

But walking simulators with bad 3D graphics and clunky controls? That is quite a cliff to jump off.

This is the crux of the matter and the focus of my disagreement -- there is no indication that Dave Gilbert's successful model (and it is successful given Unavowed's numbers) will survive the transition to 3D.

 

[Infinitron]

Not quite. Dontnod Entertainment, the Life is Strange devs, are a more successful Telltale than the actual Telltale.

Shouldn't you wait for some actual data confirming such a thing before trying to make an unqualified statement like that? To me it very much looks like they're following in Telltale's footsteps, having one breakout hit and gradual diminishing returns as people don't even want to touch their Free offerings to the same amount anymore e.g. Captain Autismo:

Sure, you're probably right, but I'd say they still count as more successful than Telltale just because they're not killing themselves by overextending like Telltale did. It's not a high bar to clear. Also Vampyr did well and they didn't make Before the Storm.

 

[toro]

Not quite. Dontnod Entertainment, the Life is Strange devs, are a more successful Telltale than the actual Telltale.

Shouldn't you wait for some actual data confirming such a thing before trying to make an unqualified statement like that? To me it very much looks like they're following in Telltale's footsteps, having one breakout hit and gradual diminishing returns as people don't even want to touch their Free offerings to the same amount anymore e.g. Captain Autismo:

Sure, you're probably right, but I'd say they still count as more successful than Telltale just because they're not killing themselves by overextending like Telltale did. It's not a high bar to clear. Also Vampyr did well and they didn't make Before the Storm.

Speaking about that: https://www.dontnod-bourse.com/fr/i...s/communiques-de-presse.html?ID=ACTUS-0-58782

DONTNOD SIGNE UN ACCORD STRATÉGIQUE AVEC EPIC GAMES ET DEVIENT COPRODUCTEUR DE TWIN MIRROR

• Signature d'un partenariat exclusif avec Epic Games pour la distribution de Twin Mirror sur PC
• Acquisition des droits de propriété intellectuelle du jeu
• Poursuite de la collaboration avec BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment en charge du publishing, du marketing et de la distribution du titre sur consoles
• Renforcement du potentiel de la licence pour une sortie en 2020 avec le soutien d'un nouveau partenaire, Shibuya Productions

DONTNOD SIGNS STRATEGIC AGREEMENT WITH EPIC GAMES AND BECOMES COPRODUCER OF TWIN MIRROR

Signature of an exclusive partnership with Epic Games for the distribution of Twin Mirror on PC
Acquisition of the intellectual property rights of the game
Continued collaboration with BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment in charge of publishing, marketing and distribution of the title on consoles
Strengthening the license's potential for an exit in 2020 with the support of a new partner, Shibuya Productions

 

[Boleskine]

It seems there are two discussions going on here - one about what avenue is most fruitful in a financial sense, and what avenue would be most appealing in a creative sense.

Meanwhile...

 

[MRY]

That's awesome! Though weird -- in the 2013 summer sale when Primordia launched, it sold 10,188 copies itself, and I had always thought that Gemini Rue and Resonance (which launched that year) sold well, too. I guess not?