Grade A post - I agree with a lot of it, and if nothing else it is excellent in the way you argue your points.
I do disagree very strongly with you in one case, however, and that's the level of demand of clarity you have for Kickstarters. Here's why:
1) Investments fail and investors invest in risky business precisely because the results are hard to define, but if met, the demands which arise from the promises can be glorious and worth more than the investment. This is the reason for pledging even though details are largely unknown, and there is no tangible documentation of the product.
2) "A clear vision statement and mission document is not tangible documentation", you might argue, and you'd be correct. However, Kickstarters don't need to satisfy 3 or 4 heavy investors, or even 50 or 100. Project Eternity had to satisfy almost 80.000 stakeholders to get to where it got to. As such, the very system of Kickstarter encourages vagueness. The key to making money seems to be
as vague as possible before it starts actively costing you money because people want to know more. In other words, as little information as you can possible get away with makes sense in the system, because if people know
just enough to donate but not enough to retract their donation then the money will flow in. Saying "this will be like BG, IWD and Torment" is too little info to get people donating, supporting that with "it will be party-based, 6 party members, story-focused and with some modern design stuff" is enough, but going further and saying "it will have cooldowns, romances and only contain 20 hours of play because RPGs are expensive" is too much. Do you follow? Shaker by Tom and Brenda missed the mark by giving out too little info, and there are plenty of projects that gave too much. Shadowrun gave too little info for me to donate. If I recall correctly you donated heavily to P:E, which enforces this theory. More information might have turned you off, so why provid it? A cynical view, perhaps, but I think it's close to the truth. "Shouldn't that give us pause as consumers?" you ask. Well, I think there's a very good reason it shouldn't, see below.
3) Just to get it out of the way: Of course, the exception to the two statements I just made are the Kickstarter projects that already have become a tangible product. I.e. "we're almost done with this shit, here it is, give us money to expand/finish." I.e. Legend of Eisenwald for example. These projects often stand or fall by the quality of their actual product.
This leads us to the following point:
Isn't number 1) and 2) basically defending your viewpoint? If 1) and 2) is true, then we should pressure developers to provide more info, so we can make more reasonable choices, right? Well, no.
I see it as evident that we've been criticising the industry for taking far too little risk in their video game endeavours the last 10 years. We demanded more risks, more refreshing games on the one hand, and a return to form on the other. But a return to form that was risky in itself, a return to form that wasn't necessarily sellable or profitable from a market perspective. From the first point evidently follows that we as gamers need to be ready to take risks, and from the second follows that we must accept that to gain the maximum backing for these sorts of projects, the developers have to be vague so as not to turn people off from what is a risky venture. If they promise the Codex exactly what we want, we won't get it, because the audience will be too small. If they promise the refugee biowhores what they want, the old-school crowd won't touch it. If they openly stated what is probably the truth - that this game will cater to both crowds in some way or fashion - both crowds would be enraged by the parts of the game that catered to the other. The end result is that we have to bet on the fact that we will be more happy than the other camp, or that both camps will be equally happy, or if that fails, that we will at least get a product that is better than the barren RPG wasteland (no pun intended) we've been maneuvering through the last 10 years.
Am I saying the Kickstarters are lying? Hell yeah. We're dealing with people trying to sell a product, of course they're only selling the great points. Your point here is that we have to be more critical as consumers, and I'm right there with you on that one. That's why I brofisted your post. We have to start demanding our money's worth, we don't need to "support" Obsidian at this point, we don't need to apologise for them, just attempt to keep them on track and keep asking them what they're doing. We're done making sure they get the money to make the game we want. Let's make sure that's what they make. So that's where I agree with you. Where I disagree with you is that I don't think this means we have to demand clear vision documents and details on the mechanics before the Kickstarter is done. If we want a resurgence of these kinds of RPGs which have little to no bearing on the current market, we have to take our chances, we have to take this one shot we've been given and give it all we got. If we let this chance pass us by we're hardly like to get another in the foreseeable future.
In other words, and I've made this point before, the Kickstarter projects will almost certainly be
much, much better than the nothing we've been treated to for ten years. And of top of this, there's a chance that i might, just might, a) result in really good games and b) spread these kind of games to a wider audience and change some of the current paradigms.
If this whole thing tanks big, if we're going to be faced with a worst-case scenario, well, the RPG situation can't become much worse than it is currently, can it? All we've lost in the process is a few dollars trying to make our hobby work.
tl;dr: I agree that we should be critical consumers, I agree that the Obsidian apologists should shut their trap now that Kickstarter is over and stop zealously defending every ignorant thing Josh or Chris says, but I also think we should support these efforts and generally be very optimistic about old-school RPGs on Kickstarter and the Kickstarter phenomena. It's all we've got at the moment.
