KickStarter Psychonauts 2

[Ivan]

Mr. Shitface will never release this scam.

He will release it, but it will be just another unremarkable stupid kiddie game of his.

Psychonauts 1 was his last really good game, everything that followed was some uninspired, hyped-up shit.

Stacking>Psychonauts

 

[Morgoth]

http://www.pcgamer.com/psychonauts-2-wont-be-released-next-year/

Delayed into 2019.

...or maybe 2020.

 

[Metro]

Even Molyneaux is ashamed.

 

[Ivan]

 

[J_C]

http://www.pcgamer.com/psychonauts-2-wont-be-released-next-year/

Delayed into 2019.

...or maybe 2020.

Or it will never see the light of day and Tim already spent all of the backer money amirite?

 

[deama]

Hmm, was hoping it'd be set several years after 1st psychonauts.

 

[LESS T_T]

The VR spin-off thing is now out on PC:

 

[Boleskine]

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Ford Cruller confirmed to return, nice there.

 

[HoboForEternity]

this shit has been in development for 2+ years and only have 7 post-campaign updates. smell like another disaster in the making. i would argue it's best spending time actually developing the game instead of making update, but 7 in the span of 2 years and 3 months is unacceptable. most reliable kickstarter projects have updates at least once in 2 months. it should be at least a dozen and honestly we haven't seen anything of the game except for somehow they can make a VR spin off.

 

[J_C]

this shit has been in development for 2+ years and only have 7 post-campaign updates. smell like another disaster in the making. i would argue it's best spending time actually developing the game instead of making update, but 7 in the span of 2 years and 3 months is unacceptable. most reliable kickstarter projects have updates at least once in 2 months. it should be at least a dozen and honestly we haven't seen anything of the game except for somehow they can make a VR spin off.

Blah, blah blah. Double Fine can't allow themselves to fail on this, since they have their own money and outside investor money at stake, not just the backer money. Also, they probably learned their lessons about showing and telling everything to the gamers, they just work on the game instead.

 

[Life of the Party]

 

[mwnn85]

Looks quite nice; there's even a few quality of life improvements stuck in there like the adjusted levitation ball.
Raz looks quite a bit more flexible and the quarry hub map they shown is huge.
We'll just have to see if going the huge open world route will be at the detriment of the excellent mind levels.

Nintendo have set the benchmark again with Breath of the Wild and Super Mario Odyssey so any new platformer has to be at least as good as those.
Surely it can't be as dull and repetitive as Brutal Legend? I don't believe Psychonauts was a fluke!

As I didn't get burnt by Massive Chalice or Broken Age I'm not really pissed off with Double Fine.
To be honest other than Psychonauts and the three Lucasarts remasters I don't particularly rate any of their other games.
Presumably they just fire those out to keep the lights on.

 

[Dexter]

 

[Unkillable Cat]

What that trailer hints at... :D

I'll be sorely disappointed if this won't be one of the big releases of 2019 2020 2021 whenever.

 

[HoboForEternity]

i dont have faith in tim schafer despite loving psychonauts and multitudes of his work in late 90s and early 2000s. dude's lost it

 

[J_C]

i dont have faith in tim schafer despite loving psychonauts and multitudes of his work in late 90s and early 2000s. dude's lost it

Well he tried all kinds of different new games, which you might not like, but looking at all the stuff from this game, it looks perfectly faithful to the original. He won't try to reinvent the wheel with this one.

 

[Crooked Bee]

I have no faith in tim schafer either, but I must admit that trailer looks pretty cool. I am kinda, sorta hyped.

 

[Egosphere]

Looks like a proper sequel. Will definitely buy it.

 

[Ivan]

What that trailer hints at... :D

I'll be sorely disappointed if this won't be one of the big releases of 2019 2020 2021 whenever.

it's been a while, refresh my memory

 

[Unkillable Cat]

What that trailer hints at... :D

it's been a while, refresh my memory

Admiral Ford Cruller was one of the greatest Psychonauts of all time, until he literally lost his mind while battling an undisclosed threat. Unable to function as a Psychonaut afterwards due to his fragmented mind, he was placed in charge of the Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp, where he worked as the cook, the groundskeeper, scoutmaster and boatsman, as well as retaining a small fragment of his own personality that helped out Raz on his adventures.

The trailer hints at the possibility that he was the threat himself.

There's also the standing question about Milla Vodello's past, which was hinted at in a well-hidden mental vault in the first game.

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Infinitron]

Still with Starbreeeze, for now: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-02-25-psychonauts-and-surviving-the-publisher-shuffle

Psychonauts and surviving the publisher shuffle
Tim Schafer says the studio's experiences with partners aren't that unusual, addresses struggles of Psychonauts 2 publisher Starbreeze

Double Fine Productions' history with publishers is nothing if not complicated.

The company's debut title Psychonauts was dropped by Microsoft before being picked up and released by Majesco. Brutal Legend was dropped after its original publisher's parent Vivendi Games merged with Activision, which decided it wasn't exploitable enough to publish. Then when Electronic Arts stepped in to do the honors, Activision Blizzard filed a lawsuit to stop it. (It would later be settled out of court.)

More recently, the studio laid off a dozen people after a publisher unexpectedly canned an unannounced title.

Now the company is readying Psychonauts 2 for launch later this year, but its current publisher, Starbreeze Studios, is not in the best financial shape.

We spoke with Double Fine founder and studio head Tim Schafer at DICE earlier this month, and he took exception to the idea that his studio's experiences with publishers have been especially uncommon in games.

"It's hard out there for a developer," Schafer said. "Our company is not unique in that we've had a rollercoaster ride with different publishers for sure, but it's just part of the business. After Microsoft cancelled Psychonauts, we still worked with them again on Kinect Party and Iron Brigade. We worked with Majesco [on Psychonauts] then worked with them again on [Majesco's sub-brand] Midnight City. Publishers have their ups and downs just like we do."

So if Starbreeze doesn't have an up following its current down, what does that mean for Double Fine and Psychonauts 2? What's the worst-case scenario here?

"I mean, it wouldn't be good," Schafer acknowledged. "But the game is funded by multiple sources. We had our crowdfunding campaign, Double Fine's own revenue, and Starbreeze as a publisher. And they've continued to be supportive. They've been supporting the game and have pledged they're definitely still capable of publishing it. So we have high hopes for that."

And in the event Starbreeze can't right its ship, Schafer is optimistic that Psychonauts 2 could be the third Double Fine game to find a new publisher after the original one dropped out.

"At a show like DICE, other publishers come by and say, 'Yeah, how's that going? If anything happens, give us a call,'" he said. "With Psychonauts 2 having been high profile and already having a great trailer out there, there would be enough interest in other people funding it and finishing it if something happened. But I've got no reason to believe Starbreeze isn't going to come through and publish it well."

Schafer's right in that developers being dropped by their publishers is not a terribly uncommon thing in games. But it's certainly less common to see developers survive having that happen to them publicly this many times.

"We've survived for a long time because we're very nimble and are able to shift when something like that happens," Schafer said. "We have a very committed team. When Psychonauts 1 was cancelled, the team was just focused on making a good game and continued to work even though we didn't know where the rest of the money would come from."


Double Fine isn't looking over its shoulder expecting the worst

Naturally it also helps that Double Fine has expanded to juggle multiple projects at once and diversified its funding sources.

"If one engine goes out on the airplane, we're much more stable than we were back when we were a single-engine Cessna back in the early days," Schafer said.

That said, there's a point of diminishing returns on some of those efforts.

"There have been points in our history where we've been internally developing eight games because we were getting into mobile and trying really small teams," Schafer said. "We tested that out, and I think we still like to be in between the 15-person team and not as big as a 60-person team. Psychonauts 2 isn't the only game we're working on. It's a large piece of the studio, but there's still another 15 or so working on another unannounced title."

That doesn't necessarily mean that Double Fine will return to making numerous smaller games once Psychonauts 2 ships. As Schafer explained, it all depends on the projects in front of them.

"There are so many games I want to make that are not as big as Psychonauts, but maybe bigger than Costume Quest," he said. "Our teams are really nimble. Psychonauts is like three of our small teams put together, so after this they can become three teams again, or two of them put together. We try to stay flexible and do whatever's right for the game idea.

While Double Fine has made adaptations like that to better survive in the market as an independent studio, Schafer suggested they haven't changed much about how they deal with publishers.

"We always go into a relationship with good faith and hope that everything's going to work out great," he said. "We have always strived to protect ourselves on business deals, but there is this leap of faith you take when you take on a partner. But I think we've always managed to survive the crazy things that happen on the end because of maybe our size, our commitment to being alive, our tenacity...

"There's just a lot of drive at the company to exist; we have a unique perspective and a unique type of company that doesn't exist a lot anymore. The size we're at and the level of independence we have is so uncommon that it definitely brings a lot of people who want to work for a company like that. So people feel like it's something worth fighting for."

 

[aratuk]

Still with Starbreeeze, for now: https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-02-25-psychonauts-and-surviving-the-publisher-shuffle

More recently, the studio laid off a dozen people after a publisher unexpectedly canned an unannounced title.

While technically that is *more* recent, it was still five years ago. Didn't notice until I saw "remaining projects are unaffected" is a list of games that were all released in 2015.

Of course Schaefer isn't going to indicate any potential problems while there is still a contract in place, unless shit is irredeemable and he's on his way to court.

 

[LESS T_T]

With Microsoft's acquisition of Double Fine, Starbreeze no more. This is published by Microsoft: