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The Long Journey Home- - Star Control 2-inspired roguelike from Daedalic Entertainment
- Thread starter vonAchdorf
- Start date
rezaf
Cipher
- Joined
- Jan 26, 2015
- Messages
- 665
In my eyes, an important point is that the repetitive task ought to be fairly easy and/or fun. What types of games will fit this definition changes with time.
Today, looking at popular mobile games would probably a good idea, since those games are by definition usually created as "side activities". Maybe a match3 variant? A flappy bird clone? Some sort of "endless runner"?
In any event, chosing a fairly challenging and time consuming type of game probably wasn't the wisest decision.
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MRY
Wormwood Studios
I wonder if they've considered an away-team DLC using QWOP controls? Also, up to 11,000k copies sold on Steam and 73% user score. The accelerando is real. Singularity soon. Should easily outsell its direct inspiration Out There (59k copies, 77% user score). Getting ahead of Flotilla looks very real.
For those curious, here's the glowing review for Out There on RPS. It's interesting to see how the same things they praise in Out There they criticize in TLJH: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/01/28/out-there-release-date-pc/
For those curious, here's the glowing review for Out There on RPS. It's interesting to see how the same things they praise in Out There they criticize in TLJH: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/01/28/out-there-release-date-pc/
MRY
Wormwood Studios
I'd somehow missed that XBox One and PS4 versions were following next month. I guess that explains the controller issue.
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 100,516
After reading the review I get something that makes me feel weird about this game. Fail, learn, fail, learn, etc. is a perfectly good model for a lot of games, and maybe this one too. The thing is, this game is also supposed to be a story. An emergent story, to be sure, but still a sensible and coherent one I hope. It's also supposed to be a story about a group of people totally out of their element, somehow surviving an unfamiliar situation. That ignorance is key to the story's interest.
What happens in this game, though, is that the player replays until the unfamiliar becomes familiar, then imbues the characters with that familiarity for subsequent playthroughs. If each playthrough can be likened to a draft for a book or movie, then the first x drafts won't be great stories because the heroes fail prematurely, and the latter x drafts won't be great stories because the characters will only be successful due to metaknowledge. ("A strange race of robots eh? Something tells me they love salt water taffy! Good thing we saved cargo space for that." "What the hell are you talking about? We needed that space for fuel!" "Call it a hunch." Not good writing.) I guess this is all fine for a video game where the story doesn't have to make sense for it to be fun anyway, but it seems like it'll be disappointing. I wish it seemed possible to play through to the end without using information the crew couldn't possibly have.
What happens in this game, though, is that the player replays until the unfamiliar becomes familiar, then imbues the characters with that familiarity for subsequent playthroughs. If each playthrough can be likened to a draft for a book or movie, then the first x drafts won't be great stories because the heroes fail prematurely, and the latter x drafts won't be great stories because the characters will only be successful due to metaknowledge. ("A strange race of robots eh? Something tells me they love salt water taffy! Good thing we saved cargo space for that." "What the hell are you talking about? We needed that space for fuel!" "Call it a hunch." Not good writing.) I guess this is all fine for a video game where the story doesn't have to make sense for it to be fun anyway, but it seems like it'll be disappointing. I wish it seemed possible to play through to the end without using information the crew couldn't possibly have.
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MRY
Wormwood Studios
Up to 20k sales on Steam, its Metacritic score and user score continue to tick upwards, and its Steam and GOG reviews remain very favorable. Pretty well positioned going into the Summer Sale, as long as it's put on a solid discount. I'd say it looks like a sleeper hit at this point.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
It's because the Codex doesn't give a score, right? I bet if you had ended with: "95/100: A spiritual successor to Star Control II that improves on the original in every way, The Long Journey Home is a triumph of challenging design." you would now be plastered across the Internet. You need to refine your shilling to a quick takeaway or its not helpful for advertising! :D
MRY
Wormwood Studios
For a whimsical, British-humored space adventure about an international crew of women and men, Kotaku is the relevant publication. If anything, the Codex might scare off the target audience. 
MRY
Wormwood Studios
I don't know why they didn't get blurbs. It's strange that that phenomenon is used only for Kickstarters. As I think about it, it's really the next frontier for these things -- much cheaper than advertising in publications and guaranteed to yield a good result.
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http://www.empik.com/the-long-journey-home-daedalic-west,p1143045857,multimedia-p
That promo has ended.
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Sad that they refuse to fix the "you have to waste fuel to see where you're going" issue as that looked like the most annoying thing from the review. Also disappointed (though not surprised I guess) that they're not offering a deeper sale than their preorder price for the Steam sale. Still too new I guess.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
They can't steeply discount because it will cause problems for the MSRP of the console releases, which I assume they are trusting will be prove the core demographic, since there won't be the same control issues and since they won't be saddled with hostile Steam/GOG reviews. The problem is that if they sell it for $15 on Steam and $40 on PS4, no one will buy it on PS4 because it will feel like a rip off. I imagine at Thanksgiving we'll see a big cut.
MRY
Wormwood Studios
Is "die Steuerung ... ist eine Katastrophe!" a meme? It seems to show up in lots of German player reviews and commentary about the game? Here's a recent one: http://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561198048996374/recommended/366910/
I'm disappointed it wasn't discounted more -- I'm ready to relax my "never more than $10" rule, despite my excitement, but $35 is silly. Was hoping for something in the $15-$20 range, but I guess Thanksgiving or maybe a flash sale is the best bet.
I'm disappointed it wasn't discounted more -- I'm ready to relax my "never more than $10" rule, despite my excitement, but $35 is silly. Was hoping for something in the $15-$20 range, but I guess Thanksgiving or maybe a flash sale is the best bet.
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2015
- Messages
- 21,194
MRY
Wormwood Studios
It's doing pretty well, I think. Early on, Richard and his teammates expressed concern about the game's Mixed rating on Steam, but they've solicited enough reviews to keep it at 70%, which means that the clear majority of players are happy. Surely most games can't say that! 90% of people who bought the game have played it, which is very high for its genre -- for instance, the game that it was apparently based on, Out There: Omega, has only 80% of its purchasers playing, and other similar tier space games have even worse player rates (50% for Flotilla and 68% for Space Pirates and Zombies). It has considerably outperformed similar low-budget rogue-like space games that have come out after the "indie boom" -- like Space Rogue (8000 sold), Distant Star (17500 sold), Star Command Galaxies (9000 sold). On GOG, its top review is a glowing five-star review and it has a very strong four-star average (Space Rogue is 3.5, by contrast).
It was never going to be FTL: it lacked the easy name recognition from a successful Kickstarter, it didn't come out during the indie game boom, it didn't have Chris Avellone attached to it, it costs four times as much, etc. You can't expect a scrappy team like Daedelic West to compete with something like that, or to catch lighting in a bottle at the same place twice, to mix idioms. What they did was go into a very crowded genre, without name recognition or a huge budget, and won the hearts of almost all their players -- even the heart of the Codex! And they made millions of dollars to boot.
Also, remember that the PC was just an extended balancing test environment for the console launch. They've now had an opportunity to reset the difficulty to a more casual level, so when it gets its main release on PS4 and XBox, it'll big a huge hit.
It was never going to be FTL: it lacked the easy name recognition from a successful Kickstarter, it didn't come out during the indie game boom, it didn't have Chris Avellone attached to it, it costs four times as much, etc. You can't expect a scrappy team like Daedelic West to compete with something like that, or to catch lighting in a bottle at the same place twice, to mix idioms. What they did was go into a very crowded genre, without name recognition or a huge budget, and won the hearts of almost all their players -- even the heart of the Codex! And they made millions of dollars to boot.
Also, remember that the PC was just an extended balancing test environment for the console launch. They've now had an opportunity to reset the difficulty to a more casual level, so when it gets its main release on PS4 and XBox, it'll big a huge hit.
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2015
- Messages
- 21,194
For comparisons sake other niche Daedalic title with same price.
Shadow Tactics
http://steamspy.com/app/418240
It was released 12/6/2016 so it has been in a couple of sales, but it had sold over 40k copies by 12/15/2016.
And before someone says that game that name drops Star Control 2 doesn't have any change to sell well.
http://steamspy.com/app/371200
Halcyon 6 (release 8/9/2016)
I think this was just overpriced against comparable rogue-lites.
Shadow Tactics
http://steamspy.com/app/418240
It was released 12/6/2016 so it has been in a couple of sales, but it had sold over 40k copies by 12/15/2016.
And before someone says that game that name drops Star Control 2 doesn't have any change to sell well.
http://steamspy.com/app/371200
Halcyon 6 (release 8/9/2016)
I think this was just overpriced against comparable rogue-lites.
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MRY
Wormwood Studios
(1) It has more or less doubled its players in the past month. With such glowing word of mouth, a strong Codex review, and sharply reduced difficulty, there's no reason it won't keep growing.
(2) Shadow Tactics was almost certainly had a much bigger budget. TLJH was made with just a 12-person team over the course of several years, and I assume that some of those folks worked for free or for peanuts. Shadow Tactics looks to have >20 people working on it, all skilled professionals. And it shows! Shadow Tactics is beautiful in every respect, while TLJH inevitably was going to struggle against slick games like Distant Star or old-school charmers like Halcyon 6.
(3) Shadow Tactics is in a genre that has defined campaigns and thus limited replayability. Basically no one is playing Commandos right now. By contrast, FTL is playable forever and sucks the air out of the genre for other games -- more than 30 times as many people are playing FTL right now as are playing Commandos on Steam. If you moved all those players to TLJH, it would blow Shadow Tactics away.
(4) They priced the game at a level that would maximize returns from loyal Daedelic fans, Star Control II cravers, and people in the indie development coterie who know and love Richard. They weren't aiming for a mass-market game on the PC. They can cut the price on their main console market, and clean up there. As I understand it, the game is not much fun to play on a PC unless you have a controller, which has caused a lot of angst. But on consoles, you won't have the problem.
Anyway, I'm sure they're doing quite well. For instance, you wouldn't send out a tweet like this if your own game wasn't in solid demand by a large number of people:
(2) Shadow Tactics was almost certainly had a much bigger budget. TLJH was made with just a 12-person team over the course of several years, and I assume that some of those folks worked for free or for peanuts. Shadow Tactics looks to have >20 people working on it, all skilled professionals. And it shows! Shadow Tactics is beautiful in every respect, while TLJH inevitably was going to struggle against slick games like Distant Star or old-school charmers like Halcyon 6.
(3) Shadow Tactics is in a genre that has defined campaigns and thus limited replayability. Basically no one is playing Commandos right now. By contrast, FTL is playable forever and sucks the air out of the genre for other games -- more than 30 times as many people are playing FTL right now as are playing Commandos on Steam. If you moved all those players to TLJH, it would blow Shadow Tactics away.
(4) They priced the game at a level that would maximize returns from loyal Daedelic fans, Star Control II cravers, and people in the indie development coterie who know and love Richard. They weren't aiming for a mass-market game on the PC. They can cut the price on their main console market, and clean up there. As I understand it, the game is not much fun to play on a PC unless you have a controller, which has caused a lot of angst. But on consoles, you won't have the problem.
Anyway, I'm sure they're doing quite well. For instance, you wouldn't send out a tweet like this if your own game wasn't in solid demand by a large number of people:
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 100,516
I'm starting to wonder if MRY is doing these optimistic running analyses to amuse me. 
MRY
Wormwood Studios
When a game comes out that is basically a superior-in-every-way version of something I dreamed of making, I have to cheer for it. Otherwise, the alternate universe where I actually released Star Captain turns out to be a crappy dystopia where my first game doesn't sell anything and teeters on Mixed status on Steam, causing me to beg for jobs on Twitter, rather than a fantasia where I establish a space opera franchise for the ages and bask in riches. The alternative to Fabulous Optimism and cheerleading for The Long Journey Home is a horrific "there but for the grace of God go I."
[EDIT: This is why, incidentally, I backed basically every game bearing any resemblance to Star Captain's concept that ran a Kickstarter campaign, before I forgot my Kickstarter password and was too lazy to reset it: https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/1056546836 (I also backed every point-and-click adventure and a lot of Metroidvanias and RPGs, as well as any project launched on the Codex, so there's a lot of noise there...)]
[EDIT: This is why, incidentally, I backed basically every game bearing any resemblance to Star Captain's concept that ran a Kickstarter campaign, before I forgot my Kickstarter password and was too lazy to reset it: https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/1056546836 (I also backed every point-and-click adventure and a lot of Metroidvanias and RPGs, as well as any project launched on the Codex, so there's a lot of noise there...)]
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What the fuck, Kickstarter Watch. thread failed me.
Not that my pledge would have mattered, but I should have heard about this!
MRY
Wormwood Studios
It's interesting that they ultimately decided to spin the game as a goofy QWOP-like rather than changing the controls. I guess that's how you make lemonade!
- Joined
- Jan 28, 2011
- Messages
- 100,516
Posted by Cobbett on his blog:
He's also done some writing for a phone game btw: http://www.richardcobbett.com/journal/post/out-now-silent-streets-case-1
He's also done some writing for a phone game btw: http://www.richardcobbett.com/journal/post/out-now-silent-streets-case-1
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