Information Thorvalla Kickstarter goes online

[almondblight]

Bullshit. Their sin was making one of weakest pitches we've seen on Kickstarter so far.

I'm not sure how much that matters right now, because I doubt many people have seen it. Even if they had a great pitch, there's just been no build up or press for this Kickstarter. Hell, Shaker had a much bigger rollout, and this is (or should have been) "The Nameless One is Kickstarting an RPG."

 

[Moribund]

He should have gotten the makeup on or at least mentioned it. He didn't mention being on the cover and he only mentioned one blurb about torment at all.

But I change my mind a little bit. He lives in San Clemente and all the houses are millions of dollars there. He can put some of his own money into it.

uhh...people who remembered the IE games fondly were the ones who funded "budget dragon age" and people who remember Wasteland 1 (an older game than the Arkania's) and Fallout 1-2 funded Wasteland 2...

I was fond of baldur's gate, but a BG with no DnD would be complete decline. JE Sawyer game system to replace Gygax's? I don't think so.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Apart from the pitch being weak, another major problem with Thorvalla is the lack of mainstream coverage. No big project has ever been successful without the RPSes, Kotakus, PC Gamers and the like posting interviews and news items about it. Guido Henkel should've really used his contacts in the industry, which I assume he has, to make that happen. And if he doesn't have that kind of contacts, he shoud've known his Kickstarter wouldn't have any chance of being successful. Press coverage + good pitch = success. No can do without either.

 

[Grunker]

I don't think it's a matter of "deserving it" or not. I think most of us want Guido to succeed. However, you also have to consider reality here, because we're not living in lala-fairy tale land.

Fucking this.

 

[FeelTheRads]

I don't think it's a matter of "deserving it" or not. I think most of us want Guido to succeed. However, you also have to consider reality here, because we're not living in lala-fairy tale land.

Well, this is my problem and why I think this whole thing will blow over and become another pre-order venue for medium-big companies. First everybody was happy that old developers get to make the games they used to make.
Now, it's all: "But they're ugly! And why didn't the pitch video make me laugh? I like to laugh. Why no screenshots? Certainly a demo should be mandatory! And they didn't release anything lately? They should have, no mater if it sucks, but it should be recent. Except no mobile games, because that means they can't do anything else anymore. Fucking has-beens."
Next step will probably require you to have the game done and be a commercial success to get any money from Kickstarter.

Yeah, good luck with that. I totally see tons of people willing to work harder than others just because they weren't the first. It would be totally worth it.

 

[Zed]

The latest update is a little misleading.
The image of the backers-only temple, Temple of the Founders, was not envisioned as such when created. It is in fact a 3 year old image (http://cghub.com/images/view/26849/). That said, it's not a rip or anything and it's certainly an asset bought by Guido. It's just not a concept-based artwork, as in "hey I had this idea for a temple, could you draw-". In fact it's kind of the other way around.
The artwork is cool though. There should have been more of that level of art on the front page. Here's a bigger version btw: http://grafikos.ru/uploads/posts/2009-06/1246337531_1246195003_7242.jpg

I kind of like the idea of having recruitable, yet configurable characters. But it's only really worth it if the characters themselves have interesting personas, as it's otherwise just a restriction placed on your party appearance.

 

[Moribund]

In the beginning there was the creator. But she was a bit short on cash so he ran a kickstarter to get some help from the other gods.

 

[Charles-cgr]

Next step will probably require you to have the game done and be a commercial success to get any money from Kickstarter.

No. The next step is that a publisher will be needed to fund successful kickstarters. What goes around comes around, irony, and all that.

I kind of like the idea of having recruitable, yet configurable characters. But it's only really worth it if the characters themselves have interesting personas, as it's otherwise just a restriction placed on your party appearance.

He does explain why he's choosing that direction with story archs and situations that can arise from previously known characters. I think they can be trusted to do that right, given their design & writing background. Sadly they're still not convincing the press.

 

[Rake]

I don't think it's a matter of "deserving it" or not. I think most of us want Guido to succeed. However, you also have to consider reality here, because we're not living in lala-fairy tale land.

Well, this is my problem and why I think this whole thing will blow over and become another pre-order venue for medium-big companies. First everybody was happy that old developers get to make the games they used to make.
Now, it's all: "But they're ugly! And why didn't the pitch video make me laugh? I like to laugh. Why no screenshots? Certainly a demo should be mandatory! And they didn't release anything lately? They should have, no mater if it sucks, but it should be recent. Except no mobile games, because that means they can't do anything else anymore. Fucking has-beens."
Next step will probably require you to have the game done and be a commercial success to get any money from Kickstarter.

Yeah, good luck with that. I totally see tons of people willing to work harder than others just because they weren't the first. It would be totally worth it.

It seems to me your problem is with the market. Of course it is a popularity contest. The kickstarter is based on popularity. If you want to avoid the lowest common denominator you don't ask for a fucking million. Like it or no the RoA hve not the fun base to genarate a million. Way too nitche

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

I don't think it's a matter of "deserving it" or not. I think most of us want Guido to succeed. However, you also have to consider reality here, because we're not living in lala-fairy tale land.

Well, this is my problem and why I think this whole thing will blow over and become another pre-order venue for medium-big companies. First everybody was happy that old developers get to make the games they used to make.
Now, it's all: "But they're ugly! And why didn't the pitch video make me laugh? I like to laugh. Why no screenshots? Certainly a demo should be mandatory! And they didn't release anything lately? They should have, no mater if it sucks, but it should be recent. Except no mobile games, because that means they can't do anything else anymore. Fucking has-beens."
Next step will probably require you to have the game done and be a commercial success to get any money from Kickstarter.

Yeah, good luck with that. I totally see tons of people willing to work harder than others just because they weren't the first. It would be totally worth it.

Again, we are just suggesting pretty common-sense solutions that could have made this kickstarter more succesful, nothing more. I can only speak for me personally, but if you have a look at my suggestions, you see that they don't include "I want a demo!", "make me laugh!" (ok, I mentioned Fargos W2 pitch was funny, certainly this helps, but it isn't mandatory), "I don't want devs who have been developing mobile games for the last decade" (although if a dev did just that, then it is espiecially important to reintroduce himself to old and new audiences).

Kickstarter started as a place to sell ideas and concepts, and I'm totally fine with that. However Gudio failed horribly at selling is idea (I still back the project, for the record). Now of course in a perfect world Gudio Henkel would easily get unlimited amounts of money to prouduce a spiritual successor of the RoA games, in the real world however, you have to put at least some thought and effort into your kickstarter pitch to be succesful.

Nobody ever said Kickstarter is a place where you can quickly grab 1 million dollars by doing a 6 minute video talking about dragons and vikings. If you take issue with that I think you take issue with the real world.

 

[CSM]

So you want me to give them money just because of what they did up to a point or for some hits? Hmm. Otherwise you're telling me I should give them money because they're popular, which is pretty fucking retarded.

What? Why do you think I care what you spend your money on? I'm just calling you an idiot that doesn't even grasp the definition of the word "has-been".

Well, this is my problem and why I think this whole thing will blow over and become another pre-order venue for medium-big companies. First everybody was happy that old developers get to make the games they used to make.
Now, it's all: "But they're ugly! And why didn't the pitch video make me laugh? I like to laugh. Why no screenshots? Certainly a demo should be mandatory! And they didn't release anything lately? They should have, no mater if it sucks, but it should be recent. Except no mobile games, because that means they can't do anything else anymore. Fucking has-beens."
Next step will probably require you to have the game done and be a commercial success to get any money from Kickstarter.

Yeah, good luck with that. I totally see tons of people willing to work harder than others just because they weren't the first. It would be totally worth it.

No, there's plenty of Kickstarters getting their funding. Just not this one, because these guy don't know what they're doing.

 

[St. Toxic]

Like it or no the RoA hve not the fun base to genarate a million. Way too nitche

 

[Stelcio]

FeelTheRads, I don't know what's your issue with Kickstarter. It's not like people don't pledge for Thorvalla because "fuck that loser Guido, whatever, kickstarter is so yesterday". Kickstarter is basically about making as many as possible Average Joes do this:

And Guido utterly fails at this. And not because his Kickstarter is more vague than others. It's because it's not well done as well internally (weak pitch video, weak descriptions of game and devs themselves, nothing to open people's wallets actually - even people here on Codex are skeptical despite knowing all well who Guido is) as externally (lack of coverage generally) and doesn't have any household name to haul it anyway.

It won't fail because Kickstarter is a broken tool to fund our beloved type of games and succesful campaigns by Fargo and others are just exceptions of unusually advantageous circumstances - as you seem to claim. It's because Guido failed to utilize Kickstarter properly, despite it being a well-known beaten track now after these few highly succesful campaigns.

Why should Thorvalla succeed then? I mean realistically, not in your dream world.

 

[Primordial Soup Nazi]

Alright, so having read Thorvalla's updates, I have to say this is looking much more fleshed-out than the flaccid pitch would have me believe. I'm convinced that this would be a project worth throwing money at...if they didn't royally bungle the initial attempt already. I'll hit 'em up on their next attempt. A few assorted thoughts:

-The "card" system makes a little more sense now, in context, but its really anyone's guess as to whether or not this is advantageous in any way over "traditional" (and by his own words, that is the type of game that Henkel hopes to make in Thorvalla) turn-based combat. At least he said "yeah, if it blows, I'll scrap it," so there's that.

-I definitely like his take on party generation/composition; it sounds like an integrated version of Baldur's Gate's Level 1 NPC mod, which is shweet. The big hurdle they're going to have to work around is how to make these amorphous, initially-classless NPCs anywhere near as engaging as PST's. To cite the example given in the update, I can't imagine a Centaur warrior having the same flavour of temperament that a Centaur sorcerer would have, and having to write multiple personality nuances for the same NPCs sounds like an awful lot of additional writing/dialogue tree composition.

-General good-news aside, that comment of Hallford's that Jarpie linked is fucking retarded, and its pretty clear that he shouldn't be the mouthpiece for the two of them; instead, he needs to stfu and gbtw.

-Not that anybody expected it, but it would have been nice if they were willing to throw in a text parser. The approach that Wizardry 8 used was pretty user friendly; lots of keywords to choose from if you care to explore what different NPCs have to say about things. Ah well.

 

[Brother None]

The whole deal boils down to that. Poor marketing skills ruin what could become a fantastic project. They really need to join forces with someone who knows how to sell shit.

Someone could probably make a decent living running other people's Kickstarter campaigns for them. Of course this opens the door for the return of publishers and once they get a get a foot in all is fucked.

Not necessarily. There's already a lot of effort to informally help each other out, cross-contact, stuff like that. Like Obsidian contacted Fargo to talk everything over, contacted some press people to set up interviews, made sure their vibrant, hype-y community got wind of it beforehand so they and the press would build up hype. It was really well-handled, but at what point of that would you need a publisher or PR man? To make a shitty teaser website? To be able to contact press? To get the help from a guy like Fargo?

Guido did a little teasing beforehand but never seemed to make a concerted push to get it to be wider-noticed, just "letting it happen". Did he contact Fargo or Obsidian for feedback on how to run a Kickstarter? As far as I know he didn't, but perhaps there's some bad blood there (I have no idea if there is, just speculating). Maybe he's pushing it now with press sites but just falling short, I don't know, but again, the thing that it takes here is work. Not publisher-type money, not a professional PR guy, but work, contacts and a little good luck. Some of that is a little shitty coz it's not too dissimilar to the way PR works, but mostly it's just about doing your research and prepping properly. Fargo won't turn away someone looking for help on Kickstarter, and if you lack press contacts he can probably help get you started, and I doubt he's the only one willing to help out. If you need such help, and many do, you should look for it.

I can't really judge from the outside looking in how much Henkel did or did not do, but the final result fall short of what a Kickstarter needs to be. It seems to me they overestimated the automatic process of people spreading it by word of mouth, and underestimated the need to do some professional-style PR and prep work. Kickstarter is different from the publisher world, but it still needs you to approach it professionally and hard. It's different, but it's not *absolutely* different.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

Yep. If you want achieve your goals in the real world it takes professionalism, hard work and a bit of luck, no matter what you do. I find it puzzling that some people (1) seem to take offense with that (2) think that this somehow requires publishers, suits, and PR-people doing your work for you.

 

[EG]

Yep. If you want achieve your goals in the real world it takes professionalism, hard work and a bit of luck, no matter what you do. I find it puzzling that some people (1) seem to take offense with that (2) think that this somehow requires publishers, suits, and PR-people doing your work for you.

What's there to puzzle? Some people have shit luck or lack the abstract quality, professionalism, for one reason, another, or none at all. That hard work isn't a way to correct for these deficiencies is "unfair."

 

[evdk]

The whole deal boils down to that. Poor marketing skills ruin what could become a fantastic project. They really need to join forces with someone who knows how to sell shit.

Someone could probably make a decent living running other people's Kickstarter campaigns for them. Of course this opens the door for the return of publishers and once they get a get a foot in all is fucked.

Not necessarily. There's already a lot of effort to informally help each other out, cross-contact, stuff like that. Like Obsidian contacted Fargo to talk everything over, contacted some press people to set up interviews, made sure their vibrant, hype-y community got wind of it beforehand so they and the press would build up hype. It was really well-handled, but at what point of that would you need a publisher or PR man? To make a shitty teaser website? To be able to contact press? To get the help from a guy like Fargo?

Guido did a little teasing beforehand but never seemed to make a concerted push to get it to be wider-noticed, just "letting it happen". Did he contact Fargo or Obsidian for feedback on how to run a Kickstarter? As far as I know he didn't, but perhaps there's some bad blood there (I have no idea if there is, just speculating). Maybe he's pushing it now with press sites but just falling short, I don't know, but again, the thing that it takes here is work. Not publisher-type money, not a professional PR guy, but work, contacts and a little good luck. Some of that is a little shitty coz it's not too dissimilar to the way PR works, but mostly it's just about doing your research and prepping properly. Fargo won't turn away someone looking for help on Kickstarter, and if you lack press contacts he can probably help get you started, and I doubt he's the only one willing to help out. If you need such help, and many do, you should look for it.

I can't really judge from the outside looking in how much Henkel did or did not do, but the final result fall short of what a Kickstarter needs to be. It seems to me they overestimated the automatic process of people spreading it by word of mouth, and underestimated the need to do some professional-style PR and prep work. Kickstarter is different from the publisher world, but it still needs you to approach it professionally and hard. It's different, but it's not *absolutely* different.

All I am saying is that this would be the one way for the suits to get into the game (along with "set up a shell company to do a campaign" and "let the people asking for funds run a campaign to measure interest in the title (and lower the necessary investment in the process)").
It should be also mentioned that some people, like Guide for example, plain suck at the presentation aspect of Kickstarter. It does not matter whether he didn't ask the people who ran successful campaign for help or whether he did and botched the execution - the outcome is the same and his KS is dead in the watter and it does not seem like any amount of proselytizing by the fans is going to change anything. You can see a lot of it in this thread, people are saying they have pledged but have no confidence in the success of the campaign, believing it is doomed to fail. Someone, and it need not actually be any kind of traditional gaming suit, who would actually run the campaign for Guido (and not just offer some advice) for either a fixed fee or an additional percentage could probably have made a lot of difference, as it is pretty obvious that some people do not have big enough names to simply crowd source their PR.

 

[almondblight]

Someone, and it need not actually be any kind of traditional gaming suit, who would actually run the campaign for Guido (and not just offer some advice) for either a fixed fee or an additional percentage could probably have made a lot of difference, as it is pretty obvious that some people do not have big enough names to simply crowd source their PR.

Not only that, but if these people aren't great at PR/business, they're going to need someone for much more than just the Kickstarter campaign. The exact same thing often happens with small time developers, where they think that merely releasing their game and having an interview at a couple of niche sites will be enough marketing, and then when the game fails assumes that the audience isn't there (or that whole Codex discussion about indie pricing). The truth is, we don't expect every indie developer to be, say, great artists, and understand the importance of hiring outside artists to improve the game. The marketing/business side is just as important, and if a designer doesn't have those skills (because they can't be great at everything) they need to find someone who does.

 

[codexian reject]

Hiring external PR, or business people would be a waste of money. What is needed is some connection with reality.
Nexus 2 hired PR company that did exactly nothing for them in terms of press coverage.

For example pitch video needed a photo of Guido in a Nameless One makeup next to PS:T box cover screaming “it's me”.
Then kotaku could post a story tittled “A new kickstarter ! By the Nameless One from Planescape:Torment !”.
Now, that sounds like a headline that can bring some page hits, which is all the likes of kotaku care about.
No PR monkey would came up with it, Guido should. Just like he should knew that his name is not strong enough to bring 1M$ alone.

Info there is in the pitch, leaves RoA and BaK fans dissapointed and leaves people who don't know who he is, without a clue how the game will play and look like.
The only thing, described in detail – the setting, sound a bit BSB, just like Arcania is to be honest. For a gamer not familiar with RoA, it will sound like a lame Skyrim ripoff.
So much focus on dragon mounts in a top down turn based game, how does it makes even sense ?

Really, he should aim for 400k, just like all the other similar projects, from two old devs without proper, functioning company, who are not going to look into it seriously until they get the money.
The fact that it is not backed by the old partners Avellone and Fargo yet, is also strange and telling...

 

[PosledniKovboj]

From the comments section

Kickstarter is the right place to pledge because if we won't make our goal here, the game simply will not happen. There won't be any restarts or anything. We're throwing everything we have behind this one campaign.

sounds to me like his uplink to reality has been severed irrepairably.

 

[evdk]

From the comments section

Kickstarter is the right place to pledge because if we won't make our goal here, the game simply will not happen. There won't be any restarts or anything. We're throwing everything we have behind this one campaign.

sounds to me like his uplink to reality has been severed irrepairably.

Or they don't really have much.

Hiring external PR, or business people would be a waste of money. What is needed is some connection with reality.
Nexus 2 hired PR company that did exactly nothing for them in terms of press coverage.

I didn't mean that they should hire a suit. They should hire somebody like Fargo. Or... Fargo.

 

[Brother None]

I don't think Fargo is available for hire to PR Kickstarters, haha.

Alsi yeah, that "there won't be any restarts". Guys, really, you're not going to make it, that's already clear. It's a punch to the chin but it's not a killing blow. Just regroup and restrategize.

The hiring external PR thing is an interesting point. I think some backers would object to it but the reality is it's a part of the industry, just like these projects have producers that partially take over responsibilities publishers would normally have, only they're much closer on the project and there's not likely to be as much friction. Still, PR, isn't that what we're getting away from? Maybe. But there's fairly independent games like Hard Reset that still hired Tom Ohle and co to PR their game for a couple of months. It's just an investment that is likely to see returns, and we all want these games to succeed.

 

[evdk]

I don't think Fargo is available for hire to PR Kickstarters, haha.

He could finance his next game from the money gained from other people's Kickstarters. Now that's crowd sourcing

 

[kaizoku]

I don't think Fargo is available for hire to PR Kickstarters, haha.

Alsi yeah, that "there won't be any restarts". Guys, really, you're not going to make it, that's already clear. It's a punch to the chin but it's not a killing blow. Just regroup and restrategize.

The hiring external PR thing is an interesting point. I think some backers would object to it but the reality is it's a part of the industry, just like these projects have producers that partially take over responsibilities publishers would normally have, only they're much closer on the project and there's not likely to be as much friction. Still, PR, isn't that what we're getting away from? Maybe. But there's fairly independent games like Hard Reset that still hired Tom Ohle and co to PR their game for a couple of months. It's just an investment that is likely to see returns, and we all want these games to succeed.

Or, he could spend that PR money into the game and getting a working prototype instead.