Game News Torment Kickstarter Update #3: ZIETS ZIETS ZIETS

[jewboy]

I still think getting rid of Tony Evans would make a nice stretch goal at 3 mil or so. At 4 million maybe we could even afford to have him killed by a professional because firing him may not be enough and because it is really the only way to be sure.

 

[Kirtai]

About "convincing the suits". Won't happen, and not because they are out of touch. It won't happen because they are in it for the money and nothing else.

Invest $100 mil in a AAA title, and you could see $100 mil profit if you sell well (say over 5 million sold in first couple of months). That is both insane ROI and simply a shit load of money. If you invested $5mil in a niche game you'd have to sell 250,000 copies to make same ROI, only earning you couple million bucks. There is a market to push out one AAA every 4-5 months. To get same income from non popamolle games you'd have to push out 20 of those in same time frame. And since you don't own infinite slaves (devs) you can produce only fixed amount of games, so you send your slaves to work on AAA titles that can bring in boat loads of cash.

I believe"opportunity cost" is the technical term for this.

 

[Globbi]

I love the idea of live orchestra if it fits in the budget and if it's what Mark Morgan wants(!). It would be terrible to tell composer to do something with too many set restrictions, but if the composer knows what he's doing, has his vision and wishes to realize it with real orchestra, that's great!

One might think, if live orchestra was not needed for PS:T, then why would it for T:TON. Better approach IMO is, if Mark did PS:T soundtrack without orchestra, then how much more can he do this time!

 

[CappenVarra]

Looks like the $75 limited digital tier could use some love... It's probably not feasible but a copy of the Numenera core book would be just right (and I don't get why Monte only sells physical books on his site; PnP PDFs sell well) - without the tombstone and other perks of the $125 digital tier (which could be boosted a bit to compensate as well?)...

 

[Krraloth]

Very nice music. It takes me in a very desolate landscape but it doesn't depress me.
What a weird feeling.

 

[WalmartJesus]

Enjoyed the track. It sounded like a cross between PS:T and something you'd hear in a Metroid game.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Brian Fargo ‏@BrianFargo
Want to hear the full Mark Morgan soundtrack from our #tormentvideo? Beautiful. http://youtu.be/qBc842j4vpU

In before Drog.

Mark Morgan never changes.

 

[Arkeus]

Too bad it's going to fail because of Kickstarter Fatigue. All the cool professional are saying so.

 

[Duraframe300]

It's great to see the campaign going so well.
Not exited about live orchestra though (must cost a bunch of money) and absolutely not convinced by Tony Evans (a DA writer for Torment is a shame and NWN 2 campaign was awfull).
Ziets is good news indeed.

Tony Evans' formspring clearly shows he only wrote a small amount for DA2 and generally just did grunt work on that game. He was also involved in Kotor 2, MotB and lead designer of SoZ.

Kotor 2 and MotB are great from a story perspective and SoZ is great from a gameplay perspective (though the story is pretty barebones), honestly it doesn't sound as bad as you're suggesting.

His NWN2 design work was also mainly Crossroad Keep (which was one of the (if not the) best parts of NWN2) and a lot of his design ideas for DA didn't make it in.

 

[Jaesun]

Yeah Crossroads Keep was pretty cool.

 

[Grunker]

Yeah Crossroads Keep was pretty cool.

The idea of it, perhaps. The execution was pretty terrible.

 

[Jaesun]

Yeah Crossroads Keep was pretty cool.

The idea of it, perhaps. The execution was pretty terrible.

Oh certainly I wish it had been fully fleshed out, but what was finished was OK. I think they included it as basically an example of how to do stuff like this with the editor. Which is good too.

 

[FeelTheRads]

Yeah Crossroads Keep was pretty cool.

The idea of it, perhaps. The execution was pretty terrible.

Not saying much, though, since pretty much all Obsidian's good ideas turn out to be terribly executed. I think this is why I hate them so much. It's like you see a kid with potential that for some unknown reason is just struggling and can't make it and you just want to punch him in the face.

 

[Captain Shrek]

Not saying much, though, since pretty much all Obsidian's good ideas turn out to be terribly executed. I think this is why I hate them so much. It's like you see a kid with potential that for some unknown reason is just struggling and can't make it and you just want to punch him in the face.

 

[Grunker]

Yeah Crossroads Keep was pretty cool.

The idea of it, perhaps. The execution was pretty terrible.

Not saying much, though, since pretty much all Obsidian's good ideas turn out to be terribly executed. I think this is why I hate them so much. It's like you see a kid with potential that for some unknown reason is just struggling and can't make it and you just want to punch him in the face.

I dunno, I both KotOR2 and NV, and in some ways MotB and SoZ. Disliked their other games strongly. I see them less like the aspiring kid and more like people with a very good grasp of what to do but a very shitty grasp of how to do it. Though perhaps that's the same thing.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

pretty much all Obsidian's good ideas turn out to be terribly executed. I think this is why I hate them so much. It's like you see a kid with potential that for some unknown reason is just struggling and can't make it and you just want to punch him in the face.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Trending towards 21,000,000 $ o_O

 

[Kosmonaut]

 

[Azrael the cat]

Do you think they'd accept a Lithuanian hitman Kickstarter from the Codex?

At lower tiers, we simply ask him to send some untraceable threats. Then as various stretch goals we add people in order of their crimes against gaming (no deaths for those who once were geat but lost it - Molyneux still make Dungeon Keeper and nothing can take that away from him. Instead he gets locked in a dungeon of the backers' design, with the torture mechanics from Dungeon Master 2, until (ala DM2) he is finally reconverted to the side of incline.
Gaider could choose between a bullet or spending 3 months reading Jennifer Hepler's most proud fan fiction,

For a stretch goal, the hitman hands Herve Cain a genuine suitcase full of hundreds of millions of dollars. He then organises Herve to get mugged on his way to the car by a bunch of goons wearing t-shirts with pictures of black islands on them. As they put in the last boot they hitnan has instructed them to say 'this is what it feels like to run a profitable AND highly innovative/quality development studio and then get dragged to the ground and stomped on because you couldn't manage your publishing division.

He'll arrange for the developers to licence the Gothic setting back to JoWood. Then he'll start cutting fingers of each employee for every mistake that could have been avoided by some basic thought about crpg mechanics.

He'll walk into the room of a WoW player, carefully unpack his rifle and torture devices, before shaking his head, thinking 'what could I possibly do to this guy that he hasn't already self-inflicted' and then leave the room.

Bioware employees start disappearing from the ground up, with a promise to replace them from their Batman Rises-style undeground prison once they have re-learnt the art of encounter design and fun mechanics. Hell, if they pull it off with under 10 deaths, and less than 20 lost fingers, I vote we even loan them the Lithuanian hitman for a few days to take out their personal frustrations.

Every time Gerald sleeps with someone who is BLATANTLY carrying an STD, the hitman apears in the relevant employee's bedroom in the middle of the night with a needle containin syphalis

We make sure that the hitman is PAINFULLY welll endowed when we hire him, and we make sure he knows the personal address and sleeping habits of any employee (Bioware or otherwise) whose job it is to write romance. He is to then inquire as to where the order to inflict such 'romance' came from, and must hide under the bed until Mr 'lets put dating sims in our crpgs' is JUST about to sleep when he surprises him Frankenfurter style (for those who haven't seen Rocky Horror Picture show, I'm thinking of the bit in the play where the bisexual alien who is implied to have an absurdly massive dick that only his genetically altered specimens can take without suffering extreme organ damage. He then pain-fucks the innocent country boy who was expecting a night with his equally innocent fiancee and high-school sweetheart, and at the end goes 'You weren't expecting THAT tonight!!!! (there's so much for wrongness in his behaviour - it isn' HIS fault young women thrugh thensekves at him.

IGN just gets exterminated. No exceptions.

He'll strap a set of explosives to Todd's chest ala Person of Interest, which will only be safely deactived when Todd fnally makes hs long-desired remake of Ultima VII, and then only if the remake is good. The bomb will be auto-attuned to go off if someone mutters the phase 'press a button and something awesome happens', with the safest advice to avoid setting off the bomb to simply not talk at all.

Every time someone wrtes a line like 'I'm looking for my father, middle aged guy - have you seen him', or about 80% of the dialogue in the intro to FO3, our favourite Lithuanan gets to shoot of their best writing hand, and keeps severing toes wth a boly cutter until your wife remenbers where we do ger nails. After that he forcibly 'reunites' some random ethnic kid with a 'parent' of the same har colour while denying pioint blank that there could be anything offensive about this.

So....who's with me to support the greatest hero Lithuania has ever produced? Who's with me to give some poor bastard who is so desperate for cash that he's stooped to killing people for money, and help him make the transition, Jesus Christ rsing-from-the-cross-style to becoming one of the greatest legend computer gaming has ever known?

 

[Cowboy Moment]

Do you think they'd accept a Lithuanian hitman Kickstarter from the Codex?

At lower tiers, we simply ask him to send some untraceable threats. Then as various stretch goals we add people in order of their crimes against gaming (no deaths for those who once were geat but lost it - Molyneux still make Dungeon Keeper and nothing can take that away from him. Instead he gets locked in a dungeon of the backers' design, with the torture mechanics from Dungeon Master 2, until (ala DM2) he is finally reconverted to the side of incline.
Gaider could choose between a bullet or spending 3 months reading Jennifer Hepler's most proud fan fiction,

For a stretch goal, the hitman hands Herve Cain a genuine suitcase full of hundreds of millions of dollars. He then organises Herve to get mugged on his way to the car by a bunch of goons wearing t-shirts with pictures of black islands on them. As they put in the last boot they hitnan has instructed them to say 'this is what it feels like to run a profitable AND highly innovative/quality development studio and then get dragged to the ground and stomped on because you couldn't manage your publishing division.

He'll arrange for the developers to licence the Gothic setting back to JoWood. Then he'll start cutting fingers of each employee for every mistake that could have been avoided by some basic thought about crpg mechanics.

He'll walk into the room of a WoW player, carefully unpack his rifle and torture devices, before shaking his head, thinking 'what could I possibly do to this guy that he hasn't already self-inflicted' and then leave the room.

Bioware employees start disappearing from the ground up, with a promise to replace them from their Batman Rises-style undeground prison once they have re-learnt the art of encounter design and fun mechanics. Hell, if they pull it off with under 10 deaths, and less than 20 lost fingers, I vote we even loan them the Lithuanian hitman for a few days to take out their personal frustrations.

Every time Gerald sleeps with someone who is BLATANTLY carrying an STD, the hitman apears in the relevant employee's bedroom in the middle of the night with a needle containin syphalis

We make sure that the hitman is PAINFULLY welll endowed when we hire him, and we make sure he knows the personal address and sleeping habits of any employee (Bioware or otherwise) whose job it is to write romance. He is to then inquire as to where the order to inflict such 'romance' came from, and must hide under the bed until Mr 'lets put dating sims in our crpgs' is JUST about to sleep when he surprises him Frankenfurter style (for those who haven't seen Rocky Horror Picture show, I'm thinking of the bit in the play where the bisexual alien who is implied to have an absurdly massive dick that only his genetically altered specimens can take without suffering extreme organ damage. He then pain-fucks the innocent country boy who was expecting a night with his equally innocent fiancee and high-school sweetheart, and at the end goes 'You weren't expecting THAT tonight!!!! (there's so much for wrongness in his behaviour - it isn' HIS fault young women thrugh thensekves at him.

IGN just gets exterminated. No exceptions.

He'll strap a set of explosives to Todd's chest ala Person of Interest, which will only be safely deactived when Todd fnally makes hs long-desired remake of Ultima VII, and then only if the remake is good. The bomb will be auto-attuned to go off if someone mutters the phase 'press a button and something awesome happens', with the safest advice to avoid setting off the bomb to simply not talk at all.

Every time someone wrtes a line like 'I'm looking for my father, middle aged guy - have you seen him', or about 80% of the dialogue in the intro to FO3, our favourite Lithuanan gets to shoot of their best writing hand, and keeps severing toes wth a boly cutter until your wife remenbers where we do ger nails. After that he forcibly 'reunites' some random ethnic kid with a 'parent' of the same har colour while denying pioint blank that there could be anything offensive about this.

So....who's with me to support the greatest hero Lithuania has ever produced? Who's with me to give some poor bastard who is so desperate for cash that he's stooped to killing people for money, and help him make the transition, Jesus Christ rsing-from-the-cross-style to becoming one of the greatest legend computer gaming has ever known?

I was reading this and couldn't get the image of hiver out of my mind.

 

[l3loodAngel]

Do you think they'd accept a Lithuanian hitman Kickstarter from the Codex?

Ok. This meme is getting old. Lithuanians are not assassins, we do not kill professionally, but mostly when drunk and each other. If 3 Lithuanians go to drink there is a huge chance one of them will not be returning home alive, he will be hacked to pieces with axe or by our own hands. In other words we do not do it for money. If you want pro work you call Russians.

 

[Indranys]

Do you think they'd accept a Lithuanian hitman Kickstarter from the Codex?
<words>

Do carry on Good Sir.
Now tell me about Leonard Boyarsky one.

 

[skuphundaku]

Much as I'm still butthertz about inXile starting this before WL2 is out, one has to wonder if all these RPG kickstarters getting millions in days from preorders based on a partial design doc alone might convince the suits there's a market for decent PC CRPGs.

The amount of money the big Kickstarter projects make wouldn't even cover the AAA costs of the Doritos bribes for the so-called journalists. There's still a long way to go until the AAA world gives a shit about KS. When they do, they'll try to outlaw it altogether if possible, but we're not there yet.

 

[Infinitron]

Azrael, that was... wow.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Selling like hotcakes. $95, $110, $125, $250, $500 tiers are gone. 39,000 backers. PE had 74,000 backers, WL2 had 61,000. Hopefully this one will hit 100,000+.