Kickstarter - Editorial @ Wired
Wired takes a look at some of the top funded RPG kickstarters with a new article called,"Over Budget, Behind Schedule: What’s Up With Gaming’s Biggest Kickstarters?"
Wasteland 2
What's the status now?
Wasteland 2's original Kickstarter pitch named this month as an estimated delivery date. "It's funny, because you have to put your date down on Kickstarter not knowing the scope of the game," Fargo said. "So we put a date down, but that was a very small project. Once we triple fund, and everybody says, 'Make the game much bigger,' does that date really apply anymore?"
When Fargo realized an October ship date wasn't going to happen, he decided instead to push for having a beta ready by then, opting to get at least something into backers' hands on time. The beta will deliver roughly 90 percent of the game's feature set, he says, albeit with some missing skills, sound effects, and animations here and there. But Wasteland is a narrative game, and inXile doesn't intend to give away the entire experience before release. Players will be able to explore most, if not all, of post-apocalyptic Arizona, but a large portion of the game takes place in Los Angeles — none of which will be accessible until the final release.
"It's such a transparent process," Fargo said. "I think that people aren't worried about you being late as long as you're showing updates, and you're communicating, and you're letting them touch and see things — as long as it's moving along, everybody's happy."
The Banner Saga
What's the status now?
The game's Kickstarter success meant it would be able to scale up in quality, but it's never as easy as it sounds, says Thomas.
"It is interesting to see how people correlate money with content," he said, "as if you just liquify a vat of cash and pour it into a computer and voila, another set of characters!" Thomas said the extra cash did allow the team to hire more, and more talented, people.
Banner Saga's multiplayer combat portion was released as a free, standalone title called The Banner Saga: Factions in February of 2013. Meanwhile, the single-player campaign has been pushed back a number of times. While the original hope was for the first part of the single-player trilogy to land by the end of 2012, it was soon delayed well into 2013, and may possibly even slip to January 2014.
Project Eternity
What's the status now?
"We've tried to always stick to what we talked about in our Kickstarter pitch," Project Director Josh Sawyer told WIRED via phone. "We're making a game that's essentially about exploring a big beautiful world with a lot of tactical combat and a cool story with cool companions in it. Every so often we have some crazy idea for something neat that we could add, but we know that there's so much to do already that we don't really need to throw more difficulty on it for us."
Much like Double Fine Adventure, Obsidian's initial expectation was to make a modestly-sized Infinity Engine-style game with a very small cast of characters, classes and not a whole lot of extra features.
"But with the Kickstarter," Sawyer said, "the fans basically said 'please give us these extra doodads, we want them.' So we're making a game that is much larger in scope both in terms of size and also the variety of characters you can make and interact with."
The team, which shifts around in size but currently consists of around 20 people, is now deep into production developing the core game. But while everything is going relatively smoothly, Sawyer is reluctant to discuss a release schedule.
"We're really trying to really focus on making this game the size that our fans expect it to be, as deep of an RPG system as they really expect it to be, and as polished as they really need it to be," Sawyer said. "We've had games come out that have not been very polished, and we don't like that reputation. We've been improving it over time, so with something where the release is entirely under our control, we're going to make sure that is absolutely as good as it can be."