Dear Kickstarter, Can I Have a New Baldur's Gate?

I have this friend who backs every single game on Kickstarter, ever. Ever. And he gets no small amount of abuse from me, because of course he does! Is he fucking insane? Backing a Kickstarter campaign means you spend real money on a game that might be released several years later, usually with countless delays and countless promised features removed, because they ran out of time and funds.

Some projects get funded, they keep your money and then there's no game at all. Because fuck you. Or, as the final update on Clang stated in September 2013: "...one of the hidden catches is that once you have taken a bunch of people's money to do a thing, you have to actually do that thing, and not some other thing that you thought up in the meantime." Yeah, you dickholes! How dare you expect a game, only because you've given your money to a guy who said he was gonna use it to create... well, a fucking game? The outrage!

Of course this is one of the worst examples I could find. The truth is, if I'm hoping to see any new RPGs, which play like Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate or maybe Wizardry 8 or Ultima VII, then there's really no way around Kickstarter. Well, Dragon Age is probably the closest modern thing we have to Baldur's Gate and I'm not gonna knock it, but I miss being able to create my entire party, to micro-manage their abilities and skills and their inventory, to watch them rise from a random bunch of adventurers to powerful heroes. Or watch them perish because I fucked up, then start over, which can also be fun. I don't think we'll see any of that in any mainstream AAA RPG anymore. And that's where Kickstarter is getting my hopes up. At least a little.

Some decent RPGs have been funded and released through Kickstarter now, none of which really blew me away. Shadowrun Returns is decent, but entirely forgettable. Fantastic writing, good story, but there's no real exploration, unimpressive AI, the whole thing can be finished in one night. Aarklash Legacy is a nice game with fun, strategic battles, but the story is weak and all characters, whilst featuring their own unique skill trees, are pre-made.

Oh yeah, it was the game with lots of shadow and... uh.. running? I think?

Those games were fun little budget titles, but they make me wonder if I should really get my hopes up for something really great, something massive that stays with me like Baldur's Gate did. Is it even realistic to hope for that? Is it fair? I think so. I'm not expecting production values of hundreds of millions of bucks, but a fantastic story, more than 8-10 hours of gameplay and deep character-customization. Let me create my own party if I want to. Surely this can be done on a smaller budget without looking as shit as Avernum (sorry!), right?

Sorry, I'm just not desperate enough.
- That's what she said!

I'm genuinely excited about Divinity: Original Sin right now. Even Claire seems to have a bit of a wide-on for this game right now and we might have to buy the double-pack on Steam. A cooperative game mode, which features two fully customizable characters sounds great and the trailer had me at "gather your party".

I find the idea absolutely fascinating. Gameplay is very old-school RPG, but the cooperative side of it is entirely new, as far as I'm aware. In multiplayer, decisions aren't simply made by "player one". Both players get to make decisions and the game allows and even encourages that players disagree with each other's decisions, so you argue things out in-game, which also has an influence on character stats progression. Could this be the beginning of a new genre of couple-based RPGs? Not bloody likely, but the idea is fun.

I can't wait to experience it firsthand, seeing as Claire and I have extremely different play styles. In Dragon Age I would take pity on a starving, imprisoned deserter and trade him some food for a key he'd offered me in return. Claire skipped the whole helping out part and just killed the poor fucker and took the key off his cold, dead hands. There was a whole lot of My Shepard - Your Shepard stuff when we both finished the Mass Effect trilogy and compared how our stories played out. There's gonna be a lot of conflict when we play Divinity together. I can't wait! I just hope it's not gonna become repetitive and result in the same endless dialogues and little else.

I'm also excited to see how Pillars of Eternity and Tides of Numenera are going to turn out. Looking at trailers, screenshots and concept drawings make me want to install some of my favourite old games again. I'm almost tempted to give Ultima VII another shot, as well. Ahhh... Ultima.

It would be a bit weird and geeky to say that Ultima has changed my life, but I guess it had a bit of an impact, at least. The English language? Yeah, I speak that shit. Ultima taught me. I still have the C64 version of Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny right here on my desk. Mint condition. Cloth map, rune alphabet, the notes and lyrics to 'Stones' and all that. I was about ten years old when I first played it, the whole thing was in English and there was no Gamefaqs (or any fucking internet) when I didn't know what to do. Heck, I couldn't even play the damn game without a dictionary at hand. A few years later I was excused from English class, because I was good enough to teach the other students. Today I live in the UK, my fiancee is British and while I had not planned any of this because of Ultima, the language practice that went along with the game sure has helped kick things off a bit.

One of my geeky friends wrote a love-letter to a girl once. He used nothing but runes. I read it out loud in front of the class. He couldn't believe I played Ultima. Happy days.

So, am I excited about Shroud of the Avatar? Nope! Wish I was, but right now I find it hard to believe that more than 26,000 people were excited enough to donate a total of more than 3 million Dollars to help fund this thing. Because the guy behind this game managed to buy a vacation in fucking space, so he sure as fuck couldn't fund his own stupid game without help, right? And for as much as I love traditional RPGs, I think they're overdoing it with SotA. NPCs all talk and behave like chat bots, which I suppose can be fun if it's done right, but my question is - why? Does that really add to the immersion? I have to type out questions to NPCs, hoping to find the right, context-sensitive keywords? Doing so might give you the illusion of freedom when compared to multiple choice dialogue, but it also removes a great deal of user comfort.

And that's what bothers me about the entire game. Don't get me wrong. I can agree when Garriott says that today's RPGs practically play themselves, they just point you in the right direction with a big, fat marker, you can just skip through all the boring quest text. I can live with the fact that they want to abandon most of that stuff, but only up to a point where they want you to make your own notes. How is this good or immersive? If you watch Garriot's interview with Spoony, you can hear him talk about how you won't just find comfortable notes in your quest log, telling you about whom you were supposed to talk to or where you were supposed to go to, even if it just came up in a dialogue - you have to remember these things, yourself.

Now I don't know about you, but I have a job, I'm taking care of my own little family and my entire life won't just suddenly revolve around Lord British's new game. Sometimes I might only be able to play for an hour or two at a time and when I get back to the game the next day it would be nice to have a quest log or a journal, which reminds me where I left off. Without forcing me to write everything down on my own. That's not hand-holding, it's a fucking comfort-feature, which has been part of every RPG for the past decade or so.

Heck, when you're running around aimlessly and without a clue where to go next or whom to talk to, it's all working as intended. It's basically Ultima VII all over again - if you're not familiar with that game, look up the Fellowship quest line or watch Spoony's excellent video above. And for as much as I loved that game back in the day, I'm not sure I wanna go back to a time where there was no quest-tracking whatsoever.
And has everybody forgotten about Pagan and Ascension? Yes, I know, EA, hasty release, yada, yada, yada, but Ultima IX fucks official canon worse than any Star Trek porn fan-fic. It screws with just about every previous game of the series, from Mondain's skull just sitting around in a public museum to making Dupres heoric sacrifice entirely meaningless. I'm not even talking about bugs, crashes, underwhelming visuals or the tiny game world - they didn't even get the damn story right.

Actually, I lied. Let's talk about graphics for a minute. Did you see Shroud of the Avatar?

Meh.

Yawn.

It's certainly not the ugliest game I've ever seen, but it's not great by any stretch of the imagination. Next week is the 2nd early access release for backers, who donated 45 bucks or more. The game is supposed to be released in October. Those muddy textures aren't gonna get much better. The game looks a lot like Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Which looked pretty nice back when it was new. Which was in early 2007.

It's not just me, is it?

What worries me the most is the lack of an actual game in all the footage released thus far. I've seen videos of people typing to chat bot NPCs, people moving ridiculous amounts of furniture from random chests to their inventory and I've seen a whole lot of badly-animated sheep. Is that it? Are we going to get a proper story? Epic quests? Or is this a bread-baking simulation where I can hang out with other people and just pretend all kinds of things, which aren't actually possible ingame, like some kind of medieval SecondLife?
We're supposed to be months away from release and so far there's this okay-ish game world and very little else.

I'm sure that some of the die-hard enthusiasts are already getting a kick out of this game. Some folks who act like Ultima Online was the holy grail of MMOs are probably creaming their pants over this right now. And hey, why the hell not? Enjoy - I hope this is gonna be the game for you!
But I'm not feeling it. I wanna go crazy about it, I wanna look forward to it, but right now I'm not feeling the magic. Heck, maybe I'm wrong, maybe the game is gonna get killer reviews and maybe one day you'll read blog posts on here about how much I love playing SotA. I could get into the early access thingie right now. But... I dunno, maybe I would have been more excited about this a decade ago, but RPGs have grown up and so have I. I'm getting too old for this shit. I want my quest log.

-Cat