I believe i have only posted once here, complaining about the lack of night/day implementation, despite the Kickstarter goal reaching. I have now come to believe i was being a touch unfair, in the sense of seeing only one side of the coin.
Having more time on my hands recently, i have given Wasteland 2 a try. And you know, it got me thinking, and in ways aside the obvious comparisons i was bound to make (both being Kickstarted, both having some funding a priori to it, and so on)
Umm... aahhh...
Oh boy...
I really hate to do this to you but, it needs to be done. Talking about "apologies"... You will probably need to offer a few more.
1. Inxile did not have any apriori funding or development done on W2, as D:OS did.
- You did not have the equivalent "weight" to bring into the PR/expectations. Though something tells me you do now
Its funny when you think about it. Fargo is clearly a talent for PR, yet it turned out that his game is mostly hype and PR, while D:OS turned out to be a great game through and through and sold much better and won more awards.
- You could not be expected (realistically, not being offensive here, on the contrary) to be able to gather an analogous momentum, or more concretely, a similar pledge amount
Thats true but Larian was not shooting for the same amount. Not even the same starting amount. Because Larian funded the game themselves and only needed additional funds to make it better.
- Quite possibly, your team was not "as" seasoned in the production of something this costly as theirs was.
UH! AH! Arrghh... UUUHHH... :lol:
Saying "as" considering the Inxile guys had pleeeenty of experience in a giant back then (Interplay). They have all had their baptism in fire, and multiple times
There was literally no one left in Inxile from Interplay days. And dont even get me started on that. I was there when it was falling apart. Its a... very long story.
Only later on, when they started doing kickstarter for new Torment they brought in a few devs that actually worked in Interplay, Colin McComb - an actual designer, and Adam Heine who only worked in QA there for a short time.
Fargo was never a developer, just a producer and CEO. And he had luck to aim at a whole niche market that nobody catered to for years and years. I highly doubt they will ever repeat success of two kickstarters built on nostalgia for most famous games of that era, Fallouts, Wasteland and Planescape Torment. Their whole team are young devs who NEVER worked on a single cRPG, but did a few mobile games and that actiony failure called Hunted.. or something. Fargo refuses to talk about it to this day.
On the other hand most of Larian team have been working together for years and years, and they made the game on their own engine which they knew very well inside out.
- You have had, and still do, a certain problem on story richness/presentation
Smaller stuff, nothing near as bad as InXile Wasteland team did.
Richness is certainly not a problem. And lets not forget that the chosen setting and style informs writing to a large extent.
- Your wages are Belgium wages, not backwater County South
I wont even ask what this means. inxile is stationed in California...
- And most importantly, you did not use a premade engine that is easy to handle to boot. You went and made your own, despite the cost this had had, thinking ahead..
Easy to handle?
:lol:
Inxile postponed the game several times, did not talk to anyone for weeks when they first failed to release the beta on time, even though people kept asking what the hell is going on... The first beta was actually some alpha version that was falling apart at every seam. Almsot completely unplayable.
The game has so many bugs and lousily designed parts that they are still patching it and trying to improve all of it so it looks like a full game. Larian has and is patching the game too but in much lesser extent.
Unity turned out to be not that great as many thought it would be.
And what they managed to churn out in the end looks like a shovel compared to orbital lasers of D:OS in both art quality and complexity of mechanics and writing and everything else.
In my humble opinion thats not such an overstatement as it may look at first.
And still, you brought D:OS to be where it is, and where it is..is miles, miles and miles ahead of anything i have touched the last..i fucking loved it. Abso-fucking-lutely amazing, well done!
This... is true.
