Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

[J_C]

And CRPGs are popular, while point and click adventure games are not.

Yeah, if there's one thing that's popular, it's Ultima-inspired turn-based co-op RPGs.

Well more popular than point and click adventure games, that's for sure. And it has nothing to do with being Ultima inspired or not.

 

[Whiran]

Well more popular than point and click adventure games, that's for sure. And it has nothing to do with being Ultima inspired or not.

I suspect that is a -good- point and click adventure game came out it'd be wildly successful like the Myst series was.

A good game is a good game and that generates success.

 

[RPGMaster]

We already knew that kickstarter cannibalizes sales. But that was kind of the point.

WHY DIDN'T ANY OF YOU TELL TIM THAT?!

 

[Redlands]

And CRPGs are popular, while point and click adventure games are not.

Yeah, if there's one thing that's popular, it's Ultima-inspired turn-based co-op RPGs.

Well more popular than point and click adventure games, that's for sure. And it has nothing to do with being Ultima inspired or not.

J_C, just stop it. You're becoming a sad, one-note joke. Whether you're trolling or sincere it doesn't matter. It's getting boring.

Let's assume that the game is okay (not great, but okay). We should be expecting better than okay. It's a project that got more than eight times the funding it asked for, from fans of the genre and thus removing the need for any publisher requirements, by a studio that's been around almost ten years now, spearheaded by one of the name developers of the genre from its heyday, and because of that name recognition the game was all over the game news media that most studios would kill to have.

And they fucked it up.

It wasn't the fault of any publishers, or suffering in media obscurity, or gamers being "entitled", or being released into a hostile environment. It's all Double Fine's fault. They squandered all of the goodwill, and reputation, and free publicity, and creative freedom they had won and made deliberately poor, amateur, and stupid choices, all of which were made public by them.

That's why they're getting shit from the Codex now, and why their game hasn't sold well. Because the game is only mediocre at best, and it had every opportunity to be fantastic. Mediocre isn't going to cut it when you have games of Heroine's Quest being released for free, or when Daedalic are able to put out pretty decent, artistically comparable adventure games with more puzzle complexity.

 

[J_C]

And CRPGs are popular, while point and click adventure games are not.

Yeah, if there's one thing that's popular, it's Ultima-inspired turn-based co-op RPGs.

Well more popular than point and click adventure games, that's for sure. And it has nothing to do with being Ultima inspired or not.

J_C, just stop it. You're becoming a sad, one-note joke.

I ....don't....fuckin.....care!

The game is good, although light on puzzles. And fuck sales, since when sales decide a game's quality? The game got good critics from the gamers (THERE ARE GAMES OUTSIDE OF THE CODEX), but adventure games don't sell much in this day and age. Show me those recent classic point and click adventure games which sold better. You can find maybe one or two.

You are like "whaaa, the Codex hates the game, so everyone hates it", while in reality, people were pleased by it outside of the codex.

 

[Metro]

The game isn't good. Nor is Schafer a good developer or manager, anymore. Re: Sales today versus sales in the 90's one could argue the consumer base for video games, even adventure games, is larger today than it was in the 90's especially with the advent of social media and platforms like Steam that make it ludicrously easy to promote your game. Finally... are there really sixteen fucking episodes of the documentary? Look no further on why this game tanked. It was never about making a good game it was about Tim's ego and the promotion of Double Fine. Sadly they just shot themselves in the foot and they're back to taking contract work from publishers as all of their own projects are underfunded and/or operating on borrowed money from three kickstarters ago.

 

[felipepepe]

It's a documentary about a company failing, kudos to the guys for not toning nothing down.

The funny thing is seeing how they aren't even trying to release Act 2 this year, even with the engine ready and reusing many areas.... they are taking 3 years to make a 8 hour adventure game. Heroine's Quest was done in 4 years, and by fans on their spare time, with no budget!

 

[J_C]

Finally... are there really sixteen fucking episodes of the documentary? Look no further on why this game tanked.

Oh come on, this was part of the deal from the beginning. And these documentaries are great, worth the KS money on its own.

the consumer base for video games, even adventure games, is larger today than it was in the 90's

I don't believe this. I mean the consumer base for video games is bigger, but adventure games? Nah. The current generation is not into this, proven by the abysmal sales of other games. The people who like old school point and click adventure games are the older gamers, and there are less and less from them. And I assume most of them backed the game through KS, this also explains why there are no more people to buy it.

The funny thing is seeing how they aren't even trying to release Act 2 this year!

Lie. In the last documentary Tim especially said that he wants to release it this year.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

I don't believe this. I mean the consumer base for video games is bigger, but adventure games? Nah. The current generation is not into this, proven by the abysmal sales of other games. The people who like old school point and click adventure games are the older gamers, and there are less and less from them. And I assume most of them backed the game through KS, this also explains why there are no more people to buy it.

Adventure fans didn't die. They're in their thirties and forties, with no spare time but a lot more disposable income.

They will shun their job and family duties for the right game. (or at least buy the game and wait until they have some free time)

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Anyway, a good game usually finds it's audience over time. So long as it's available to buy, and the game is as good a J_C makes it out to be, it's going to bring in steady profits.

 

[Curious_Tongue]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/new...-Made-More-on-Psychonauts-This-Year-Than-Ever

Double Fine gained the publishing rights to its first game, which helped the studio realize how much money it was missing out on by not owning its games. In an interview with Polygon, studio head Tim Schafer stated, "We made more on Psychonauts this year than we ever have before."

By getting back the publishing rights to Psychonauts, which "instantly started making money" for the studio, "we realized how much money we're losing out on, by not controlling our own destiny." Because of this, Double Fine is finding new ways to get funding while retaining the rights to its creative works, like investors and the immensely successful Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter from earlier this year.

 

[felipepepe]

The funny thing is seeing how they aren't even trying to release Act 2 this year!

Lie. In the last documentary Tim especially said that he wants to release it this year.

Where? I saw it, and Tim keeps saying how "we made Act 1 in 2 years, trying to make Act 2 in 1 year will be hard", and how he won't get any award by releasing it in the same year as Act 1...

 

[buzz]

I have to agree with J_C that it's unfair to compare adventure games to RPGs. Daedalic or Wadget Eye Games had probably some pretty good sales, enough to turn adventure games into a lucrative business. Telltale was also probably like that before The Walking Dead. But I'm pretty certain that none of them managed or would even dream or staying on Steam's Top Sellers list for several weeks, at the top spots even.
The pure adventure game genre is inherently flawed. It's a genre that relies on extremely minimal gameplay systems: explore, talk to stuff, solve puzzles. You can turn things around and do something else that may or may not count as an adventure game (see Portal, Amnesia or even TWD), but the classic kind where you click around and do inventory puzzles? Those will probably never sell that much.

Maybe Grim Fandango (if DF doesn't gay it up) will be that one true revival that will sell a huge amount.

edit: What I'm trying to say is that, even if Broken Age was the best adventure game since Day of the Tentacle, it probably still wouldn't have sold as well as D:OS did.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

1. Get hands on Divinity Engine.
2. Make adventure games with inventory puzzles, exploration and dialog.
3.????
4. PROFIT

 

[buzz]

That's still ignoring the combat system, which is probably the game's biggest selling point.

 

[Shadenuat]

What I don't like about Broken Age the most is that no character in the game takes world around them seriously. And it doesn't even feel like a parody like old adventure games, but more like a parody riding a parody.

I can forgive even shitty mechanics and childlike puzzles in an adventure game as long as at least setting is interesting and characters take what happens with them seriously. But I can't even invest in a gameworld where every character is just a joke or an allegory to something I don't care about.

 

[J_C]

The funny thing is seeing how they aren't even trying to release Act 2 this year!

Lie. In the last documentary Tim especially said that he wants to release it this year.

Where? I saw it, and Tim keeps saying how "we made Act 1 in 2 years, trying to make Act 2 in 1 year will be hard", and how he won't get any award by releasing it in the same year as Act 1...

Check out 16:50 mark in the latest documentary. Tim says that "I'm really trying everything to make sure the game comes out this year". In the next scene they talk about that it won't be easy, but it is not true that Tim wants to postpone it to 2015. He says the opposite.

 

[m_s0]

It's a documentary about a company failing, kudos to the guys for not toning nothing down.

The project may be failing, but the company seems to be doing better than ever.

 

[Sensuki]

He seemed way more concerned about Awards than anything else. It's kinda funny because they're not going to win any .

 

[Curious_Tongue]

Blackthorne

What could your people do with a budget of 3 million?

 

[J_C]

He seemed way more concerned about Awards than anything else. It's kinda funny because they're not going to win any .

Stop making shit up! He only mentioned awards in 2 sentences, and not in a concerned manner. You desperately want to look edgy or what?

Blackthorne

What could your people do with a budget of 3 million?

This question has already been asked before, go back a few dozen pages. No need to stir shit up again. And Blackthorne is not in Double Fine's position, since he doesn't have to run a medium sized studio in San Francisco.

 

[Redlands]

I ....don't....fuckin.....care!

The game is good, although light on puzzles. And fuck sales, since when sales decide a game's quality? The game got good critics from the gamers (THERE ARE GAMES OUTSIDE OF THE CODEX), but adventure games don't sell much in this day and age. Show me those recent classic point and click adventure games which sold better. You can find maybe one or two.

You are like "whaaa, the Codex hates the game, so everyone hates it", while in reality, people were pleased by it outside of the codex.

You are one of the dumbest cunts I've met on the Codex, and that's including the WCDS. You've literally argued "Fuck sales, popularity doesn't decide quality. But it was popular outside the Codex, so it must be good!" In one post. Congratulations, you've changed your stance faster than HHR with a new gadget. Should we kickstart a fund to get you treatment for whiplash?

First, comparing this game to other recent classic point and click adventure games is fucking stupid.

• Most recent adventure games don't have huge names from adventure game's heyday behind them. And of those that do, most of the others are being produced by studios with far less experience, connections and infrastructure than Double Fine.
• Most recent adventure games aren't plastered constantly throughout the press during their funding, and those that are don't do nearly as well score-wise.
  
• Most recent adventure games don't get over eight times their original budget.
• Most recent adventure games have a hard time getting on Steam at all, even ones from established developers.
• Most recent adventure games still have puzzles in them.

The game should have sold well. Compared to other adventure games, it probably has. But it should have sold significantly better because the game rolled a fucking natural 20 on community goodwill and free publicity.

Second, let's argue quality. The Codex, despite what other game sites, and sometimes itself, would have you believe, usually arrives at a consensus that is a pretty good indicator of quality, because unlike most places which cultivate only positivity, encourages negativity and skepticism. Go back and read this thread from the start. People were saying , or at least interested in how it turned out and looking forward to it. And why not? As much as I usually don't like LucasArts' adventures personally, I know a good game when I see one, and of their line-up I've played I can appreciate that most of them were at least good, if not great or (in the case of Grim Fandango) fantastic. If Broken Age had been legitimately good you'd have gotten what happened with:

• Might and Magic X,
• Divinity: Original Sin,
• Heroine's Quest,
• Quest for Infamy,
• Paper Sorcerer,
• Tex Murphy,
• Primordia,
• Ether One,
• A Space Adventure, and
  
• the first 3-4 Blackwell games,

where, even though there may have been contrary voices, the general consensus was that these were pretty good games to at least try out, or at least "eh, good for what it is". That really didn't happen. But you know, maybe the Codex is just wrong in this one instance. It could happen, right? The Codex is a pretty small place, maybe it's just selective bias, after all.

Third, if the game was so good, well-liked, and well-publicised, and only really hated on the Codex, why the fuck didn't it sell better? It's certainly was placed way, way more in the general gaming public consciousness than (numbers are Metacritics reviewer and user scores and sales figures from VGChartz, which I know isn't optimal):

• Deponia (74/8.4/130k)
  
• Machinarium (85/8.8/100k)
• The Book of Unwritten Tales (82/8.4/100k)
• The Whispered World (70/8.5/90k)
• Lost Horizon (77/8.7/90k)

For comparison, Broken Age for PC is (82/8.1/135k) (that sales figure is according to the image posted earlier). Somehow, an adventure game with the name Tim Schafer behind it only sold on the PC as well as Deponia. What happened?

Tim Schafer, veteran adventure game developer, with his own studio, asked for $400k for a project to make a point and click adventure game. He got $3 million, and has so far released a 4-6 hour adventure game that's weak on puzzles and big on flash. Oh, I'm sorry, only he's only managed to release half of the game. This year we've gotten so far two adventure-RPG hybrid with a pretty decent amount of replayability and at-least-decent core mechanics and puzzles, whose developers combined asked for less than a tenth of the original asking budget for Broken Age. Fuck, one of them was released for free.

But go on, keep defending Broken Age by crying about how expensive it is for Schafer to run his studio (after he got eight times the money he asked for for the project, despite the fact he should know how to fucking budget a project by now, since he's had the studio for 5-10 years now), and how hateful and unfair the Codex is (despite us actually enjoying and actively promoting a whole lot of new releases, including some adventure games), or about how they are doing really well in comparison to other adventure games (not really, factoring in the extra publicity they got from having Tim Schafer and a whole bunch of the gaming press on board). It's not like a lot of people here were ever looking forward to what Schafer was going to create anyway (go back and look at the first few pages of the thread).

Because it's not like a game that the Codex likes and whose members will probably actively promote (D:OS) will actually sell better than one that isn't (Broken Age). That's just silly.

 

[Xu Fugui]

 

[J_C]

I ....don't....fuckin.....care!

The game is good, although light on puzzles. And fuck sales, since when sales decide a game's quality? The game got good critics from the gamers (THERE ARE GAMES OUTSIDE OF THE CODEX), but adventure games don't sell much in this day and age. Show me those recent classic point and click adventure games which sold better. You can find maybe one or two.

You are like "whaaa, the Codex hates the game, so everyone hates it", while in reality, people were pleased by it outside of the codex.

You are one of the dumbest cunts I've met on the Codex, and that's including the WCDS. You've literally argued "Fuck sales, popularity doesn't decide quality. But it was popular outside the Codex, so it must be good!" In one post. Congratulations, you've changed your stance faster than HHR with a new gadget. Should we kickstart a fund to get you treatment for whiplash?

First, comparing this game to other recent classic point and click adventure games is fucking stupid.

• Most recent adventure games don't have huge names from adventure game's heyday behind them. And of those that do, most of the others are being produced by studios with far less experience, connections and infrastructure than Double Fine.
• Most recent adventure games aren't plastered constantly throughout the press during their funding, and those that are don't do nearly as well score-wise.
  
• Most recent adventure games don't get over eight times their original budget.
• Most recent adventure games have a hard time getting on Steam at all, even ones from established developers.
• Most recent adventure games still have puzzles in them.

The game should have sold well. Compared to other adventure games, it probably has. But it should have sold significantly better because the game rolled a fucking natural 20 on community goodwill and free publicity.

Second, let's argue quality. The Codex, despite what other game sites, and sometimes itself, would have you believe, usually arrives at a consensus that is a pretty good indicator of quality, because unlike most places which cultivate only positivity, encourages negativity and skepticism. Go back and read this thread from the start. People were saying , or at least interested in how it turned out and looking forward to it. And why not? As much as I usually don't like LucasArts' adventures personally, I know a good game when I see one, and of their line-up I've played I can appreciate that most of them were at least good, if not great or (in the case of Grim Fandango) fantastic. If Broken Age had been legitimately good you'd have gotten what happened with:

• Might and Magic X,
• Divinity: Original Sin,
• Heroine's Quest,
• Quest for Infamy,
• Paper Sorcerer,
• Tex Murphy,
• Primordia,
• Ether One,
• A Space Adventure, and
  
• the first 3-4 Blackwell games,

where, even though there may have been contrary voices, the general consensus was that these were pretty good games to at least try out, or at least "eh, good for what it is". That really didn't happen. But you know, maybe the Codex is just wrong in this one instance. It could happen, right? The Codex is a pretty small place, maybe it's just selective bias, after all.

Third, if the game was so good, well-liked, and well-publicised, and only really hated on the Codex, why the fuck didn't it sell better? It's certainly was placed way, way more in the general gaming public consciousness than (numbers are Metacritics reviewer and user scores and sales figures from VGChartz, which I know isn't optimal):

• Deponia (74/8.4/130k)
  
• Machinarium (85/8.8/100k)
• The Book of Unwritten Tales (82/8.4/100k)
• The Whispered World (70/8.5/90k)
• Lost Horizon (77/8.7/90k)

For comparison, Broken Age for PC is (82/8.1/135k) (that sales figure is according to the image posted earlier). Somehow, an adventure game with the name Tim Schafer behind it only sold on the PC as well as Deponia. What happened?

Tim Schafer, veteran adventure game developer, with his own studio, asked for $400k for a project to make a point and click adventure game. He got $3 million, and has so far released a 4-6 hour adventure game that's weak on puzzles and big on flash. Oh, I'm sorry, only he's only managed to release half of the game. This year we've gotten so far two adventure-RPG hybrid with a pretty decent amount of replayability and at-least-decent core mechanics and puzzles, whose developers combined asked for less than a tenth of the original asking budget for Broken Age. Fuck, one of them was released for free.

But go on, keep defending Broken Age by crying about how expensive it is for Schafer to run his studio (after he got eight times the money he asked for for the project, despite the fact he should know how to fucking budget a project by now, since he's had the studio for 5-10 years now), and how hateful and unfair the Codex is (despite us actually enjoying and actively promoting a whole lot of new releases, including some adventure games), or about how they are doing really well in comparison to other adventure games (not really, factoring in the extra publicity they got from having Tim Schafer and a whole bunch of the gaming press on board). It's not like a lot of people here were ever looking forward to what Schafer was going to create anyway (go back and look at the first few pages of the thread).

Because it's not like a game that the Codex likes and whose members will probably actively promote (D:OS) will actually sell better than one that isn't (Broken Age). That's just silly.

I hope it took a lot of time to write this novell. Because I don't care and didn't read it. Just keep parroting what others already said.

 

[Redlands]

I hope it took a lot of time to write this novell. Because I don't care and didn't read it. Just keep parroting what others already said.

If that post is what you consider was a novel, no wonder you think Broken Age is a good game.