KickStarter The Wayward Realms - upcoming Daggerfall-like RPG from original Elder Scrolls developers

[Takamori]

Its a risk that I gladly didn't take it. In these trying times we live in a boulevard of broken dreams and scams.

 

[Ramnozack]

Based on what is going on in the discord, did you really want a daggerfall ""successor"" made by these people anyway?

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

Got more out of my friend. Maybe not relevant to Wayward Realms itself but for any devs struggling to find investors this seems like sound advice to me. Baring in mind you are having to impress people to whom investing 3-8 million dollars on something is equivalent to asking a mate to lend you a quid for the fruit machines. With about the same risk of failure too.

 

[Takamori]

Got more out of my friend. Maybe not relevant to Wayward Realms itself but for any devs struggling to find investors this seems like sound advice to me. Baring in mind you are having to impress people to whom investing 3-8 million dollars on something is equivalent to asking a mate to lend you a quid for the fruit machines. With about the same risk of failure too.

Common sense basically, have some actual material to see if it has potential. Or you will be falling for idea guy 53523434243# pitch

 

[Roguey]

Daggerfall's spiritual successor would have to look much better than DFUnity, and would have to have most of the features that fine folks at Bethesda removed in last 24 years and quite a few new ones. Otherwise, what's the point of creating one ?

Somewhat better (i.e. decent at 1080) but not much better. Recreating Daggerfall's feature-set is obvious, I was talking about new features.

Besides, Paradox never intended to publish something looking like The Quest done on the cheap. Original publishing deal would have to be renegotiated somewhere down the road, and it would end up with Paradox buying the company to 'save the project' and it would leave original creators with no money and no control.

With 8 million, you get what you pay for. Additionally, as discord screenshot guy claims, they didn't want some Skyrim-looking-and-playing thing, they wanted Daggerfall. Making a Daggerfall requires trade-offs in the graphics department.

If the goal is to bring back original Daggerfall vision, with 'acceptable' graphics and limited feature set - there are already modders doing exactly that on DFUnity, with much less drama and much more visible progress.

Over 20 years and none actually exist though.

 

[Bad Sector]

Yeah, the real issue with this was obvious from the beginning of the article:

Julian said he was reluctant to commit to an RPG project like this on top of his day-job, but then proceeded to ramble about game design ideas for an hour or more.

Ideas are practically worthless and anyone come up with them but actually producing them is the hard part and Julian didn't seem to be interested in putting any actual work on the project.

 

[The Avatar]

TLDR; they tried to make a game without someone filling the producer role, and it didn't go well.

Producer has nothing to do with it. Its more like they couldn't get anything of substance done because the guys have day jobs and count not fully commit to the project, so it just sort of lingered on without any real progress.

 

[Tavernking]

One day some literal random nobody will single-handedly achieve what these 'industry veterans' have wasted a year and a half trying to do. There eventually will be a worthy Daggerfall successor, but not from these folk.

 

[Azdul]

Most AAA games in West are wasteful and mismanaged af. They aren't good metric of real costs

Mismanagement, drama, people quitting, autistic programmers, arrogant managers - it happens everywhere, not only in the West. Case in point (with English subtitles):

 

[Trans-Financial-Man]

Most AAA games in West are wasteful and mismanaged af. They aren't good metric of real costs

Mismanagement, drama, people quitting, autistic programmers, arrogant managers - it happens everywhere, not only in the West. Case in point (with English subtitles):

This is a pretty good documentary actually. I quite enjoyed it. Thank you for sharing. But my earlier point stands. Hire slavs for the menial tasks. Keep me in management. I've managed harder and riskier things than Game Dev. Welcome to the art of outsourcing.

 

[The Wall]

Yes, Slavs are people too. I was mainly talking about Slavic mental capabilities which are unshackled by Western PC culture and production costs. Anthem, Andromeda, Fallout 76 - all costed fortune. For a fraction of that fortune you can make million times better games with Slavs*

*0% exaggeration

 

[Lord_Potato]

Yes, Slavs are people too. I was mainly talking about Slavic mental capabilities which are unshackled by Western PC culture and production costs. Anthem, Andromeda, Fallout 76 - all costed fortune. For a fraction of that fortune you can make million times better games with Slavs*

*0% exaggeration

As proven by the Witcher trilogy, Underrail, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Atom, Encased... action RPGs, spiritual successors to Infinity Engine and Fallout... we've got it all!

 

[V_K]

Witcher trilogy

$80 mil (W3).

Underrail

Indie passion project.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance

$35 mil.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Atom, Encased

Shovelware.

 

[The Wall]

How much would Witcher 3 cost in West? Or Kingdom Come? Hundreds of millions. If we neglect fact that modern West is INCAPABLE of producing Witcher 3/ Kingdom Come. This generation's AAA RPG open-world costs are in hundreds of millions. Hundreds of millions wasted on garbage games. I mourn every $ wasted on Anthem, Fallout 76, Fallout 4, Andromeda

BTW: Your Mom is shovelware and your Dad vaporware. West is in serious crisis, spiritual. Self-destructing

 

[Lord_Potato]

Witcher trilogy

$80 mil (W3).

Underrail

Indie passion project.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance

$35 mil.

Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Atom, Encased

Shovelware.

It's strange that Western companies were unable to make such good "shovelware". Is it creative bankrupcy, or just common laziness?

 

[The Wall]

Is it creative bankrupcy, or just common laziness?

Both. I'm not kidding, bro

 

[grimace]

Could "D" have been Douglas Goodall, he of the famous 2005 anti-Morrowind interview? The part about him leaving the development of Morrowind "due to them changing direction from the previous game Daggerfall" is consistent with that.

A worthwhile read, indeed!

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/threads/interview-critical-of-bethesda-rubbed-out.10403/#post-172709

Arena and Daggerfall had more in common with random games (Rogue) than with traditional RPGs (Ultima et al.)

and

I told Stefan that we’d absolutely want to get Ted Peterson on board as well, because of his writing expertise, his amazing work on Daggerfall’s character creation system, and our shared idea of a procedurally generated storyline/quest system we had discussed during our interview.

I'll say it again:

I thought [assumed] the man who went by ‘Julian LeFay’ had coded a procedurally generated storyline/quest system for educational software and was going to use that to build a computer role playing game.

I thought [assumed] that part of the code was written.

 

[Max Heap]

LeFay strikes me as a typical "blue collar" intellectual or old-skool autist if you allow me say so.
He seems very proficient at what he does. He's definitely more of a practitioner than a thinker. But what he does, is exactly what he is interested in doing right at the moment.
And nothing more. The standard profile of a highly talented underachiever. It's also a standard profile for many old-skool software engineers.
That includes the doggedness with regards to programming languages, which I pointed out as a red flag much earlier in this thread.
It all comes full circle, really.

I don't think LeFay is a bad guy. These programmers are immensely useful if you have the right job for them.
But I've met too many of his type to not see where this was headed. People like this need an experienced producer.
The suit that cracks the whip so to say. It's quite a spectacle - I have to admit - to see what a difference that can make.
Thanks to Kickstarter, we see that out in the open again and again as well.

 

[The Wall]

My favourite meme that came out of this mad circus

 

[Zer0wing]

Is it creative bankrupcy, or just common laziness?

And a lot more. Even from an software engineering standpoint, KFC is the first CryEngine game that dares to go open-world. Witcher 3 is very interesting internally, too. Not too shabby even if compared to Ass Creed from 2017 & 2018, still an european game.
Novadays, the west (and japan) is essentially Unreal 4+quixel downscaled megascan. It's boring.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Slavs are people too.

Are they?

 

[The Avatar]

Yes, Slavs are people too. I was mainly talking about Slavic mental capabilities which are unshackled by Western PC culture and production costs. Anthem, Andromeda, Fallout 76 - all costed fortune. For a fraction of that fortune you can make million times better games with Slavs*

*0% exaggeration

As proven by the Witcher trilogy, Underrail, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, Pathfinder: Kingmaker, Atom, Encased... action RPGs, spiritual successors to Infinity Engine and Fallout... we've got it all!

You're cherry picking. There are a lot of shitty games made there, especially ones that get outsourced from the West. One of the worse games of all time was made in Ukraine: Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

 

[Zer0wing]

Are they?

No. Better. We are posthuman.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

How come slavs are only capable of making clones of 20 year old American games?

 

[Zer0wing]

How come America can't move on from failing at remaking their own 20 year old games? How come Japan fails at anything but milking their own 20-30 year old franchises since 2017? How come simulation market in the west consists of Microsoft Flight Simulator and nothing else?