The Banner Saga - Update #9, The Final Hours

Dhruin

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The Banner Saga is counting down to the end of their Kickstarter campaign, with 50 hours to go as I write ($597k). From Update #9, discussing what they can do as additional milestones are reached:
The Orchestra (at $600k)
Austin Wintory is currently working on the soundtrack and hiring on musicians but due to the cost of a full orchestra is still working with a combination of digital and live music. If we hit this goal we'll be able to have a full, honest-to-goodness orchestral score, each instrument played by a real musician in a high-quality recording studio used by film legends like John Williams.
Then what are the promotional music prizes for?
Prizes like the score and the signature have helped us get this far and also double as a way to guarantee that your personal donation goes directly into funding the music for the game.
The Most Content on the Most Platforms (at $650k)
Like the port to iPad and Linux, if we hit this goal we'll be able to make the game available on Xbox Live Arcade and Playstation Network. The funding will allow us to have additonal developers port the game, leaving us to focus on content development.
The additional content is just as important. This will give us the ability to add a much wider range of special events that can occur as you travel and really expand the scope of the finale to make it the biggest, most rewarding conclusion we can.
The Player-Owned Cities (at $700k)
If we meet this goal we'll be able to add one of the coolest features we thought was way beyond the scope of our game. In multiplayer, players will control their own city, raising it from a modest village to a bustling city with visual customization and their guild crest flying on the walls. Over time, players can construct buildings that will allow them to recruit new units, trade for powerful items and ultimately fight for territory.
Thanks, Tannhauser.
More information.
 
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37h > 617k, so we have that quality sound! Yay
 
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Have to say I'm not really crazy about how these projects keep presenting more and more outrageous goals when they beat their funding multiple times over. A solid game is based on a cohesive, and limited, vision. It's great to have more money than you need, but looking at the original conception for some of these Kickstarter games compared to what they end up with is not encouraging to me.
 
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Well at least with this one-

1) Orchestra -> not beyond the original concept merely improving the quality and depth of the musical composition
2) Porting to more platforms -> not changing core game, just more ways to play it
3) Player controlled cities -> was part of the original plan for the game but they could not afford to do it until now and they had thought they would have to cut it from the design plan (they explain this in the video.)

I do see what you mean though, but it seems to be more of a problem with games that exist merely as ideas rather than the projects where they're at least part way into development already. That's part of the reason I actually generally prefer to donate to projects that already have something to show for their work (meaning they've already, to a large extent, had a higher-level design in mind and moved into the lower-level and implementation phase to the point where they've done real work on it.) In this sense I do consider projects like Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun riskier than Banner Saga in terms of knowing what I will actually get out of it - but the prospects and the pedigree were enough to make them very appealing none the less.
 
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