RPGWatch - Wave Of Darkness Interview

Couchpotato

Couchpotato

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A sequel to Legends of Dawn? It's called Wave of Darkness, and I had the chance to interview Dreamatrix Game Studios about their new game.

Here is a small sample of one of my questions.
Couchpotato: Your most recent game Legends of Dawn was funded on Kickstarter, and released with a lot of negative feedback. Were you discouraged by the overwhelmingly negative reception of Legends of Dawn?

Dino: We also got tons of positive and constructive feedback. “Negative” feedback was deserved, and I don’t believe in negative feedback. It is a feedback, people telling you what they don’t like or want differently and when you strip emotional part the substance of feedback is very constructive as it points to solutions and learnings. When people care they are passionate and then some things may be taken too seriously. When expectations are set, a few disappointments are bound to happen. If you can’t handle that, don’t do games (or anything involving other people).

For those who may not know; due to some miscommunication LoD was released on Steam earlier than planned and backers got their keys a few hours after the release as we were rushing through the damage control. It was enough to set [the] stage on fire. A few backers were provoked and become extremely vocal. Those who were publicly supportive of us or our game were attacked and silenced as well. But hey, this is how this works nowadays. Behavior on internet and forums is still evolving from its “wild west” stage and exaggeration is the norm. Anyway 99% of our backers and new owners of Legends of Dawn were supportive and were happily playing the game.

Without the backers, supportive or at some point angry, we wouldn’t be on Steam, nor would we have a chance to develop our upcoming Wave of Darkness. We received so much helpful feedback and the whole experience was amazing. We’ll avoid repeating mistakes, [but] if you are doing anything new and ambitious, can you avoid them all?
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More information.
 
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I hate to say it, but this game looks kinda nice.

Though they'd have to do a 100% turnaround on everything before I'd consider purchasing another game from them.
 
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I was one of their big fans as the first game was being developed. But after release I was pretty disappointed and waited for them to fix all the biggest problem but they didn't.

What they say here sounds good but so did LoD descriptions. I cannot bring myself to trust them anymore until the game is out and reviewed.

As far as this interview one of the big questions that is missing is if any of these WoD enhancements will find their way into LoD? I still want to finish LoD (only played it for about 12h) but I cannot in its current shape.
 
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Another great job Couch! Seriously, your really good at these. I really like that you asked them about the negative feedback, and gave them a chance to tell their side of things, and what they plan to do to address those issues. Sounds like the new game will be much better as a result.
 
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Dino: But hey, this is how this works nowadays. Behavior on internet and forums is still evolving from its “wild west” stage and exaggeration is the norm. Anyway 99% of our backers and new owners of Legends of Dawn were supportive and were happily playing the game.
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I don't like how he says 99% of people played it and liked it. That is just not true, the Steam positive/negative score is much closer to the truth. Out of 140 reviews only 12% were positive.
It is bad practice to act like all was OK except for a few loud naysayers. Accept and learn from your mistakes and fix them.

It is good that other two guys seemed to be much more realistic and I hope Dino does not go around and keeps spreading his (wrong) opinion as it will piss off even more of the majority of people that were not happy enough with final product.

If they expect people to give them money in another KS, they need to be humble at this time. And sincere about it as community has a knack in finding out if you are playing them.
 
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They are professionals - their coders, animators and graphics artist are OK, only a good designer and project manager is missing to hold it all together and DEMAND bug fixes and key feature changes. Someone, who has power over them.
 
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I started to follow their Steam forums and it seems they actually started replying to people more regularly. The guy in the interview says they need to focus on communication with fans, so good thing they recognized that.
 
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I'm rellay intrigued if their new KS campaign will succeed. I have great doubts.
 
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Thanks for the interview Couchpatato. There wasn't enough information about the game.
 
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I agree with most of the comments so far only to add that what they patched just wasn't much fun. It looked good, features were there but it just lacked any kind of wow factor. I wouldn't buy another game from them without a lot of favorable reviews.
 
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Gokyabgu said:
Thanks for the interview Couchpatato. There wasn't enough information about the game.
Click to expand...
Well I didn't receive a lot of information so I had to go with what I was sent. As I said at the end of the interview look forward to more information in the following weeks.:)
 
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Hi guys,

I just created an account on RPGWatch simply to thank you guys for comments, suggestions and everything regarding the interview. Kevin is a great lad and RPGWatch is an amazing community. It's really a privilege to have an interview published here.
Any kind of additional comments and suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
 
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I remember them being quite open to constructive criticism after release. I was suggesting at a frantic pace once I started the game and several things that I, (and many others), requested got into the game. Item sorting and teleport scrolls are a couple of those and I really tried to help these guys in the beginning. I played LoD for almost 200 hours, iirc, and most of that was in trying to help make the game better. I never got much past the 2nd town as I kept going back to the beginning out of habit and to see what changed in the latest update. I remember one quest was to kill a spider and it would break if you killed this other group of spiders first. I hope they fixed the runes issue where you needed something like 36 different runes to open all locks. It basically took 1/3 of all inventory space just to have your lockpicks :)

Iggy is the forum master poster at Dreamatrix, iirc. He was the dude that talked back to us on the boards. I'll back the game because they did try very hard and I think the next game can be successful. I need to go back to LoD and see what has changed since I stopped playing.
 
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Is there a way to get into the beta of the new game? Since the beta sounds open now, will that be an available perk right from the start in the KS campaign?
 
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@crpgnut, the team made real effort into fixing the game, and we're working on a new LoD patch as we speak. But, the thing is, there are six guys in the studio who can be considered to be on an "full time" contract. Unfortunately we don't have folks dedicated exclusively to debugging, so patching the game takes some time.

Regarding beta access, it isn't ready for public just yet. I mean, it's certain WoD will get into Early Access program, and I believe that LoD backers will get some perks and bonuses. What kind of bonuses, it's still a bit early to tell.
 
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Are these WoD enhancement going to be patched into LoD as well?

I hope you worked on improving the resources the game uses, it was too slow for the level of graphics it has.
Also the camera, even when you did raise it a bit, it was still not enough.
 
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Archangel said:
Are these WoD enhancement going to be patched into LoD as well?

I hope you worked on improving the resources the game uses, it was too slow for the level of graphics it has.
Also the camera, even when you did raise it a bit, it was still not enough.
Click to expand...

The main "issue" with our engine was constant world streaming. The game didn't have loading screens. Being a 32-bit title, LoD suffered because of it.

WoD will be a 64-bit only title which will open a new door into a whole new world of performance improvements. Better memory management and such.

The sequel does have camera tweaks.
 
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Came only to say hi, aaaand…
Samo da znaš, ima tu i domaćih. :D

Endless respawns again or this time it'll be something like Divinity: Original Sin aka no_phoenix powers on mobs spectacularity?
 
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