I've sent out e-mails to everybody who donated $10 or more to our Original Sin fundraiser, to verify if you want to receive the available rewards corresponding to the amount you donated and if needed your address.
Those who have donated less than $25, but at least $10 are eligible for a digital copy of the game as well, because many who have donated more do not want their copy.

At the moment of this writing I am still missing information of 38 individuals!!

If you have donated $10 or more, but did not receive an e-mail, check your spam folder. If that does not show the mail contact me via a PM on our forums.

Stardock announces the release of Fallen Enchantress – Legendary Heroes is now available via digital distribution for $39.99 for newcomers to the series, or $19.99 for those who already own Fallen Enchantress.

Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes begins right where Fallen Enchantress left off. Your fame has spread far and wide bringing forth champions who will aid your cause in restoring civilization to the land.

Two New Factions.
The Objectivist Capitarians and the Industrious Urxen have been added.

Fame.
Champions are no longer placed randomly on the map but instead are earned through fame that your civilization generates through its deeds.

New Leveling System.
Your sovereign and your champions now evolve through a skill tree that visually allows you to pre-plan what kind of hero you want him or her to be.

New Tactical Battle Maps.
Battles are now much more intense with far more special skills available and initiative being far more important. New combat mechanics - such as swarming increase the strategic options.

New Monsters.
The Legendary Heroes did not reach our lands alone. Their ancient enemies have arrived with them - including the nightmarish liches and their skeletal minions, banshees and the dreaded Garagoxi seek dominion over Elemental itself.

More Magic.
New spells like "Wall of Fire" and "Raise Horde" add new options and new dangers to battle.

New Quests, Items, and Equipment.
All of the factions will encounter new quests, gain access to new weapons, armor and equipment and discover many new treasures as they explore the world.

Huge Maps.
A new gigantic sized map delivers epic sized games.
Updated Graphics Engine.

The graphics engine delivers stunningly new visuals while improving performance on older machines.

Updated User Interface.

LOTS more.

Neocore Games announces that The Incredible Adventures Of Van Helsing has officially launched on PC exclusively on Steam. The game is available for $13.49 due to being 10% off on Steam till May 29th.

The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing is a real-time Action RPG filled with fierce and demonic battles, memorable characters, and a refreshingly unique story loosely based on Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula.

Set in a gothic-noir universe resembling a fantastical 19th century Europe filled with monsters, magic, and weird technology, The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing will follow the son of the famed hunter, known in-game as Van Helsing, in a tale wrought with wry humor and snappy dialogue. Van Helsing, a larger-than-life hero possessing a dark yet romantic charm, will follow his path to the dismal land of Borgovia where former supernatural foes have enlisted his help to defeat a new scourge terrorizing the ravaged city.

Full Control released two more quick updates for Jagged Alliance: Flashback. The total sofar is $323,852 pledged of $350,000 goal. The project mangaged to get a huge boost, but still needs more money with just 23 hours left

Kickstarter Recap

Backers and fans, let us tell you something. The last ~29 days have been quite an amazing journey. And we’re already looking back, getting a bit sentimental. Thomas even had a tear in his eyes this morning (srsly). It feels as it was just yesterday that we pressed the green “launch the damned thing” button on Kickstarter. Without knowing what would come, what to expect, what to fear.

It’s has been a great learning experience from our side and we’ve been challenged in more ways than we could imagine. And at the same time it has been a fantastic journey that seems to have united us with a large part of the community to dare dream the dream of another great Jagged Alliance game.

We are now approaching 6000 people who share the same dream. So we wanted to take this opportunity to make a recap of what has happened the last ~29 days.

- The most important thing is that people from all over the world have already put more than $307,000 (at the time of writing this) into Jagged Alliance: Flashback already. Again we want to tank you (pun intended, as always) for all your support.

- We recently released a Diorama of the game which everyone can download to get a feel for the art direction we’d like to see in Flashback. Thanks for the massive feedback you gave us on that one. See update #20 for more info

- From the start of the Kickstarter we realised that we needed to be a lot clearer and more specific in certain areas, we were in pre-production (and still are) and wanted feedback from all the fans. But the following two weeks we spent on clarifying major parts of the story, combat and strategic elements of the game, which was overall well received by the backers. See the following updates for more info: Update #1, Update #2, Update #4, Update #5 and Update #9.

During the Kickstarter we’ve been trying to reach out the press for coverage in various areas and also social media like Reddit and YouTube. We even did a Reddit IAMA . We managed to get some coverage here and there, but not at the level we anticipated, which is why we’d like to thank you guys for your help with pushing them to do those interviews and spreading the word among friends, family and on multiple forums! And Thanks to all those journalists who had the time to send us some questions!

Slacker Backer initiative

When we reach our goal (Yeah we’ll get there!!) we want to open up for a slacker backer initiative like they have on Project Eternity. The initiative will run to a certain date and all funds will go towards stretch goals. We plan to make this available to both Paypal and Credit Card backers.

The Paypal tally is almost $ 8,000 which means we’re already ⅓ of the way to the first stretch goal when we reach our initial goal.

We right now have no end date, and we are unsure what it will be. As long as we are in pre-production and even early production we can still add more sectors and story that fits with the sector. So we will announce the end date sometime after summer to give appropriate warning.

This also means that we will continue adding stretch goals as we reach the initial ones.

Bear Pit Interviews

Shanga and his fellow bears have been busy and cooked together questions for Chris Camfield, Ian Currie and our CEO Thomas Lund. All of the interviews were ready yesterday, so we think you should go check them out :D

Chris Camfield
Ian Currie
Thomas Lund

New Tiers

$650 Doctor Y No Q Tier: Phew, we’re glad you’re here, you’re rewarded with:
All previous DIGITAL REWARDS + Become a Doctor (Help co-design the Doctor and the name of the clinic co-write 3 responses) Limited (3)

$850 Bubba Croc Tier: *Snap Snap* it’s a Trap, you get: All previous rewards + Become the croc “farmer” in the game and help decide his name and the name of the croc farm. (Co-write 5 responses of your choice) Limited (1)

Neverwinter’s beta was taken offline due to hackers exploiting, and cheating with the economy.  Perfect World promised to release a care package to try to make up for the losses and hardship. It looks like they delivered.

When we opened the doors of the Neverwinter Open Beta on April 30, we expected there to be all kinds of responses, from positive feedback and fun player stories to bug reports and constructive feedback…We’ve counted on these responses to make the game even better as we get closer and closer to our live launch.

What we did not expect, and should have, is how amazingly supportive and helpful our community would be during the brief snags that we might hit along the way.  We are sincerely overwhelmed by all of the positive comments and feedback that we’ve received from you over the past few weeks, and would like to express our deepest thanks for your ongoing support and willingness to help us make Neverwinter one of the best free-to-play MMORPGs around.

Case in point: this past weekend, the Neverwinter community helped us to identify a major exploit involving the Auction House and Astral Diamond Exchange, which we promptly addressed through a number of corrective actions, including permanent bans on exploitative accounts and a necessary rollback to the time before the exploit was initiated.  We realize the frustration that the rollback and related downtime may have caused and are deeply sorry for this inconvenience.  We’re also overwhelmed by your positive support and patience during the downtime, as well as your assistance in identifying the issue and helping us to develop and implement a solution as quickly as possible.

To celebrate its anniversary Blizzard rounded up a whole bunch of statistics, and put them all into this neat little infographic.

14.5 million unique gamers have played Diablo III since launch, with 2.1 million logging in every day on average. Of the 67.1 million characters created, just 9% are using hardcore mode. Each of those characters kill an average of 49,595 monsters.

The three Battle.net regions are remarkably evenly represented in the global population, with 22.2 million players from the Americas, 22.1 from Europe, and 22.9 from Asia.

Fallen Enchantress Legendary Heroes  has been officially released today and alrready there are a few reviews for the game.

rtsguru - 8/10

Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes is a solid 4x game with a huge range of customisation for replayability. A turn-based 4x strategy game set in a fantasy universe with RPG elements. The game offers a solid foundation to get lost in, however feeling occasionally cliche the universe can feel bland at times. A great improvement over its predecessor.

everydaygamers - 9/10

Simply put, you will be enchanted by the game.  The more I played, the more I discovered, and the more it kept me coming back for more.  I can’t say that I’ve been this enamored by a fantasy strategy game since Heroes Of Might and Magic III.  There is a scenario-based campaign to fill the role of a story campaign.  If that’s not to your liking, you can simply customize a map, number of opponents and embark on a new adventure each time you restart.  Regardless of faction and setting, the game allows you to customize all of your units, their appearances and their equipment.  Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes  is wildly addicting and offers just enough variety to fuel the ‘one more turn’ golem inside you.  I went through a phase of not finishing campaigns by just restarting on new maps, with new factions and seeing what the game would throw at me.  It’s that depth and variety that kept me from being satiated and shows me that my time in the world of Elemental is far from over.  

I am very excited by what Legendary Heroes has done, and I cannot wait to see what lies ahead in the post-release patches and updates.  If you like a little fantasy role-playing in your empire builder, then look no further than Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes.  You can purchase Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes on Steam or directly from Stardock.  Don’t forget that the game is $39.99 and contains all of the content found in the original Fallen Enchantress.  If you have already purchased Fallen Enchantress, you can get all of the content from Legendary Heroes at the discounted price of $19.99.  For either price, Fallen Enchantress: Legendary Heroes will enchant you into hours of ‘just one more turn’.  It gets a 9 out of 10.

thunderboltgames - 5/10

Legendary Heroes doesn’t leave the greatest first impression. Its graphics make the game look like an HD port of something released last generation. Its story drops out once the game starts, leaving you stranded, without direction as to what you’re expected to do next. There is a scenario to play through, but it does little to add any sort of entertaining narrative.

At first glance the lack of direction appears to be a weakness, but in actuality Legendary Heroes requires you to assist it, to give it the direction it needs. The game thrives on customized scenarios just as much as it wants you to create your own unique army. To get the most out of the game it’s best to play around with the settings to make your own world.

You can choose a sovereign or build your own. Name him, or her. Name their kingdom. Decide what clothes they wear and what sigil is emblazoned on their banner. Give them a backstory. But that’s only the start of it. The experience of Legendary Heroes is highly user defined. It’s a sandbox for you to build your empire, for you to explore, and it’s up to you in regards to the how.

 

Feargus Urquhart gave an interesting perspective at a Russian game developer conference called KRI 2013. The topics covered the future of the mid-sized developers, and also on Obsidian's specific strategy for the future.

Thanks go to Gamebanshee for translating and posting the story.

Given that the talk is rather long and there's quite a lot of Russian in there, a language a sizable portion of our reader is likely unfamiliar with, I'll try to summarize the salient points of Feargus' speech:

AAA is growing bigger in terms of budgets and team sizes, making this a much less relevant prospect for developers of Obsidian's size, and also making big-budget titles less innovative (because publishers want to be assured their significant investments will wield some profit)

In the future mid-sized developers will have to look at alternatives, and he points out a few of these:

 -  making parts of games (again, linking back to the swelling team sizes, that make it more difficult to handle everything in-house)

 -  making free-to-play titles (which he compares to TV, while AAA is akin to      movies) and smartphone/tablet titles

- funding game projects with Kickstarter

Feargus also explains that games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and Fallout: New Vegas are actually exceptions to the trend of bloated budgets and teams he explained earlier, and are actually relatively cheap to develop, certainly cheaper than what people believe

Feargus then goes on to point out the strategy Obsidian is adopting to tackle future challenges:

First of all, the company won't devote any further resources in developing their own engine, Onyx (which powered Dungeon Siege III and the upcoming South Park: The Stick of Truth, and which was also used as the tech backbone for the ill-fated Aliens: Crucible), and will instead license third-party tech like CryEngine 3 and Unity.

However the tools that have been developed for Onyx, like Obsidian's proprietary dialogue tool, will continue to be used and integrated with the third-party technology Obsidian will employIterating on tools and having them be as efficient as possible is something he stresses Obsidian is putting a lot of focus on, echoing the thoughts of Todd Howard from whom he's borrowed the expression "ninjas and tools"
  
Obsidian is going to make an effort to get games in a playable state earlier in the development cycle for the future, something he acknowledges has been difficult for the company in the past due to the sprawling nature of their games.

In general, the company is going back to their roots and look more into PC and tablets in the future. Feargus acknowledges that there's not exactly a wealth of deep RPGs on tablets, but sees it as an opportunity, as they can take the genre in that space.

Feargus was also gracious enough to elaborate further on his thoughts on the AAA marketplace for us, and whether Obsidian will stop looking into it altogether:

Games.On.Net has an interview with Grinding Gear Games Chris Wilson about Path of Exile.

GON: Chris, you’ve been in open beta for a little while now, since January in fact — can you tell us a little bit about how everything’s progressing?

Chris: So we’re now at 2.46 million registered users. So we had a large surge of people who became interested in the game, and who have joined our community, which has exceeded our expectations. Most of the game’s performance so far has exceeded our expectations, and this has raised some issues with how do we handle all these users, but thankfully the tests we’ve done prior to open beta were very optimistic in terms of user numbers so we were (barely) able to handle the amount of people that flooded our servers. And it did cause a few weeks of instability while we dealt with issues that only manifest when you have more than 50,000 people playing at once. But we we have those under control now.

GON: So what is your peak concurrent player count?

Chris: We’ve hit 70,000 in the first week of release. We’re very pleased with that. There was an awful lot of stuff combining at the same time with the game being very new and a lot of people talking about it which caused us to really strain the servers, but thankfully it’s dropped a bit to a more maintainable rate at the moment.

GON: Have you identified any issues in the beta that you’ll need to address going forward before launch?

Chris: We have found a lot of things based on player feedback and our own analytics that we can improve. There are various systems that we’ve been working on with the players to find better solutions to. For example loot allocation in the game, a lot of players would like it to be a bit more forgiving and less free-for-all, so we’ve been looking into a variety of options which will hopefully launch by the end of the month.

Full control released two updates today for Jagged Alliance: Flashback. The kickstarter is close to the end and still needs at least $70,000 with 47 hours left.

Again we want to thank you for all this support, for your trust and your help. Thank you so much, this already has been an amazing journey. We love you. Honestly.

So this is the first day we’re going for a second update. Why? Just because. And Javier already posted this on the Bear’s Pit. But we want you to know his thoughts as well, as he is one of our leading heads behind the scenes.

Assets and Modding

Hello everybody! People keep asking about budget things and how much money we can spend on this and that. So let me give you a small insight on the Art-Department. One of the challenges we face with whatever budget we have to make Jagged Alliance Flashback is of course what we make with the time and money we get. If you ever worked with 3D graphics you know its a time intensive affair. And sometimes not always a loved affair. To bring in the love again we need to have an art pipeline that is efficient and reduces wasted time. Cause wasted time is money thrown out of the window. And honestly: Who the hell does that?

New Tier Bundles

$2700 Two Please Tier: You sure drive a hard bargain, therefore you get: All previous rewards ($2500 not included) + The $1200 and $1800 bundled up (ONLY THIS TIER) Limited (3)

$3600 Lead and Conquer Tier: You’re quite the multitasker huh, you get: All previous rewards + The $1800 and the $2500 bundled up (ONLY THIS TIER) Limited (1)

 

Radio in JAF

Kaboom! As you may know, there’ll be an in-game radio in Jagged Alliance: Flashback. This means that here and there you’ll find radios to listen to and probably also be able to carry one with you for the road. Crank up the volume and go for it. To make this part a bit more interesting we’d like to add different music from the 1980’s era and include channels, each with their very own music style which people can choose from (in terms of modding we think we’re going the Grand Theft Auto way to allow people adding their own music, however that’s not yet clear).

While we won’t have Elliot, the idiot, in the game (which is for obvious reasons) you may have noticed that one of our backers already pledged to become the voice of the local radio. The radio host will occasionally be able to comment on the current situations happening in San Christobal. These are triggered either by the player succeeding or failing specific missions and can even be used to hint at troop movements across the island. Elliot might be gone and the faces change, but rest assured we’ll try hard to re-produce the same tongue-in-cheek situations and dialogue from JA2 in Flashback.

Diorama Commentary Video

We released a diorama commentary video to go along with the this morning's press release, so you should get a chance to see it in the update as well.

NewGamerNation has an article about Diablo 3, and the topic is about the failure of it's story.

With its most famous legacy usurped, now may be a good time to assess Diablo III on a different criterion. I am not an expert on Action RPGs, and I’ve only played a few hours of Diablo II, so I don’t feel qualified to ruminate on the loot distribution and auction house. What I can talk about is the story and characters. Any RPG, even one where the conflict is literally as simple as ‘good versus evil,’ requires an engaging story and characters to be truly successful. Believable motives, interesting dialogue, and memorable villains are the hallmarks of a successful RPG. Of course, it’s nice to have these components in any game, but in a genre that boasts game features like  Alpha Protocol‘s dynamic dialogue system or  Mass Effect‘s famous characters, any RPG worth its salt needs to put in a strong showing.

This is where Diablo III disappoints the most. Sure, the loot is uninspired and the auction house is a painfully naked attempt for Blizzard to wring yet more profit out of a game that has already sold over twelve million copies, but what really hurts is that such a phenomenally successful game could have such mediocre writing. Players starting up this hugely-anticipated chapter in the series expected either a bare but serviceable story, like in the previous installments, or a dynamic world with genuinely fascinating characters. What they got was a mess with a lot of characters, lore, and words, but nothing that was fresh or sensible.

Sloppiness and blandness are the hallmarks of Diablo III‘s story, and yet there is a bright side. When I am listening to a podcast or have an hour to kill, I might still play a bit of the game, because its visuals, sound design, and action are so addictive and satisfying. It’s just a shame the writing can’t match their standard.

IndieGameInsider has an articele about a new indie game some of you might be interested in. The game is called Dungeon of Elements, and merges puzzles with rpg dungeon crawling.

Dungeon of Elements, the upcoming game from Frogdice Games, is a title that combines the casual puzzle gameplay of tile matching with the more hardcore elements of a dungeon crawler to create a hybrid game inviting to gamers of all calibers.

In the game, players take on the role of an alchemist on the hunt for rare elements. In the quest to obtain these precious resources, players will battle in 45 different levels while obtaining new gear and items along the way. In the lab, players conduct experiments to create new armor and items.

The studio’s goal is create games that merge casual gameplay with core genres in an effort to appeal to every type of gamer.

Rock, Paper, Shotgun played the alpha version of Grim Dawn, and has posted a preveiw of the game.

This is alpha code, and just the first third of the game, but it’s enough to sate my need to finally play the thing. And gosh, that title’s appropriate. It is, mostly in the right way, grim. Dark, gloomy, and mercilessly tough, it’s the game I’m certain so many furious Diablo fans wanted D3 to be when they found out that had planned to feature colours. There seem to be two central pillars here: traditional, and difficult.

Which is a mighty good thing, I should add.

It’s extremely dark and bleak environments at first can look a little primitive, but you quickly realise the detail comes with study. Much has been done to the old Titan Quest engine, not least freeing the camera to rotate on the X axis, and you don’t need frills when it’s serious business. So you really already know what to expect: A Tetris inventory attached to a character sheet of square slots, basic stats embellished by a sprawling choice of skills, and hundreds and hundreds of monsters to left and right click all over.

The Nerd Cave has a new interview with Guido Henkel. The interview covers Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny, Neverwinter Nights, Fallout 2, Planescape: Torment, and Deathfire.

Can you talk a little bit about some of the gaming projects you have worked on in the past? Most notably Realms of Arkania: Blade of Destiny and Neverwinter Nights.

I’ve started writing computer games on the Apple II in the very early 80s and had my first game published in 1983 or so. I was a huge fan of text adventure games in those days and the first few years I focused on that genre. However, I was attracted by role-playing games a lot and eventually let role-playing influences flow into these text adventure games. “Drachen von Laas,” for example, a game that was published in Germany only, already had a full blown phased combat system, even though the game itself was still a text adventure game.

Eventually I made the switch to full role-playing games (RPG) and “Spirit of Adventure” was the first hard core RPG I wrote, together with my friend and business partner Hans-Jürgen Brändle, at the time. The success of that game opened the door for us to obtain the license for “Das Schwarze Auge,” a famous German pen&paper role-playing game. We began developing games in that universe, which were subsequently released as the “Realms of Arkania” trilogy.

After the third game in the series I left Attic Entertainment Software, the company that I had co-founded, and moved to the US where I worked for Interplay Productions for a while. During my tenure there I worked on “Fallout II,” and “Planescape: Torment”, and also helped start up the “Neverwinter Nights” project, among others.

All in all, I’ve been in the games industry for just about 30 years now, pretty much since its infancy, really, when computer games were still sold in Zip-lock bags.

What role did you play in the development of these particular titles? 

“Blade of Destiny” was developed by a very small team. Attic was still pretty much a start-up company at that time. As a result everyone had to multi-task as much as possible, and we tapped into everyone’s full abilities. In my case that meant that I was working on the game as a designer, a programmer, and a producer, and later on also as the publicist and business developer when we began to reach out, looking for partners to release the game internationally. I was wearing every hat imaginable on that project — as well as all the other “Realms of Arkania” games. It was my job at Attic, in a sense, to be the Jack-of-all-Trades.

As for “Neverwinter Nights,” I was Interplay’s internal producer for the game during its start-up phase. As such I was part of various brainstorming sessions where the foundation for the game was laid, and where technical questions and obstacles were tackled. Apart from the look of the game and the technical design of the block-based level design of the game, we did research on the game system itself, as the AD&D 3.0 rule set was just about to be released, and we wanted to see if we should or should not use it for “Neverwinter Nights.”

I was working hand in hand with Trent Oster on this, who was the producer for the game at Bioware. He was really the driving force behind the project while I was there only to lend my experience to the discussions. I left Interplay a few months after “Neverwinter Nights” really went into development, so my contributions to the game happened really just at the beginning.

IGN has a new 19 minute video in their Up at Noon series about Mass Effect and the need for strong female Characters.

FemShep -- Jennifer Hale -- swings by Up at Noon to talk about the franchise, and we make some Pokemon/Star Trek jokes.

Softpedia has a quick look at the The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing and includes a gameplay video also.

The story is set in 19th century in Eastern Europe in a world full of magic, monsters and weird technology.

As a RPG fan, I found this steampunk universe intricately depicted by Neocore, starting from monsters that freely roam the fictional kingdom of Borgovia and continuing with the plethora of weapons, armors, skills and perks including in the game.

I cannot refrain from comparing Van Helsing with Diablo III and Torchlight II. Even though the former borrows lots of RPG elements from the other two, it takes all those features to a whole new level.

The main protagonists, Van Helsing and his ghost(ly) companion Katarina, will make use of a wide range of weapons, including revolvers, swords, muskets and rifles.

There are all sorts of actions that you can predefine for your companion, like allowing her to collect all loot that drops from monsters.

You can set Katarina's behavior or how exactly you want her to fight: melee, ranged or ghost. The latter only provides buffs to your character, but it's extremely useful in boss fights.

Your character's skill tree is huge and it's split in three categories: Mystic Warrior (melee), Occult Hunter (ranged) and Auras. There are no classes in this game, so you can choose the skills that define your play style.

The good news is that you can level up your companion as well. Although Katarina's skill tree is not that big, I found most of the abilities extremely powerful.

Dark Triad: Conspiracy  has a new development update found on their cancelled Kickstarter. The update shows renders of the noble district, offers a list of the non-combat skills, and annouces the company is changing their name from Autoloot Games to Azurite Games.

          

Non-Combat Skills

Also we want to share with you the ultimate list of non-combat skills that will be available unless we need to include one or a couple more due to gameplay needs later. Miguel A.L.M. has been working on it and we are quite happy and sure this will cover most game situations we can think of. The list was bigger but we decided to disregard those ones that weren’t meaningful enough. It must also be taken into account that we can only spent a full year after the next Kickstarter relaunch to complete the game due to budget constraints, so we needed to focus only on the strictly necessary ones to add enough content and at the same time to have full control of the possible outcomes. This will serve us to prepare all the quests, dialogues and game situations so you can complete them in different ways.

PCGamesHardware has an interview with Thomas Lund of Full Control about
Jagged Alliance: Flashback.

PCGH: 60 hours days left on the clock and there are still 80.000 US-D missing on Kickstarter - Will Jagged Alliance Flashback happen or not, what's your personal opinion?

Thomas: I have no clue. I hope it happens. That's all I can say. And that we'll continue to fight until the very last second. I mean, Kickstarter is nearly unpredictable. We have seen so many weird things happening on this platform already, it'd be insolent to think someone can say anything for sure.

PCGH: Do you think that the mediocre reception of Jagged Alliance Back in Action affects the success of the JAF kickstarter campaign?

Thomas: Hard to say. It was quite a hard way to convince people that we don't plan to go the route Back in Action has taken. I think we managed that somehow during the campaign. What I think is that it surely didn't help that much. Over all these years the Jagged Alliance community had to deal with several letdowns and troubles in terms of games. So it's quite understandable that those who already suffered from the pain don't want to suffer again and therefore are very skeptical. I can fully understand that but it makes me also sad at the very same time.

Gamezebo has taken a look at Expeditions: Conquistador, which could not have been too long as the article about it is rather short.

Instead of leading a party through monster-filled dungeons, Expeditions: Conquistador will challenge you to assemble a group from more than 30 different followers to help your explorer seek out riches and fame in the mysterious land that a bunch of us now call home. That would be the Americas, though the game includes both real and legendary locales. The choice between slashing and burning your way across the New World or trying a more diplomatic approach is yours, but the developers at Logic Artists are claiming that there will be serious consequences for every decision.

An interview about Age of Decadence with Iron Tower's Vince D. Weller can be found at ePressDeck, which answers amongst others the question what a CRPG is.

EPressDesk: On your website your game, Age of Decadence, is described as a CRPG style game. Can you tell me a little bit about what that means and what sort of games you can compare it to?

Iron Tower: The way I see it, role-playing games are about using your character’s skills, abilities, and knowledge (as opposed to your own) and being able to make decisions fitting your character (as opposed to following a linear storyline with little or no input).

Basically, a true role-playing game is *your* adventure set within a flexible story arc that supports different decisions and offers different paths and outcomes. You decide what to do and how to do it, and your actions affect the story and alter your options, creating a different experience with each replay.

I don’t think I can compare it to anything because it’s sort of a ‘one of a kind’ game now. I’m not sure if it’s good – in fact, I suspect that it’s not – but what’s done is done. So, if you feel like playing something different tonight, download the demo (283 MB) and see for yourself.

The Surly Gamer has recorded his playing session of Age of Decadence based on its demo.

Here is a recent preview of The Dark Eye: Demonicon available at Gameuber. It is a bit on the short side though.

The initial tutorial quest of a cannibal stealing villagers to dial up his magical power was still there, as was Cairon’s uncomfortable infatuation with his fiery redheaded sister, sending the character down a dark, dangerous path. A lot of Demonicon’s appeal is distilled into its dark fantasy setting, with the character’s downfall running parallel with a town which has yet to fall to evil pillaging forces in a grand, continent-wide war. If you aren’t familiar with The Dark Eye universe it seems to share a lot in common with Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings, only darker and more German…

In a post-funding update the team of Legends of Eisenwald lets us now that they are now greenlit on Steam.

Thanks to your many players and to your ongoing support, we have been greenlit today!

We planned quite a bit of activity to support our campaign on Greenlight and now we would have to change a few of our plans, but this time around this is a much nicer change compared to postponing the release. 

We didn't expect to be greenlit this round but regardless, we really appreciate it and Greenlight is a great service for indie developers. Alexander talked about it a few days ago in this article. If you want to hear his (well, actually our) thoughts about it, check it out.

Gamestar has penned down a preview of Daedelic's first RPG named Blackguards. The interview is in German, so for those who are challenged when it comes to the German language, you can try this somewhat mediocre translation.

From the conclusion:

I like my role playing story-heavy and my combat turn-based. Insofar BlackGuards meets exactly my taste. In particular, the lovely designed and enormously varied battlefields. Finally also a turn-based game requires me to include the environment as part of my tactics. I'm still a bit skeptic though whether Daedalic can maintain this variety and this pace throughout the entire game or that the majority of battles will just result in 'kill all enemies'. If Daedalic will get this done right and can also provide the usual story quality, Blackgaurds could turn into a surprise hit of the year.

 

Lords of Xulima project staff sends word of a new blog post on the games webpage. The topic of discussion deals with balancing in RPGs 

Hello Watch,

The Numantian Games team is hard at work on their debut indie RPG, Lords of Xulima. We expect the game to be ready in late 2013. Here is a link on our latest developer blog post. As we work on refining Lords of Xulima and making it the best RPG we can, we are taking time to look back at past games and describe how their systems and designs have influenced us. Here we talk about the challenges of balancing in open world games, and the horror of auto-scaling.

Matt Chat has a new video with Betrayal at Krondor designer Neal Hallford, and they chat about a variety of topics starting with Dungeon Siege.

In the fourth and final installment of my interview with Betrayal at Krondor designer Neal Hallford, we chat about a variety of topics starting with Dungeon Siege. Was Dungeon Siege too big for its britches? Then we chat about the hit game Champions of Norrath and why Neal prefers PC gaming to consoles. We wrap up with a discussion about Chris Taylor and his excellent leadership.

We all know about the fate of 38 Studios, and their downfall after releasing KoA: Reckoning. Well now that the ashes have settled Rhode Island Wants to Sell Kingdoms of Amalur and Copernicus.

As one lawyer for Rhode Island makes the state's case this week against the people involved in the 38 Studios loan debacle, another is ready to sell the company's video games -- once intended as progenitors of a new industry here.

"Who knows what the value ultimately will be," said Providence lawyer Richard J. Land. "But there is interest in the assets."

The company's most-valuable assets were its intellectual property -- the drawings, designs and work related to its video games and the computer software supporting the games.

The state sued former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling and 13 others in November in a separate attempt to recoup 38 Studios' $130-million debt. A hearing in that case is set for Wednesday.