11 days to Grimoire release. Yay.

Pretty clear that steam/game release is some sort of a hoax. Take a look at a couple excerpts from Grimoire's official Steam post from yesterday:


"Bloodshot eyeballs inflamed to 8x normal size, mucus from nose pooling on floor around chair, been doing 20 hour days with nothing but expired beef jerky to keep me from starving to death. My wife has brought a bedpan into my study and placed it under my chair like that episode of South Park so I no longer have to break to go to the bathroom.

"Game looks so utterly beautiful that tears are mixing with the mascara as they run down my cheeks. I … never … dreamed … my game would finally look this good.​


Gimme a break. This guy's not even close to serious.

__
 
Roq said:
No a demo and a superdemo were actually released several years ago and many of us played them, including myself. They were surprisingly good. Obviously there remains doubt over the remaining game. Personally, I think Cleve is perfectly genuine in wanting to make a good game, that conclusion is hard to avoid from the quality of the superdemo. Sure he is a pretty fallible guy in other respects such as anything to do with release dates. But that is a problem that afflicts many developers such as even Blizzard… Cleve, though, does seem to have an extremely severe case of making promises you can't keep syndrome.
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Yes, as I said, a demo was released that contained that exact same starting area from the 20 year old version, and which was mostly the same, including many of the same incomplete parts. That doesn't prove that there has been any development, in fact it suggests the opposite. And as I pointed out, Cleve outright lied this time. It's not about him being fallible or making promises he can't keep. It's about him blatantly lying and making things up. You can't possibly compare him to other developers who miss release dates but tell the truth and keep people informed about it. There is no reason to believe that the game is anything other than a scam/hoax at this point. Even Steam has removed it from their list of upcoming games.
 
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RPGFool said:
Pretty clear that steam/game release is some sort of a hoax. Take a look at a couple excerpts from Grimoire's official Steam post from yesterday:


"Bloodshot eyeballs inflamed to 8x normal size, mucus from nose pooling on floor around chair, been doing 20 hour days with nothing but expired beef jerky to keep me from starving to death. My wife has brought a bedpan into my study and placed it under my chair like that episode of South Park so I no longer have to break to go to the bathroom.

"Game looks so utterly beautiful that tears are mixing with the mascara as they run down my cheeks. I … never … dreamed … my game would finally look this good.​


Gimme a break. This guy's not even close to serious.

__
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Come on... that is just his style. Actually it is not untypical geek "humor". And there is a sort of bravado and geek ethic that underlies it.
 
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Roq said:
Come on… that is just his style. Actually it is not untypical geek "humor". And there is a sort of bravado and geek ethic that underlies it.
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Yup. It's all a big geek joke… hoax. Indeed, Grimoire : Heralds of the Winged Exemplar is not even available for purchase on Steam.

It ain't serious.

__
 
Roq said:
Come on… that is just his style. Actually it is not untypical geek "humor". And there is a sort of bravado and geek ethic that underlies it.
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Yeah that would maybe be funny 20 years ago. Now he is just one of the top trolls on the internet. The only thing he has ever wanted to accomplish.
 
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Golden Era Games said:
No such thing as bad publicity. You guys would not believe how soon you will be crying tears of joy and playing my fantastic game, it is almost there. Could be tears of despair mixed with tears of joy … what have you and whatnot.
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What a fool. He's been breathing Codex fumes for far too long.
 
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fadedc said:
Corwin has claimed to have played through the game twice but we don't know exactly what he played and how different it was than the 20 year old version. And for the record he also gave glowing reviews to Dungeon Lords when that first came out so many of us may have vastly different opinions than him about what counts as a complete/quality game.
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Oh come on! Give Corwin a break. Do you not realize how old he is?
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Golden Era Games said:
Almost there. Game is looking ABSOLUTELY UNBELIEVABLE. - Cleve
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http://steamcommunity.com/games/650670/announcements/detail/1430306874646967361


--

Time to turn off the counter again.
 
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He is unbelievable, I agree. But I disagree about people jumping through emotional hoops. Each time this happens I think people actually care less about it. There's probably 5 people that get strung along at this point. But it's definitely a hoax. There's no game there beyond the "superdemo" and it was probably stolen to begin with.

We're in the Age of RPG Hoaxes, it seems. I simply removed the game from my wishlist and barely shrugged. Nothing of value was lost.
 
Oh well. The cycle begins again, like the turning of the tides.
 
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That's why I've always been a strong advocate of RPGwatch just not covering any Grimoire related news items. The hoax can't continue if nobody pays attention to it anymore, and this is one of the few places left that still does.
 
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Given that otherwise intelligent people are still taking this seriously, I can only assume that they are currently living in a cluster of huts in the Australian desert known as Clevetown, wearing white robes, and awaiting his evening sermon.
 
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Ripper said:
Given that otherwise intelligent people are still taking this seriously, I can only assume that they are currently living in a cluster of huts in the Australian desert known as Clevetown, wearing white robes, and awaiting his evening sermon.
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..lol!
 
I'm relieved. For the first time I was actually fearing the game would be released. But now everything is back to the usual, the world makes sense and Cleve doesn't. As it should be.
 
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Personally I think it is a hoax because many of things he's claiming to be doing at the last minute should have been done 15 years ago (assuming this game has a 20 year development cycle). Even worse if he is squeezing them in at the very last minute it is almost guaranteed that it will be broken at launch.

For example versioning in the save file. Now to be fair this could mean a couple of different things. He could be adding a version # at the beginning of the file (or in the file name) or he could be changing the save format to a metadata format that understands.

Now people say he is old school so that might suggest he just adding a version # to the internal data structure. Why this wasn't the first thing he did when he created the game I have no clue and while the effort level is low it suggest he has no real path for upgrading the internal format. If it is something more sophisticated then it might be a big project because he has to translate the 20 year old internal data structures (which is probably spaghetti - btw did he use basic or 6502 assembly code for this project ?) into something modern (xml?) which might take him 10+ years at the current progress rate he has been presenting.
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Anyways I have no clue what he is up to but i get the sneaky feeling he be better off holding the release until he does a rewrite.
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Btw does this game have any animations - i dont' remember seeing any in the stream video.
 
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fadedc said:
That's why I've always been a strong advocate of RPGwatch just not covering any Grimoire related news items. The hoax can't continue if nobody pays attention to it anymore, and this is one of the few places left that still does.
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Whilst it is possible that it is a hoax (anything is possible), I do think that the evidence rather points against that conclusion. If it is a hoax then it is a very elaborate one, in which Cleve has managed to entangle many other people, including another programmer, who would have been pretending to have worked on the graphics, his own son, who is passing himself off as a pretty normal kind of guy etc. So it would have to be quite a complex conspiracy conducted over a quarter of a century and with some serious deliverables. You have to wonder at the intent of such a deception? What is it exactly that this small coterie of conspirators intends to achieve by their deception? Maybe it's some sort of post modernist work of living art or something?
 
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Lucky Day said:
Oh come on! Give Corwin a break. Do you not realize how old he is?
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Corwin originally played Grimoire while on Noah's Ark, waiting for the flood waters to recede. The second time was during the heyday of the Roman Empire.

you said:
Personally I think it is a hoax because many of things he's claiming to be doing at the last minute should have been done 15 years ago (assuming this game has a 20 year development cycle). Even worse if he is squeezing them in at the very last minute it is almost guaranteed that it will be broken at launch.

For example versioning in the save file. Now to be fair this could mean a couple of different things. He could be adding a version # at the beginning of the file (or in the file name) or he could be changing the save format to a metadata format that understands.

Now people say he is old school so that might suggest he just adding a version # to the internal data structure. Why this wasn't the first thing he did when he created the game I have no clue and while the effort level is low it suggest he has no real path for upgrading the internal format. If it is something more sophisticated then it might be a big project because he has to translate the 20 year old internal data structures (which is probably spaghetti - btw did he use basic or 6502 assembly code for this project ?) into something modern (xml?) which might take him 10+ years at the current progress rate he has been presenting.
-
Anyways I have no clue what he is up to but i get the sneaky feeling he be better off holding the release until he does a rewrite.
-
Btw does this game have any animations - i dont' remember seeing any in the stream video.
Click to expand...

I've played the old beta before, and it was barely able to run with a bunch of effort on a WinXP machine a decade old. It was apparently written with P1-era CPU architecture in mind, if not 486-era. I was able to get it to boot up under WINE, but it's buggy.

Given how far and fast computers have gotten since then, he's had to have rewritten the engine by now. Given the screenshots, he's also redesigned the UI (original was just as clunky as Wizardry 6) and gotten some newer graphics (old stuff looks like he stole it from Sir Tech from when they were making Wizardry 7).

So not fake, but still a hoax as he's not going to release it. I expect that there will always be 'one last thing' to pop up and delay release at the last second, just like 5,000 times before.

Basically, I expect to release my own game first. And I'm barely working on it, as I'm focused on other projects at the moment.
 
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Roq said:
Whilst it is possible that it is a hoax (anything is possible), I do think that the evidence rather points against that conclusion. If it is a hoax then it is a very elaborate one, in which Cleve has managed to entangle many other people, including another programmer, who would have been pretending to have worked on the graphics, his own son, who is passing himself off as a pretty normal kind of guy etc. So it would have to be quite a complex conspiracy conducted over a quarter of a century and with some serious deliverables. You have to wonder at the intent of such a deception? What is it exactly that this small coterie of conspirators intends to achieve by their deception? Maybe it's some sort of post modernist work of living art or something?
Click to expand...

Well remember that Cleve has a history of blatantly lying and making things up, and that anyone can post on the internet claiming to be anyone. Is there any evidence that these people are actually who they say they are, and not just Cleve posting as someone else? It wouldn't have to be a "complex conspiracy", just one guy with some free time and some 20 year old code that they may or may not have written themselves.

As for the reason for the deception, see the past indiegogo campaign. Cleve has taken money from quite a few people without delivering and may plan to do so again in the future. People rarely need any motivation beyond money.
 
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