Realms Beyond - Kickstarter Live

Myrthos said:

Fluent has been on this game and its developers since the first time it was made public. He has made up some conspiracy theory at the time, which he outlined in his post and nothing the developer or anyone else is telling him to contradict his views, is going to convince him that he is wrong.

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"There are no facts, only interpretations." You quoted it yourself, man.

Listen, no hard feelings to the devs or anyone else, I guess I'm just cautious after being fooled with Cave of Sorrows and then Demons Age. I'm still not 100% convinced in this game, I mean look at the quote from their Kickstarter I posted. If they pull that off - the depth of dialogue from Planescape Torment, reactivity of Arcanum, combat of ToEE, etc. etc., then sure, I'll buy it day one and sing its praises. But I've been fooled too many times and it makes me extra cautious, maybe paranoid when I see similarities between Ellis's games and what I saw from this one, along with the whole Chaos Chronicles "whatever happened there" thing. But I don't want to be negative and go on some crusade. I'll just wait to see more stuff from the game and I truly do hope they pull off what they promise in the Kickstarter.

My honest criticism right now is that the combat looks too slow, and the 3.5 OGL rules are cool, but after seeing them enough times now I'm kind of looking for more in that area. I want to see more unique Feats and Skills, Spells and the like. But let's hope they keep working on it and it turns out well. Peace.

Darkheart said:

So I did what I haven't done ever before and went full in. In 2020 you will have the pleasure to meet yours truly as a bandit leader (the most notorious, naturally) in the game world!

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Thank you Darkheart! Your help is much appreciated and your name already fits very well as Bandit Leader.

Feel free to send me your ideas regarding that character as PM, I'll forward those to our world designers.

TheRealFluent said:

Reminds me of a few things. First, an Ellis Studios game going by the graphics. Some of the textures, terrain art, character art and portraits reminded me of things I saw in a game of theirs called Sacred Blade. Second, it reminded me of that Demons Age game or whatever that was released and quickly pulled off Steam last year I think? That thing was kind of an abomination if I'm being nice about it. The combat and looks are very similar. Finally, the combat looks painfully slow and enemies are too far apart to initiate combat, which also reminds me, funnily enough, of the Ellis Studios gem "Cave of Sorrows" which completely stole a mod for RPGMaker called "The Red Hand of Doom". Enemies in Cave of Sorrows would trigger from way too far away in the dungeon and combat would suffer badly because of it.

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Imho you're making two mistakes here.
There first one is that you kind of mix your assumptions about a connection to Ellis Studios with your valid criticism about the game Realms Beyond (ot its pitch) itself.
That's bad style. These are separate topics which I think you should separate more clearly.

The second one is that you apparently base your assumption about a connection to Ellis Studios solely on ingame features like assets and ignore the bigger picture. Ellis Studios was/is a more or less faceless construct whereas Ceres Games shows us multiple verified persons who partially had a lot of conversations with us in this very forums. With the Kickstarter they're now opening even more to the public. That's certainly not Ellis Stuois or Demon's Age style. Of course you can never really rule anything out but in this case imho chances are vanishingly low.
If you really want to help and investigate then find out who is behind Ellis Studios and if he or she is involved in Realms Beyond or Ceres Games.

Edit: And backed of course!

Morrandir said:

Imho you're making two mistakes here.
There first one is that you kind of mix your assumptions about a connection to Ellis Studios with your valid criticism about the game Realms Beyond (ot its pitch) itself.
That's bad style. These are separate topics which I think you should separate more clearly.

The second one is that you apparently base your assumption about a connection to Ellis Studios solely on ingame features like assets and ignore the bigger picture. Ellis Studios was/is a more or less faceless construct whereas Ceres Games shows us multiple verified persons who partially had a lot of conversations with us in this very forums. With the Kickstarter they're now opening even more to the public. That's certainly not Ellis Stuois or Demon's Age style. Of course you can never really rule anything out but in this case imho chances are vanishingly low.

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Yeah you're right. I should have given them benefit of the doubt but was having a rough day. My fault. I hope it turns out to be an interesting game because it sounds like something I'd like.

TBH, there's one too many things that give me pause. You guys fund it, and let's see what we get.

That's ok, I gave enough to make up for a few naysayers. I'll be there with my pitchfork when I see an actual crime, some of you folks here need to seriously curb your enthusiasm for the negativity.

It looks very good but is it fully voiced or text only?

griniaris said:

It looks very good but is it fully voiced or text only?

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Text only.
Voice over are very expensive and don't really add anything essential to a game. It's a luxury feature, and I'm personally glad they decided to allocate ressources into more important things (like creating a big world full of stories and battles).

There's some interesting updates on sound design (part 1) (part 2). Perhaps the game will have "combat barks", too. But voiced dialogue is generally a huge waste of money for indie developer IMO. Sure, if you can manage to afford high quality professional VA it's nice to have, but inevitably a lot of people will either want to disable it or skip through it. And the people who really want / expect VA will inevitably complain that a game isn't fully voiced or that the VA is bad. People are already complaining that Disco Elysium VA sucks, for instance.

You just can't please modern audiences with VA, but it can eat up an enormous amount of a budget. Just not worth the investment, especially for this game which is perhaps geared towards older gamers who grew up playing games with little or no VA.

Winterfart said:

Voice over […] don't really add anything essential to a game.

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Which of course is a personal opinion.

Morrandir said:

Which of course is a personal opinion.

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Yes, what else could it be?

Winterfart said:

Text only.
Voice over are very expensive and don't really add anything essential to a game.

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Voice overs can very easily bring a character to life *very quickly* in way which no amount of text can ever accomplish. Doubly so in top down isometric game where you hardly see the charterers. You can very easily guess a person personality with few spoken lines than 100s of written lines. So I completely disagree with the point that it don't add anything essential. But like you say it can be expensive...

Just like Waylanders both made almost $30,000 in one day. Though you have to wonder if it was a good idea to launch two promising kickstarter projects on the same day?

lostforever said:

Voice overs can very easily bring a character to life *very quickly* in way which no amount of text can ever accomplish. Doubly so in top down isometric game where you hardly see the charterers. You can very easily guess a person personality with few spoken lines than 100s of written lines.

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And I completely disagree with that. But that's not really important and I don't know about you, but I already had tons of internet debate about this exact topic, there's no right answer.
Like I said, I'm just glad that the devs of this game and me have the same opinon on that :

"full VO just isn't something we consider to be of high priority; there are more important and interesting things to spend our budget on."

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(source)

The fund raising seems to be going decently well. It should easily make the goal at this rate.

Carnifex said:

That's ok, I gave enough to make up for a few naysayers. I'll be there with my pitchfork when I see an actual crime, some of you folks here need to seriously curb your enthusiasm for the negativity.

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Seems like only a couple of weeks ago we had to talk you out of swearing off crowdfunding for good!

We won't spend our limited funds to voice-over texts, but for voice-sets that work for all languages.

HobGoblin42 said:

We won't spend our limited funds to voice-over texts, but for voice-sets that work for all languages.

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Don't get me wrong, I am not expecting voice over for indie game like this as the money could be better spent elsewhere. I was simply stating that voice overs do have merit.

Ripper said:

TBH, there's one too many things that give me pause. You guys fund it, and let's see what we get.

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I've only seen one red flag, and it's what Fluent pointed out

In Realms Beyond, you will find the tactical turn-based combat of the Gold Box Games, Temple of Elemental Evil and Dark Sun, the world exploration and camp management of Realms of Arkania, the interactivity and living world of Ultima, the choice-driven quests and reactivity of Fallout and Arcanum, and the rich NPC interaction of Baldur’s Gate and Planescape Torment, along with fresh new features that haven’t been seen before in the genre.

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I've seen scam kickstarters in the past excessively namedrop like this

Couchpotato said:

Just like Waylanders both made almost $30,000 in one day. Though you have to wonder if it was a good idea to launch two promising kickstarter projects on the same day?

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Personally I find this a double edged blade. Waylanders got a lot of media attention from major gaming web sites. I personally didn't back it like I did Realms Beyond, but I could see that if someone did and saw Realms Beyond on Kickstarter, they might have backed that as well. I personally don't go to Kickstarter anymore unless I'm looking at backing a specific game, but I have gone there, seen other campaigns and checked them out because I was curious.