Original Sin - Preview @ Colony of Gamers

Myrthos

Cave Canem
Administrator
Joined
August 30, 2006
Messages
11,223
Colony of Gamers report in with their opinion on the hands-on session they had for Divinity: Original Sin.
Around the very beginning of the game, as my companion and I wandered around getting our bearings, I found a book next to a corpse. My character read it aloud to the other character: apparently this man leaped from the top of a cliff because his Gods told him if he did, he would fly. My partner's character said that the man was obviously a fool, and I was offered a choice of dialogue options. I could either agree, disagree, or not make up my mind one way or the other. I disagreed, and said that sometimes you have to trust the gods. My character gained two points of Faith, my partner's gained two points of Cynicism.

You can read more about the Party Dialogue System in the Kickstarter, but it was constantly enjoyable to play. When the characters disagree, there's a hidden system that measures their persuasive abilities against one another and you get to see the outcome. There may have been more than one occasion I overruled my partner and insulted some guard's mother just so I could test out the combat system.
More information.
 
Joined
Aug 30, 2006
Messages
11,223
Whilst I think Sin's multiplayer is an excellent way of doing it, I get the strong feeling that perhaps the best approach to Kickstarters is to keep the message as simple as possible: The most successful Kickstarter game so far was Project Eternity: "We're going to remake Baldur's Gate and here's a nice picture of a waterfall".

If everyone on Watch and Codex were to contribute to a Kickstarter, perhaps we could raise a few $10k, but where does all the other money come from? How long do people look at a pitch before they decide to pledge or not, on average? My guess would be < 30 seconds and that a single HD piece of art, combat sequence, or whatever (e.g. Tides brilliant child mogul sequence), at the start, may be the difference between success and failure. I'd bet that a lot of the contributors to Tides and PE never played Torment/BG or any other turn based game close to the genre.

Perhaps, Original Sins problem is that it is aimed too much at genre fans, who understand the intricacies of this type of game, and there just aren't so many of those on Kickstarter as one might think.
 
Joined
May 18, 2012
Messages
1,501
Location
Somerset/London UK
The problem imo is that they don't know how to make bundles / rewards for the backers. They are giving pretty useless stuff. I feel thats where the motivation lacks.

Also yes, going into too many details is bad and overcomplicating things. There is a ton of polish to be done to the game itself, new features are not really required.

Most of all I feel they need to research the successful kickstarters, look at the tiers, see what sold and how, and if they don't figure it out, ask for the help of other designers who succeeded
 
Joined
Aug 7, 2008
Messages
1,168
Location
Ro
Looks like the Original Sin kickstarter is being pretty succesfull to me.
 
Joined
May 23, 2007
Messages
217
Looks like the Original Sin kickstarter is being pretty succesfull to me.

Well they set quite a low target and I'm pretty sure they are going to make that. But, obviously they are not doing as well as some of the other comparable projects (Original Sin was high on Watch's most anticipated games for 2013), despite having an excellent looking game with a lot of innovative features that is likely to release within a year.

Would be nice to see them clear $1m as I reckon they could make use of all of that in finishing the game and making it as good and polished as possible. And that is still possible with a following wind.
 
Joined
May 18, 2012
Messages
1,501
Location
Somerset/London UK
Back
Top Bottom