Ah right, funnily enough, Geneforge was the only game I've played of his where I hated the sound effects. Or, one specific sound effect drove me nuts, this oriental sounding lady who would screech out "HaPaBaLaaaUnCahHeTah" or some such string of syllables with overbearing frequency and at a pitch entirely distinct from all the other sounds. It even made me loathe having to go into the town areas.
But if I turned off the effects then I'd lose all the effects I didn't mind. I don't think any games are advanced enough to the point where you can have every single sound variant be an on/off option.
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On a more on-topic point regarding Kickstarter and money, my view is that Vogel has never been given the chance to 'go large'. And this is often the case with people who start out as indy developers, particularly auteur developers.
Let's take the two big Kickstarters: Torment and Pillars. In both cases these Kickstarters garnered millions of dollars. Millions. Pillars ended up with $4m in pledges alone and Torment amassed $4m as well.
And have the developers of these games ever been 'indy' developers? Black Isle Studios (who trained J. Sawyer and also had Feargus as it's boss even back then) was a company that was born within a large professional company, Interplay Entertainment. The budget and marketing was there from the outset of their first cRPG.
The game these two were then tasked with making, Pillars, was to be a spiritual sequel primarily to an old but still popular Bioware game. The founders of Bioware made their first game with $100k of their own money, which would be $170,000 in today's money, more money than Vogel has ever had to make a video game. They were happy to sign on to Interplay Entertainment as well, because they were businessmen first and game developers second. That is why they then sold out to EA Games just over 10 years later.
Now, in terms of gameplay, imagine if Pillars of Eternity had been made for $100k. Reduce the graphics, remove the music, reduce the staffing all-round, would it have been half as interesting as a Vogel game? Pillar's user score on Metacritic is 8.3 even with all the bells and whistles, Avernum: Escape from the Pit sits at 8.4 from user score on a literal fraction of the budget.
And Pillars was generally accepted when it was released. Torment on the other hand bombed like a poorly tasted joke at a charity event. It has a 7.0 user score on Metacritic. Again, Torment was made by people who have never experienced true independent development. Colin McComb worked for bigger companies, just doing his bit. He also has very little video game experience as compared to many others who work in the industry, and yet he was given the title of Creative Lead for Torment.
The people who made Torment, InXile studios, are, again, all people who have never been what one would call indy developers. Brian Fargo was the son of incredibly wealthy bankers who, as his first entry into the world of video games, started a development house, the above mentioned Interplay.
And how is all of this relevant to Vogel? Because people just put money on top of money. It's almost like people watching celebrities because they are celebrities, which makes the celebrities even more of a celebrity. And this tends to happen when you work for someone else and that someone else needs to use you and your name to sell a product.
Vogel isn't a celebrity, he's an indy developer who never sold out and never uses his talents for someone else's work or benefit. He's not one of the gang who get's work and hype because 50 of his mates upvote his twitter and make nice threads about him and his games. He is not a part of the bung network.
But he does make quality games.
So why don't we 'find out' if Vogel would make a 'AA' game if he had $4m?
It's all very well saying his work is lacking this that and the other, but by doing so you automatically lock him in the ever-repeating cycle of "his games are too low budget for me, hence I shan't contribute to his success".
Instead of us giving £8m to two sets of old has-beens to make two games which scored lower than a Vogel game on Metacritic, how about we, just for once, just one single time, try out Vogel for $8m and see what happens?
Can't be worse than anyone else… right?
