Howdy, Stranger!
It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Quick Links
General: Rebel Galaxy Announced by Double Damage
SBFord
Former Associate EditorMember LegendaryPosts: 33,129
Double Damage, a new studio set up by Erich Schaefer and Travis Baldree formerly of Runic Studios, has released an announcement trailer for its upcoming title, Rebel Galaxy.
The edge of everything is dangerous territory.
Are you a cunning pirate?
A cold-hearted mercenary?
A shrewd trader?
A scoundrel with a heart of gold?
Maybe all of the above?
One thing’s for damn sure. You’re going to find out.
Check out the Rebel Galaxy site for more!
Comments
New players can get a welcome package and old/returning players can also get a welcome back package and 7 days free subscription time! Just click here to use my referral invitation
I guess that's one perspective on it. After shipping Torchlight 2 we immediately spent the following five or six months rolling out several patches, the editor with full steam workshop integration, and some additional content in the form of the nether realms - for a 20 dollar game that most of our users bought for 5 bucks. I mean, I suppose you could consider that leaving it to rot, but it doesn't feel like it quite qualifies us for 'rogue developer' status. Heck, I put quite a few hours into helping out with the mac port of Torchlight 2 AFTER leaving Runic, and I'm not even a Mac developer.
The expectation of ongoing content for a standalone game with no subscription or ongoing revenue stream is puzzling.
Happy to answer any questions about how that worked out though!
Travis - Torchlight 2 was undoubtedly a solid game that also experienced solid sales. I believe what Seelinnikoi is referring to is typically when a developer has a hit on their hands they continue to support the product by developing dlcs, expansions, etc that produce additional revenue.
I'm a previous supporter of both Torchlight 1 and Torchlight 2 but I will tell you what they both lacked...longevity. I'm willing to pay for longevity.
Now this Rebel Galaxy game does look promising. I remember playing Tie Fighter and X-Wing as a young kid. I really loved those games. However, I'm still looking for longevity. I'm not interested in a 20 hour game. I want a game I can play for hundreds of hours. I want one that is continually supported and expanded upon, kind of like an MMO. I want something akin to X-Wing meets Mount n Blade Warband. It would be a bonus if this game also had coop via steam.
Copy / pasting half the skills from TL1 and giving them a different name / graphic isn't hard work, sorry. Oh, and what about the fact that to this day people still can't get decent performance out of the game under certain configurations, because you people lacked the ability to program the game to take advantage of multiple cores. I just loved the way you swept our problems under the rug and went on your merry way. To this day many people still can't properly play the game even in single player, despite having system requirements which not only ran Torchlight 1 flawlessly (as well as all comparable games from your competitors), but drastically exceed what was recommended by Runic.
TL2 for me was a gargantuan disappointment. You even delayed the game's release for almost a year, yet it still feels unfinished and unpolished. I dare say I almost felt 'Flagshipped' again.
Oh yeah, and how's that Torchlight MMO you people told us about coming along? You know, the one that was supposed to follow TL2? Oh wait, you bailed on that too.
Forgive me if I think that my money is better spent on games made by studios which actually give a damn about their customers instead of fobbing them off with excuses and bullshit.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
#IStandWithVic
Ok, I'll bite.
First off, I'm sorry it was a disappointment! You never aim to disappoint anyone, and I can guarantee that enormously more effort was put into TL2 than TL1, both in complexity, scope, content, and attention to detail. Everyone's entitled to their opinion on whether that was worth it. In aggregate, the reviews were better, and we got more positive responses form customers. (Many people hated TL1, of course, and thought TL2 was infinitely better.)
In the end, that's one of the reasons that we provided a demo - most studios don't bother anymore.
I'll have to disagree on the 'copy-pasting' of skills. I wish to god it had been that easy! But it wasn't.
Maybe if we'd done that, the game wouldn't have been delayed for a year
Multiplayer had a lot to do with that, but also a console port of Torchlight that went off the rails and had to get put back on track, which sucked up a chunk of dev time. In retrospect, that was a mistake, and we should have killed the console port, but you make mistakes, and you learn, and you move on.
Having been doing this for, I dunno, 20 years now? It's never possible to support every possible permutation of hardware on the PC. Or at least I've never seen anyone entirely successful at it. Again, that's one of the reasons we liked to provide demos - so that we could let people figure out if it would work for them or not.
We DID bail on doing an MMO. And if we'd done it, Runic wouldn't exist right now. Not a lot of successful MMOs out there. I don't regret the decision.
And of course, it's my wish that nobody spends money on things they don't want, and only on things they do.
If this game isn't your bag, I would never want you to buy it and feel disappointed! Nor is that ever the wish of any of us developing this stuff.
Whether you believe me or not, we DO care about our customers, and DO make decision to attempt to please them. We also make games to please ourselves - we make games because we like them, and first, we make stuff that we want to play. We also make decisions based on keeping food on the table. Those aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. But it never pleases everybody.
Anyway, again, I'll apologize that you were disappointed with Torchlight 2. I wish it had been up your alley, and it obviously wasn't.
Yes to Mythos. No to Hellgate.
A lot of developers do like to roll on with the DLCs and expansions - it takes a lot of the risk out of the equation, but I've never found it very fulfilling to do. And having worked on Action RPGS for something like 10 years now, (and most of the team for 6 or 7), we were all pretty ready to move on to a new genre.
Many studios that do this are also multi-project studios - they can afford to have a subset of the team work on that stuff while they work on the next big thing. Runic was never that big - we couldn't afford to have part of the studio doing something else. We didn't have that many people!
Longevity is great! And we did our best to give those games the legs we could with the resources we had ( releasing the editor, workshop integration, etc.). If there was some exact ingredient that you could add that produced longevity, we would have done it. We made the best decisions we knew to make at the time. And all of them are constrained by budget, bodies, and resources. *shrug* You do the best you can!
Spikex - a follow up question, and don't take this as snark, because it's not.
If you're purchasing a game, and it costs anywhere from $5 to $20, do you think it's reasonable to expect it to provide 100s of hours of entertainment and an MMO-like experience? If it doesn't, does the developer deserve your scorn?
Nothing wrong with products that DO provide that, but for the most part they are either a) more expensive or b) require subscription or some other ongoing revenue stream, or more often, both. They're services, effectively, which is a different beast.
As a developer, I don't really want to be in the service business. I want to make new interesting stuff which is played, (hopefully) enjoyed, and then the player is ready for a new experience.
Some people won't think it's new or interesting. They'll think it's dumb, derivative, and crappy. Everybody who makes stuff gets used to that. Somebody will despise what you do, and will tell you in no uncertain terms what an idiot you are for doing it that way. Yay internet!
Let's take a reverse scenario - somebody who wants a game they can finish by the end of the weekend buys an MMO and is surprised that they aren't done by the end of Sunday, and that somebody is asking them for 15 bucks at the end of the month.
It's a strange expectation to have if you're picking up an MMO!
The demo ran just fine, for myself and many others experiencing the problem. This was made known right at the outset. Again, trying to fob people off with excuses.
I'm done. I said what I wanted to say. Good luck to you in your future endeavors, but I will not be following them.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
#IStandWithVic
I'm afraid I don't have any information about the details of your personal experience, so, no, I can't make an accurate assessment of exactly what went wrong for you. And the fact that I'm here in an unrelated forum talking with you about your experiences with a game shipped over two years ago at a company I no longer work for might be the opposite of fobbing it off.
I'd be curious to know the specific details of the problems you experienced, and if I'm aware of a workaround, or just the reason why, I'm happy to attempt to provide it.
Best of luck to you as well! Take care.
Thanks for the well-wishes
Yeah, it's saving my bacon doing something else. It's also refreshing doing something that isn't so exactly in the template of a genre. There's a certain expectation for action-rpgs, and very specific boxes to tick.
This doesn't exactly play like anything else, which means I get to make it up. It's a lot more fun - harder in some ways, easier in others. But always a lot more interesting.
Where are you at in the industry, if you don't mind me asking?
Geez, give the guys a break. TL1 and TL2 were solid games. I don't see how anyone can complain about the games (and editor) delivered for the price. TL2 was in no way a copy paste job - all new classes, above ground areas, multiple hub towns, multiplayer, weather, etc.
As a software developer (not games) I can completely understand the desire to change it up and work on something new. This game looks interesting, although there seems to be a lot of these kinds of games in the works lately, I hope it doesn't get lost in the crowd.
I wish you guys all kinds of luck and hope it works out. I look forward to hearing more about it.
Travis I'll say this, TL2 was a great game. I appreciated it, and I loved it. That being said the feeling most people had after you guys launched TL2 was that Runic became a Ghost Town. Practially as soon as the game launched it was like a gag order was placed on Runic. We as fans had interaction prior to the release, post release if you told us every person at Runic died in a plane crash we probably would have believed it because it felt like we heard absolutely nothing from you guys after you got our money. I mean you are right, it was a single game for $20. Yes the editor is great. But fans had expectations that TL2 was going to follow more along the route of D2. We expected some official follow ups, with official new classes and areas. All of us who enjoyed the game, would have happily kept paying. To me personally, it just seems like post launch we kind of got abandoned. So yeah, a lot of people will worry thats exactly whats going to happen with this new company.
Looks like this would be a fun romp as to the longevity thing well not all games need to last 10 years.
Some of us have mmos we have been playing long term and will continue to play but like to have a distraction like this that may last a coupe weeks or month etc.
About the only thing that is turning me off right now is that for pc users like me it looks like it is steam only? Frankly I do not have steam on my pc and will not ever have it on my pc.
Please allow pc users to purchase it directly from your site instead of steam or like many do I will just get a "free" copy elsewhere. I am quite serious, you might be surprised how many of us skip on games like this because they are available on steam only.
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
No fate but what we make, so make me a ham sandwich please.
Travis - In response to your direct question, I would say no the developer doesn't deserve any scorn. However, I think you are too stuck on the low price point being the factor. To me the main factor is how the game is marketed and if the developer fulfills it's initial marketing promises. I do believe you fulfilled your initial obligations with Torchlight 2. Like others have said I wish the game had continued support post release.
I was also a early supporter of Mythos which was a pretty solid title that had really good potential. I really don't believe Mythos ever had a chance to see it's full potential which is sad.
The rest of my previous post was really personal preference in the type of games that I'm looking for. I am a fan of games that offer near endless replayability with no level or skill caps. I'm also a fan of games that are continuously monetized and supported post release if done correctly. This is all my personal preference. I'm sure there are a ton of gamers out there that enjoy 10-15 hour length games. I'm simply just not one of them.