Good Morning Friends! I am about to take you down a rabbit hole, because yesterday without really meaning to… I absolutely dug one. I am not exactly sure what causes my brain to travel the pathways it does, but like so many things in my life, it started out simple enough.
I had seen some news scroll across my feed about Ashes of Creation and I logged into Kickstarter to try and remember during what phase of testing I would be getting access. For those who are curious, we are in Alpha 1 still and have Alpha 2 and two phases of closed beta before I get access. Granted I knew I was backing a slow-moving horse when I chipped money in to fund this project, but what I did not remember is that every single project has an estimated delivery date associated with it. These are wildly inaccurate, but it planted a seed in my brain as to exactly HOW wildly inaccurate they were.
This of course led to me pulling a google sheet, logging the projected dates for all twenty-five software projects that I have backed since the launch of Kickstarter. After that, I spent the next hour googling to find release dates that map up to each product giving me the above table. I guess I should talk a bit about my methodology because I was trying to keep things simple I logged the month and year for each project and then did some “datediff” math to figure out how many months late a given project was when it released. There were a few projects that have never been released, and for those, I have currently plugged in June 2022 even though I know it is equally wildly inaccurate. Of those projects, one had an updated release date so I used that instead. I get that my methodology is not perfect but this is just to create some general trends that we can talk about.
Abandonware
Riding the way of “pretty Minecraft” games was TUG, an open-world survival builder MMORPG by Nerd Kingdom. TUG stood for The Untitled Game, and honestly, it looked really interesting to me because at the time it was trying to do something that nobody had really pulled off. In the years to follow the launch of this project, however, it has been done over and over again and pulled off successfully. To date, this project is 89 months late based on the original estimate, and the last update to the Kickstarter was in March of 2017. We know this is a dead project but no one has been willing likely for legal reasons to actually just come out and say it. In the comments, you can even see someone going as far as trying to start a class action lawsuit against the company. I gambled some money and I lost, and I am largely okay with that.
Best In Class
On the other end of the spectrum, you have Mages of Mystralia from Borealys Games that not only met the original Kickstarter delivery estimate but beat it by one month. Granted this is maybe not the fairest example because before the Kickstarter launched, I had already played a very polished demo of the game at Pax South. However, I feel like they need to get credit here for beating the Kickstarter estimation game and actually being able to deliver on a project ahead of time. I also feel like we need to give credit to the mobile game Cockatilt and The Wonderful 101 Remastered which were both released within a month of the original estimate which would simply account for the natural shift in a schedule.
The Worst Offenders
Of the games that have actually been released, the worst offender in the delay is Crowfall. This is not shocking given that MMORPGs notoriously take about twice as long to produce as the original estimates. By the time Crowfall was officially released in 2021 it was 55 months later than the first estimate, so just over 4 and a half years late. Granted there is part of me that would prefer that the game still is in testing so that maybe it could turn into a game that I was actually interested in playing. It was a game with some interesting concepts that coalesced into something that I was wholly uninterested in and I am not sure I have logged into the final released version. That is part of the risk of backing a project that is only funded on some pretty prose and a few bits of concept art.
The Full List
I realize that I posted an image of a spreadsheet, but for sake of those with “old eyes” like myself, I am going to actually share the information in text form. Here is the full list of the twenty-five projects I have backed throughout the years sorted ascending based on “months late”. If you are so inclined I have shared the raw spreadsheet here.
Mages of Mystralia – 1 Month Early
Cockatilt – 1 Month Late
The Wonderful 101: Remastered – 1 Month Late
Ravaged – 3 Months Late
Warmachine Tactics – 3 Months Late
Hamsterdam – 5 Months Late
Mask of the Rose: A Fallen London Romance – 5 Months Late – Projected Release Date
TemTem – 6 Months Late
Sunless Skies – 8 Months Late
Wasteland 2 – 9 Months Late
Divinity: Original Sin 2 – 9 Months Late
Amplitude – 10 Months Late
Battle Chasers: Nightwar – 10 Months Late
Battletech – 11 Months Late
Dead State – 12 Months Late
Dreamfall Chapters: The Longest Journey – 19 Months Late
InSomnia the Ark – 22 Months Late
Boyfriend Dungeon – 25 Months Late
Torment: Tides of Numenera – 26 Months Late
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – 27 Months Late
HEX TCG MMO – 30 Months Late – Now Defunct but did release
Ashes of Creation – 42 Months Late so far – No Release Date
Crowfall – 55 Months Late
Curse of the Deadwood – 66 Months Late – No Release Date
TUG – 89 Months Late – No Release Date – No Updates since 2017
The Kickstarter Gamble
I think one of the challenges with Kickstarter is the interface and the way that the project pages are designed to make it seem like you are purchasing a product. In actuality, you are gambling on an idea that someone out there has, and hoping that maybe just maybe it comes to fruition. You are investing in the future of a product, and like with all investments… sometimes things go off the rails completely and you lose all of your money. For the most part, I have done pretty well thus far with my video game Kickstarter, though the long-tailed nature of them has led me to plunk my money on the line far less often than I did in those heady early days.
The first project I ever funded was Wasteland 2 in 2012, and the last project that I funded was Mask of the Rose: A Fallen London Romance in 2022. The last one I am not even sure I am that interested in the game, but wanting to help support more Fallen London nonsense to exist in the world because it is a phenomenal setting. Granted my sample size is small with only twenty-five games backed over a ten-year span, but there is definitely a trend toward games coming in late. Given that the average on my list was just shy of twenty months late, and the median was ten months late… you really need to take that estimated delivery date as the complete nonsense that it really is. If you are backing a Kickstarter you are gambling on the future of a franchise and the hope that maybe just maybe someday you will get to play it.
Does this impact my likelihood to back a game on Kickstarter? Somewhat to be honest, but I had already reached that conclusion before looking at the data. The types of Kickstarters that I now back are less about me wanting the product and more about me wanting to help support and fund the product. For example, I thought Boyfriend Dungeon was a worthy cause and was a game that should exist in the world, and even though I have yet to play it… I was more than happy to plunk some money on the line knowing at some point I would walk away with a discount copy of the game. Other games like Crowfall or Ashes of Creation were essentially just me getting a cheap copy of the game and a space in line for the alpha/beta process if they turned out to be phenomenal. There are folks who have an ax to grind with how inaccurate these estimates end up being, but I am not one of them. I just abused it for a blog post.
The post Kickstarter Guesstimates appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This is likely a post that very few people will care about, but I am making it nonetheless. Some years back I completely reworked the way my menu structure functioned, and among several tweaks was adding the “Game Tools” menu. Something you need to know about me is that I do not use bookmarks, and instead largely rely on the browser remembering sites I hit frequently when I start typing the name into the search bar. The end result is that I have near total recall while actively playing a game, but rapidly forget what sites I had been using when I go on one of my long breaks from a specific title. I wanted a way of keeping track of these resources that I regularly use while playing games that I often cycle back and forth between. The added benefit of the Game Tools menu is that it allowed me to easily share those same resources with anyone else interested in playing the game.
WordPress has this really neat functionality to nigh infinitely nest menus under one another, and I thought this to be a really cool way of creating a structure for links. The only problem here is that once a menu gets too large it becomes ridiculously cumbersome to manage. As a result any time I changed anything it would seemingly take a progressively longer amount of time to actually save the edit. I’ve even had the save fail completely and cause it to lose an entire submenu in the structure. This only served to cause me to not really want to touch the links at all and leave them more or less in an “as is” state. None of this made me happy, and like so many things in my life, I eventually reach a critical breaking point that brings me to action.
So instead of trying to come up with a clever way of handling this, I am legitimately rolling back to one of the earliest constructs of the internet… a static page. Right now I am in the process of converting all of the nested menu structures into a single landing page. This does a few things that are beneficial, namely, it reduces menu bloat but also serves to give me a place to make some commentary about each resource. At the time of writing this Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy V, New World, and Diablo 3 have been converted to this new structure. The rest will follow as I have time to take my contorted menu structure and rework it into something that makes sense in page form. I’m attempting group links a bit more than I have in the menu, but each game page is ending up a little bit different. I might roll some additional information on each page, like where you can actually find me in that game and maybe a link to that category of posts on the blog.
This is just one of several changes that have been a long time coming. Another thing that is really bothering me right now is the sidebar so I figure once I sort out my menus, that is probably going to be my next renovation. I’ve been consistently blogging on the same website for over thirteen years now, and I feel like I need to uproot a few things and move them around a bit. I still largely like the central column with sidebar format, because that is ultimately what feels the most blog-like for me personally. I’ve always felt like blogs are best experienced in the structural context of the chosen layout of the author, but I have to admit some of the more pictorial tumblr/instagram style formats drive me up a wall.
Again I am not sure anyone cares because I am not entirely certain anyone has actually used that “Game Tools” menu to access the resources contained within. However, I use it… and it will make things a little less fiddly to update.
The post Game Tools Revisited appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Last night was a very good night, and one that I have needed for awhile. It had absolutely nothing to do with what I happened to be playing, which was of course Guild Wars 2, but instead the company I kept. I’ve talked about my friend Grace so many times over the years on this blog and quite honestly they are one of my favorite people on the planet. It used to be that we were pretty regularly on the same bandwidth when it came to games and were partners in crime… whatever that crime happened to be. Lately however we have fallen out of step and the crossover opportunities have been limited. Our fallback was always Diablo 3 and the coming of a brand new season roughly every three months. However we’ve both sworn off Blizzard titles for the moment until the situation there improves… which has been more painful than I can put into words because it has also cost us our regular decompression sessions.
The pandemic has been hard in wildly different ways for different people. Grace and I have managed to stay in contact and pretty much still talk every single day, but our long gaming sessions over voice chat have dwindled to non-existent. Last night however we opted to remedy that and while they spent the evening on a combination of the Switch and Knitting and I had a casual night of World Bosses in Guild Wars 2, we spent almost three hours just talking about whatever the conversation happened to bring up. We talked about parents, jobs, and they graciously listened to me go on at length about Guild Wars 2. I am not necessarily trying to sell Grace on the game but I certainly would love to have them try it, but also know that at least until Living World Season 1 has rolled out completely that is going to be a non-starter. I just have a problem with gushing about something when I am super into it, and Grace has been there for me as I gushed at length about other games that they were not interested in at all.
The sad thing as we were talking is that we realized we had not done one of these big lengthy catch up sessions… since probably last year sometime. That is way the hell too long honestly. Granted we hang out for the length of the AggroChat podcast, but that is a more directed conversation and less free form random word association. The next step however is we have to figure out some game we are both interested in playing at the same time. While I have missed the conversation, I have very much extremely missed the random nonsense that we often got up to when playing games together. Aging and adulthood sucks sometimes, because it often pulls you away from the sorts of interactions you need most. Part of it for me is that I have also not been as available as I once was given that I can only really hang on voice chat when I am upstairs due to the quirks of Parsec blocking microphones. Since I have been working remotely for the last three years… the upstairs is “Work” and when I get off I go downstairs to “Home”. Though last night was fine and I really need to try and sort out how to make a microphone work in spite of Parsec.
In other random news I am really enjoying the Halo series. I’ve said it before but I know next to nothing about Halo and I think it has helped my enjoyment. It does however make me want to go back and try and play the games again. I find it to be a really compelling setting and maybe it will act as a catalyst for me to actually get into the series in general. I know I had not played any of the Witcher games to the end until I watched the Netflix series, and that lead me to go on a deep dive and play everything Witcher related I could get my hands on. I technically own all of the Halo games, and even if I did not they are all available through Gamepass. At some point when I decide to get on a single player kick again, I should try and play through them all.
The post Partner in Crime appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I have a bunch of things that I have repeated on this blog but never actually coalesced into a “feature”. I watch way more YouTube than I should, and I often times have a video running on my second monitor that I am halfway paying attention to. I could be watching something more meaningful… but I am trash. I have a number of guilty pleasure channels that I indulge in from time to time, and have shared a number of these in the past. Today I am going to share some more and you can judge me for my bad taste (at least on some of these).
Mythical Kitchen
I’ve been a fan of Rhett and Link for years, and through the transitive property of enjoyment… I got hooked on Mythical Kitchen when they spun that off as a secondary channel. Chef Josh is just the right level of endearing and annoying mixed into a compelling package. I also really like the larger cast of talent specifically Nicole, Trevor, and Vi. There are so many reoccurring bits and the one I linked today is where Josh cooks a three course meal for a famous food critic… and then decides to use some item commonly found in a Seven Eleven. It is this nexus of comedy show and cooking show that I particularly enjoy.
Overnight Channel/TFIL
So there is an awful lot about this channel that would normally annoy me. However something is going on with it that I find interesting. Firstly it very much seems to have started as the same bullshit prank channel that the internet is flooded with, but at some point they decided to lean super freaking hard into paranormal investigations. I am a sucker for these sorts of shows and if I happen to see a marathon of Ghost Adventures on… I am going to watch it. I have watched a number of these videos over the last few weeks and they have greatly improved their technique and are seemingly taking this shit way more seriously than you would expect from a channel of “himbos”. The disturbing thing is that they have managed to capture some pretty shocking evidence in spite of themselves. I think my interest comes from the fact that I too dabbled in EVP back in the late 90s and was in the orbit of a legitimate group of investigators here.
Adam Savage’s Tested
I love Adam Savage. I have loved this man since Myth Busters and I have continued to follow his career after that show stopped. The format of his Tested videos really changed with the pandemic and they became deeply personal, and honestly… something I enjoy so much better. I specifically linked a video of him showing off his Science Fiction Blaster collection, but probably my favorite videos are the “One Day Builds” series. My dad was a maker before that title existed, and honestly watching an Adam Savage video reminds me a lot of my father and visiting his own very similar workshop. My Mom is the sort of person that despises silence… and my Dad has always used his workshop as a way to get some peace and quiet. It is also great when Adam goes into stories about his movie prop making days.
New Rockstars
The next two picks should be taken as a pair and not individually. One of the interesting things that has shifted interesting over the last few years is the way that Disney shows have become the new “must see tv”. As a result I consume a certain amount of media surrounding these, namely I have gotten in this pattern of watching a show and then turning around and watching some of the easter egg videos or reaction breakdowns surrounding it. There are two channels that really stand out for me in the way they digest this media and then spin off content related to that. The first is New Rockstars and they probably have the higher production value.
Screencrush
The second of these is Screencrush and honestly… I think I like its overall aesthetic better. The entire show takes place within a set patterned off of a Blockbuster Video, which absolutely hits me straight in the nostalgia feels. Additionally Screencrush has Doug the Dog, and having a cute animal immediately improves everything. Like I said above I don’t really consider these two different picks on this list, but instead sort of bookends that provide similar but different experiences. For example I have been thinking about both the Dark Avengers and the Midnight Sons of late, trying to figure out how Moon Knight and Blade are going to work into these… and low and behold here is a video with some theories surrounding that.
Loading Ready Run
We close out this section with the granddaddy of guilty pleasure channels for me… Loading Ready Run. If for some reason you are not already in the orbit of this channel, I highly suggest at least tuning in each week for CheckPoint. This is effectively a condensed news comedy show and the takes they come up with are golden. The absolute best thing they have ever done however is Qwerpline, an imaginary radio talk show set in the occasionally eldritch city of Nsberg. I am also partial to Crapshots which is a very short form sketchy comedy show. Again if you are not already watching their content then I would suggest adding it to your rotation.
The post Pile of Guilty Pleasures appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
