What are those ladies and gentlemen in Stompy Bot and MekTek up to?
Entering into the last 20 days of its Kickstarter, the gentlemen of Stompy Bot held a feedback group in which they answered questions from backers about the Free-to-Play status of the game, and also have updated their site talking about how individuals can customize their Gears while in combat.
As it stands, the men and women of Stompy Bot and MekTek have been honest about their goals and desires for the game, and, as I understand it, have listened to the fans as best that they can. If you would like to look into everything, please follow the link:
They also have multiple posts and updates from the developers, including that Heavy Gear Assault is now going to include single-player missions as well as multiplayer deathmatches, races, and more.
For those who would like to read up on an exclusive interview, here is another link recently released:
On this subject, one of the devs from Studio MekTek posted this:
"To clarify a bit for everyone here, the idea was to build a multiplayer base on arena combat to then further develop a north vs. south world war game (bringing in coop and AI at that point) then build a singleplayer campaign while all that was up and running - never to "Not build singleplayer" or "focus on multiplayer". The stuff at the high stretch goals was to reflect what it'd cost to have all that done by the date indicated on kickstarter, not to say "we won't do this unless you give us this much", that probably should've been clarified sooner.
It's a shame some people don't want to try to understand that even if we did have unlimited resources - we need to build a game with movement, combat systems, balanced weapons, test damage, customisation and all that stuff first - that's most of the way to a multiplayer arena game. "Focusing on a singleplayer game" would still start with that, only rather than have a game to play when those systems were ready, you'd have to wait for the singleplayer campaign to be done too. I'm not sure why anyone would want launch 6 months to a year later unless they weren't playing anything but singleplayer, and then it seems unfair on the people who do want to play multiplayer (potentially much later multiplayer if the game hadn't been designed for multiplayer underneath from the beginning to save a little more time).
By doing episodic missions we can release more stuff to play sooner, it's more work with not a lot of resources which may be more difficult but certainly not impossible to do that way so that's the way we'll work if that's what people want. Ignoring the fans and failing would mean that the industry would from now on likely never bother with singleplayer or even moderately complex mech games, having their suspicions "confirmed" that people just want stuff like MWO or Hawken (it could still be done in a different kickstarter maybe, but it's a horrible thought to me that we might be stuck with this new kind of simplified mech game for good. I want to at least be able to say I did everything I could)."
Well it isn't going to be the MW4 project they took on and summarily abandoned. I assume that whatever this project is will get identical treatment. Good for a few months and then no answers as all the downloads go missing.
This has already been discussed over on the MekTek forums. Another individual made the same comment.
But this is Heavy Gear. Not Mechwarrior.
MekTek dropped the MW4 project due to circumstances dealing with copyrights, I believe. As for 'downloads', that's not what they were discussing with Heavy Gear Assault.
So what happened to your game, while unfortunate, is the way of things. Move over Mechs.
BrandonKF wrote: This has already been discussed over on the MekTek forums. Another individual made the same comment.
But this is Heavy Gear. Not Mechwarrior.
MekTek dropped the MW4 project due to circumstances dealing with copyrights, I believe. As for 'downloads', that's not what they were discussing with Heavy Gear Assault.
So what happened to your game, while unfortunate, is the way of things. Move over Mechs.
-Brandon F.
Actually it goes to MekTeks ability to see a project through.
MekTek dropped MW4 due to them not wanting to bother hosting the files and game servers anymore. So they tried to palm the license off on another group and let them deal with it. Except the business landscape has changed since they originally got the license, and now the license cannot be transferred easily. Their download page still doesn't work.
So just because the name has changed, doesn't mean they will bother supporting it for more than 6 months.
Anyone ever played that game? I only ask because while I've seen mini's once, I've never seen it played, in any store, ever. There are three distinct Battletech groups at the local store. It attracts new players regularly. You can dis 'mechs if you want, but without them that game would probably not exist, and they are still far more popular despite being badly handled by every company that has had the rights so far.
DP9 is from my area, I believe. I've heard of some people really like HGB, but never witnessed anyone playing it. It's all Snarks and Grumpkins, methinks.
I really like Heavy Gear Blitz. My local area picked it up, and we have some 14 regular players.
It's honestly a very good game, despite some (historically) poor company support. Things are getting a lot more cleaned up with basically 'new codexes'.
It plays to me at least, like what Battletech ought to be when you go beyond 4 mechs per side. Maneuver is way more important than better weapons, since a crappy gun with a good setup is more powerful than a super cannon just standing there and plinking at enemies in cover.
Killionaire wrote: I really like Heavy Gear Blitz. My local area picked it up, and we have some 14 regular players.
It's honestly a very good game, despite some (historically) poor company support. Things are getting a lot more cleaned up with basically 'new codexes'.
It plays to me at least, like what Battletech ought to be when you go beyond 4 mechs per side. Maneuver is way more important than better weapons, since a crappy gun with a good setup is more powerful than a super cannon just standing there and plinking at enemies in cover.
Yeah, Battletech isn't the only mech game that has been historically mismanaged. HG hit the scene in the mid-90's and quickly became very popular with Activision licensing two video games and Sony snapping up the rights to the cartoon but then the company just kept making serious mistake after serious mistake. Edition flip flops every 2-3 years for a decade, a switch in scale of the minis coinciding with the first premature edition swap making everyone's entire collections obsolete, and DP9 even taking a break for a few years to focus on television and movie production (not kidding unfortunately) with no RPG books coming out during that time. I really like the art style and core ruleset but definitely not the history of squandering consumer good will. They've been focusing on the right things for a few years now and trying to fight their way back but it's obviously an uphill battle. The minis though look very nice since the introduction of the blitz variant of the game and people do play it (but unfortuantely not in my area). Hopefully the reintroduction of a video game (consoles and PC supposedly according to a gencon video) will help increase the visibility of the game.
Mathieu Raymond wrote: DP9 is from my area, I believe. I've heard of some people really like HGB, but never witnessed anyone playing it. It's all Snarks and Grumpkins, methinks.
We are from the same area.
The game is dead around Montreal. It used to have a small community, which died because of DP9's incapacity to improve or think more than 5 seconds.
I saw it happens twice in 5 years, as a matter of fact.
To put it simply: after a few years following DP9, I'm impressed by the professionalism of every other game company.
DP9 shows how much we take for granted in other companies!
@warboss: No, they don't focus on the right things. They focus on the superficial, easy things that they feel like doing, without addressing the core issues, like having coherent rules, answering the questions arising from incoherent rules, or game balance.
In fact, they seem actively hostile to game balance.
Justyn wrote:You can dis 'mechs if you want, but without them that game would probably not exist, and they are still far more popular despite being badly handled by every company that has had the rights so far.
I apologize if I offended, Justyn. I've never played the boardgame myself, only the video games. I appreciate it for what it is. But I like Heavy Gear's storyline, and the universe that they've created. If you want to, feel free to drop by over by the Dream Pod 9 forums and discuss with the rest of the players. Then browse the quick start rules and the rest, and see how it shapes up for you.
mrondeau wrote:
Mathieu Raymond wrote: DP9 is from my area, I believe. I've heard of some people really like HGB, but never witnessed anyone playing it. It's all Snarks and Grumpkins, methinks.
We are from the same area.
The game is dead around Montreal. It used to have a small community, which died because of DP9's incapacity to improve or think more than 5 seconds.
I saw it happens twice in 5 years, as a matter of fact.
To put it simply: after a few years following DP9, I'm impressed by the professionalism of every other game company.
DP9 shows how much we take for granted in other companies!
@warboss: No, they don't focus on the right things. They focus on the superficial, easy things that they feel like doing, without addressing the core issues, like having coherent rules, answering the questions arising from incoherent rules, or game balance.
In fact, they seem actively hostile to game balance.
As for game balance, it's actually better now with the newer army lists from both NuCoal and the South, in my humble opinion, mrondeau. Several players I've written with outside of the DP9 forums have been giving it rather great reviews.
Bubbalicious, I am not sure whether it will be an Arena or Blitz! version, yet.
If anyone wants to take the game for a quick spin around their local gaming stores, a lot of folks would probably enjoy it a great deal. The game's start-up costs run around $150-200 for a full army list, but that depends on which faction you choose to go into (and what vehicles you want to buy). With upgrades and skills, you could easily make a Black Talon team of five stealth Gears (costing around $50 American) and have it fill 800-1,000 TV. It all depends on how you want to play it.
It's not exactly Mechwarrior, since Heavy Gears are nowhere near as big. Think AT VOTOMs (the inspiration for it came from there). Also, the combined arms aspect of Heavy Gear is very good. Gears don't occupy the top spot, they're more like one-man infantry fighting vehicles designed for rough terrain. So the amount of cover and concealment you need to bring can't be as thin as Warhammer (say, what, 15-30 percent of the table?), but not nearly as thick as Infinity.
God bless, all.
-Brandon F.
(For the record, I end just about all of my posts with God bless, because I believe in blessing someone rather than cursing them out or making fun of them. If I do poke fun at Mechs, it's razzing and in good humor. I don't want hostility, but I won't back down on my faith. Thanks. And peace to you all.)
With upgrades and skills, you could easily make a Black Talon team of five stealth Gears (costing around $50 American) and have it fill 800-1,000 TV. It all depends on how you want to play it.
Just be careful, it's easy to lose friends while playing Black Talons.
Some people play Heavy Gear Blitz in the San Diego area, it's quite a fun game and the core rules are really nice, despite having some issues with costing between individual units/variants/factions, though the new books they're putting out are slowly fixing that.
It's relatively cheap to get into, $115 gets you a starter set with enough mini's to play a standard game, dice, tape measure, and a rulebook. You could built larger-than-average sized armies of 3-4 factions for the price of a single 1850pt 40k army if you wanted to.
The game isn't hugely widespread, but have its hotspots.
IceRaptor wrote: Hudson, MRondeau and Brandon all on the same thread? Outside the protective DP9 walls?
Indeed! Its nice to see some familiar names (including yours) outside the walls of dp9forum's Woodbury and the prison of a single rpg.net thread. And, yes, I just finished watching the Walking Dead.
I should have known when I de-lurked I might get tagged by a bunch of snipers... LOL!
Vakthati isn't wrong, though. The Pod Squad out of San Diego has a really nice group, even got their own Facebook page, "The Infamous Pod Squad". Las Vegas' gaming group is, to put it mildly, very active. There's a few other hotspots, as mentioned, but really it's all up to individuals to build interest in their local communities. As V has pointed out, it really doesn't cost you too much, and with these new books coming out, there's an ability to choose which army list you would like to go into, and then have that single army - with all its relevant fluff and background and army-building - in one handy book. They've only covered the New Coalition, Port Arthur Korps, and the South so far, but the other factions will come in good time.
Also, if you get them over on DriveThruRPG, it's no trouble getting the copies with the free Field Manual rules. Oh, and the original rulebook, Locked and Loaded, is also free over on the DriveThruRPG site.
It's a small southern town in the TV show I referenced (Walking Dead). It's filled with a bunch of people trying to live "normal" pre-zombie lives oblivious to the dangers of the zombie apocalypse; they're surrounded by guarded walls that keep them physically safe from the dangers outside but also keep them involuntarily locked in as well except for a chosen militant few. Think Mayberry mixed in with the Alamo led by a mid-war Stalin. The prison is the other setting currently in the season.
IceRaptor wrote:Hudson, MRondeau and Brandon all on the same thread? Outside the protective DP9 walls?
Hold on, I'm making popcorn.
Okay, continue.
warboss wrote:
Indeed! Its nice to see some familiar names (including yours) outside the walls of dp9forum's Woodbury and the prison of a single rpg.net thread. And, yes, I just finished watching the Walking Dead.
Oh, don't mind me.
I just passed by to confirm the absence of HG groups in Montreal, and the prevalent attitude towards the game and DP9.
Well, when it's not ignorance of its existence.
PS Oh, and game balance ? Free Blazing Mambas. Doubling the firepower for free is not balanced.
mrondeau wrote:
Oh, don't mind me.
I just passed by to confirm the absence of HG groups in Montreal, and the prevalent attitude towards the game and DP9.
Well, when it's not ignorance of its existence.
PS Oh, and game balance ? Free Blazing Mambas. Doubling the firepower for free is not balanced.
That would be the prevalent attitude of your gaming group, mrondeau. And I am sorry that it doesn't meet your expectations. It is what it is, in this case, as you desire.
Grundz wrote:I seem to remember a heavy gear game that was pretty damn good a little before mechwarrior 3 came out, let you customize the hell out of your mech.
Heavy Gear 1 came out after Mechwarrior 2, as I recall, and Heavy Gear 2 came out a few months after MW3... I bought both of them. Sadly, the way things ended up, HG2 got rave reviews from critics, but it was limited by mismanagement. I do recall that it the customization was one of the things I enjoyed a great deal (although I admit to being guilty of packing a light railgun onto a Hunter once... okay, maybe twenty times).
Arizona wrote:
IceRaptor wrote: Hudson, MRondeau and Brandon all on the same thread? Outside the protective DP9 walls?
Hold on, I'm making popcorn.
Okay, continue.
Somebody say popcorn?
You got any butter there, gentlemen? Long time no see, Arizona. God bless!
they're surrounded by guarded walls that keep them physically safe from the dangers outside but also keep them involuntarily locked in as well except for a chosen militant few.
Absolutely brilliant analogy - its extremely apt. It's a large part of the reason I've stopped posting over there, except in isolated cases.
That would be the prevalent attitude of your gaming group, mrondeau. And I am sorry that it doesn't meet your expectations. It is what it is, in this case, as you desire.
I've had many gaming friends that I've developed at Gencon and Origins who loved the system up until the point they played it. It was especially awkward when I introduced it to several long term friends, who ended up hating it. You aren't dismissing isolated cases.
Turning back to the topic at hand - the game looks to be obviously set as a gladiatorial arena style game. If you checkout the image you can see a Hunter versus a Basilisk - both of the concept arts they have released - on the screen just above the exit. The general aesthetic looks to place it outside the badlands (see the trees beyond the arena), though that could just be typical artistic license. The various screen elements signify a jump into a more modern concept for anime developed given all of the holographic displays in place.
Given MekTek's background, First Person seems pretty likely, probably taking an existing engine to extend rather than spinning their own. Stompy Bot's page had lots of very detailed renders - I wouldn't expect that level of detail for a isometeric or turn based game, but anything's possible.
Yeah, I'm expecting an indie Steam type game along with console arcade downloadable versions as well if the Gencon Video commenting about it is still accurate and it hasn't gone PC only. This is an indie studio with an as yet unknown publisher to my knowledge and not the AAA (for it's time) release done by one of the largest developers/publishers like Heavy Gear 1 and 2 were.
I don't think they've got the funding to do a full on shooter (whether 1st or 3rd person) with a full storyline. I'm completely fine with a smaller scale Rollerball meets Gladiator multiplayer robot shooter. I'd personally prefer a 3rd person viewpoint like Gears of War (the roadie run would be a good SMS mechanic as long as you could shoot in some fashion).
warboss wrote: Yeah, I'm expecting an indie Steam type game along with console arcade downloadable versions as well if the Gencon Video commenting about it is still accurate and it hasn't gone PC only.
Very possible. That would likely be much more within their reach. And could be really profitable, since the multi-spectrum launch would give them plenty of options to pickup a wide group of players. I'm hopeful it will be interesting enough to want to play, since I really hope the game goes well.
warboss wrote: Yeah, I'm expecting an indie Steam type game along with console arcade downloadable versions as well if the Gencon Video commenting about it is still accurate and it hasn't gone PC only.
Very possible. That would likely be much more within their reach. And could be really profitable, since the multi-spectrum launch would give them plenty of options to pickup a wide group of players. I'm hopeful it will be interesting enough to want to play, since I really hope the game goes well.
I'd be happy with a tabletop game of Heavy Gear that I found enjoyable. I can only squeeze so many "Big Stompy Robots" into an Infinity list. (That number would be one.)
The site is working and now shows a homemade crowdfunding effort with only part of the details you need to make an informed consumer choice (and initially almost none till hours later). It sounds vaguely like a freemium type game of unknown perspective (first, third, isometric, who knows) with an unknown release date on unknown formats (pc? ps3? ps4? xbox 360? nextbox?) from a relatively unknown company that wants more money than industry giant Valve to make a AAA game when the only previous company experience is with some mods and they couldn't get the site working properly for an hour or two after the countdown ended.
The initial version of the site mentioned a blurb about publishers believing the mech genre is dead as why they're going for crowdfunding instead but frankly somehow Mechwarrior and Hawken (a 4-man outfit initially when they posted their first gameplay video) got funded through traditional methods. I wish them well but I've seen too many video games get cancelled even with backing to throw money at a nebulous product like this that is likely in the pre-production phase at best. I hope they do get put out a finished product that I can later buy and use (my current PC crop can't support much gaming). I guess my original hope of a simple xbox arcade/PS store/steam indie game wasn't ambitious enough...
The initial version of the site mentioned a blurb about publishers believing the mech genre is dead
They have never heard of Japan before have they
I wonder when the next dynasty warriors gundam is coming out.....
In their defense, it's a Western company catering to Western style mech games. I agree that their (now gone) statement was incorrect but for different reasons than gundam.
The initial version of the site mentioned a blurb about publishers believing the mech genre is dead
They have never heard of Japan before have they
I wonder when the next dynasty warriors gundam is coming out.....
In their defense, it's a Western company catering to Western style mech games. I agree that their (now gone) statement was incorrect but for different reasons than gundam.
I suppose
True though about Hawken
And not to mention so many games these days love jamming in Mechs like Mass Effect and Halo (both lacked mechs originally)
Oooh I can actually see the website now. Observations
•Heavy Gear brought to life with next generation cutting edge technology.
•Mass Destruction. Gears and environments will be modeled with a dynamic destruction engine.
•Fast-paced mecha action.
•Nearly Unlimited Upgrade options for your Gears.
•World-Class Sporting Event excitement meets Giant Robots: Tournaments means high stakes, but high rewards.
•Spectate and sponsor other player's matches.
•Fame and Fortune up for grabs: Record and share your exploits with your friends.
Wont launch with half of that. Guaranteed.
Stompy Bot Productions
Stompy Bot Productions, a cute business name, for a serious company. We are New Brunswick�s newest digital publishing company based in Saint John. Our goal is to produce triple AAA video games and media with supporting mobile and social networking applications. Stompy Bot Productions is committed to publishing high-fidelity, high-quality, innovative, successful, electronic video games, for all ages.
MekTek Studios
MekTek Studios is a Saint John-based Canadian video game developer, best known for its work on the MechWarrior4 series with Microsoft Game Studios. Since then, the team has seen the addition of game design veterans such as Jack Mamais, most noted for Heavy Gear 2, FarCry and Crysis, as well as Matthew Steinke, who worked on Mortal Kombat and Splinter Cell. Dedicated to the Giant Robot genre and composed of passionate and creative individuals, the MekTek team will be developing Heavy Gear Assault.
So they spun the RED line as if they personally developed Mech 4. When they couldn't even code a working download client for the game. Makes me think that ORANGE might also refer to modders. Blue just makes me laugh. AAA titles from crowdsourcing. Piranha has a serious amount of dosh invested in Mech online, before the founder sourcing.
Free-to-Choose: New Revolutionary Model
Heavy Gear Assault can be fully enjoyed without ever needing to purchase anything. What we are offering is a new way of doing business. The best part is that our players are in the driver seat and can freely choose to pay or not with no consequences to their enjoyment of Heavy Gear Assault. Of course, there will be upgrades and items that can be purchased, but nothing will be available that will break the balance of the game.
Further more, we will also include a Premium Subscription component, whereby for a nominal fee, a player can join a club of premium members. Being a premium member will allow the player to enjoy a large number of advantages that would not normally be the case. We want to empower our players and give them the flexibility to choose the level of their commitment all the while offering the best gaming experience we can.
Here are some examples of the advantages to being a premium member:
1.Discounts on premium items and regular items purchasable through real or in-game currency.
2.Exclusive game content.
3.Special promotions.
4.Invitations to certain prestigious tournaments and game events.
5.Earn Experience and in-game currency at a faster rate.
6.Occasional Free rewards.
Wow I am glad that a mech game finally got around to using this model.
Be part of an exclusive club of Founders.
As a crowdfunding contributor, you will be among a small group of people that will be instrumental in the foundation of something potentially huge. You've seen what we have in mind and the vision of where this could go. You share our vision and want to see this project happen. You want to be right there from the very beginning.
Going with founders also then. Couldn't come up with something like Generals or Gladiators? Was there zero thought put in to this blatant money grab?
Automatically Appended Next Post: Feast your eyes on the stretch goals.
Stretch Goals
Game on: $900 000
Organized Tournaments bringing new meaning to your games. High Stakes, means High rewards.
Spectating mode. Allows Duelists to spectate other players games and sponsor the results. Community updates.
Mass Dueling mayhem for all Duelists.
Gearing Up: $1 500 000
New Arenas. Complete with Dangerous features.
Terra Nova Corporate Sponsorship programs. Get your team sponsored by one of the many Terra Novan Companies.
Bonus in-game currency for all pledge levels. 5% more.
Unlocks $1.5 Million Commemorative Milestone Vibroblade for all Contributors.
Switching Gears: $2 000 000
In-Game Social media network. Allows you to record and share your experiences in-game with your friends and follow the exploits of other players. This can link to external social media like Facebook.
Unlocks Peace River Gears.
In-Game Dynamic Economy.
Unlocks special $2 Million Commemorative Milestone Autocannon for every contributor.
Upstart New Comer: $2 500 000
Sports Desk: Continuous eSports Video Coverage. News, Interviews, live feeds of Heavy Gear Arena. Will your matches make the weekly highlight reel?
Form Dueling Teams, and compete together for top spots.
Unlocks New Coalition Gears.
Bonus in-game currency for all pledge levels. 10% more. None cumulative with previous bonus currencies.
Locked and Loaded: $3 000 000
Organized League play based on skills with Ranking consequences. Accurate stats tracking and career leaderboards. Compete for a spot in the league playoff tournament and feeder tournaments.
Unlocks a Hardback "Makings of Heavy Gear Assault" Full-Color book, including developer stories, concept art and behind the scene images, for GREL contributors and above.
Unlocks $3 Million Commemorative Milestone Frag Cannon for all Contributors.
Putting the Heavy in Heavy Gear: $3 500 000
Vintage Gear designs available.
Gear-Striders.
Take it to new heights. Zero-G orbital arenas.
Bonus in-game currency for all pledge levels. 15% more. None cumulative with previous bonus currencies.
Stomping onto the Scene: $4 000 000
Official Periodical eMagazine featuring highlight reels, interview and strategies.
Unlocks Heavy Gear Assault; Graphic Novel for all pledge level veteran duelist and above.
Unlocks $4 Million Commemorative Milestone Sword for all Contributors.
Armed and Dangerous: $4 500 000
Faction specific Arsenals. Factions will have different looking and performing weapons.
Bonus in-game currency for all pledge levels. 20% more. None cumulative with previous bonus currencies.
Lock, Stock and Barrel: $5 000 000
Additional musical tracks. These will be added to the musical tracks available to certain pledge levels.
Duelist can tailor their intro music.
Unlocks $5 Million Commemorative Milestone Rifle for all Contributors.
Geared for success: $5 500 000
In-Game voice announcers and dynamic in-game commentaries.
Android and IOS mobile app, allowing Duelist to interact with their inventory, in-game social media, spectate and sponsor matches from the comforts of their mobile devices.
Official Live Tournament Scene, travel to major conferences to strut your stuff on the world stage and become the Real World Champion Duelist you know you are.
Bonus in-game currency for all pledge levels. 25% more. None cumulative with previous bonus currencies.
All in: $6 000 000
Three words: Gear Death Races.
See the World: Visit Arenas in the other Leagues of Terra Nova.
Tactical Companion Game on Android and IOS mobile platforms.
Over the Top: $8 000 000
Players can explore the thrills and excitement of Terra Nova from the view point of their Character. Leave Khayr ad-Din and explore how things are done elsewhere on Terra Nova.
A more human way of exploring the universe of Heavy Gear. You will be able to move freely as a character in the world of Heavy Gear.
No limits: $10 000 000
Single Player and Co-op military campaigns expansions outside of the Arenas.
Single Player and Co-opPvE.
So no game until 900,000 (and no refund system like kickstarter to fall back on) Ridiculous uncosted stretch goals like "More levels" More than what? How many on launch? "5% more in game currency?" What does that get you?
Stretch goals going up by millions. As if people are going to poor money in to this so fast that the hundred thousands are going to fly by too fast for them to notice.
Don't mind me if I pull up a chair and watch this end hilariously. Although it will likely just end with a missing downloads page, and a counter hinting at the new thing that's totally gonna revolutionize everything.
There is a lot that I could say to all of that, GBL, but I'll refrain. Suffice to say, you sound bitter. That is all. Whatever you're bitter over, I pray it's taken care of at some point for you. Peace.
It is true that what they're talking about is, as one gentleman over on the DP9 forums referred, ballsy.
You're talking about throwing together a game that is very much like Star Wars: The Old Republic. That's not a horrible thing. It's just going to take effort. However, the fact that they have Jack Mamais in on this is a positive thing for me, since if he went from Heavy Gear 2 to the likes of Crysis and Far Cry, he's got the talent.
Edit: Thanks for pointing out that there's mechs in ME, kenshin... I saw some clips for ME2, but never played beyond the first. After hearing about the end, I was, like others, I suppose, disappointed. But then that's what you get when you get a game that provides you with so many options and storytelling abilities.
It is true that what they're talking about is, as one gentleman over on the DP9 forums referred, ballsy.
"Ballsy" is one way to put it.
My way of putting it would be Pants on head "ballsy"
I wouldn't be so hard on them, had they ever finished a project. It isn't a crime to be ambitious, and its not a crime to ask for fan funding. However they could prove themselves before doing so.
Something more than a 40 second trailer with 30 seconds of titles and a cheap render.
They leave behind a trail of half finished products, and one could easily believe that they nuked their own forums to try and erase that history. AT1's Moddb page still links to mektek.net asking me to download the MTX Software.
MechWarrior Online (The obvious comparison, as the funding model seems to have been lifted wholesale from them) had a great deal more to show off at this stage. So even assuming they didn't have a sordid history, they have already taken miss steps. Our first look at the game is accompanied by an outstretched hand asking for cash.
And you cant seriously pretend that the line stating that they were MechWarrior 4 developers wasn't misleading? Did they ever release a patch for any bugs they didn't cause?
And where is the plan? How long is development? How many maps? How many mechs? Which features will be in when they launch early to raise more cash?
They have set the bar REALLY high for themselves, but without any of the information any of the successfully crowd sourced games had at this stage.
Star Wars: The Old Republic
I assume you intended to compare it favorably to TOR. I agree, but only because we know it will be launched half finished.
Now I have been very negative, so here is how I believe it should have been run.
Developed until they can release early in game footage.
Kickstarter with a goal of 100,000 and if you play the stretch goals correctly, it could exceed 1mil
Remove the MekTek moniker completely. The name is dirt. But Stompy Bot is an awesome name without any attachments.
Scope Down. Under Promise Over Deliver. Coming in talking about how you are going to redefine gaming, is a lofty goal.
Some games have successfully kickstarted just their betas. How about we get 2 Gears fighting in an arena with a handful of mod parts. Sell just that, and when it works, add features and ask for more support.
I'm rather disappointed with the offering. They avoided kickstarter specifically so they wouldn't be on the hook legally if they fail to deliver - which I understand but makes me much more suspicious. And there are no core details about what gameplay will be like, or discussions of how the F2P model (which is what they have, no matter how they cloak it) will influence the game.
Overall it feels like a very amateur offering, sadly.
Now I have been very negative, so here is how I believe it should have been run.
Developed until they can release early in game footage.
Kickstarter with a goal of 100,000 and if you play the stretch goals correctly, it could exceed 1mil
Remove the MekTek moniker completely. The name is dirt. But Stompy Bot is an awesome name without any attachments.
Scope Down. Under Promise Over Deliver. Coming in talking about how you are going to redefine gaming, is a lofty goal.
Some games have successfully kickstarted just their betas. How about we get 2 Gears fighting in an arena with a handful of mod parts. Sell just that, and when it works, add features and ask for more support.
While I completely agree with the above, I suspect that they decided it wasn't financially possible since the first version of their page said they have no publisher that would normally fund that (they have since removed that statement). I wish them luck and will likely buy/try any HG product that they eventually come out with as long as they support a format that I own (no gaming-worthy PC so console for me)... but this homemade high apple pie in the sky crowdfunding venture is just way too risky for me to throw money at years in advance.
Let's see...
No indication of the base goal, trying to pass free-to-play as revolutionary, hype levels close to critical, no indication of the amount already pledged, no indication of when the money is charged, limited chance of reimbursement if the project fails, no real information on the type of game, platform or anything, failed launch event, history of failed projects... and based on Arena, the single worst unplayable mess I have ever seen.
I stand corrected. There are companies more incompetent than DP9.
Dullspork wrote: I hope this goes better for them than the Warmachine video game.
I hope so too but the warmachine game (despite my love for heavy gear and dislike for steampunk personally) is based on a more popular IP and had major publisher funding... and is still apparently in limbo despite those advantages compared to HG. I posted earlier in this thread that I was expecting an arcade type game but that was also with the expectation that they had a publisher backing them up. If they're truely doing this with no backing other than crowdfunding, they should have started with a freemium HG iOS/android/flash game instead and then moved onto a paid xbox arcade/steam title with paid DLC and THEN to a AAA release for the final step. They're a company who has basically made a few appetizers for someone else's dinner party and now thinks that they're ready to open up a chain of restaurants.
warboss wrote: If they're truely doing this with no backing other than crowdfunding, they should have started with a freemium HG iOS/android/flash game instead and then moved onto a paid xbox arcade/steam title with paid DLC and THEN to a AAA release for the final step.
My issue with the offering is pretty much the above; I don't know *anything* about this studio, and they want me to give them non-refundable money with little more than a render that grad students can come up with? Eh... that sounds a bit silly to me. Simply not using kickstarter makes me think they aren't even sure of their own success - 5% of the total isn't that much, and the protections that kickstarter provides everybody are missing. That makes me extremely nervous about funding them.
With the information that is available right now, it feels an awful lot like I'd be lighting money on fire. That bothers me quite a bit because I was hoping to get behind this 100%. C'est la vie.
IceRaptor wrote: Simply not using kickstarter makes me think they aren't even sure of their own success - 5% of the total isn't that much, and the protections that kickstarter provides everybody are missing. That makes me extremely nervous about funding them.
Ironically, Kickstarter doesn't actually give you any real protection despite the public viewpoint that it does. What it does give you is some transperancy to the whole offer with current funding totals and information about the number of backers in a public venue that is not able to be manipulated easily after the fact by the kickstarting company. You're also not signing away your right to a refund as well as legal recourse like you do with their TOS. The way they have it set up is that you basically just hand your money behind the curtain ("Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!") and hope something comes of it in the end with no real recourse due to the terms of service you agree to with the pledge. They couldn't get the website working for the end of the countdown and forgot to include paypal as a payment but they certainly managed to cover their own butts right off the bat.
I would have loved (as I said earlier) an arcade/steam arena fighting title in 3rd person perspective with relatively modern graphics; that's not possible without significant funding that is substantially less than what they're asking for. What is possible with crowdfunding and limited time is maybe coming up with a Civ Revolutions style orthographic 2.5d downloadable game that largely automates the tabletop one. That doesn't require top notch graphics or animation but I'd have thrown $10-15 at them for something like that with the polar factions and $5 DLCs for other factions.
I believe Edison once said that invention is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. Unfortunately, it seems Stompy Bot believes in the inverse with the combination of lofty goals and lack of preparation shown so far.
I'd be amazed if they could even get 1/3 of what they are asking for
But come on, some of those goals are utterly ridiculous. The highest funded game on KS got a wee less than $4 Mil, and that is Obsidian who has a lot of credentials.
How long will this crowdfund thing go on for anyways?
Well, from what I'm hearing Star Citizen made upwards of 8 million dollars, but that was with Chris Robert (thank you, HudsonD). Mind you, never heard of the man, nor of Star Citizen, but the fact that that wasn't on KickStarter should say that independently-sourced games aren't impossible.
One of the DP9 forumites pointed out that 10 million 'is about right'... development costs, as he put it, are between 10 million and 20 million, hence why big publishers like EA and Activision don't like to start new IPs.
As far as the type of game that it is, they're basically starting off with an arena-style combat. They want location-based armor and equipment damage on the Gears, as well as interactivity with the terrain. Including that with skill sets for pilots and the possibility of upgrading your Gear with new equipment would make for an interesting proposal.
And Mrondeau, for what it is worth, now that I have some understanding of where you're coming from I am sorry that you feel so slighted. I guess I've always been one to be optimistic, and while this might have been underwhelming, I'm still going to keep my optimism up. As for a target date, I would guess on the outside of 2 years, if fans new and old show an interest in the game.
BrandonKF wrote: Well, from what I'm hearing Star Citizen made upwards of 8 million dollars, but that was with Robert Jordan. Mind you, never heard of the man, nor of Star Citizen, but the fact that that wasn't on KickStarter should say that independently-sourced games aren't impossible.
It's actually Chris Robert, the guy behind "Wing Commander" and a few others.
One of the DP9 forumites pointed out that 10 million 'is about right'... development costs, as he put it, are between 10 million and 20 million, hence why big publishers like EA and Activision don't like to start new IPs.
If memory serves me well, that forumite is also a DP9 employee.
On the other hand, if the team is really serious about the kind of game they want to build, 10 millions isn't that far off. I have to express my doubts, however, that they're going to get that much through crowdfunding.
And Mrondeau, for what it is worth, now that I have some understanding of where you're coming from I am sorry that you feel so slighted.
Would you expand on that, please ? I am very curious about how you reached such conclusions.
Goes to show how much I paid attention to the credits from Wing Commander, eh?
And Saleem being an employee is news to me... we counting Pod Squad folks as employees?
As for my comment towards Mrondeau, I understand that he has a lot to say about the tabletop game, and the company as a whole (which isn't exactly large). I'm not being sarcastic or anything, I'm being dead serious. You put a lot into something, and when nothing comes of it, it can be a downer. You two, I recall, happen to be two of the guys I had a lot of conversations with in the Grognard forum. You both had some very passionate ideas on how to improve the game from your perspectives. I'll respect that.
He's an assistant line developer according to the FIF credits and the 1st person mentioned after the "big three" of Robert, autel, and mason (assuming you put any importance on that order).
In either case, if he's correct, then the 10 million mark isn't unreasonable.
From what I've heard from the admins over on MekTek forums, the license was agreed upon six months ago. This soft launch will include a lot of marketing as things progress.
As for those who are interested in the tabletop game, squigsquasher, feel free to check it out on Dream Pod 9 and its forums.
Well, I'd say that they've done a great deal of the work, but I'd also give the nod to everyone else, including the playtesters and Pod Squad. They all work hard for the game. : )
BKF : Ah, so you haven't read the credit sections for any L&L-era DP9 book either, eh ?
That's a pity, there's a lot to be learnt from the credit sections. How many different people actually worked there ? How many tasks did the average contributor perform ? How big was the playtest pool ? Many interesting things really...
All in all, you do seem to be making many assumptions, without necessarily knowing the whole picture, or what happens behind the scenes, as shown by your surprise that a "DP9 forumite" was actually one of the main writers.
That is not a reveal trailer. It's something all right, but it's not a reveal trailer.
MWO's 2012 Debut trailer should be an appropriate comparison. It is, after all, their most likely competitor with Heavy Gear Assault. So, let's break it down comparatively.
MWO presented to us a design that has been one of the two iconic faces of the franchise for over a decade. Even people who don't play MechWarrior or BattleTech might recognize an Atlas. Anyone who has played either game and doesn't at least get a flicker of recognition from the Atlas wasn't paying very much attention.
I don't recognize this Gear. It's not, for example, one of the Scopedog derivatives that the franchise started with. It's not (that I can tell) my good buddy the Ferret. Now, granted, most Gear models aren't that visually distinctive but if you want people's attention, you're going to need that recognition.
The MWO trailer tells a story. It is a brief story, but its subject matter is thematically appropriate. The presentation of a 'Mech powering up, being moved to drop position, and dropping is not only enough to give us a good look at that 'Mech (and others) but also fits with a reveal trailer: this is a beginning. It also depicts something that's actually pretty interesting and something most of us would probably find memorable, i.e. turning on a giant robot and jumping out of a perfectly good aircraft with it.
The trailer for Heavy Gear Assault turned on a light. It didn't tell a story, thematically appropriate or otherwise. It did not give us a good look at the subject matter (we never even saw a full-body shot of the Gear). It turned on a light and did a little bit of pulling back the camera. There's no activity or action.
By time, the MWO trailer was 93 seconds. Breaking down by content the trailer was (from the start to Atlas drop cradle firing jets) 73 seconds of actual content and 18 seconds of production logos and the like. All of the stuff gamers don't care about was concentrated at the end.
The Heavy Gear Assault trailer is 45 seconds long. It opens with 18 seconds of pleading for money and logos, gives us 8 seconds of a Gear's head and chest with no background, switches back towards pleas for money/logos at 26 seconds in, and spends a full 12 seconds on the Stompy Bot Productions logo animation to round it off. Eight seconds of content, count 'em. The company logo at the end took up more space in the video than the product they're trying to sell!
If you've got a product you're trying to sell then the product should always be the most important thing in any presentation of it. I probably shouldn't have to tell anyone that, it's pretty common sense, but this trailer breathtakingly violates that in multiple ways. (The Stompy Bot Productions logo animation is actually the most memorable part, which is kind of scary.) It's a bad trailer, for not having a hook; it's a bad commercial, for not concentrating on the product; it's a bad movie, for being mostly filler and lacking any narrative or thematic elements.
If DP9 wants to raise funds for a new Heavy Gear game, I've got a rather pertinent suggestion: release Heavy Gear 1 and Heavy Gear 2 via Good Old Games. Drop an ad or two into the internets. Watch hordes of people like me who remember the old days fondly buy them for five bucks. Fund new game with profits.
BrandonKF wrote: Well, from what I'm hearing Star Citizen made upwards of 8 million dollars, but that was with Chris Robert (thank you, HudsonD). Mind you, never heard of the man, nor of Star Citizen, but the fact that that wasn't on KickStarter should say that independently-sourced games aren't impossible.
Star Citizen had a Kickstarter and their Website. Kickstarter did what it usually does and built an amazing amount of hype for their game. People continued to flock to their website well after the kickstarter had raised enough money for them to succeed.
Star Citizen had loads of concepts, a real video, actual game information.
Star Citizen did not throw up an empty website, with a non trailer and put its hand out asking for cash.
NGTM-1R wrote: That is not a reveal trailer. It's something all right, but it's not a reveal trailer.
MWO's 2012 Debut trailer should be an appropriate comparison. It is, after all, their most likely competitor with Heavy Gear Assault. So, let's break it down comparatively.
MWO presented to us a design that has been one of the two iconic faces of the franchise for over a decade. Even people who don't play MechWarrior or BattleTech might recognize an Atlas. Anyone who has played either game and doesn't at least get a flicker of recognition from the Atlas wasn't paying very much attention.
Yes, I understand that the trailer wasn't everything everyone was expecting. I am one of them. Believe me. But I'm willing to wait.
I don't recognize this Gear. It's not, for example, one of the Scopedog derivatives that the franchise started with. It's not (that I can tell) my good buddy the Ferret. Now, granted, most Gear models aren't that visually distinctive but if you want people's attention, you're going to need that recognition.
It's a Warrior. Peace River model of the Hunter. That or its a Hunter carrying a Paxton Industries logo.
If DP9 wants to raise funds for a new Heavy Gear game, I've got a rather pertinent suggestion: release Heavy Gear 1 and Heavy Gear 2 via Good Old Games. Drop an ad or two into the internets. Watch hordes of people like me who remember the old days fondly buy them for five bucks. Fund new game with profits.
I remember it, too. Whether or not Activision allows it is the question.
And these same suggestions have been made elsewhere on the MekTek forums and the Facebook posts.
This is to update everyone as to the status of Heavy Gear Assault, the new video game that is now announced.
Jack Mamais, the creative director for the game, also director for Heavy Gear 2, Far Cry, and Crysis, has fielded some questions from folks on the Facebook page for the computer game.
For all those who are interested in reading what he had to say, or posting questions and comments and suggestions of their own, feel free. God bless, all.
See, this was needed from the start. Actual (Necessary) information is being drawn out on the facebook page. Very Slowly. And actual useful details are even slower.
To prevent others from having to dig for this info, I will throw some relevant looking quotes up here.
We've heard some some concerned voices about security within the Heavy Gear website, but want to ensure that from this point forward, ALL connections through the site are encrypted via SSL. For those avid users of PayPal, we will also soon have PayPal integration to be able to pledge as well!
We've also updated the website to include an About page to address some of the direction in which we are taking the game! Please keep checking back for new content, as we'll always be updating!
That's a step in the right direction. I would prefer that the company promise something, put a number on it, and refund people if they don't hit it. IE Kickstarter.
I am shocked that a AAA games company( ) would run credit card transactions without SSL or digital signing. But they fixed that up quick enough.
We are in full development mode right now! Cool stuff to show coming very soon!
So it is in development, they aren't waiting for our money to begin. THAT is good to know. If this is the case, the pledge system would be better utilized right before beta, just like MWO.
Nick Lind Do you guys have any forums so that we can chat about the game with others who are excited for it?
11 hours ago · Like..
Heavy Gear Assault I'm not sure Nick, I think I saw a post on reddit.
11 hours ago · Like..
Heavy Gear Assault However, I'll ask our web guys and see if we can start a forum. If so, I'll post details here.
11 hours ago · Like · 3
The guys on the Mektek.com forum (which if you go there directly still exists, and has a post outlining that the website will return in some form after they are happy with all the redirects they have sent to the heavy gear website.) should probably be afraid of this.
Joseph Dufault Reposting here from the Heavy Gear II page:
I don't see how you can include Microtransactions and not make them unbalanced in some way. That is, after all, the whole incentive to buy them unless you're simply going for aesthetics (which I doubt). Which means inevitably you'll still have the "Gold Tank" Scenario WOT deals with- players who would rather spend 50 dollars on an overpowered, or intentionally unbalanced tank so that they can have an advantage over other players. It entirely undermines the competitive play of the game which, being THE core dynamic of the game, essentially fractures what it's built upon.
Microtransactions are not the answer here.
10 hours ago · Like..
Heavy Gear Assault I must differ from you there Joseph. I play a lot of World of Tanks and it has fantastic gameplay. Rest assured, we will work hard to balance the game and insure that it is fun for every single person who plays it.
This Developer likes WOT. Depending on your views of WOT, this gives you an idea of what they will be doing.
The page currently has 618 Likes.
I still think they have a long way to go before they should have asked for money, but slowly details are emerging.
As they described, GBL, it was a soft launch. Now, though, I hope that the fact that all of these questions and answers on Facebook will encourage folks around here to look into what's going on.
The Developer there was Jack Mamais, the director, answering off HGA's page while fielding questions and comments and suggestions from folks. He might still be open to asking, if you or anyone else would like to.
He might still be open to asking, if you or anyone else would like to.
Challenge Accepted
Matt Osborne What are your exact milestones for release. Levels, Gears Etc. I would like hard facts before I put my money toward anything. Things like "More levels" and "10% more in game currency" are absolutely meaningless without an idea of your actual plans. Also: What guarantees to people have that you wont take their money and run? Paypals protections only last 30 days. Kickstarter would let you name a number of dollars that you need, and if you don't get it, we get that money back. Can you match that?
Yeah, that was surprising for me too... lots of suggestions and detail there.
But I also think that Mr. Mamais is the game design guru, not the producers themselves, so that might be a question for them. He wasn't able to answer questions pertaining to pledges:
Mr. Paul Parke wrote: "I have 2 more questions. First will there be a deadline on Pledge funds. aslo if I were to pledge, could I upgrade it to a higher amount later on?"
Mr. Mamais answered: "I'm not sure Paul, this is another question for our producer, I'll bring it to his attention."
Mr. Sammy Busby wrote: "I would love to see Single Player become available as I loved both Heavy Gear 1 and 2 and even still have them. Everyone make sure to Pledge some MONEY so we can get Single Player!!!! It would be so awesome to have a new Heavy Gear like that. Thats my dream game. If SP is implemented, will it play like HG 2? If so Im sold! Take my money!"
Mr. Mamais answered: "I'm happy you both like HG2, it is obviously a big influence on are gameplay (especially since I directed it) but I think you will see much more agile Gears in HGA (at least for the smaller classes). We will have jumping and our SMS mode will be much more advanced than anything we've seen in a Heavy Gear or Mech game yet. Terrain will play a big part in the game with respects to gameplay. I hope this answers your questions, at least in part "
Another tidbit, concerning weaponry that Mr. Mamais answered: "Perks and Flaws will be part of this game. Some Gears will not be able to use some weapons for various reasons. I love your comments on TV and how we did not get it quite right for HG2, I will take a hard look at your suggestions for inclusion into our design."
One thing we won't see, hopefully and thankfully, will be the previous designs where everybody was running around in the multiplayer maps with railguns and lasers all the time.
So in regards to funding, Mr. Mamais is making the producers aware of the questions, but he seems very enthusiastic about sharing the design concepts and hints about the future of the game with everyone. : )
Enthusiasm is nice but attention to detail is more important and they don't seem to be demonstrating that. The website wasn't working for hours after the end of the 20 day countdown and I don't buy the "sudden demand crashed the server" excuse for a game with less than 1,000 likes (unless their server was an original iphone on a 2g network). The video they posted still has a typo in the little text that they bothered to put in it (seriously, no body spell checked the 3 lines of information they put in???). They did however finally answered some but certainly not all the initial important points that should have been addressed at the very start of the campaign before taking the first pledge... I guess that's progress...
Attention to detail is a huge part of what makes a game sink or swim. If they can't apparently to put correct spelling in their lackluster promo video and have trouble setting up a simple website given 20+ days of notice, how can they be trusted to publish a good AAA game that isn't riddled with bugs on their first attempt out of the gate? Like I said, 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration is the key but they seem to be going for the inverse ratio.
Either way, Brandon, I sincerely hope that your optimism ends up trumping my realism in the end like a Kodiak stomping on an Asp.
warboss wrote: Enthusiasm is nice but attention to detail is more important and they don't seem to be demonstrating that. The website wasn't working for hours after the end of the 20 day countdown and I don't buy the "sudden demand crashed the server" excuse for a game with less than 1,000 likes (unless their server was an original iphone on a 2g network). The video they posted still has a typo in the little text that they bothered to put in it (seriously, no body spell checked the 3 lines of information they put in???). They did however finally answered some but certainly not all the initial important points that should have been addressed at the very start of the campaign before taking the first pledge... I guess that's progress...
Attention to detail is a huge part of what makes a game sink or swim. If they can't apparently to put correct spelling in their lackluster promo video and have trouble setting up a simple website given 20+ days of notice, how can they be trusted to publish a good AAA game that isn't riddled with bugs on their first attempt out of the gate? Like I said, 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration is the key but they seem to be going for the inverse ratio.
Either way, Brandon, I sincerely hope that your optimism ends up trumping my realism in the end like a Kodiak stomping on an Asp.
Its not even that.
At this stage, they should already have their critical path to release. If they don't, this will not be a AAA title. All I see them releasing is vague hopes and ideas, and promises that the title is in development.
This leaves me with 3 potential ideas on how this project is being run.
1. They have everything set up perfectly in the background, however they don't want to release their insubstantial goals before getting enough money to surpass those goals.
2. They are cowboy coding this, and it will be delivered over budget and well past schedule. They have begun development with no goals or idea where they are going.
3. Its a scam. There is nothing going on here, and they want your money. If something is released it will be worse than 2.
I am leaning towards 2. It fits with MekTeks background. Its not that they are trying to be bad, they just don't know better.
Honestly, the main reason I think this isn't a scam is that most scams would try quite harder to look legit !
Website not ready at the end of the countdown ?
SSL not ready at launch ?
Undisclosed amount of pledges ? No estimation of release date whatsoever ?
No email confirmation at sign-up and no password retrieval interface ?
Seriously, in 16 years of internet, this is the first time I see a supposedly professional website with so many critical features missing !
All the questions related to pledges during the FB Q&A were left unanswered by the lead designer, and still are, nearly one week after.
I just can't imagine a project raising more red flags at once, unless it was trying hard to.
It is very telling when Paulson Games new mecha combat tabletop has released more concept art than this "AAA Game" and he hasn't even put his kickstarter up yet.
Well, three weeks after this soft launch, the pledge is at 100,000 and the ticker is up. They are also open now on PayPal, for all those of you who were concerned about putting in your money into a site that wasn't secured. So congratulations.
For those who register with the actual website, they also sent out an announcement e-mail that should be in your mailboxes with whatever profile you signed on for. Some extra art in there, as well.
BrandonKF wrote: Well, three weeks after this soft launch, the pledge is at 100,000 and the ticker is up. They are also open now on PayPal, for all those of you who were concerned about putting in your money into a site that wasn't secured. So congratulations.
For those who register with the actual website, they also sent out an announcement e-mail that should be in your mailboxes with whatever profile you signed on for. Some extra art in there, as well.
-Brandon F.
Paypals protections only last 30 days.
Is 100,000 with or without the financial backing they said they had received from real investors or is it all crowd fund?
I ask here because they don't like specifics on facebook.
BrandonKF wrote: Well, three weeks after this soft launch, the pledge is at 100,000 and the ticker is up. They are also open now on PayPal, for all those of you who were concerned about putting in your money into a site that wasn't secured. So congratulations.
Thanks for the update. I'm glad to hear that they've been making some progress on the items that realistically should have been working at launch. I suspect that they'll get a big surge of donations when they show in game screenshots as opposed to concept art.
Some dude on 4chan (yea yea I know, 4chan ) claims to be a dev and is taking questions. He's on /m/ right now, was on /v/ a while ago (why would you ever go to /v/!)
Spoiled the link since I'm sure people might cringe from seeing a 4chan link
While that's more cutscene than gameplay, it's good to see something working and not just the intro teaser with the typo. The hunter does look spiffy and I do hope they'll make a completely new sculpt that resembles it as the Hunter XMG in the tabletop game. Hopefully the video will spur some donations as the last two weeks have netted less than $1000 (they were at $104,400ish on 3/12/2013).
No, Jack Mamais said that was real, from in-game Unreal 4 engine graphics, warboss. So... I leave things for a week, and look what happens? Maybe I should be gone longer, but then I wouldn't be able to see more. : )
I like Heavy Gear. I really do. It's got a lot of great elements in the gameplay and setting. I really do love it, and enjoyed the old Activision games.
However, this is probably the saddest thing they've tried.
Honestly, this had trainwreck written all over it from day 1. An unknown studio, with no design details, no prototype, just some generic 'concept art' of a game that ALREADY had concept and designs. Those are the things serious businesses actually require to pursue an ambitious and complex project such as a computer game. The era of even somewhat sub-AAA titles coming from nowhere is all but gone, with the cost of passable assets, and the increasing architectural complexity of modern action titles. Good wishes and desire won't make something happen, nor are Kickstarters a silver bullet. Every single highly successful kickstarter came from people who knew how to drive them, and who had already had the cash to produce prototypes to increase faith in investors.
Sorry DP9 and MekTek, this isn't how you play with the big boys.
Killionaire wrote: I like Heavy Gear. I really do. It's got a lot of great elements in the gameplay and setting. I really do love it, and enjoyed the old Activision games.(...)
Good wishes and desire won't make something happen, nor are Kickstarters a silver bullet.
We'd all like DP9 to straighten its act and Heavy Gear to succeed, however good wishes and desires, both theirs and the fans', are exactly what the company has been running on for the last few years.
The results speak for themselves.
As I said before, I wish them well but I also wish they had set more realistic starting goals like a small dowloadable 3rd person isometetric action game. The odds are stacked against winning the the Indy 500 with your first race as a team.
For me, the cardinal sin seems to be that they just don't get the medium of crowdsourcing. Hopefully I'm proven wrong - I'd like to see them succeed despite not being in their demographic - but they are asking way too much for way too little, with few steps along the way. They have some nice perks for the individual pledge levels, but something like a tech for each pledger at 200,000 would be virtually free for them and a nice milestone during the pledge drive.
I fear as Killionaire mentions that they simply are in other their heads.
To my limited understanding, the Stompy Bot/MekTek team does have some 'known entities' in video game development on the team. They might not be the John Romero 'rockstar' type-developers, but on the other hand they're not John Romero 'rockstar' type developers. I haven't met them beyond (literally) a couple-line text with one of their guys yesterday, but they apparently have some people who've worked on big-name games.
They have some people that have worked on big name games (like Jack Mamais specifically as they focus on him alot... although he has a 5+ year gap though where he was teaching prior to joining this project from his bio). The problem is that the goals they've set both in funding and the type of game they're attempting are more appropriate for famous studios led by gaming celebrities, not new studios with no prior work who just hired some experienced people working together for the first time (and apparently telecommuting from pre-crowdfunding press releases). I really wish they would have chosen a less ambitious project to start with and then (after it's success) moved on to the moby dick of gaming (the "AAA game").
There's a lot of factors that go in successful electronic game projects, which simply are not present. It's not only a factor of 'Have a few key people worked in gaming', but also the proper planning and management. Do they have a reasonable and achievable roadmap? Do they have an agreed upon process and periodic deliverables? Do they have a functional and 'fun' prototype prior to production?
The fact that most of their staff is operating remotely is guaranteed doom for anything of this complexity. It simply does not happen. The difficulty of communications shafts productivity that hard. The 'rockstar developer' is also a bit of a myth, and less productive in a lot of cases than just random people with maybe only 2 or 3 years experience, who are well managed.
As for their kickstarter... they don't seem to realize that Kickstarter isn't a magical button one pushes, then receives money from. It, in actuality, is an ADVERTISEMENT PRE-ORDER engine more than any 'investment' tool. That requires a very solid set of deliverables to be shown and in an advanced state. Not to mention within 9 months of delivery. Otherwise, absolutely no one will pledge, and the project takes a PR hit.
In this case, all of the above has occurred, extremely predictably.
Guys - I like HG. I can never find anyone near me who plays it.
I've driven an hour and a half one-way to meet a guy to play it and he never showed. I had issues when the scale changed from 1/87 - but hate to admit - it is more manageable at its current scale.
I loved the first video game and liked the second one. I too feel this is rather ambitious. But I am backing it for now. I can put in suggestions and see how it goes - in case it succeeds or fails.
I think there is a little too much fat in terms of items that will probably end up junked/boxed ebayed off that I will not use. The key ring stuff. But I understand it is a for of relatively minimal investment on advertisement.
I am concerned that it will fail - it does not look to be picking up steam - but there are several other KS projects and about 36 days to go. I feel that $800K is too much and $4 million is a passionate desire to achieve.
But I am putting my money in on this to see how it goes - worst case - nothing for awhile. Moderate - it gets funded streamline later in another project. Best case - it gets funded and ihave a new source for HG Video games.
PanzerTC wrote: Guys - I like HG. I can never find anyone near me who plays it.
I've driven an hour and a half one-way to meet a guy to play it and he never showed. I had issues when the scale changed from 1/87 - but hate to admit - it is more manageable at its current scale.
I loved the first video game and liked the second one. I too feel this is rather ambitious. But I am backing it for now. I can put in suggestions and see how it goes - in case it succeeds or fails.
I think there is a little too much fat in terms of items that will probably end up junked/boxed ebayed off that I will not use. The key ring stuff. But I understand it is a for of relatively minimal investment on advertisement.
I am concerned that it will fail - it does not look to be picking up steam - but there are several other KS projects and about 36 days to go. I feel that $800K is too much and $4 million is a passionate desire to achieve.
But I am putting my money in on this to see how it goes - worst case - nothing for awhile. Moderate - it gets funded streamline later in another project. Best case - it gets funded and ihave a new source for HG Video games.
Go for it.
People call kickstarter a scam, but it is far safer than paypal (after 30 days), or anonymous online credit card transactions.
All the money is returned in the likely event that this doesn't make its money.
I also like Heavy Gear. And I would pledge for this project if I thought they were legitimate. They are asking for way too much money, for a project that will tax players for years to come. Their model, we invest and then we pay. Also, mektek has a reputation for supporting their products until they get bored of them.
That's probably a more accurate assessment. This really is an overly-ambitious project, because the existing fan base isn't nearly big enough to support the game that they have in mind, even if it does get funded.
They should have done something much more modest and used that to expand later.
Nick Lind Do you guys have any forums so that we can chat about the game with others who are excited for it?
11 hours ago · Like..
Heavy Gear Assault I'm not sure Nick, I think I saw a post on reddit.
11 hours ago · Like..
Heavy Gear Assault However, I'll ask our web guys and see if we can start a forum. If so, I'll post details here.
People have been telling them what they want for months, but kickstarter has forced them to reevaluate. Not surprising.
I still don't trust them not to take the money, and then after the kickstarter say that they cannot make the single player game until the multiplayer one is successful.
Gearhead wrote: Hmm. I only started following it a couple days ago, so that's not very encouraging to hear.
Well some background on the developers.
Their main team was formed out of Mektek, a team of modders that has imploded several times during their lifetime.
For their most recent project, they managed to get the rights from Microsoft for MechWarrior 4 Mercenaries.
They released MW4 for free under the terms they struck with Microsoft.
They added all their mechs to the game, broke and fixed the game about 5 times, promised that the game would be fixed and updated with new multiplayer modes.
Then Heavy Gear came along, and they dropped MW4 completely. They tried to move the rights to another modding group, but Microsoft wouldn't allow it. So that project is in limbo, because of their actions, and they refuse to take responsibility for it, or comment on the current state of the license. So far MW4 isn't even legally hosted anywhere anymore. You aren't allowed to discuss this fact on their forums.
Not to mention several other destroyed projects in their recent history.
Assault Tech 1: Battletech
Solaris Assault Tech
Each of these were abandoned in turn.
Now they call themselves a "AAA" game studio but they have left us with a significant amount of reason to doubt they can complete a project.
Gearhead wrote: I remember MekTek and their MW4 stuff, but I hadn't heard of THAT massive cockup.
That's even less encouraging. Fortunately there's that little button marked "Cancel pledge" at the bottom of the page, should the need arise.
As I said, let it ride, kickstarter is very focused on making you happy, rather than the company. if you get squeamish just ask for your money back. More than likely you will simply get your money back in a few weeks when the project fails, and mektek moves on to "DUST TACTICS ARENA" or some such.
Well, I would rather be more optimistic than you are, GBL.
And I believe they discussed MW4 until they were dickened out by all the naysayers. If you were one of the 'Zs', as I put it there, I happened to notice quite a few times where the developers actually answered those points every single stinking time, and it still wasn't good enough.
But that's then, this is now. Stompy Bot and MekTek are both trying to get Heavy Gear Assault up, and KS has been what everyone has been asking for. Folks have been asking for single-player, so they changed it up and accepted that and have updated it to include single-player missions.
They're doing a lot to try and get what the players want, but unless YOU, the PLAYER, go out and spread the word that there is a new Heavy Gear game out there that needs your help, it's not going to go anywhere.
Kickstarter isn't a magical one-press button, but it also requires that the folks who are actually interested in the game to share news and updates about it themselves, if they want to see what they've pledged come to fruition. So, it is an investment on the pledger's part as well, if they truly want to have that game, then they'll discuss it with others elsewhere.
So I'll keep on providing the updates here and see what happens. God bless!
Feel how you want about the project and the team (as far as I'm concerned, they're amateurs who believe their own hype too much), there's no hiding it's a failure as far as crowdfunding campaigns go.
It took them 4 days, including the early rush, to make what they should make on a single average day. Given the drop that occurs after the early rush, if they wanted to have a chance of making their first goal, they should have made around 80 to 100k, on the first day. Five days later, they have only made 22k, that's a Kickstarter that won't even remotely be succesful.
It's actually the first time I've ever seen a KS lower its ambitions mid-project, which I think is sending a very clear message...
Well, I would rather be more optimistic than you are, GBL.
And I believe they discussed MW4 until they were dickened out by all the naysayers. If you were one of the 'Zs', as I put it there, I happened to notice quite a few times where the developers actually answered those points every single stinking time, and it still wasn't good enough.
I have never seen them answer a question that was framed around them fulfilling their obligations to the MW4 franchise. They WOULD however try to reframe the debate as "When we (got rid of the license) Big bad evil Microsoft/Topps would not relicense it, ah well not our problem."
They could have chosen not to rock the boat, and continue offering MW4 as is.
Also, AT:1 and Solaris Arena. Other deceased projects that they have let flounder. But I am sure this one will be fine. /sarcasm
BrandonKF wrote: Kickstarter isn't a magical one-press button, but it also requires that the folks who are actually interested in the game to share news and updates about it themselves, if they want to see what they've pledged come to fruition. So, it is an investment on the pledger's part as well, if they truly want to have that game, then they'll discuss it with others elsewhere.
We agree on this at least. On kickstarter, you leverage your reputation (last 3 projects dead while incomplete) against a modest business plan (these guys want 10 million for the full game) for the potential of gaining critical mass on social media, often rocketing projects to unexpected heights of success.
To do this successfully projects generally have incredible value for money in pledge levels (I can pledge 15 dollars for 15 dollars of in game currency? Woo!) and feasible stretch goals that actually give things to the players, often every 10,000 - 100,000 dollars or so. (First stretch, 1.5 million, now they have changed it to vague new features every $50,000 or so )
But what you miss, is that the project will generally make people WANT to spread the word. But there is nothing here. There is a chance that the kickstarter will be a learning opportunity for the devs (the single player mode is an improvement, but single player "episodes" is so vague as to be useless) and their next campaign will be a success. I have seen similar projects cancel themselves 22 days in and relaunch. But they didn't rethink any parts of their original failed approach when they started this campaign.
Thank you for returning to the thread, it gives us someone to argue against.
I've seen a lot of Kickstarters come and go, and this one is gonna go, and not in the good way.
The two biggest Kickstarters ever, have both been Planescape related, and if you look at their model for what they did, it's no wonder why they skyrocketed to those millions. Easily attainable goals, HUUUGE fanbase (Guilty as charged and damn proud of it...MORTE GET OUT OF THE CLOSET YOU BASTARD!!), and not to mention TONS of incentives. Then the cross campaigning between the two, as well as original heads and staff working on those games? HELLOO!
Heavy Gear...Well...Let's be honest, it's an over priced miniatures game that had a 40 episode TV series, 2 Video games in the late 90s and is honestly not a very popular game with a substantial fanbase to support it. It doesn't have near anything like the fan base for more popular, famous and time tested intellectual properties such as Warhammer 40K (Most of us love it, despite GW's attempts at strangling us and begging us to love em as much as we love their product I know, I know.), Battletech (Still my most beloved of all Miniature games), FoW (Because history matters...Dammit...), or hell even Spartan Games who have been coming up more and more around my FLGS.
Heavy Gear is well...It's a game that hasn't engendered much trust with the gaming community at large. Given a few companies I've named haven't done that either but look at em, they are still some of the most well known table top games in the world. Warhammer and FoW have some of the biggest gaming communities out there, tens of thousands of players and hobbyists buy up their products! Warhammer has what...10, 15 PC titles under its belt? (Fantasy and 40K combined, 40K having the larger slice of the pie.) And hell, who wouldn't wanna be in command of an entire Russian Red Guard Tank Division? That's a hell of a lot of Communist steel to throw Hitler's way and lemme tell ya, Soviets scare the crap out of me in that game.
In the end, each game relies upon its devs to bring out the best in their games. Right now GW's dev talent is beyond compare, they have some of the most amazing people working there. (Aside from Corporate/Management/Marketing...those three places could use a good cleaning out with a heavy Flamer or 6...THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS OVERKILL WHEN DEALING WITH THEIR KIND!!) FoW has Battlefront, and let's face it, they are doing a damn fine job when it comes down to keeping the game balanced with such wide ranging and differentiating army doctrines (Again...Soviets scare me.) Heavy Gear's devs...well...Looking at their past history...Not gonna step on that land mine a second time in my life, and the team they've gone with for this...Yeeaaaah....
Or you can post your questions on their Kickstarter.
God bless, all.
-Brandon F.
Your choice not to participate, but I haven't had a single one of my questions answered by the devs on their facebook page, so I am not going to go out of my way to be ignored elsewhere.
As to the kickstarter page, I would have to back to post, and I wont do that until I see something worth backing.
Baineblade wrote:I've seen a lot of Kickstarters come and go, and this one is gonna go, and not in the good way.
The two biggest Kickstarters ever, have both been Planescape related, and if you look at their model for what they did, it's no wonder why they skyrocketed to those millions. Easily attainable goals, HUUUGE fanbase (Guilty as charged and damn proud of it...MORTE GET OUT OF THE CLOSET YOU BASTARD!!), and not to mention TONS of incentives. Then the cross campaigning between the two, as well as original heads and staff working on those games? HELLOO!
I wouldn't know about those, honestly, since I was only recently introduced to Kickstarter when I was looking over the newer products being issued by Fate CORE and Robotech.
Heavy Gear...Well...Let's be honest, it's an over priced miniatures game that had a 40 episode TV series, 2 Video games in the late 90s and is honestly not a very popular game with a substantial fanbase to support it. It doesn't have near anything like the fan base for more popular, famous and time tested intellectual properties such as Warhammer 40K (Most of us love it, despite GW's attempts at strangling us and begging us to love em as much as we love their product I know, I know.), Battletech (Still my most beloved of all Miniature games), FoW (Because history matters...Dammit...), or hell even Spartan Games who have been coming up more and more around my FLGS.
Ahem... overpriced? Not hardly. For what it's worth, the game can be played for less than what your average Warhammer 40K army list costs.
Heavy Gear is well...It's a game that hasn't engendered much trust with the gaming community at large. Given a few companies I've named haven't done that either but look at em, they are still some of the most well known table top games in the world. Warhammer and FoW have some of the biggest gaming communities out there, tens of thousands of players and hobbyists buy up their products! Warhammer has what...10, 15 PC titles under its belt? (Fantasy and 40K combined, 40K having the larger slice of the pie.) And hell, who wouldn't wanna be in command of an entire Russian Red Guard Tank Division? That's a hell of a lot of Communist steel to throw Hitler's way and lemme tell ya, Soviets scare the crap out of me in that game.
I studied history because I enjoyed history. And I enjoyed Warhammer to a point. But the difference lies in the fact that 'grim and dark' do not the world make.
As far as trust with the gaming community at large... do please let me know where this mistrust occurred? When and where exactly did Dream Pod 9 so alienate the world's fanbase by stomping on their dreams?
Or you can post your questions on their Kickstarter.
God bless, all.
-Brandon F.
Your choice not to participate, but I haven't had a single one of my questions answered by the devs on their facebook page, so I am not going to go out of my way to be ignored elsewhere.
As to the kickstarter page, I would have to back to post, and I wont do that until I see something worth backing.
Maybe because you are asking questions that are simply the same old stuff that you've touted here.
As to the backing, you can back with $1, and then you can ask questions. And you can cancel your pledge, as previously mentioned by Gearhead.
But seriously, I doubt you will change your mind, or even ask any questions that don't intend to be pointed towards accusations, because you don't want to change your mind. The guys could slave away for hours, days, weeks on end, and put out a really great product (even after being shouted at from several angles that they're just after everybody's money), and you still would be warning off the rest of the folks out there that these companies aren't worth backing.
Heavy Gear...Well...Let's be honest, it's an over priced miniatures game that had a 40 episode TV series, 2 Video games in the late 90s and is honestly not a very popular game with a substantial fanbase to support it. It doesn't have near anything like the fan base for more popular, famous and time tested intellectual properties such as Warhammer 40K (Most of us love it, despite GW's attempts at strangling us and begging us to love em as much as we love their product I know, I know.), Battletech (Still my most beloved of all Miniature games), FoW (Because history matters...Dammit...), or hell even Spartan Games who have been coming up more and more around my FLGS.
Two video games, a TV show, and an IP that's still around closing in on 20 years? That's a hell of a lot more than most tabletop games get, aside from Battletech (now a shadow of its former self and living off a bygone era) and Warhammer, what other tabletop miniatures IP can claim such success? Just because nobody plays it in *your* area doesn't mean it isn't popular in other places.
As for price...Methinks you really don't have any idea of what you're talking about. I was able to build armies of tournament size with extras for multiple builds for 4 different factions, oh an terrain...for the price of a new 1850pt CSM army.
And the minis, aside from some of the really old sculpts that are in the process of getting redone, are beautiful.
But seriously, I doubt you will change your mind, or even ask any questions that don't intend to be pointed towards accusations, because you don't want to change your mind. The guys could slave away for hours, days, weeks on end, and put out a really great product (even after being shouted at from several angles that they're just after everybody's money), and you still would be warning off the rest of the folks out there that these companies aren't worth backing.
With support like that, who needs enemies?
-Brandon F.
I could support this. They have already gone halfway towards running a less "pants on head" kickstarter with their recent changes. The issue now lies with their pledge levels having near zero value for money and the amount of time they have left. It is unfeasible for a project asking for this much money to succeed without a massive end rally. You might even note that up thread I was telling someone that they should jump in, if they are interested, because they are protected by the move to kickstarter.
There is, for instance, nothing stopping them from making the 15 dollar pledge come with 15,000 USD "worth" of in game currency. Its just a value in a database. To lock it down to simply a preorder of in game currency for some pledge levels is silly. If they had a pledge level that was just the music by Jeehun Hwang, I would have already backed.
Why I wont pledge: There is no reward tier that potentially outweighs having to chase mektek for my money, if they somehow do succeed, but fail to keep the game running. Its a chicken/egg situation. They need to support a good project, long term to repair their reputation. They need money to do this (seemingly), They are leveraging their reputation for this money.
You remember, that originally this was a project asking for 10 million dollars, through an unsigned credit card transaction on their website, with only a couple pieces of concept art and a 30 second logo clip as proof they can make this happen. Criticism is a natural response to the way things have been handled.
The guys could slave away for hours, days, weeks on end, and put out a really great product (even after being shouted at from several angles that they're just after everybody's money), and you still would be warning off the rest of the folks out there that these companies aren't worth backing.
And I wanted to tackle this one specifically. What I am warning people against, is getting invested in a game that doesn't exist, being created by a team with a reputation for vaporware. If they produce a good game, and they continue to support it while fans are willing to pay for it, I will consider myself proven wrong, and I will be happy to admit it.
However, I will never apologize for alerting people to poor practices. Everyone should be aware of the situation before they make a choice, even if that choice is to back them.
However, I will never apologize for alerting people to poor practices. Everyone should be aware of the situation before they make a choice, even if that choice is to back them.
And I'm glad you do. I'm going to continue my backing, but it's a much better-informed decision than it was when I first did it.
As for price...Methinks you really don't have any idea of what you're talking about. I was able to build armies of tournament size with extras for multiple builds for 4 different factions, oh an terrain...for the price of a new 1850pt CSM army.
One thing to keep in mind is that comparing HGB's price to 40k may not be the best comparison. It's certainly valid - but 40k and Fantasy are known to be horribly overpriced. It might be better to compare them against similar forces for Warmachine, Infinity, Malifaux or Mercs. HGB fits more as a second tier game with the latter three in most stores, in my experience.
I'm not saying you're right or wrong, just that where you put the goalposts are important.
As for price...Methinks you really don't have any idea of what you're talking about. I was able to build armies of tournament size with extras for multiple builds for 4 different factions, oh an terrain...for the price of a new 1850pt CSM army.
One thing to keep in mind is that comparing HGB's price to 40k may not be the best comparison. It's certainly valid - but 40k and Fantasy are known to be horribly overpriced. It might be better to compare them against similar forces for Warmachine, Infinity, Malifaux or Mercs. HGB fits more as a second tier game with the latter three in most stores, in my experience.
I'm not saying you're right or wrong, just that where you put the goalposts are important.
I always make my decisions based on relative mini price. For instance, I wouldn't play a game with a single 28mm miniature that cost me 150 AUD even if it was "All I needed to play the game" over warhammer just because "The game is overall cheaper". But obviously everyone makes their own value judgements. For me, I think HG is pricey, but I have bought 30 dollar garage kits based on battletech, and even 30 dollar single Battletech figurines from controversial underground casters, simply because I like the sculpt more than the official one, so I don't think I really get a say in this.
As for price...Methinks you really don't have any idea of what you're talking about. I was able to build armies of tournament size with extras for multiple builds for 4 different factions, oh an terrain...for the price of a new 1850pt CSM army.
One thing to keep in mind is that comparing HGB's price to 40k may not be the best comparison. It's certainly valid - but 40k and Fantasy are known to be horribly overpriced. It might be better to compare them against similar forces for Warmachine, Infinity, Malifaux or Mercs. HGB fits more as a second tier game with the latter three in most stores, in my experience.
I'm not saying you're right or wrong, just that where you put the goalposts are important.
Perhaps, but I haven't found HG to be too hugely far out on price for what you need to build an army, especially relative to the quality of the mini's. Getting into Infinity cost me more than getting into Heavy Gear did for my first army. I haven't found the prices to be much divergent from these games. The new Drake is roughly the same size and cost as an Infinity TAG for instance, and while not quite as stunningly dynamic (I do love my PanO Cutter), still looks great and has a lot more weapon and posing options (not to mention is much sturdier).
I always make my decisions based on relative mini price. For instance, I wouldn't play a game with a single 28mm miniature that cost me 150 AUD even if it was "All I needed to play the game" over warhammer just because "The game is overall cheaper". But obviously everyone makes their own value judgements
Well, that was the only point I was trying to make - expensive or not is going to be relative to whatever goalpost you choose. Like most skirmish games, it's cheaper than 40k simply by virtue of needing fewer models. Depending on what army you field it can be more or less expensive (in total) than Warmachine. It tends to compare equivalently to Infinity on a price per figure and total army value, but Malifaux, Mercs and Dark Age tend to be 'cheaper' as you need fewer figures (typically).
I was just trying to provide nuance to the 'expensive or not' discussion. It really depends on the context you're choosing, IMO.
Maybe because you are asking questions that are simply the same old stuff that you've touted here.
So the devs don't have to answer the hard questions. I see.
No, I was pointing out that what has happened in the past has already happened and they are trying to get something started in the here and now. And by all the showings they've given up, I'd say they are doing their best with what limited resources and manpower they have on hand.
I could support this. They have already gone halfway towards running a less "pants on head" kickstarter with their recent changes. The issue now lies with their pledge levels having near zero value for money and the amount of time they have left. It is unfeasible for a project asking for this much money to succeed without a massive end rally. You might even note that up thread I was telling someone that they should jump in, if they are interested, because they are protected by the move to kickstarter.
There is, for instance, nothing stopping them from making the 15 dollar pledge come with 15,000 USD "worth" of in game currency. Its just a value in a database. To lock it down to simply a preorder of in game currency for some pledge levels is silly. If they had a pledge level that was just the music by Jeehun Hwang, I would have already backed.
Why I wont pledge: There is no reward tier that potentially outweighs having to chase mektek for my money, if they somehow do succeed, but fail to keep the game running. Its a chicken/egg situation. They need to support a good project, long term to repair their reputation. They need money to do this (seemingly), They are leveraging their reputation for this money.
You remember, that originally this was a project asking for 10 million dollars, through an unsigned credit card transaction on their website, with only a couple pieces of concept art and a 30 second logo clip as proof they can make this happen. Criticism is a natural response to the way things have been handled.
I remember, and I did mention this multiple times that the announcement was underwhelming, and disappointing. On the other hand, making the pledge equal the amount of money you get in-game is not horrible.
I don't suppose it would be too much to offer up a suggestion to them to make, say, a $5 pledge for some music by Mr. Hwang?
And I wanted to tackle this one specifically. What I am warning people against, is getting invested in a game that doesn't exist, being created by a team with a reputation for vaporware. If they produce a good game, and they continue to support it while fans are willing to pay for it, I will consider myself proven wrong, and I will be happy to admit it.
However, I will never apologize for alerting people to poor practices. Everyone should be aware of the situation before they make a choice, even if that choice is to back them.
Okay. I apologize for being an ass. You aren't wrong to do that. I meant what I said about not wanting to argue; truthfully, I don't want to defend people I barely know against other people I barely know. I just prefer if folks would have a little faith when that faith is given freely, on my part, and also given support by another person's actions. The guys have obviously been trying to put this game into motion the last five months, so I would like others to see that and accept that it's not all vaporware after all. God bless you and yours.
I always make my decisions based on relative mini price. For instance, I wouldn't play a game with a single 28mm miniature that cost me 150 AUD even if it was "All I needed to play the game" over warhammer just because "The game is overall cheaper". But obviously everyone makes their own value judgements
Well, that was the only point I was trying to make - expensive or not is going to be relative to whatever goalpost you choose. Like most skirmish games, it's cheaper than 40k simply by virtue of needing fewer models. Depending on what army you field it can be more or less expensive (in total) than Warmachine. It tends to compare equivalently to Infinity on a price per figure and total army value, but Malifaux, Mercs and Dark Age tend to be 'cheaper' as you need fewer figures (typically).
I was just trying to provide nuance to the 'expensive or not' discussion. It really depends on the context you're choosing, IMO.
As for price...Methinks you really don't have any idea of what you're talking about. I was able to build armies of tournament size with extras for multiple builds for 4 different factions, oh an terrain...for the price of a new 1850pt CSM army.
One thing to keep in mind is that comparing HGB's price to 40k may not be the best comparison. It's certainly valid - but 40k and Fantasy are known to be horribly overpriced. It might be better to compare them against similar forces for Warmachine, Infinity, Malifaux or Mercs. HGB fits more as a second tier game with the latter three in most stores, in my experience.
I'm not saying you're right or wrong, just that where you put the goalposts are important.
Perhaps, but I haven't found HG to be too hugely far out on price for what you need to build an army, especially relative to the quality of the mini's. Getting into Infinity cost me more than getting into Heavy Gear did for my first army. I haven't found the prices to be much divergent from these games. The new Drake is roughly the same size and cost as an Infinity TAG for instance, and while not quite as stunningly dynamic (I do love my PanO Cutter), still looks great and has a lot more weapon and posing options (not to mention is much sturdier).
Having bought Infinity miniatures compared to Heavy Gear, I'll agree that it isn't difficult to get into some games like Malifaux and Infinity for a lower cost than Heavy Gear. HGB! generally tends to be more exciting and offer more opportunities when played above the squad level of 5 Gears... meaning you'll need anywhere from 10-15 units.
I will also say I am biased, not only because I enjoy Heavy Gear, but also because many of the other options out there on the market don't appeal to me. I used to enjoy Warhammer 40,000, but the overall tone of the game eventually wore thin on me.
Malifaux doesn't particularly interest me, since it, too, is horror-based.
Flames of War might be interesting, but I have yet to enter into it.
Infinity is the one that actually captured my attention long enough for me to get into the rules and find out that it was a great system, if complicated in the beginning. That very complicated system also brings with it ample opportunities for players to make do with whatever they have handy, which is something I find appealing when it comes to tactics and overall strategy in a tabletop game.
Okay. I apologize for being an ass. You aren't wrong to do that. I meant what I said about not wanting to argue; truthfully, I don't want to defend people I barely know against other people I barely know. I just prefer if folks would have a little faith when that faith is given freely, on my part, and also given support by another person's actions. The guys have obviously been trying to put this game into motion the last five months, so I would like others to see that and accept that it's not all vaporware after all. God bless you and yours.
That "faith" isn't given freely, since at this point, expressing faith in the project requires putting money into it.
Besides that, a project is vaporware until it's been released, and Mektek doesn't have the best track record, there. I think people have every right to be cautious.
As I mentioned, Hudson, I gave my faith freely. Others may not. I'm just pointing out that the new stuff being put out shows that there's more than 'vaporware' being attempted. But if that is your definition, I respect that.
Also, here is their most recent updates concerning the game:
Hey Brandon, as the original poster here in the thread can you update the title and text of the first entry with links to reflect that the kickstarter is now live? Only you can do that... and fight forest fires.
No worries... I just figured that you don't really post here much and maybe thought it was like the DP9 forums where you can't edit posts after a day or so. When I saw you post a few days in a row, I figured I'd mention it.
No, I was pointing out that what has happened in the past has already happened and they are trying to get something started in the here and now. And by all the showings they've given up, I'd say they are doing their best with what limited resources and manpower they have on hand.
That's true.
2 Points however.
1. I was heavily invested (emotionally, i don't think they ever asked for money, i would have given if able) in their previous projects. I can see that by all accounts they are trying to do something new and successful. However, the way they treated their previous properties, even after the new website and all, is astonishingly poor. Had they given their previous projects a better send off, rather than jump on to the new bandwagon, people wouldn't be so harsh.
2. I am currently evangelising a project that hasn't yet made it to kickstarter. At every turn the developers acknowledge their history, give us amazing peeks behind the curtain, and humbly acknowledge and improve their project based on very very pointed criticism. They actually invite it. If you think I have been harsh on this project, then you are not ready for what i have sent to a project i like. However i am certain they will be successful, for these reasons.
Okay. I apologize for being an ass. You aren't wrong to do that. I meant what I said about not wanting to argue; truthfully, I don't want to defend people I barely know against other people I barely know. I just prefer if folks would have a little faith when that faith is given freely, on my part, and also given support by another person's actions. The guys have obviously been trying to put this game into motion the last five months, so I would like others to see that and accept that it's not all vaporware after all. God bless you and yours.
You weren't being an ass. And you don't have to argue. I understand that my posts can read like a massive blunt object. But had the guys approached their project from a different perspective, they would probably be funded by now. However everything i have seen has shown that they want to run their project one way, and their audience wants it a different way. Every successful kickstarter has built upon a model that the early pioneers carved out for them. By turning their back on that model, they have hurt their chances of being successful. And that, far more than anything I can possibly accomplish, is what is damaging their kickstarter campaign.
As for the 15 dollars = 15 dollars. Having a massive amount of value in the campaign, is more important here due to the free to play nature of the game. Why put 15 dollars of credit into a game before it is made, when I can wait and see if the game is good. This is considered a loss, if the game is not good. If for instance, I can get 2 - 3 times my moneys worth if I take a risk now, they see it as an advantage of backing now, rather than playing for free later. This is for instance, how the Mechwarrior Online Founders Program worked. I think the amount of in game currency (and in game swag) I ended up with was over 250 dollars worth, for 100 dollars.
Honestly, I suppose I wouldn't mind having someone who was bluntly honest for a comrade.
It's difficult to swallow sometimes, though, I'll admit. Like bitter medicine.
But I understand, all the same. You probably had the same emotional attachment to their previous works as I do to Heavy Gear. That may be strange for some, but I suppose that for those who actually enjoy what a setting offers, it makes a big difference.
And the price thing is something I'm not really familiar with, although I did see Robotech's own work become something that went from you paying perhaps $6.50 per model down to 2.50, thanks to all their stretch goals.
As far as evangelising a project, if you could PM me, I'd be interested to hear about the project you're supporting.
Here are a couple more links dealing with what's going on in the HGA world.
But I understand, all the same. You probably had the same emotional attachment to their previous works as I do to Heavy Gear. That may be strange for some, but I suppose that for those who actually enjoy what a setting offers, it makes a big difference.
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I was actually betting on AT1 becoming rather good/popular.
It had serious potential.
MW4 is something I own anyways, I just enjoyed the idea of continued support and upgrades. As I have mentioned before, I would have loved to support mektek financially to this end.
Well, all the same, I'll post what one of the developers mentioned right here:
"To clarify a bit for everyone here, the idea was to build a multiplayer base on arena combat to then further develop a north vs. south world war game (bringing in coop and AI at that point) then build a singleplayer campaign while all that was up and running - never to "Not build singleplayer" or "focus on multiplayer". The stuff at the high stretch goals was to reflect what it'd cost to have all that done by the date indicated on kickstarter, not to say "we won't do this unless you give us this much", that probably should've been clarified sooner.
It's a shame some people don't want to try to understand that even if we did have unlimited resources - we need to build a game with movement, combat systems, balanced weapons, test damage, customisation and all that stuff first - that's most of the way to a multiplayer arena game. "Focusing on a singleplayer game" would still start with that, only rather than have a game to play when those systems were ready, you'd have to wait for the singleplayer campaign to be done too. I'm not sure why anyone would want launch 6 months to a year later unless they weren't playing anything but singleplayer, and then it seems unfair on the people who do want to play multiplayer (potentially much later multiplayer if the game hadn't been designed for multiplayer underneath from the beginning to save a little more time).
By doing episodic missions we can release more stuff to play sooner, it's more work with not a lot of resources which may be more difficult but certainly not impossible to do that way so that's the way we'll work if that's what people want. Ignoring the fans and failing would mean that the industry would from now on likely never bother with singleplayer or even moderately complex mech games, having their suspicions "confirmed" that people just want stuff like MWO or Hawken (it could still be done in a different kickstarter maybe, but it's a horrible thought to me that we might be stuck with this new kind of simplified mech game for good. I want to at least be able to say I did everything I could)."
Given the KS numbers so far, I think it's time to go "Game over man, game over !".
Edited after request, for more awesomeness.
I think the issue is that they always assumed they would end up with some money, and that's why they didn't go with the kickstarter route to begin with (refund on unsuccessful project) But their actions have had the end result of alienating the community, and at least look partially dodgy.
They will need to eat a great deal of humble pie if they are to succeed.
I would suggest that they rescope, shed some (preferably mektek) weight, and come back to us with a new Single Player Heavy Gear experience. (with the option for them to use the assets to create a F2P MMO later down the track) This would be particularly effective if they use a different Game Engine. Half of their costs are most likely license fees for UE4. With a bit of elbow grease, OGRE3d (and derivatives) or Unity 3d would be a better platform for this game.
The probable failure of the kickstarter brings up the question of what they'll do with the money that was raised during the private crowdfunding they did on the website. That money was technically raised with the TOS fine print disclaimer that refunds are only at the sole discretion of Mektek/Stompy.
Well, they held a survey for backers yesterday, and apparently their information and the way they answered stuff from the crowd has had an impact. Also, wanted to share this comment from one of the pledgers:
Just pledged $1 to say this:
"I think you should just dump the F2P model and let us Kickerstarters fund a DRM-free nickel-and-diming-free mech game"
You are so right, Swiftpaw. I do not want to pay for the game in it, but BEFORE playing it. I hate MWO because they killed MWLL, and MWO and HAWKEN both for jumping on the moneygrabbing micropayment hype train which is currently wrecking my PC gaming world. Do I want to see this gak going down on Kickstarter too? Hell, no.
And the response given:
@ThomasN: We realize that many mech fans have been burned by our competitors but the PC gaming market has grown significantly with the advent of digital only downloads, micro-transactions, subscriptions, and the likes. Certainly games like TF2, WoT, EVE, and WoW have huge followings and massive support from their fans with many millions of players. While we do not wish to comment on your bad experiences with MWO and Hawken - you should realize that we are here to do things right. This is not a cash grab - we are gamers just like you! MekTek started off as a mod team not some evil corporation. F2P isn't the problem - its companies taking advantage of players that is the problem. That's not what we're about. How many games have you purchased off the shelf that were misrepresented in their marketing? I know I had my share of disappointments. That ultimately is why for the greater gaming market F2P is not a bad model at all. It allows you to try the product and if done right - allows you to keep having fun with the free version forever. In many ways the good companies used to release demos of their game back in the day that did just that. Before F2P there were demos. However, remember when MW2: Netmech was released for free? That was one of the best and it was the very first multiplayer 3D mech game and it was released for free back in 1995! I really don't think anything free is ruining anything for anyone. Its just that you've been burned by someone that was purposefully trying to take advantage of you. Give us a chance instead of holding us accountable for our competitors mistakes!
-Vince
Shortly after completing the survey, one of the backers (who I'll shorthand as B) had this to say:
Having just completed their survey, I would say that I'm now more supportive of this product. I won't go into any details other than to say "Stompy Bot, you need to get that information out. It will HELP."
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It has some distinct differences from a normal P2W style F2P-game. It's still all about the monetization, but, at least this has some aspects that make good, solid sense. I’m coming from a position of "I can't imagine what they could say about F2P/P2W to convince me to support them" to "wow, that actually makes sense, and I'd do that in a heart-beat." All I can say is “everyone, try to remain objective and receptive to new ideas.” That’s all they asked of me (well, they didn’t, I ask that of myself and give it to everyone).
.
Keep in mind, Stompy Bot, that F2P is synonymous, for most people, with P2W. It is with me, and that isn’t likely to change. F2C is somewhat different, but, people are going to have to see its options before they can understand what you're doing. And, I don't think a lot of them will get it. Without going into details (though there was no NDA, I realize you’re still working on aspects of it, and, as such, I’m not going to throw too much bad data out) a lot of people will still see it as P2W.
So, the question of whether or not HGA will be funded by the end of its run will depend a great deal on the company really pushing its marketing and explaining what it has in mind for the game.
For those of you who are very much against the format, I will respect your opinions. God bless, all.
And the reason why they released this content during the Kickstarter was because they have been creating the bulk of it for the past two months. It's difficult to release content that you are working on from the ground-up.
And the reason why they released this content during the Kickstarter was because they have been creating the bulk of it for the past two months. It's difficult to release content that you are working on from the ground-up.
Which brings up the question of how successful they could have been if they had worked on more content before starting the crowdfunding... I realize it might be a chicken and egg scenario (they need crowdfunding to afford to work on content but the crowdfunding won't succeed unless they have content to show off first) but the last minute pulling an all-nighter to bang out the term paper overall feel of the crowdfunding is a bit disheartening. I keep coming back to the (IMO) bad decision of setting such an unrealistic goal in the first place instead of a smaller but more attainable goal like a smaller indie HG game. What's better.. What's worse? Failing at an unrealistically grandiose goal or succeeding on a much more mundane project? It's obviously a judgement call without an absolute right or wrong answer but I'd personally prefer having *any* working Heavy Gear game out sometime in the near future.
I hear the chicken-and-egg thing quite a bit around the Net. Honestly? The men of Stompy Bot and MekTek have shown they are trying to make this game, and not merely in it for tons of money.
So what gives with folks?
Personally, I think the fact that MekTek is signed on with them is one of the reasons that everything came up first and foremost as 'vaporware'. Which is sad.
BrandonKF wrote: The men of Stompy Bot and MekTek have shown they are trying to make this game, and not merely in it for tons of money.
So what gives with folks?
I think the issue lots of people have is that they don't feel they're proven that they're capable of making the holy grail mega expensive "AAA" game they want to do at OTHER PEOPLE'S cost. They've shown little technical expertise and attention to detail in their initial crowdfunding efforts; responsiveness to fan input is a laudible trait to a degree for a company but it isn't a replacement for either. They've simply bit off more than the community thinks they can chew and the (lack of) funding shows it. Like I said, I would have preferred if they had succeeded at both funding and accomplishing a more mundane goal than failing at such a grandiose one right out of the gate.
I understand that it was a pretty high level to be asking, but when you consider the rest of the boardgames/RPGs/miniature games that have been presented over Kickstarter, and their tremendous success, isn't it actually to be expected that a computer game which would span 4 different systems and use the most recent game engine contrived require some extra funds?
BrandonKF wrote: I understand that it was a pretty high level to be asking, but when you consider the rest of the boardgames/RPGs/miniature games that have been presented over Kickstarter, and their tremendous success, isn't it actually to be expected that a computer game which would span 4 different systems and use the most recent game engine contrived require some extra funds?
I agree with you about there being an inherent difference in funding scale between board games but I think other video game kickstarters are a better comparison. Companies with years of continuous experience together, long histories of successful (both critically and commercially) games, and "rockstar" personalities leading them aimed for lower goals than Mektek did as a new startup with no history of successful independent products staffed by a few veteran (although a bit out of the loop) telecommuting staffers working together for the first time. Those same companies that have all those good things going for them compared to mektek/stompy still weren't able to raise more than half the lofty goals mektek set for themselves. Ambition is one thing but the goals for this were much closer to hubris especially with the incredibly poor effort put into the website funding campaign.
In the end, we keep coming back to the same thing... we have a company (company... not discrete individuals) that hasn't proven itself in any way asking in an initially very amateurish fashion that inspired no confidence for money that companies that have proven themselves in every way haven't been able to raise.
Even still, I'll keep trying to put it out there. Maybe with enough exposure and enough recognition folks will realize they are not actually trying to steal their money (which is practically the entirety of the argument that's been presented all along).
BrandonKF wrote: Even still, I'll keep trying to put it out there. Maybe with enough exposure and enough recognition folks will realize they are not actually trying to steal their money (which is practically the entirety of the argument that's been presented all along).
No. The argument is that StompyBot is not actually capable of completing the project, not that they are trying to steal.
I can try to win the Kentucky Derby as a jockey in my first race but, at 6'4" and more pounds than I care to admit, it's about as likely as this getting funded.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
BrandonKF wrote: Even still, I'll keep trying to put it out there. Maybe with enough exposure and enough recognition folks will realize they are not actually trying to steal their money (which is practically the entirety of the argument that's been presented all along).
That's not even close; the vast majority of points presented here point out that we don't believe they've shown us they're capable of completing this. Your consipiracy been mentioned in passing by one or two people but calling it "practically the entirety of the argument" is plainly false.
I think most people agree with the statement that Mektek is genuinely trying to complete the project, that is not the issue at hand.
The big issue is that Mektek so far hasn't shown they have the right stuff for such an ambitious undertaking. If anything, they appear to have a messiah complex, with their claims of saving the mecha genre where everyone else has failed (their claims, not mine !).
BrandonKF wrote: I understand that it was a pretty high level to be asking, but when you consider the rest of the boardgames/RPGs/miniature games that have been presented over Kickstarter, and their tremendous success, isn't it actually to be expected that a computer game which would span 4 different systems and use the most recent game engine contrived require some extra funds?
I just did a bit of googling. While there is no actual official data some people have been quoted up to 750,000 dollars to license unreal.
Spoiler:
(my data is very out of date, but it is a good number, that lines up with the scale of the kickstarter, and it is unlikely that as they have added features it would have decreased. This price allegedly contains a support contract with epic)
That isn't the most you can pay for an engine, I think I saw gamebryo advertised over a million once.
But even if they are looking at lowballing it (one of the lower end packages was around 350,000 dollars) that's a massive chunk of their target.
The issue I have with this, is that they could easily support a lower cost indy engine. gamekit is really good and free. NeoAxis is even better, and comes with similar features and support as Unreal for a much lower price.
Spoiler:
(Note: If you were to google either of the above, find a dirty looking screenshot of low quality, and come back here and tell me that these engines are garbage, I would be forced to point out that the quality of the game assets directly effects the outcome of the graphics, and the rendering engine barely affects it, except for very specific circumstances. Ogre3d (on which both the above are based) comes with a lot of very high quality shaders, and you can get very professional looking graphics out of it, if the assets look good. Conversely, Unreal will not prevent Stompy Bots assets from looking like garbage if they are garbage.)
More importantly, is both engines support OpenGL and are cross platform out of the box.
So to answer your question, you can do the same thing for far less money. Unreal is good for big time developers who can afford to spend 3 quarters of a million dollars to get a year ahead of schedule, but I don't think it has a place in a kickstarter.
If you guys are interested, I can point out some for/against reasons for using unreal, along side some educated guesses as to why they are thinking of going down that route.
BrandonKF wrote: Even still, I'll keep trying to put it out there. Maybe with enough exposure and enough recognition folks will realize they are not actually trying to steal their money (which is practically the entirety of the argument that's been presented all along).
StompyBot is asking for an investment, which implies risk. Part of being an investor is determining how much of that risk you are willing to absorb, based upon the visible parameters you have access to. So things like team competencies, past track record, how they handle their current advertisement, etc. are all comparisons that you would use to say 'okay, this is a good or bad investment'. A known team with a good product is potentially lower risk than a new team with a good product, which is why in the outside world you have angel investors & venture capital firms who are willing to capitalize those risky teams when regular investors would steer clear.
And that's really what most of the complaining I've seen has been about. The KS has been run like amateur hour - in no particular order:
They started the KS portion of their campaign an exceptionally high funding goal, with no benefits until you hit that funding goal. They have consistently demonstrated a lack of KS savvy as they set their goals exceptionally high for the target audience
There has been a complete flip flop of their goals, from a MMOFPS to now including single player content. I read this that their design is weak and they aren't capable of selling it, which indicates they are either not passionate or competent about their game, and are willing to bow to player pressures. More often than not this leads to really sub-standard games as you try to be everything to everybody.
They have demonstrated very little technology beyond a deformable environment and mutable skins on their models. They have shown a single render - the Hunter - and little artwork for the other factions, when you'd think that they would be present at the start.
They are a rebranded MekTek, which has had various problems in the past.
The big take away for me has been that they aren't quite competent in managing their launch, which doesn't make me think they have their act together on the game. I would expect them to be able to clearly manage their offerring and have responses ready for the 'single player' demands and other whines from the community. Instead, they have offered poorly constructed vlogs, poor appeals to nostalgia and laughable 180s in design as they scramble to gain some funding... any funding.
From my perspective, the way I look at it is this.
You have a company that at one point was customizing motorcycles. They didn't have the best customer support, but they work they did was competent and they managed to gain a small following. They decided that they want to start making motorcycles, from soup to nuts. Instead of trying to build a prototype that had a low power engine, simple seat and body, and see if there was an interest in the market they instead decided to build a carbon-fiber body with all electronic control and asked their existing customers to fund the tooling they needed to work with the carbon fiber and to bring an electronics guy in house. Some of those customers are the people that had custom bikes that needed a minor repair and they company ignored every call they put in.
It comes down to - how much do you like the ideal of the new bike? How easy do you think it is to go from bending steel to working with carbon fiber? How much money can you throw at them, assuming that it does work out? How much can you throw at it, assuming it doesn't work out?
So far my impression of their competence is pretty low.
I would also add that:
They did not start with a Kickstarter. They collected funds on their own website, taking the money immediately. That's ... optimistic, to say the least.
Personally, I would start by making sure I will get enough money before collecting anything. This also hurts their kickstarter, since they already "wasted" their initial pledge peak somewhere else.
They have a F2P model. That means that people have to pay while playing. They have decided to do a single-player game because the potential market reaction was hostile to a MMFPS. That means that their income system, the things that would allow them to keep the servers running, pay the bills and eat, might have to change. Yet they decided to do the single player really quickly... without changing the income system.
Also, technically speaking, everyone who pledged on their website pledged for a MMPFS, done a specific way. They will not get the project they pledged for.
They have been insisting that "F2C" is not "F2P" since the very beginning. They have defined F2C exactly like I would define F2P. It's slightly weird to see a "F2P bad, F2C good" graphic right above a description of F2C that applies just as much to F2P. That's not a big issue, it's just a weird delusion that they are changing the world while doing something very common. The problem with F2P is not the model itself, it's the implementation. Since it's all about the details, you can't know if the implementation is good until it's been out for a while.
Brandon, I don't think anyone here means to take out their Mektek frustrations out on you as a proxy punching bag so hopefully you don't feel that way. That said, I think almost everyone who posted in the last couple of pages (including yourself) has already made up their minds about the crowdfunding after following the game for several months and won't be swayed barring some shocking world changing disclosures.
BrandonKF wrote: That's pretty much exactly how I feel when I get hammered by experts with every possible factoid to try and dispel excitement about the game, warboss.
Sorry, my latest post was trying to be very tactful about that, but I have the tact of a freight train full of sledgehammers so what can I do?
Not just about you, GBL. As stated above, Ice, mrondeau and Hudson had disagreements with me on the DP9 forums.
I'm not exactly well-suited for discussions about such things. I'm just a simple fan trying to drum up excitement and getting folks interested in the game. I'm not equipped with all the math abilities, game experience, probabilities and what-have-you that you guys have.
Edit: Here's their newest update on Facebook:
"Hate F2P? Get all launch content with a one-time-payment Opt-out Bundle. Love F2P? Play for free -- forever. Want to host your own servers? Sign up for Premium membership. All Gears and equipment purchased by any player of any payment level are always the same and always attainable. Combined with our intelligent Threat-Value matchmaking system that matches players based on variables such as equipment quality and recent win/loss ratio, and you're always in for a fair fight.
Learn more about our revolutionary Free-to-Choose (F2C) model in this Kickstarter update."
BrandonKF wrote: Not just about you, GBL. As stated above, Ice, mrondeau and Hudson had disagreements with me on the DP9 forums.
I'm not exactly well-suited for discussions about such things. I'm just a simple fan trying to drum up excitement and getting folks interested in the game. I'm not equipped with all the math abilities, game experience, probabilities and what-have-you that you guys have.
Its a laudable goal. And if they rescope, come back with a new kickstarter next month, you may well be on the winning "side" of this debate. Its not over until they give up, and their FAQ on their website still says that they don't plan on doing a kickstarter. Obviously things can and will change. I still think that they are unwilling to move on Unreal as a platform, if they did they could make this for far cheaper.
"Hate F2P? Get all launch content with a one-time-payment Opt-out Bundle. Love F2P? Play for free -- forever. Want to host your own servers? Sign up for Premium membership. All Gears and equipment purchased by any player of any payment level are always the same and always attainable. Combined with our intelligent Threat-Value matchmaking system that matches players based on variables such as equipment quality and recent win/loss ratio, and you're always in for a fair fight.
Learn more about our revolutionary Free-to-Choose (F2C) model in this Kickstarter update."
What if I just want to play the singleplayer episodes? You’re in luck! All players who contribute at least $15 on Kickstarter will receive access to the first singleplayer episode and any additional episodes that are unlocked as part of our stretch goals during the Kickstarter campaign -- at no extra cost.
KD, could you go easy on the martyr routine please ?
Like 'em or hate 'em, facts are facts. Right now, the fact is that Stompy/Mektek have not shown any evidence of having what it takes to manage such an ambitious project. They have stated intentions, sure, but intentions and abilities are two very different things. The embarassing failures of not one, but two crowdfunding campaigns is only a symptom of that gap.
Will I (we) change my mind if they manage to show the right stuff ? I'll be happy to. Right now, I cannot in good faith support such amateurism.
Oh, as I was typing, the KS got updated with detailed explanations of their new, revolutionary (sic) F2C model, which is the exact, text-book definition of the current F2P model every F2P MMO use. Seriously, with blunders like that, how can you expect people to trust and fund this project ?
BrandonKF wrote: That's pretty much exactly how I feel when I get hammered by experts with every possible factoid to try and dispel excitement about the game, warboss.
While I can't speak for others, I feel incredibly disappointed by the whole endeavor. My own personal excitement about the project was dispelled by Mektek. There was a reason that when I didn't see any news after the initial license announcement that I started a thread asking if anything was going on. There was a reason that I was clicking (or technically tapping on my phone) at the end of the countdown after counting down the days with the timer. I *was* excited. What dispelled that excitement was the initial crowdfunding that felt like it was planned on a cocktail napkin and executed by high school freshman computer science class students. I've tried to not comment on it on the dp9 forums as much as possible out of respect to DP9 (who have little to do with this project) during the kickstarter but the ridiculous initial goals coupled with piss poor execution initially have dispelled any excitement on my part. No amount of video blogs will fix that. IMO they need to start from scratch and come up with a completely different *reasonable* goal/business plan commensurate with their resources and abilities.
Fact is, we don't have sufficient actual facts from the company involved, besides 'take our word for it press releases', that don't actually give any indication of what the plan is, or how they're organizing things.
Anyone who's actually professionally worked in developing or managing a game project can tell you, this entire thing not only suggests poor management, but smells strongly of it. The fact that they can't really even figure out the order of magnitude of how much some things will cost is a strong sign.
I know you're a big fan. But being a fan is less useful to getting an actual thing done in the real world than to be critical and expect transparency. It's good to have an enthusiastic base, but there's nothing shown to be enthusiastic about yet. And the fact that they don't have such a thing proves incompetence and ignorance about the actual mechanics of kickstarter. They're focusing way too much on ideas of what the Product will be, not on what the Project will be.
warboss, I don't think that what you describe is going to happen.
On that we unfortunately agree... :( But a man can dream (about XCOM: Heavy Gear on consoles...)
I like the way you think. Alas
Gentlemen - I too would love to play Heavy Gear on my X-Box 360. I am worried about the KS as well. I wish it were going like the Mantic one did - but I understand the concerns that have been mentioned to date. I will continue to support it up to the last hours of the campaign.
warboss, I don't think that what you describe is going to happen.
On that we unfortunately agree... :( But a man can dream (about XCOM: Heavy Gear on consoles...)
I like the way you think. Alas
Yeah... the idea of a gear squad fighting it out in turn based combat with some choice animations would indeed be great for consoles... Uh... I wish they had gone that route.
On a more positive note, the "opt out" option quasi-buying the game upfront is a nice addition but I'm kind of confused how that fits in between the other pledge levels. The full $60 opt out bundle that contains all the north/south gears.. how does that interact with the premium membership? What is the difference between a well stocked arsenal and a fully stocked arsenal? How does the $500 pledge level containing all "core gears" compare with the opt out benefit of northern/southern gears? I'm glad they added that option (although I'm not sure how you'd get it via pledges as I don't see an option for just that) but it seems like they added that without really considering how that $60 opt out affects the other pledges' relative values. In the end, it's a bit esoteric for me personally as I'm not a PC gamer and don't plan to be. I don't know if they can actually change the pledge levels that people have already chosen in kickstarter.
BrandonKF wrote: Edit: Fact is, I've had many disagreements with Hudson, Ice, and mrondeau in the past.
I'm not trying to make a punching bag out of you, but this is an open forum - your ideals are but one of many, and live or die by the strength of their argument. You seem to consistently cast me in the light of a disagreeable ogre out to gobble up all the goodness and light in the universe to give your position strength, and it's wearing thin. I'm not kicking your kittens, I'm not a bad guy - I'm just voicing my opinions, the exact same way you are. I'm trying to be fair here, but I'm not a thug and I don't like being portrayed that way.
Yeah... the idea of a gear squad fighting it out in turn based combat with some choice animations would indeed be great for consoles... Uh... I wish they had gone that route.
I totally vote for a https://mwtactics.com/ approach. That would make me soo happy. I'm pretty sure I'd throw hours away just killing off Jagers in the badlands...
Yeah... the idea of a gear squad fighting it out in turn based combat with some choice animations would indeed be great for consoles... Uh... I wish they had gone that route.
I totally vote for a https://mwtactics.com/ approach. That would make me soo happy. I'm pretty sure I'd throw hours away just killing off Jagers in the badlands...
Lol, the site is down for maintenance. Perhaps its not the greatest example at the moment. Is that basically the program that is a much prettier and more automated version of vassal specific for MW?
Lol, the site is down for maintenance. Perhaps its not the greatest example at the moment. Is that basically the program that is a much prettier and more automated version of vassal specific for MW?
You're thinking of MegaMek (http://megamek.info/). MWTactics is much nicer UI, and they're using a quasi-card based mechanic for the MMO aspect that should give it some legs.
I'm mostly drooling over the graphics, though. The boards look quite nice.
So at this point, the KS campaign looks DOA - it's barely making any money day to day and the Kicktraq trendline is showing less than 80k for the pledge. That's pretty disappointing, as that last video was pretty nice, and if they could get some gameplay out there of that caliber I'd be willing to drop some serious cash.
Oh well. I guess Titanfall will have to do for my mecha fix, unfortunately.
Yeah, HG was what was running through my mind when I saw that trailer. The mechs there are about the size of a grizzly/cobra using my (now ancient) memories of the full size hunter gear DP9 used to bring to GenCon. I want some relatively fast paced (at least mass effect 3/space marine speed) third person mech gaming sometime in the next few years. If the Xbone changes its anti-consumer policies, it may end up scratching that itch.
warboss wrote: Yeah, HG was what was running through my mind when I saw that trailer. The mechs there are about the size of a grizzly/cobra using my (now ancient) memories of the full size hunter gear DP9 used to bring to GenCon. I want some relatively fast paced (at least mass effect 3/space marine speed) third person mech gaming sometime in the next few years. If the Xbone changes its anti-consumer policies, it may end up scratching that itch.
If you're specifically referring to Titanfall, Wikipedia lists it as being available for Windows eventually, so as long as you have a PC capable of supporting it, the XBone's draconian policies might not be all that big a deal.
It's hope I'm hoping to play it, assuming they can deliver on what the trailer showed off.
The kickstarter has just crossed another unfortunate milestone. It now needs to earn more per day every single day for the rest of the kickstarter than it has total for the entirety of the KS campaign to date in order to hit the minimum funding goal. I take no joy in posting that (despite what some readers may assume) but rather see it as the culmination of a bunch of irreversible mistakes. It's not a case of too little too late as I do agree with Brandon that /Stompy are actually trying at this point (so not too little) but it definitely is way too late.
Silly gearhead... morale rules are optional in HG which generally means no one uses them. Just like your gears, they're in it till they're overkilled! :(
warboss wrote: Silly gearhead... morale rules are optional in HG which generally means no one uses them. Just like your gears, they're in it till they're overkilled! :(
Actually, they're not in the game as of the Field Manual....
I'd like to correct some assumptions that have been made and some incorrect assertions that have probably arisen from those assumptions, and I'll remain around to answer questions as much as I can.
First off, GBL, I apologise for whatever has made you so bitter towards Mektek, I do know that some of our guys can be short with their answers and if this reaction was a result of someone being rude to you then I don't begrudge you it at all. I'm one of the newer guys on the team, so I don't know what it was about and don't have anything against you. I don't know who didn't answer your questions or why, but I'll do my best to do so for you now. Not everyone gets their questions answered, try not to take it personally.
The Good Now, the first thing I need to clear up is the "Never Completed Anything" aspect. Mektek has been a team for well over 10 years - in fact they've spent over 10 years working on MW4 even without including MW3 or earlier games. Mekpaks have been available and widely played from 2003 up until recently, with several versions being completed. In 2010, in spite of not making any money off anything, Mektek managed to negotiate a deal with Microsoft to build Mektek's "Free Release", giving them access to a lot more development materials and the ability to distribute the game (now hard to get on shelves) to the community, again, for free. By this point, the Mekpak was at version 3. Each Mekpak was practically an expansion in itself, with people liking some over others but each new version featuring significantly more features, mechs and equipment than the last. There was another expansion patch released for version 3.
That is already the longest running mod team I can think of. It's one of the very, very few examples of someone getting Microsoft to cooperate in this way. Not just something impressive, several somethings, and several somethings released, with the first free release being a complete stand alone version of the game with more changes than any official expansion. One of the Mektek mechs was even brought into BT canon!
Once they were a studio, that wasn't the end of it. They're behind the software in the battletech pods some of you will have played; http://www.mechjock.com/
I don't know how many more completed, well made projects you want, GBL, but this is all just stuff from the old Mektek staff alone without including the new Heavy Gear guys like Jack and Clancy (I think this is the comparison you were after?). I have to admit, this is the first forum I've been on where Mekteks ability to complete was in question, so I'm more than happy to answer questions about this within reason.
The Bad Let's bring up the stuff you've listed as the bad stuff: a few people decided they wanted a version 4 of the Mekpak. Jehosephat, the guy who originally worked out how to extend the game to allow so many new features to be added and the lead developer, had a stroke. The community reaction was horrible and far from supportive, so Jeho left to get his health back. Jeho's work on this was critical, and even if it were possible to pick up from where he left it at this point, nearly 10 years in, everyone figured that we'd just have fun with the current version (a lot of debate was around over whether some of the v4 changes would be good anyway). Everyone enjoyed versions of 3, for at least a couple years after all this. I don't mean to blame the fan reaction for this outcome, I'm not sure Jeho could've helped any more than he did if people had been nice. Mekpak 4 didn't get released, so that's one point at least you can point at in the last 10 years, from a free mod team.
"Issues with the team" is something so far back I barely know about it from the outside. You'll have to be more specific about that if you want more information so I can find out for you - Mektek remained stable throughout even when it was just a mod team, and is certainly stable ever since it's been a professional studio.
The Ugly A lot of people were just upset at us when we dropped support for the Mekpak and shut down the servers (I was here for this bit). I'm not sure why Mektek gets so much of the flak for this, even though they held it together much longer than anyone else, they seem to get the blame for it all falling over in the end. From what I could see though, we really didn't have a choice - we didn't want to stumble into the legal hellstorm that was being kicked up around Battletech at the time if it came to our doorstep, not to mention that situation would've been completely a lose-lose for Battletech in general (not to mention the Heavy Gear project could've potentially been dragged into it, completely unacceptable). GBL, if you think it's just co-incidence that this all happened around the bankruptcy of Smith and Tinker then either you're less cynical than I thought, or you hate Mektek more than I thought.
I really hope that's cleared some things up for some people. Now that's out of the way, on to more HG related stuff;
The Kiickstarter The kickstarter launch.. we got screwed with misinformation about the market there. I'm should probably not go into details about what went wrong right at the start there, maybe later I'll be able to, but it doesn't really matter now. Marketing predictions of the stretch goals were reflective of how much it would cost to reach those targets by the deadline given (I'm not sure why that was done that way, and worse, it wasn't clarified that those tasks would still be worked on even if the goal wasn't met, just to a later deadline!). Many of the late stage stuff had initial design work done on it because work on stuff like singleplayer would have to be started as early as time allowed, perhaps I can get permission to show off a singleplayer design doc from part of mission 1, would anyone be interested in that? (it would obviously be full of spoilers).
One of the great things about kickstarter is that we can get feedback directly from you and not have to rely on a marketing company, and things like singleplayer missions which we had been forced to put to the back of the list due to faulty market info we suddenly had a good excuse to bring forwards again. We're now dealing directly with the players, which cuts up time we could be using for development but is more than worth it - what people are saying they want is a lot closer to what I was hoping to make (special thanks for supporting singleplayer and LAN, guys!).
What warboss said is true, we're not out until we're actually out. One of our stumbling blocks has been getting coverage, I've been told that from our metrics simply not enough people know about this project yet for it to succeed - but that may work in our favour. If you guys tell me what you want to see, what you think needs further explaining and what you think is missing then we still have a chance to fix it before we get any surges in visitors. At the moment, we're working on getting some gameplay footage as that seems to be in highest demand.
Regardless of anything anyone has said so far, thanks to all of you for caring enough to be involved in making such a huge and detailed thread on this!
So, go ahead and I'll answer what I can. I've answered a lot of stuff but I've only read through the thread once and I'll need to go back and make notes before trying to respond properly. A lot of stuff will become obsolete with stuff we show soon on kickstarter, I hope.
Thanks for signing up and braving the storm here. I know BrandonKF is probably breathing a big sigh of relief now that his long watch is over. The situation with the crowdfunding on the website and kickstarter seems to outsiders is a bit more complicated to outsiders than your post would make it. Bad marketing demographics didn't cause the countdown to end with an error 404 non-functional website for hours. Bad market research didn't cause a typo in the initial video or an utter lack of normal crowdfunding info for weeks on the crowdfunding website (like platforms supported, estimated release date, end of the crowdfunding, info on what happens to the money if the goal isn't reached, etc). What's done is done but it feels to those of us on the outside that this whole endeavor (at least from the publicly released side) was rushed with no attention to detail which would be the deathknell for something as complex as a "AAA" game (I'm not a fan of the term).
I want to give you my money but the efforts so far have instilled no confidence in me. From poor initial effort to the (what I consider) completely unrealistic game type and funding goals for a first time full game effort, Stompy/mektek isn't making it easy for me to do so. In the end for me personally, I don't own and don't plan on owning a modern PC gaming rig so I've been out of the demographic of your customers despite being very interested in HG (see my blog sig) and owning a modern console, 2 laptops (capable of playing smaller indie games), and multiple android gaming capable devices.
The best advice I can give you (admittedly from a simple consumer standpoint as I haven't made a video game since 1992 in my PASCAL high school programming class) is to come out with some sort of less ambitious game within the next year to get the ball rolling both in terms of brand recognition as well as steady income. You don't jump from a new indie studio (which is what I would call a company who had only created mod packs for other games) to a "AAA" studio in one quick jump in 99.99999% of cases (Mojang being the only exception that I can think of). Come out with a small turn based multiplayer XCOM enemy unknown wargame for mutliple cheap platforms (iOS, android, PC indie game, console indie arcade release) to both cater to the existing tabletop fans as well as to energize the market for a future bigger offering like the F2P arena game you've not been able to fund. Get your name and the name of the game brand out there in the wild first before attempting to conquer the Mt. Everest of gaming genres.
warboss wrote: Thanks for signing up and braving the storm here.
Yup, seconded. Welcome to the mosh pit. Hopefully people won't throw too many elbows! That said...
warboss wrote: I want to give you my money but the efforts so far have instilled no confidence in me.
I'm not as down on the F2P model as other people are - I've played WoT and MWO, and while they didn't hold my interest they were fun enough games in their own right. The first video looked really nice, and I hoped that was the gameplay vid. Then I saw the GDC video and went... eh.
Since then, you released the Gearbay vid and I thought - wow, that looked awesome. That actually makes me excited to play - but it's not gameplay. It's just a cinematic.
My real issue with HGA isn't the F2P model (bring it on!) or anything else, other than what appears to be a very clumsy management of the initial launch of the product. The initial private crowd-sourcing was opaque and had few protections, while the KS campaign seemed to be written by someone who had take a nice long hit on the crack pipe. There seemed to be no attempt to tailor the campaign to either market, and communications have been all over the place. Instead of sticking to the F2P model and explaining why it's going to be awesome, there appeared to be a panic and a shift towards single player content (which is nuts from my perspective until you get the arena game done).
The combination has made me very leery of supporting the organization, because I'm afraid the technical side might be as disorganized as the marketing / advertising side. That's may be completely unfounded - but the marketing is the face of the organization, and that's all I have to go on.
So yeah. Give me a F2P like the Gearbay example, and I'll sign up and play, and maybe even contribute. But you guys really need to take the guy managing your message back out behind the shed.
Howdy Agonarch! You get points for bravery, to be sure.
Okay, here's my weigh-in: I agree that the current project is too ambitious, all things considered. It looks cool, but it's too much for the time being.
I love Heavy Gear (in case my name wasn't a giveaway,) and I credit HG2 on the PC for getting me started into miniatures wargaming. I own a large stack of HG rule and sourcebooks, and even though I don't actually play the game (or any other,) I still read them for enjoyment, and I but and paint minis when I can. The best thing that Heavy Gear has to offer is its settings and stories, and its diverse technologies (NOT just gears!); I think it's one of the better game universes out there, and I don't see HG:A playing to those strengths. In fact, focusing primarily on arena combat (yes, I know about the proposed single-player story) dredges up unpleasant memories of the TV show.
Anyway, as it's currently proposed, it seems to be relying too much on flash and wow, but it's trying hard to be seen in a market flooded with flashy and well-established games. In order to get attention, I think it needs to be fundamentally different, as in you might to well to scrap the project and start again with something else entirely. Look at Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns: they're both from VERY well-established designers and with heavy fanbases, and both are isometric CRPGs. I've been aching for a Battletech CRPG for ages, as much as I enjoy Mechwarrior, because the exclusive focus on 'mech combat leaves out soooo much, and there's a heckuva lot more than just that in Battletech. My suggestion is to work on a game that is less technically-demanding, but that will allow you to create a more immersive and interesting playing experience, focusing on character and storytelling, something that people can play alone just as well as with others. Don't over-reach and try to do a big expensive studio game, because without something really unique and special to set it apart and garner interest, it's not likely to succeed. For me, arena combat in Heavy Gear is a very minor sideshow and isn't very interesting, and doesn't strike me as enough of a draw for someone not already familiar with the setting.
There are people still concerned about the skill of the Mektek team and that's fair enough - when I cleared up that other stuff I only focused on the old Mektek team who primarily came from the modding team because that's what seemed to be the concern. Iin the last 6 months they've hired people who've worked on MechWarrior 2, Heavy Gear, Heavy Gear 2, MechWarrior 3 and 4, amongst many others (you were talking about a computer upgrade, well, Jack was the lead designer of Crysis and in one way or another that guy seems to have been responsible for all of my own computer upgrades the last few years so I know how you feel, although this time the upgrade was to make one of his games rather than play it ). There has been several decades of game development experience added to this team, and it's far from a group of first time developers at this point.
Most of the people you're speaking to now are designers or developers, not marketers. I can see how you might assume the marketing could relate to the technical side, but those are very different and separate things (which is how this problem happened in the first place). As far as I know, in spite of funding, we're still the only one to have demo'ed multiplayer anything in UE4. I know the GDC tech demo was 'meh', and it was, for sure - the majority of work had been in basic movement, controls and network replication, not leaving much time for gameplay at that point - it was a technology demonstrator to prove to people at the time that we could work in the engine. As far as I am aware we were the second team to demo anything in UE4 playable by the public at all (beaten by a few hours, and the control on the other game was much simpler than ours). We'll just have to show everyone again what we're capable of on a shoestring, but at some point we're not going to be able to keep stretching our budget anymore, to go with the goals we want I think it needs to be kickstarter.
Ice, you mention you want to see the gearbay in more detail? I think there's plans to show a walkthrough of the area, that area shown in that clip is playable (though still a bit underdeveloped, did I mention we're looking for funding? ).
The countdown ending in error 404 I'm not sure who to blame, I do know our cloud hosters machine fell over (it had been quiet so they weren't expecting a spike. Genius.. they refunded us some money at least, but it still isn't a good look for anyone). Perhaps we should've had a plan B, but this was a big company that claimed it could be trusted with stuff like this.
I'm pretty sure it's been stated that if the project fails, money collected by the website simply gets returned. Does it not say that somewhere on our site? I need to look into that (not kickstarter fail, complete dissolution of the project. We're still hopeful kickstarter will work otherwise it means going back to those kind of guys who said things like 'don't waste money on singleplayer, it won't sell' and looking sheepish)
The figurative 'guy who needs to go behind the shed' I assume is still back there. He went back there at the very start of all this and refused to do anything, leaving us to scramble in the spotlight. Occasionally he even asks for money from back there. I'm not the biggest fan of "that guy", to put it kindly.
Running and hiding behind the shed is no substitute for being taken there forcibly. Tell him from us that he needs to be autoflagellating vigorously and bathing his wounds in his own tears and shame, or we're sending someone after him.
warboss wrote:Thanks for signing up and braving the storm here. I know BrandonKF is probably breathing a big sigh of relief now that his long watch is over.
Thank the Lord I don't plan on joining any Night's Watch anytime soon...
Agonarch, thanks for showing up.
Seems the forum people decided to delete my last post, so I'll just say that I did respond, Ice, and it was to tell you I didn't think you were a bully. I figure you for an Internet tough guy who also happens to be a straight shooter from where you see things. Which is fair.
First off, GBL, I apologise for whatever has made you so bitter towards Mektek, I do know that some of our guys can be short with their answers and if this reaction was a result of someone being rude to you then I don't begrudge you it at all. I'm one of the newer guys on the team, so I don't know what it was about and don't have anything against you. I don't know who didn't answer your questions or why, but I'll do my best to do so for you now. Not everyone gets their questions answered, try not to take it personally.
Welcome. My position on this whole thing has evolved somewhat. But lets start with the basics.
No one from Mektek pissed me off directly. If I seem somewhat attached its due to my longtime love of MechWarrior and Battletech that was somewhat unceremoniously dropped by you guys.
I posted several questions on your facebook wall, after you went live with your original Unsecured, No Guarantee, Online Credit Card Crowdfunding model.
I wasn't insulted that my questions weren't answered, just grimly amused that you wanted money with zero guarantees and weren't even able to answer slightly harder questions than average.
The Good Now, the first thing I need to clear up is the "Never Completed Anything" aspect. Mektek has been a team for well over 10 years - in fact they've spent over 10 years working on MW4 even without including MW3 or earlier games. Mekpaks have been available and widely played from 2003 up until recently, with several versions being completed. In 2010, in spite of not making any money off anything, Mektek managed to negotiate a deal with Microsoft to build Mektek's "Free Release", giving them access to a lot more development materials and the ability to distribute the game (now hard to get on shelves) to the community, again, for free. By this point, the Mekpak was at version 3. Each Mekpak was practically an expansion in itself, with people liking some over others but each new version featuring significantly more features, mechs and equipment than the last. There was another expansion patch released for version 3.
That is already the longest running mod team I can think of. It's one of the very, very few examples of someone getting Microsoft to cooperate in this way. Not just something impressive, several somethings, and several somethings released, with the first free release being a complete stand alone version of the game with more changes than any official expansion. One of the Mektek mechs was even brought into BT canon!
Once they were a studio, that wasn't the end of it. They're behind the software in the battletech pods some of you will have played;
http://www.mechjock.com/
I don't know how many more completed, well made projects you want, GBL, but this is all just stuff from the old Mektek staff alone without including the new Heavy Gear guys like Jack and Clancy (I think this is the comparison you were after?). I have to admit, this is the first forum I've been on where Mekteks ability to complete was in question, so I'm more than happy to answer questions about this within reason.
The Bad Let's bring up the stuff you've listed as the bad stuff: a few people decided they wanted a version 4 of the Mekpak. Jehosephat, the guy who originally worked out how to extend the game to allow so many new features to be added and the lead developer, had a stroke. The community reaction was horrible and far from supportive, so Jeho left to get his health back. Jeho's work on this was critical, and even if it were possible to pick up from where he left it at this point, nearly 10 years in, everyone figured that we'd just have fun with the current version (a lot of debate was around over whether some of the v4 changes would be good anyway). Everyone enjoyed versions of 3, for at least a couple years after all this. I don't mean to blame the fan reaction for this outcome, I'm not sure Jeho could've helped any more than he did if people had been nice. Mekpak 4 didn't get released, so that's one point at least you can point at in the last 10 years, from a free mod team.
"Issues with the team" is something so far back I barely know about it from the outside. You'll have to be more specific about that if you want more information so I can find out for you - Mektek remained stable throughout even when it was just a mod team, and is certainly stable ever since it's been a professional studio.
The Ugly A lot of people were just upset at us when we dropped support for the Mekpak and shut down the servers (I was here for this bit). I'm not sure why Mektek gets so much of the flak for this, even though they held it together much longer than anyone else, they seem to get the blame for it all falling over in the end. From what I could see though, we really didn't have a choice - we didn't want to stumble into the legal hellstorm that was being kicked up around Battletech at the time if it came to our doorstep, not to mention that situation would've been completely a lose-lose for Battletech in general (not to mention the Heavy Gear project could've potentially been dragged into it, completely unacceptable). GBL, if you think it's just co-incidence that this all happened around the bankruptcy of Smith and Tinker then either you're less cynical than I thought, or you hate Mektek more than I thought.
I really hope that's cleared some things up for some people. Now that's out of the way, on to more HG related stuff;
I would like to contrast this Very well crafted, intelligent response, with the current official version of events on Mekteks forum
Mektek Forums wrote:
◾MekTek Studios version of MechWarrior4 was a free release provided with permission + license from Microsoft.
◾MekTek Studios is moving away from MechWarrior/BattleTech so we have been trying to support a new group of MechWarrior fans trying to bring MechWarrior4 back online.
◾Since Smith and Tinker went bankrupt and foreclosed - gaining permission from Microsoft has been challenging for the new group.
◾It does appear that the Free Release was well supported while Smith and Tinker existed but not so much nowadays. We've been told that this is a "money" issue.
◾Since both Piranha Games and Microsoft have not expressed any support for the free release - we are unsure when exactly anyone will be able to bring back MechWarrior4 legally.
To analyse:
In your version of events, Smith And Tinker's Bankruptcy and Battletechs Licensing woes caused you to pass on the license.
On the forums, it reads to me, that it was dropped beforehand, and passed on to a mysterious group we have never heard from. And it was this second group that hasn't been able to relaunch due to the aforementioned issues.
Neither story provides any basis for Mektek being unable to continue support it, beyond "We don't want to".
Because Mektek dropped support, and Mekteks license terms indicated that only they can redistribute it, MechWarrior 4 is no longer available for free to anyone.
It seems to me that a crowdfunding campaign would have been FAR more appropriate in MechWarrior 4's case, than Heavy Gear.
One of our stumbling blocks has been getting coverage, I've been told that from our metrics simply not enough people know about this project yet for it to succeed - but that may work in our favour. If you guys tell me what you want to see, what you think needs further explaining and what you think is missing then we still have a chance to fix it before we get any surges in visitors. At the moment, we're working on getting some gameplay footage as that seems to be in highest demand.
Another one is trying to sell a free to play game. That traditionally doesn't go well on kickstarter.
Another issue is the poor value for money pledge levels. Being able to pre pay 15 dollars into a F2P game before you get a chance to play it, is no choice at all. For something that is essentially funny money, you can afford to give backers any amount. Double it at a minimum.
Another issue is the complete failure of stretch goals. Stretch goals do not equal milestones on your game design document. Stretch goals should reward participants who generate buzz for your game. "If I get 10 of my friends to back, they will triple the amount of in game currency everyone gets, on top of the last three value adds, Whee!"
I am sorry, but you guys swaggered on to kickstarter, with exactly the same plan you had for raising money on your own website, which also failed. It seems like Stompy Bot is a small games company, with the management rigidity of a large one.
To Succeed:
Cancel the kickstarter.
Drastically rescope. You mentioned having a marketing company involved. That's a waste. Kickstarter is overrun by companies that know what their fans want. Not marketing firms.
You don't need UE4 to be successful. If you want community support, use a community engine like Ogre or Unity. If you chose UE4 just so modders would be useful, find something else for them to do or fire them. Unreal scripting is not worth the license fee (for a company of your size).
Now you have kicked UE4 to the curb, you can have a reasonable starting goal. If it is more than 100,000 you are gonna have a bad time.
Outline your single player campaign. Give players things they want.
Stretch goals that are not only extra features, but also more swag.
eg - 150,000 We can afford to commission 2 more Southern Gears + Free T-Shirt for X level and above.
Feel free to add UE and F2P Arena game back in as stretch goals. Make sure these goals reward the backer alongside the project.
Essentially: Be more like Shadowrun Returns, and less like MechWarrior Online.
First off a quick apology: I write this at a time very late where I am, and I'm quite sick, but I feel you've earned answers to this stuff, so I'll do my best. If there's anything wrong I'll correct it as soon as I notice, keep an eye out. Let me know if you spot anything odd you need clarifying (because it may well be a mistake)
Certainly, on the bottom right of this page is a counter; http://www.heavygear.com/ It shows the total collected from all sources, including kickstarter, so if you want to know just what's come from out of kickstarter substract the current kickstarter amount from it.
In your version of events, Smith And Tinker's Bankruptcy and Battletechs Licensing woes caused you to pass on the license.
On the forums, it reads to me, that it was dropped beforehand, and passed on to a mysterious group we have never heard from. And it was this second group that hasn't been able to relaunch due to the aforementioned issues.
Neither story provides any basis for Mektek being unable to continue support it, beyond "We don't want to".
Because Mektek dropped support, and Mekteks license terms indicated that only they can redistribute it, MechWarrior 4 is no longer available for free to anyone.
The forum version you've pointed to is short, yes, and I did have a longer version there also. That... terser version was put in by Vam as the main version because no-one read my version because it was long, and went on to complain anyway. The fact of the matter is yes, Mektek have moved away from Battletech and yes, MW4 free release is no longer supported. This message is short enough that people read it, but the people who read it and care get upset. I suppose I could add my detailed version to the end there, but that was decided against as adding walls of text to the end might cause people to skip the whole message (people didn't even start the long one in general).
It doesn't say anywhere there about the reason, it only goes into why the new team was having trouble (the same reasons we were worried about). We were trying to pass it on when the Smith and Tinker thing halted anyone from doing anything - if we'd failed to pass it on then we could've at least hosted a torrent or something (technically distributed by mektek's tracker, but not our bandwidth) - the bottom line is the legal issues are what stopped this, the fact that it all happened during transfer to the third party only obsfucates matters.
It seems to me that a crowdfunding campaign would have been FAR more appropriate in MechWarrior 4's case, than Heavy Gear.
We tried that before I joined, and that didn't even raise enough money to pay for that round of server hosting (thanks again to the people who did pay in, though). The team paid the difference (as they had for the decade prior), and it was called to an official stop to it when even more problems started rearing up. The attempt to switch to the third party began before any real problems started, but Microsoft had as much as a heads up on what was going on as we did (or more, probably).
Perhaps because Mektek was the only entity that could, as you were the only entity to get such a favorable license from Microsoft.
This angle of reasoning I don't understand - with no money for it and no-one willing to spend anything more on the project (after spending a great deal on it), we should've just kept ticking along forever, for free, because we were the only one's who'd already spent the money on lawyers to organise agreeable terms from Microsoft? The legal stuff will have to wait for a bit because I'll be speaking about that later, but even in spite of this we might have found a way if not for legal stuff.
For the record, this is the kind of question most likely to get ignored if you've been asking it elsewhere, as you're basically implying the people who spent a lot of money and time on this that they're dicks for not spending more money and time on this, while offering no money or time. I can answer it because I wasn't in the early team, but if I was I can see how it might upset me. It comes across that you are insinuating you have more right to play a game for free than someone else has to not have to pay for you to be able to. I don't believe this is how this was intended, but that's how it comes across.
Well there was the Solaris based, multiplayer total conversion for MW4 I know was being worked on.
Also Assault Tech 1, which was a fantastic game in itself, also discontinued when mektek essentially 'Raised Shields"
Ok, those are the other way around, the first was a tech demo (that failed) and a little unfair to complain about, but the second one I admit there's a point there (although it was still just at a tech-demo stage, there were real plans for more);
Assault Tech 1 was a concurrent project during Mekpak development. I'm not sure if this was late mod team stuff or early studio stuff but it was still completely free, this was a game written by part of the team pretty much from scratch to fulfil some requirements that MW4 couldn't as a tech demo. As I understand, it turned out that the engine wasn't advanced enough to make what they wanted in any reasonable timeframe. It could've perhaps been a good game, but it could never be what was intended, and had proved that. That's exactly why you do tech demonstrators. That said, this it's not like it's not available, go download and play it right now, it sounds like you're complaining they didn't keep it in-house (it was still pretty fun). Quite simply, there's limited resources and they were spent on the Mekpak.
Solaris Assault Tech was the more recent one of the two, and it was done in UDK. This is another victim of the legal situation, which I'll get to.
Another one is trying to sell a free to play game. That traditionally doesn't go well on kickstarter.
Another issue is the poor value for money pledge levels. Being able to pre pay 15 dollars into a F2P game before you get a chance to play it, is no choice at all. For something that is essentially funny money, you can afford to give backers any amount. Double it at a minimum.
Another issue is the complete failure of stretch goals. Stretch goals do not equal milestones on your game design document. Stretch goals should reward participants who generate buzz for your game. "If I get 10 of my friends to back, they will triple the amount of in game currency everyone gets, on top of the last three value adds, Whee!"
These are good suggestions, but they're all trumped by the problem you were responding to here of simply not being enough people seeing it. It doesn't matter what we do or show if not enough people see it. That said, I like all of this, and I'll be bringing these things up (I especially like the idea of early adopters getting more extra stuff, that seems fairer to me).
I am sorry, but you guys swaggered on to kickstarter, with exactly the same plan you had for raising money on your own website, which also failed. It seems like Stompy Bot is a small games company, with the management rigidity of a large one.
I'm here, talking with you. That wouldn't be allowed by most places I can think of (that said, I haven't shot my mouth about the legal stuff at this point yet, so it may change!). We did get off on the wrong foot with the kickstarter for sure.
Cancel the kickstarter.
Drastically rescope. You mentioned having a marketing company involved. That's a waste. Kickstarter is overrun by companies that know what their fans want. Not marketing firms.
You don't need UE4 to be successful. If you want community support, use a community engine like Ogre or Unity. If you chose UE4 just so modders would be useful, find something else for them to do or fire them. Unreal scripting is not worth the license fee (for a company of your size).
Now you have kicked UE4 to the curb, you can have a reasonable starting goal. If it is more than 100,000 you are gonna have a bad time.
Outline your single player campaign. Give players things they want.
If we rescope, then this will not be the same game, we won't be able to give the players anything beyond the bare minimum at the price you've said (which is downright ridiculously low, even by indie game standards). UE4 is not a game, it's an engine - it's programming, not modding. It's cutting edge sure, and that might hold us back a bit in a few areas where Unity or Ogre is better developed by virtue of being older, but Unity and Ogre would be taking the Assault Tech 1 path of moving into an engine that can't do what we want, can't do anything new for the players (UE4 more than makes up for things that are hard with things that are easier or awesomer). Maybe it'd be ok for an MW4 clone, but not much else and nothing like what would keep the experienced guys in this team interested. I don't see Ogre or Unity as being especially community engines, either, compared with UDK.
The money you're thinking of is just ridiculously low, this is probably just a matter of not being aware of what things cost. We could make a low detail, simplified game (like for a cellphone) at those kinds of prices. Take a look at this skullgirls indiegogo page (specifically the cost breakdown) http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/keep-skullgirls-growing. That's for adding one, single character, who they expect will be cheaper than usual, to an existing, 2d, game. $150k, and it's not unreasonable. You're asking us to make an entire 3d mech game with customisation and everything you'd expect, for 2/3rds of adding a character to a fighting game? And you're expecting us to not only be able to do that, but to "give players what they want"? If I've missed something here that makes this more possible, please, tell me!
This is another area where you're likely to get comments ignored, by the way: there'll be some experienced developers on any team who do know how much things cost, and when people make suggestions at lowball prices some of the experienced guys will just ignore you as "some guy who doesn't know what they're talking about". I'm not so quick to do that, but I do see where they're coming from - a lot of people throw stuff up in the air without knowing about it and they don't want to waste their time listening to that, but you've already brought up a bunch of good points so I'm more than happy to take the time here (you've been fairly respectful and I'd take the time even if you had no good points). If you want clarification on why it's likely to cost that much, I think I can do that for you.
Stretch goals that are not only extra features, but also more swag.
eg - 150,000 We can afford to commission 2 more Southern Gears + Free T-Shirt for X level and above.
Feel free to add UE and F2P Arena game back in as stretch goals. Make sure these goals reward the backer alongside the project.
If we can reach where we need to, our current design allows us to make and implement new gears much cheaper than this, but I see where you're going here. The disadvantage is that it is topheavy, we need to do a lot more work to get a category started, but once it's implemented we won't risk being stuck in a "maybe 1 update a month" cycle because of the difficulty of implementing more. I like the idea of an f2p system being a stretch goal. I feel like a poor job has been done on incentivising people. Maybe make f2p only available to referrals of backers or something, I dunno (spitballing here).
Now, I'm from here speaking as myself, not as a Mektek Dev. I understand that any legal ramifications of the things I'm about to say fall on me, and me alone. With that said, I fully intend to pussyfoot around because lawyers can terrify me. What I can do at least is bring up enough information for you to look up and draw your own conclusions.
I'll start with some easy facts to verify, this is as of the time just before Smith and Tinker fall over;
Mektek has some Mechwarrior rights,
"Someone Else" has some Mechwarrior rights.
Mektek is supporting MW4. That's old, no-one cares, no big deal. It supports the pods, that's a bit of an issue, but meh, it doesn't really effect "Someone Else". Solaris Assault Tech might, though. Mektek is friendly with DP9, and that might seem scary, I dunno. HG has been talked about but they're working on SAT at present. I think this is where Mektek starts organising the shift of MW4 distribution to the third party.
Stuff starts to get difficult with the shift, something is unusual. This shouldn't have been any problem. Some of the team would already prefer to do HG than Battletech.
Smith and Tinker falls over. The actual shift of the license to the third party still hasn't happened yet, so we're left holding the bag unless they can sort the legal stuff out and take it from us. Right now there's bigger Mechwarriors to fry, and the effort flounders uselessly (and moneyless-ly).
Lawyers pore over everything, hoping to clear up every link they can for sure, but Battletech is a huge rights mess (it's their job to do this, there's nothing wrong with clarifying who has what rights)
This from here is all my understanding as best I can, and I believe everything here to be correct. If there are errors or omissions, I apologise and will correct them as I am made aware (please don't sue me!)
You're presented with (grossly simpified) legal choices. You are Mektek: Pick a Path;
*Defend Rights,
*Drop Rights,
*Don't exercise rights and let others exercise theirs.
If we do the first one, and win, we might be able to make a full game, but we might be left with not enough rights to make a Battletech game (and now no-one else, either). We've very likely just killed Battletech games on pc.
If we do the first one and it falls somewhere in the middle, it's anyone's guess. Very likely chance no-one is left able to make BT games on pc, though.
If we do the first one, and lose, we're in the exact same situation we are now, except we've spent money that could've been on our own project and can never ever bring back the Mekpak.
If we do the second one, it costs us a great deal for no reason. We lose everything and stand to gain nothing, but at least risk nothing peripheral.
If we do the third one, we don't have any chance to kill Battletech games and it doesn't cost us anything (well, current progress on SAT. SAT at this point is a tech demonstrator, but it's proved UDK capable of our requirements. Seeing as we'll have to rewrite SAT as part of developing from this prototype anyway (a standard practice, not a bad program) this is a smaller loss than you'd think). We pick the third "Back away slowly, Hands raised, and hope nothing bites us" option, which isn't a good choice sure, but have you looked at the alternatives? Only one of these has any chance of saving the Mekpak initially, and this one has the best chance of saving it in the long run.
Now all this has come up, the HG stuff that we've been looking at finally persuades the last members of the team who weren't sure. Mektek goes into full negotiations with DP9, a bunch of people are headhunted for HG specifically, and early versions of HG design and prototyping begin with close collaboration with Epic, who've just started to get shiny new versions of this engine available for very early development...
Please note, this is all my best understanding, and I could be wrong about any of this. No-one wants to talk about this because if they DO get something wrong they could be in serious trouble, this is normal for any legal situation and might explain the stonewall you were getting if you were trying to find a way into these 'not so hard' answers (I'm assuming this is what it was, there's really nothing else that I can think of that people might be reluctant to answer). A lot of people come across as demanding the answers, or acting like they have the "right to know" these things, which they do not, unfortunately, and that attitude doesn't sit well with most of the team. You've showed me respect, so I'm showing you respect in return by giving you the best answer I possibly can. If I get banned from talking with you at least you'll know why people don't answer certain kinds of questions (even with their opinions) .
First off a quick apology: I write this at a time very late where I am, and I'm quite sick, but I feel you've earned answers to this stuff, so I'll do my best. If there's anything wrong I'll correct it as soon as I notice, keep an eye out. Let me know if you spot anything odd you need clarifying (because it may well be a mistake)
Certainly, on the bottom right of this page is a counter; http://www.heavygear.com/ It shows the total collected from all sources, including kickstarter, so if you want to know just what's come from out of kickstarter substract the current kickstarter amount from it.
In your version of events, Smith And Tinker's Bankruptcy and Battletechs Licensing woes caused you to pass on the license.
On the forums, it reads to me, that it was dropped beforehand, and passed on to a mysterious group we have never heard from. And it was this second group that hasn't been able to relaunch due to the aforementioned issues.
Neither story provides any basis for Mektek being unable to continue support it, beyond "We don't want to".
Because Mektek dropped support, and Mekteks license terms indicated that only they can redistribute it, MechWarrior 4 is no longer available for free to anyone.
The forum version you've pointed to is short, yes, and I did have a longer version there also. That version was put in as the main version because no-one read my version because it was long, and went on to complain anyway. The fact of the matter is yes, Mektek have moved away from Battletech and yes, MW4 free release is no longer supported. This message is short enough that people read it, but the people who read it and care get upset. I suppose I could add my detailed version to the end there, but that was decided against as adding walls of text to the end might cause people to skip the whole message (people didn't even start the long one in general).
It doesn't say anywhere there about the reason, it only goes into why the new team was having trouble (the same reasons we were worried about). We were trying to pass it on when the Smith and Tinker thing halted anyone from doing anything - if we'd failed to pass it on then we could've at least hosted a torrent or something (technically distributed by mektek's tracker, but not our bandwidth) - the bottom line is the legal issues are what stopped this, the fact that it all happened during transfer to the third party only obsfucates matters.
It seems to me that a crowdfunding campaign would have been FAR more appropriate in MechWarrior 4's case, than Heavy Gear.
We tried that before I joined, and that didn't even raise enough money to pay for that round of server hosting (thanks again to the people who did pay in, though). The team paid the difference (as they had for the decade prior), and it was called to an official stop to it when even more problems started rearing up. The attempt to switch to the third party began before any real problems started, but Microsoft had as much as a heads up on what was going on as we did (or more, probably).
Perhaps because Mektek was the only entity that could, as you were the only entity to get such a favorable license from Microsoft.
This angle of reasoning I don't understand - with no money for it and no-one willing to spend anything more on the project (after spending a great deal on it), we should've just kept ticking along forever, for free, because we were the only one's who'd already spent the money on lawyers to organise agreeable terms from Microsoft? The legal stuff will have to wait for a bit because I'll be speaking about that later, but even in spite of this we might have found a way if not for legal stuff.
For the record, this is the kind of question most likely to get ignored if you've been asking it elsewhere, as you're basically implying the people who spent a lot of money and time on this that they're dicks for not spending more money and time on this, while offering no money or time. I can answer it because I wasn't in the early team, but if I was I can see how it might upset me. It comes across that you are insinuating you have more right to play a game for free than someone else has to not have to pay for you to be able to. I don't believe this is how this was intended, but that's how it comes across.
Well there was the Solaris based, multiplayer total conversion for MW4 I know was being worked on.
Also Assault Tech 1, which was a fantastic game in itself, also discontinued when mektek essentially 'Raised Shields"
Ok, those are the other way around, the first was a tech demo (that failed) and a little unfair to complain about, but the second one I admit there's a point there (although it was still just at a tech-demo stage, there were real plans for more);
Assault Tech 1 was a concurrent project during Mekpak development. I'm not sure if this was late mod team stuff or early studio stuff but it was still completely free, this was a game written by part of the team pretty much from scratch to fulfil some requirements that MW4 couldn't as a tech demo. As I understand, it turned out that the engine wasn't advanced enough to make what they wanted in any reasonable timeframe. It could've perhaps been a good game, but it could never be what was intended, and had proved that. That's exactly why you do tech demonstrators. That said, this it's not like it's not available, go download and play it right now, it sounds like you're complaining they didn't keep it in-house (it was still pretty fun). Quite simply, there's limited resources and they were spent on the Mekpak.
Solaris Assault Tech was the more recent one of the two, and it was done in UDK. This is another victim of the legal situation, which I'll get to.
Another one is trying to sell a free to play game. That traditionally doesn't go well on kickstarter.
Another issue is the poor value for money pledge levels. Being able to pre pay 15 dollars into a F2P game before you get a chance to play it, is no choice at all. For something that is essentially funny money, you can afford to give backers any amount. Double it at a minimum.
Another issue is the complete failure of stretch goals. Stretch goals do not equal milestones on your game design document. Stretch goals should reward participants who generate buzz for your game. "If I get 10 of my friends to back, they will triple the amount of in game currency everyone gets, on top of the last three value adds, Whee!"
These are good suggestions, but they're all trumped by the problem you were responding to here of simply not being enough people seeing it. It doesn't matter what we do or show if not enough people see it. That said, I like all of this, and I'll be bringing these things up (I especially like the idea of early adopters getting more extra stuff, that seems fairer to me).
I am sorry, but you guys swaggered on to kickstarter, with exactly the same plan you had for raising money on your own website, which also failed. It seems like Stompy Bot is a small games company, with the management rigidity of a large one.
I'm here, talking with you. That wouldn't be allowed by most places I can think of (that said, I haven't shot my mouth about the legal stuff at this point yet, so it may change!). We did get off on the wrong foot with the kickstarter for sure.
Cancel the kickstarter.
Drastically rescope. You mentioned having a marketing company involved. That's a waste. Kickstarter is overrun by companies that know what their fans want. Not marketing firms.
You don't need UE4 to be successful. If you want community support, use a community engine like Ogre or Unity. If you chose UE4 just so modders would be useful, find something else for them to do or fire them. Unreal scripting is not worth the license fee (for a company of your size).
Now you have kicked UE4 to the curb, you can have a reasonable starting goal. If it is more than 100,000 you are gonna have a bad time.
Outline your single player campaign. Give players things they want.
If we rescope, then this will not be the same game, we won't be able to give the players anything beyond the bare minimum at the price you've said (which is downright ridiculously low, even by indie game standards). UE4 is not a game, it's an engine - it's programming, not modding. It's cutting edge sure, and that might hold us back a bit in a few areas where Unity or Ogre is better developed by virtue of being older, but Unity and Ogre would be taking the Assault Tech 1 path of moving into an engine that can't do what we want, can't do anything new for the players (UE4 more than makes up for things that are hard with things that are easier or awesomer). Maybe it'd be ok for an MW4 clone, but not much else and nothing like what would keep the experienced guys in this team interested. I don't see Ogre or Unity as being especially community engines, either, compared with UDK.
The money you're thinking of is just ridiculously low, this is probably just a matter of not being aware of what things cost. We could make a low detail, simplified game (like for a cellphone) at those kinds of prices. Take a look at this skullgirls indiegogo page (specifically the cost breakdown) http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/keep-skullgirls-growing. That's for adding one, single character, who they expect will be cheaper than usual, to an existing, 2d, game. $150k, and it's not unreasonable. You're asking us to make an entire 3d mech game with customisation and everything you'd expect, for 2/3rds of adding a character to a fighting game? And you're expecting us to not only be able to do that, but to "give players what they want"? If I've missed something here that makes this more possible, please, tell me!
This is another area where you're likely to get comments ignored, by the way: there'll be some experienced developers on any team who do know how much things cost, and when people make suggestions at lowball prices some of the experienced guys will just ignore you as "some guy who doesn't know what they're talking about". I'm not so quick to do that, but I do see where they're coming from - a lot of people throw stuff up in the air without knowing about it and they don't want to waste their time listening to that, but you've already brought up a bunch of good points so I'm more than happy to take the time here (you've been fairly respectful and I'd take the time even if you had no good points). If you want clarification on why it's likely to cost that much, I think I can do that for you.
Stretch goals that are not only extra features, but also more swag.
eg - 150,000 We can afford to commission 2 more Southern Gears + Free T-Shirt for X level and above.
Feel free to add UE and F2P Arena game back in as stretch goals. Make sure these goals reward the backer alongside the project.
If we can reach where we need to, our current design allows us to make and implement new gears much cheaper than this, but I see where you're going here. The disadvantage is that it is topheavy, we need to do a lot more work to get a category started, but once it's implemented we won't risk being stuck in a "maybe 1 update a month" cycle because of the difficulty of implementing more. I like the idea of an f2p system being a stretch goal. I feel like a poor job has been done on incentivising people. Maybe make f2p only available to referrals of backers or something, I dunno (spitballing here).
Now, I'm from here speaking as myself, not as a Mektek Dev. I understand that any legal ramifications of the things I'm about to say fall on me, and me alone. With that said, I fully intend to pussyfoot around because lawyers can terrify me. What I can do at least is bring up enough information for you to look up and draw your own conclusions.
I'll start with some easy facts to verify, this is as of the time just before Smith and Tinker fall over;
Mektek has some Mechwarrior rights,
"Someone Else" has some Mechwarrior rights.
Mektek is supporting MW4. That's old, no-one cares, no big deal. It supports the pods, that's a bit of an issue, but meh, it doesn't really effect "Someone Else". Solaris Assault Tech might, though. Mektek is friendly with DP9, and that might seem scary, I dunno. HG has been talked about but they're working on SAT at present. I think this is where Mektek starts organising the shift of MW4 distribution to the third party.
Stuff starts to get difficult with the shift, something is unusual. This shouldn't have been any problem. Some of the team would already prefer to do HG than Battletech.
Smith and Tinker falls over. The actual shift of the license to the third party still hasn't happened yet, so we're left holding the bag unless they can sort the legal stuff out and take it from us. Right now there's bigger Mechwarriors to fry, and the effort flounders uselessly (and moneyless-ly).
Lawyers pore over everything, hoping to clear up every link they can for sure, but Battletech is a huge rights mess (it's their job to do this, there's nothing wrong with clarifying who has what rights)
This from here is all my understanding as best I can, and I believe everything here to be correct. If there are errors or omissions, I apologise and will correct them as I am made aware (please don't sue me!)
You're presented with (grossly simpified) legal choices. You are Mektek: Pick a Path;
Defend Mechwarrior Rights,
Drop Mechwarrior Rights,
Don't exercise rights and let others exercise theirs.
If we do the first one, and win, we might be able to make a full game, but we might be left with not enough rights to make a Battletech game (and now no-one else, either). We've very likely just killed Battletech games on pc.
If we do the first one and it falls somewhere in the middle, it's anyone's guess. Very likely chance no-one is left able to make BT games on pc, though.
If we do the first one, and lose, we're in the exact same situation we are now, except we've spent money that could've been on our own project and can never ever bring back the Mekpak.
If we do the second one, it costs us a great deal for no reason. We lose everything and stand to gain nothing, but at least risk nothing peripheral.
If we do the third one, we don't have any chance to kill Battletech games and it doesn't cost us anything (well, current progress on SAT. SAT at this point is a tech demonstrator, but it's proved UDK capable of our requirements. Seeing as we'll have to rewrite SAT as part of developing from this prototype anyway (a standard practice, not a bad program) this is a smaller loss than you'd think). We pick the third "Back away slowly, Hands raised, and hope nothing bites us" option, which isn't a good choice sure, but have you looked at the alternatives? Only one of these has any chance of saving the Mekpak initially, and this one has the best chance of saving it in the long run.
Now all this has come up, the HG stuff that we've been looking at finally persuades the last members of the team who weren't sure. Mektek goes into full negotiations with DP9, a bunch of people are headhunted for HG specifically, and early versions of HG design and prototyping begin with close collaboration with Epic, who've just started to get shiny new versions of this engine available for very early development...
Please note, this is all my best understanding, and I could be wrong about any of this. No-one wants to talk about this because if they DO get something wrong they could be in serious trouble, this is normal for any legal situation and might explain the stonewall you were getting if you were trying to find a way into these 'not so hard' answers (I'm assuming this is what it was, there's really nothing else that I can think of that people might be reluctant to answer). A lot of people come across as demanding the answers, or acting like they have the "right to know" these things, which they do not, unfortunately, and that attitude doesn't sit well with most of the team. You've showed me respect, so I'm showing you respect in return by giving you the best answer I possibly can. If I get banned from talking with you at least you'll know why people don't answer certain kinds of questions (even with their opinions) .
Thanks for posting such a detailed response Agornarch. That was more effective communication than I've seen from HGA so far, quite frankly, and if nothing else that's a bit reassuring. You obviously spent quite a bit of time with the messages, which is a stark contrast to pretty much everything that came out of the both launches. Maybe you should be doing the marketing management instead of whomever is currently dropping that ball!
Stretch goals that are not only extra features, but also more swag.
eg - 150,000 We can afford to commission 2 more Southern Gears + Free T-Shirt for X level and above.
Feel free to add UE and F2P Arena game back in as stretch goals. Make sure these goals reward the backer alongside the project.
If we can reach where we need to, our current design allows us to make and implement new gears much cheaper than this, but I see where you're going here. The disadvantage is that it is topheavy, we need to do a lot more work to get a category started, but once it's implemented we won't risk being stuck in a "maybe 1 update a month" cycle because of the difficulty of implementing more. I like the idea of an f2p system being a stretch goal. I feel like a poor job has been done on incentivising people. Maybe make f2p only available to referrals of backers or something, I dunno (spitballing here).
The above praise said, one thing I don't think we're seeing eye to eye on is the the KS rewards, especially as incentive tools. In game cash is a fickle tool to get players excited because it's mundane - anybody can get access to it, with a bit of time (or deep enough pockets). Most of the rewards are the lower tiers are basically ball caps, keychains, posters, the music score - etc. All kitchy items that isn't going to appeal to everyone. But you guys do have complete control over the things that could excite players - and they are paradoxically locked in the higher tiers!
A savvier campaign might have been to put in milestone along the funding path that provided benefits a multiple tiers that could only be obtained through the kickstarter, and make the benefits far more explicit. For instance, you guys hand out Team Techs like crazy. But the only verbiage for them is 'makes repair times faster'. How much faster? How does that impact my ability to play that model? What will that *give* me, in concrete terms, not vague 'faster repair times'. Let's say your following a model that says for each 100 credits of damage to a vehicle, that vehicle is out of commission for 1s. Then, a normal Team Tech reduces that to 0.75s. You could easily apply 'skilled technicians' to reduce that to 0.7 or 0.6s, and that's a concrete value that players understand they are getting. For each $100,000 you reach, you reduce the repair time for these 'prime techs' by 0.1 or something similar - you give players concrete reasons for wanting to spread buzz about your system.
Maybe techs will have a cost associated with them - you have to play say 10k a match for a tech - you could easily give KS backers a 'free' tech that never goes away as a benefit. Or if you're working in XP for techs, KS backers get a flat 25% bonus to all techs, that increases 5% for each 1000 backers added to the system. There are any number of possible benefits you could add that have no direct cost to you using this model, that still provides milestones in the KS campaign for people to work towards. An even more savvy approach would to be let them pick from support personnel as they want, after you clearly define the benefits for each of those support personnel. In such a way you're selling the game to people, not dictating it to them, and making them want to get as many people online as possible.
Which is really the failing that I'm seeing, and what GBL is referencing - the approach for the KS (and soft launch) basically screamed traditional mecha game, instead of being focused and savvy about the conventions of the market you were applying to. Contrast what you have setup right now and something like:
Fresh Meat: Basic Arsenal - Your begin play with an selection fo weapons, ready for use. Backers get two of each autocannon (LAC, MAC, HAC) which excels in tracking light targets, one of each light rocket pack wich can tear through structures, and five grenades ready to scatter your opponents to bits.
Fighter: You get the Basic Arsenal + one Premier Support Personnel selected from the list below. Premier Support cost 25% less and are 10% better than the in-game support that can be bought.
Duelist: Talented Rookie: Your manager has obtained a talented pilot that starts can quickly learn the ropes. The rookie gains +2.5% XP and comes with one skill already learned. You also get the Basic Arsenal and one Premier Support Personnel.
Southern Veteran: You start with one Jager Prime and Sidewinder Prime, which gain XP at a faster rate (+2.5% XP) and have a unique skin to demonstrate Southern Glory to everyone you come across.
And so on. Then, for milestones:
$50,000 - All Basic Arsenals are upgraded to contain two light bazookas and two panzerfausts, armor busting weapons sure to ruin your opponent's day
$100,000 - All Premier support becomes 10% more efficient than their basic counterparts, and are reduced in cost to %50.
$150,000 - All basic Arsenals are upgraded to contain one medium bazooka and one medium rocket pack, granting you greater punch out of the gate
$200,000 - All rookies come with two skills already learned. All Prime units gain additional Rep (+2.5%) in their respective arena.
Note - none of the above costs anything other than pride in some 'grand design', which isn't a pragmatic problem. It's only an issue if you have a design astronaut, which would be a serious problem.
I'm not saying the above is perfect or even good, but I was able to slam it out in 10 minutes, and it 'feels' more appropriate for KS than what you guys presented. And incidentally would cost you less cash on any given package since there's none of the physical goods getting in the way. Which is why I say it comes across as you guys not thinking long and hard about the venues you've chosen and how you're going about asking for money.
There's some interesting stuff you guys have going on, but seriously - your marketing and approach is illogical in the extreme. Load up players on the stuff that won't cost you anything other than bits (and maybe design time for things like the skin), and make it clear why it's a benefit, and you'd do significantly better than you already have, I thinkk.
Seems the forum people decided to delete my last post, so I'll just say that I did respond, Ice, and it was to tell you I didn't think you were a bully. I figure you for an Internet tough guy who also happens to be a straight shooter from where you see things. Which is fair.
Uh.... you do realize Internet Tough Guy is a pejorative, right? You might be trying to say something but being tripped up on meaning, but you just said I'm not a bully, I'm a thug?
Note: most, if not all, "you" in the following are 2nd person plural.
What I'm seeing is that your are still putting the cart before the horses.
First, you are overambitious. Don't start with that big game, start with something smaller. Like an android/iOS app. That gives you money, exposure and a chance to prove that you can work as a team*. More importantly, the risk is much, much lower. Right now, you are asking people to gamble a lot of money. That's also one of the big problems with your communication, BTW. No, you are not valiantly saving a genre from doom, re-inventing gaming or anything like that. Your communication, right now, is more bragging than fact. You over-promise and over-praise yourself. You are creating unreasonable expectations in those who believe the hype and look way over your depth to those who don't. The insistence that F2C is in any way different from F2P is especially puzzling. It makes you look either delusional or completely uninformed about your market.
Second, you are asking for money for an undefined project. You went from a F2P multiplayer game to a F2P single player game after the market rejected the multiplayer. Fair enough. Problem is, that's a huge shift, and indicates that F2P is not going to work. Since that's how you plan to make money, that bring the entire project into question. People who pledged on your site pledged for a project that is no longer going to happen, since you changed it based on the reactions to the Kickstarter. In effect, that says that you will get the money and do whatever you want with it, since you did not hesitate to change the entire project when it suited you.
This tell me that the project is under-defined, that you have no real business plan, nor market research. You need to stop, regroup and define what you want to do, make sure it's actually profitable and that it's possible to get the funding you need to do it. Otherwise, you are only going to waste a lot of your time, effort and other people's money.
But hey, you can do what you want. I'm not the one doing the work, and I won't have to deal with the fallout if you fail. Especially if you do as I suggest and fail. You failing would not kill HG, DP9 is already doing that just fine by themselves, and the mecha genre is not going to be affected be the failure of an obscure game.
On that last point, you might want to actually get some publicity. I'm in your prime demographic, and I have seen exactly 0 adds.
* Big names are rather meaningless when it comes to software. You need a team and a support structure. The junior programmer doing the boring parts is more important than the lead designer, and a good QA department is more important than both combined.
I appreciate the candid responses here that have been somewhat lacking both on the dp9 forums in the HGA thread as well as on the kickstarter. How much do you think would a smaller scale/scope game like a turn based Xcom: Enemy Unknown style game cost? No single player initially but rather just versus bots and multiplayer with limited animations/art assets needed for this compared with a full FPS. The tech for something like that doesn't seem to requirement heavy and should be doable on multiple cheap platforms like iOS/Android/PC and even indie games on the xbox. Doesn't UE3 have a feature that allows you to develop and export the work to multiple platforms right away? IIRC, UE3 licensing (now that UE4 is the flashy favorite child) costs nothing upfront and only charges an end licensing fee if you sell a certain amount afterwards ($50k comes to mind but I can't be sure about it). Further stretch goals could be a change from isometric to full 3d (with somewhat forced angles like xcom), single player campaign, addtional factions beyond just the starting north/south/CEF, skins, maps, gears, etc. The above isn't as flashy and likely to get your name on the front virtual page of gaming sites (which HGA doesn't seem to be doing either) but it's likely a whole lot cheaper and easier to get out the door and earning cash sooner. I'm not saying that you have to use the exact d6 mechanics of HG to resolve the combat but anything tabletop-ish is likely to appease alot of the tabletop fans yet still be video-game enough to appease computer gamers (if shadowrun is any indication) without coming off as jumping on the Mechwarrior popularity bandwagon again.
Counter argument: Salary for a computer programmer for one year - $40,000 to $75,000 depending on region, market, and specialty.
In other words, at a certain point in the history of this sort of project, everyone stands up and says "We'd like to be able to eat, and not need a second job to afford to do this."
solkan wrote: Counter argument: Salary for a computer programmer for one year - $40,000 to $75,000 depending on region, market, and specialty.
In other words, at a certain point in the history of this sort of project, everyone stands up and says "We'd like to be able to eat, and not need a second job to afford to do this."
It might be a good idea to quote the original argument you're countering. I don't think you're directing it at me but my post is the one above yours.
First off a quick apology: I write this at a time very late where I am, and I'm quite sick, but I feel you've earned answers to this stuff, so I'll do my best. If there's anything wrong I'll correct it as soon as I notice, keep an eye out. Let me know if you spot anything odd you need clarifying (because it may well be a mistake)
Certainly, on the bottom right of this page is a counter; http://www.heavygear.com/ It shows the total collected from all sources, including kickstarter, so if you want to know just what's come from out of kickstarter substract the current kickstarter amount from it.
Fantastic, actually I didn't know the website had been updated. The last time I saw it, it was a few days in to the kickstarter, and the FAQ still had 'Why we don't do a kickstarter" as an item.
In your version of events, Smith And Tinker's Bankruptcy and Battletechs Licensing woes caused you to pass on the license.
On the forums, it reads to me, that it was dropped beforehand, and passed on to a mysterious group we have never heard from. And it was this second group that hasn't been able to relaunch due to the aforementioned issues.
Neither story provides any basis for Mektek being unable to continue support it, beyond "We don't want to".
Because Mektek dropped support, and Mekteks license terms indicated that only they can redistribute it, MechWarrior 4 is no longer available for free to anyone.
The forum version you've pointed to is short, yes, and I did have a longer version there also. That... terser version was put in by Vam as the main version because no-one read my version because it was long, and went on to complain anyway. The fact of the matter is yes, Mektek have moved away from Battletech and yes, MW4 free release is no longer supported. This message is short enough that people read it, but the people who read it and care get upset. I suppose I could add my detailed version to the end there, but that was decided against as adding walls of text to the end might cause people to skip the whole message (people didn't even start the long one in general).
It doesn't say anywhere there about the reason, it only goes into why the new team was having trouble (the same reasons we were worried about). We were trying to pass it on when the Smith and Tinker thing halted anyone from doing anything - if we'd failed to pass it on then we could've at least hosted a torrent or something (technically distributed by mektek's tracker, but not our bandwidth) - the bottom line is the legal issues are what stopped this, the fact that it all happened during transfer to the third party only obsfucates matters.
It seems to me that a crowdfunding campaign would have been FAR more appropriate in MechWarrior 4's case, than Heavy Gear.
We tried that before I joined, and that didn't even raise enough money to pay for that round of server hosting (thanks again to the people who did pay in, though). The team paid the difference (as they had for the decade prior), and it was called to an official stop to it when even more problems started rearing up. The attempt to switch to the third party began before any real problems started, but Microsoft had as much as a heads up on what was going on as we did (or more, probably).
Well I had no idea, which is a problem with crowd funding.
But as someone who frequently pops in to and out of battletech related forums, I would have thought I would have known. Kickstarter has been running for years, was it considered?
Perhaps because Mektek was the only entity that could, as you were the only entity to get such a favorable license from Microsoft.
This angle of reasoning I don't understand - with no money for it and no-one willing to spend anything more on the project (after spending a great deal on it), we should've just kept ticking along forever, for free, because we were the only one's who'd already spent the money on lawyers to organise agreeable terms from Microsoft? The legal stuff will have to wait for a bit because I'll be speaking about that later, but even in spite of this we might have found a way if not for legal stuff.
For the record, this is the kind of question most likely to get ignored if you've been asking it elsewhere, as you're basically implying the people who spent a lot of money and time on this that they're dicks for not spending more money and time on this, while offering no money or time. I can answer it because I wasn't in the early team, but if I was I can see how it might upset me. It comes across that you are insinuating you have more right to play a game for free than someone else has to not have to pay for you to be able to. I don't believe this is how this was intended, but that's how it comes across.
Consider this: The talk on various battletech communities at the time, was that Mektek was the gatekeeper of the MW4 franchise, and that they had bold plans to revitalize it and keep it going. As far as my memory goes, mektek members were talking this up too. Some people were cynical that you had the technical know how to do this, that you would have access to the source, and screw it up(not me, I was as giddy as a schoolgirl). But Mektek was always adamant that they could revitalize this ageing platform and turn it in to something that the community would love. Thee were no messages of this being a short term deal, or limited in any way, by anything but optimism. I don't know what things were like on the Mektek forum, but this is the semi official feeling emanating from it. Your terms with Microsoft also made things impossible for another group to jump in and take it from you if things went south. So in this way everything was squarely on Mektek. In hindsight, it was probly doomed to fail, but I for one got attached to the ideology.
Well there was the Solaris based, multiplayer total conversion for MW4 I know was being worked on.
Also Assault Tech 1, which was a fantastic game in itself, also discontinued when mektek essentially 'Raised Shields"
Ok, those are the other way around, the first was a tech demo (that failed) and a little unfair to complain about, but the second one I admit there's a point there (although it was still just at a tech-demo stage, there were real plans for more);
Assault Tech 1 was a concurrent project during Mekpak development. I'm not sure if this was late mod team stuff or early studio stuff but it was still completely free, this was a game written by part of the team pretty much from scratch to fulfil some requirements that MW4 couldn't as a tech demo. As I understand, it turned out that the engine wasn't advanced enough to make what they wanted in any reasonable timeframe. It could've perhaps been a good game, but it could never be what was intended, and had proved that. That's exactly why you do tech demonstrators. That said, this it's not like it's not available, go download and play it right now, it sounds like you're complaining they didn't keep it in-house (it was still pretty fun). Quite simply, there's limited resources and they were spent on the Mekpak.
Solaris Assault Tech was the more recent one of the two, and it was done in UDK. This is another victim of the legal situation, which I'll get to.
You call AT:1 a tech demo now, however the ModDB page for the game, run by Mektek, lists it as Remake of MW2. And while one of the downloads is a tech demo, its an older release than the beta and the 2.3.0 Full Version Release. I understand that you want to defend your current organization, but you cannot rewrite history.
Another one is trying to sell a free to play game. That traditionally doesn't go well on kickstarter.
Another issue is the poor value for money pledge levels. Being able to pre pay 15 dollars into a F2P game before you get a chance to play it, is no choice at all. For something that is essentially funny money, you can afford to give backers any amount. Double it at a minimum.
Another issue is the complete failure of stretch goals. Stretch goals do not equal milestones on your game design document. Stretch goals should reward participants who generate buzz for your game. "If I get 10 of my friends to back, they will triple the amount of in game currency everyone gets, on top of the last three value adds, Whee!"
These are good suggestions, but they're all trumped by the problem you were responding to here of simply not being enough people seeing it. It doesn't matter what we do or show if not enough people see it. That said, I like all of this, and I'll be bringing these things up (I especially like the idea of early adopters getting more extra stuff, that seems fairer to me).
You have this in reverse. Not enough people saw it, because no one shared it. No one shared it because of the above, and numerous other reasons. A tiny miniatures company recently made 12,000 dollars in 30 seconds, because people loved what they were selling, and they had a well thought out kickstarter, and people pledged, and shared with their friends, and they shared it and so on.
I am sorry, but you guys swaggered on to kickstarter, with exactly the same plan you had for raising money on your own website, which also failed. It seems like Stompy Bot is a small games company, with the management rigidity of a large one.
I'm here, talking with you. That wouldn't be allowed by most places I can think of (that said, I haven't shot my mouth about the legal stuff at this point yet, so it may change!). We did get off on the wrong foot with the kickstarter for sure.
This is very after the fact. I acknowledge that its good to have a developer to talk to, and you are doing a good job. It is definitely a step in the right direction for you guys. However, most successful kickstarters reach out to, and speak with their fan base before launching.
Cancel the kickstarter.
Drastically rescope. You mentioned having a marketing company involved. That's a waste. Kickstarter is overrun by companies that know what their fans want. Not marketing firms.
You don't need UE4 to be successful. If you want community support, use a community engine like Ogre or Unity. If you chose UE4 just so modders would be useful, find something else for them to do or fire them. Unreal scripting is not worth the license fee (for a company of your size).
Now you have kicked UE4 to the curb, you can have a reasonable starting goal. If it is more than 100,000 you are gonna have a bad time.
Outline your single player campaign. Give players things they want.
If we rescope, then this will not be the same game, we won't be able to give the players anything beyond the bare minimum at the price you've said (which is downright ridiculously low, even by indie game standards).
That's correct. It shouldn't be the same game. You have failed to market the current one to us. Part of the issue, is that you have said "This is the amount of money we need to do everything" not " Here is a good base, we can expand from here"
You have far too many things that are absolutely required to release this game, and I believe it is in part, due to the fact that you have already assembled the team, promised wages and asked for money after the fact, rather than asking "What is a realistic goal, and if we exceed that, who can we hire to take on the extra workload"
UE4 is not a game, it's an engine - it's programming, not modding.
I would appreciate it if you didn't assume anything about my knowledge in this regard.
UE4 is a sought after engine due (in part) to Unreal Script, allowing less technical savvy people to get involved (Like say, a modding team) this was my assumption due to Stompy bot consisting of an ex modding team.
It's cutting edge sure, and that might hold us back a bit in a few areas where Unity or Ogre is better developed by virtue of being older, but Unity and Ogre would be taking the Assault Tech 1 path of moving into an engine that can't do what we want, can't do anything new for the players (UE4 more than makes up for things that are hard with things that are easier or awesomer). Maybe it'd be ok for an MW4 clone, but not much else and nothing like what would keep the experienced guys in this team interested. I don't see Ogre or Unity as being especially community engines, either, compared with UDK.
"More cutting edge" isn't an issue. Ogre is very cutting edge itself. Sinbad spins up extra components for a fee, and there are also Full Featured Engines with Tools similar to UE4 built upon it like NeoAXIS.
But with the team Stompy Bot has put together, you would believe that they could build anything they needed on top of a Community Developed Open Source engine anyways.
The money you're thinking of is just ridiculously low, this is probably just a matter of not being aware of what things cost. We could make a low detail, simplified game (like for a cellphone) at those kinds of prices. Take a look at this skullgirls indiegogo page (specifically the cost breakdown) http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/keep-skullgirls-growing. That's for adding one, single character, who they expect will be cheaper than usual, to an existing, 2d, game. $150k, and it's not unreasonable. You're asking us to make an entire 3d mech game with customisation and everything you'd expect, for 2/3rds of adding a character to a fighting game? And you're expecting us to not only be able to do that, but to "give players what they want"? If I've missed something here that makes this more possible, please, tell me!
I said rescope. I am not asking you to make the current game for less money. I am telling you to make less game for less money, and if people support you, and if you reach critical mass, people may give you the money to make it how you have it set up now.
I used to have a chat log with a university friend of mine. Annoyed that I cannot find it at the moment. I had linked him to a similar discussion on the CBT forums where a novice animator was claiming that it took 2 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a single model similar to the mechs in MechWarrior Online. This feels like the same conversation. I may have been out of the industry a while, but I know what can be done, especially if people are happy to sacrifice for their craft. The numbers were an example only, based on what I have seen other kickstarters do. I can never know your exact costs, without known all of your exact expenses. Normally when planning a project I would use my best estimates of the time it takes to create a asset, based on feedback received from the artists responsible. Shadowrun Returns had half of your initial goal and made 1.8 million dollars. I know that their team is approximately the size of yours, and they had about the same amount of media attention as you. What's the difference?
I am pretty sure that Harebrained Schemes have other games in development, so they can afford to task staff to other projects if Shadowrun Returns had failed to produce that amount of money. However they have already blown through all the kickstarter money, and have also used traditional funding and good old savings to bring us something they want to make. So the question isn't can you afford to make a game for 100,000, it is can you afford to have a higher starting price, knowing that the more you ask for leads directly in to less exposure on kickstarter.
This is another area where you're likely to get comments ignored, by the way: there'll be some experienced developers on any team who do know how much things cost, and when people make suggestions at lowball prices some of the experienced guys will just ignore you as "some guy who doesn't know what they're talking about". I'm not so quick to do that, but I do see where they're coming from - a lot of people throw stuff up in the air without knowing about it and they don't want to waste their time listening to that, but you've already brought up a bunch of good points so I'm more than happy to take the time here (you've been fairly respectful and I'd take the time even if you had no good points). If you want clarification on why it's likely to cost that much, I think I can do that for you.
I never brought any of these numbers up on the facebook page, I cant even find my questions any more, but they were more general questions asking about how you intended to run the company, your general background and if the project failed, would there be refunds.
My numbers are an example, and you argue the example but not the lesson, you need to ask for less money, or fund yourselves traditionally and come back when you can afford to ask for less.
But aren't you so nice, to come on here and insult my intelligence when your friends wouldn't even bother.
Stretch goals that are not only extra features, but also more swag.
eg - 150,000 We can afford to commission 2 more Southern Gears + Free T-Shirt for X level and above.
Feel free to add UE and F2P Arena game back in as stretch goals. Make sure these goals reward the backer alongside the project.
If we can reach where we need to, our current design allows us to make and implement new gears much cheaper than this, but I see where you're going here. The disadvantage is that it is topheavy, we need to do a lot more work to get a category started, but once it's implemented we won't risk being stuck in a "maybe 1 update a month" cycle because of the difficulty of implementing more. I like the idea of an f2p system being a stretch goal. I feel like a poor job has been done on incentivising people. Maybe make f2p only available to referrals of backers or something, I dunno (spitballing here).
F2P is sort of like crowdfunding on the other end. I know that you say you aren't going to do it, but people don't want to pay upfront to help you launch a game, that will nickel and dime them once they get in.
You would do best to give kickstarter backers something really massive, like permanent premium accounts that ignore the F2P system. And to make that around the 50 dollar tier. Not the 3 month premium, but show them that if they get in at that level, they never have to worry about F2P. And going forward from that, make the tiers above, attempts to lure those people into higher tiers with swag and gifts.
Now, I'm from here speaking as myself, not as a Mektek Dev. I understand that any legal ramifications of the things I'm about to say fall on me, and me alone. With that said, I fully intend to pussyfoot around because lawyers can terrify me. What I can do at least is bring up enough information for you to look up and draw your own conclusions.
I'll start with some easy facts to verify, this is as of the time just before Smith and Tinker fall over;
Mektek has some Mechwarrior rights,
"Someone Else" has some Mechwarrior rights.
Mektek is supporting MW4. That's old, no-one cares, no big deal. It supports the pods, that's a bit of an issue, but meh, it doesn't really effect "Someone Else". Solaris Assault Tech might, though. Mektek is friendly with DP9, and that might seem scary, I dunno. HG has been talked about but they're working on SAT at present. I think this is where Mektek starts organising the shift of MW4 distribution to the third party.
Stuff starts to get difficult with the shift, something is unusual. This shouldn't have been any problem. Some of the team would already prefer to do HG than Battletech.
Smith and Tinker falls over. The actual shift of the license to the third party still hasn't happened yet, so we're left holding the bag unless they can sort the legal stuff out and take it from us. Right now there's bigger Mechwarriors to fry, and the effort flounders uselessly (and moneyless-ly).
Lawyers pore over everything, hoping to clear up every link they can for sure, but Battletech is a huge rights mess (it's their job to do this, there's nothing wrong with clarifying who has what rights)
This from here is all my understanding as best I can, and I believe everything here to be correct. If there are errors or omissions, I apologise and will correct them as I am made aware (please don't sue me!)
You're presented with (grossly simpified) legal choices. You are Mektek: Pick a Path;
*Defend Rights,
*Drop Rights,
*Don't exercise rights and let others exercise theirs.
If we do the first one, and win, we might be able to make a full game, but we might be left with not enough rights to make a Battletech game (and now no-one else, either). We've very likely just killed Battletech games on pc.
If we do the first one and it falls somewhere in the middle, it's anyone's guess. Very likely chance no-one is left able to make BT games on pc, though.
If we do the first one, and lose, we're in the exact same situation we are now, except we've spent money that could've been on our own project and can never ever bring back the Mekpak.
I don't want to argue "what you should have done"
I only know what you have done, and how that was presented to myself. And its on this basis that I have formed my opinion.
I thank you for trying to peel back the curtain, but it isn't really helping.
Note: most, if not all, "you" in the following are 2nd person plural.
That's also one of the big problems with your communication, BTW. No, you are not valiantly saving a genre from doom, re-inventing gaming or anything like that. Your communication, right now, is more bragging than fact. You over-promise and over-praise yourself. You are creating unreasonable expectations in those who believe the hype and look way over your depth to those who don't. The insistence that F2C is in any way different from F2P is especially puzzling. It makes you look either delusional or completely uninformed about your market.
Holy crap, I had noticed this myself, but didn't really know how to put it in to words. Contrasting to the language from Harebrained Schemes, which was very self deprecating and thankful, HG does sound somewhat bragging.
Not to mention wrong, over the last couple of years we have had a handful of successful online mech games.
You need to stop, regroup and define what you want to do, make sure it's actually profitable and that it's possible to get the funding you need to do it. Otherwise, you are only going to waste a lot of your time, effort and other people's money.
Seems the forum people decided to delete my last post, so I'll just say that I did respond, Ice, and it was to tell you I didn't think you were a bully. I figure you for an Internet tough guy who also happens to be a straight shooter from where you see things. Which is fair.
Uh.... you do realize Internet Tough Guy is a pejorative, right? You might be trying to say something but being tripped up on meaning, but you just said I'm not a bully, I'm a thug?
Tripped up on meaning would be putting it mildly, Ice.
Suffice to say, I was saying I appreciate that you, mrondeau and HudsonD and the others are straight shooters. And I meant to use the words 'internet tough guy' not as a pejorative (so whoever flagged that, thanks for not asking me first what I meant), but meant it as a way of saying, "You're tough, you know your stuff, and I respect that, I just don't have the know-how to really argue with your standpoint."
That's all.
As I can see, Agonarch's letting you guys know what's going on. But, well, it is what it is. God bless.
This one is going to be shorter, there are a good number of excellent points brought up that I want to take back and point at people so I'll be doing that, but I want to at least answer a few more of these before I go less active (I'll still be around, just don't know how often I'll be able to check back here for few days)
Well I had no idea, which is a problem with crowd funding.
But as someone who frequently pops in to and out of battletech related forums, I would have thought I would have known. Kickstarter has been running for years, was it considered?
No kickstarter for this - Mektek Studios is Canadian and has been pushing to be able to put something on kickstarter for some time. That's part of the reason for the launch timing (though we could've delayed it). It's open to US or UK organisations only (although backers can come from anywhere)
Consider this: The talk on various battletech communities at the time, was that Mektek was the gatekeeper of the MW4 franchise, and that they had bold plans to revitalize it and keep it going. As far as my memory goes, mektek members were talking this up too. Some people were cynical that you had the technical know how to do this, that you would have access to the source, and screw it up(not me, I was as giddy as a schoolgirl). But Mektek was always adamant that they could revitalize this ageing platform and turn it in to something that the community would love. Thee were no messages of this being a short term deal, or limited in any way, by anything but optimism. I don't know what things were like on the Mektek forum, but this is the semi official feeling emanating from it. Your terms with Microsoft also made things impossible for another group to jump in and take it from you if things went south. So in this way everything was squarely on Mektek. In hindsight, it was probly doomed to fail, but I for one got attached to the ideology.
I thought that's what the free release was? They kept it going for years after that agreement, and things were no less favourable for future deals with Microsoft than they were when Mektek started for anyone else (Microsoft reserves all rights) - MWO didn't have any trouble, for example, it's just a matter of who was willing to front up with the money required to try to make these agreements. Microsoft was never going to be the one to pay for someone's legal fees because they liked a game a lot.
I don't know what extra access the team got from this, but I do know it wasn't as much as you're implying - most of the tools and things used for the mod were written by team members themselves - it needed to be next to no work for Microsoft for this to have any chance of success (which is reasonable - there's no way anyone could ask them to pay for something that was only ever going to cost money).
You call AT:1 a tech demo now, however the ModDB page for the game, run by Mektek, lists it as Remake of MW2. And while one of the downloads is a tech demo, its an older release than the beta and the 2.3.0 Full Version Release. I understand that you want to defend your current organization, but you cannot rewrite history.
It's not a matter of changing history. The main developer on this described it to me as a tech demo, that is what it appears to be, and it does appear to be based on MW2 (that developers favourite MW). It was developed through to a playable version 1 and released freely, I don't see what you're quite arguing here. We don't seem to be in disagreement. I don't know about the forum stuff surrounding it, it's possible that they held hope that it could've been built into what they wanted, but it just turned out not to be the case in any sort of reasonable timeframe. One of the problems with development is that you just don't know what's going to be a problem if you're working with stuff people haven't done before. You might get everything built, designed, tested, find out something doesn't behave how you expected, you can either redesign it to fit the system better (if it's serious, may require quite a rewrite) or you can make missiles expensive and ECM powerful (to deter people from using them) and keep making big tweaks like that as people complain so it looks like you're doing due diligence when you know full well the design is broken, not the numbers.
You have this in reverse. Not enough people saw it, because no one shared it. No one shared it because of the above, and numerous other reasons. A tiny miniatures company recently made 12,000 dollars in 30 seconds, because people loved what they were selling, and they had a well thought out kickstarter, and people pledged, and shared with their friends, and they shared it and so on.
That's an interesting and I think probably accurate point. One of my arguments has been that we're not showing enough information about the game for people to use as ammunition to explain it to their friends. One of the earlier posts here mentioned Techs being listed in a lot of stretch goals, but never really explained - this prevents people from understanding what that is, and seeing how it can have clear value to them (and therefore be worth that particular goal). I might build up a wiki so that people can see further details on a lot of this information - I know one of the first things I do when getting a new game is to go through skill or equipment lists and try to work out what stuff I'll be aiming to use together.
This is very after the fact. I acknowledge that its good to have a developer to talk to, and you are doing a good job. It is definitely a step in the right direction for you guys. However, most successful kickstarters reach out to, and speak with their fan base before launching.
We should've had more developers out and about, then this wouldn't have all been such a surprise. I agree wholeheartedly here, and a lot of feedback I've had leading up to and immediately since the start of the kickstarter has been gold.
That's correct. It shouldn't be the same game. You have failed to market the current one to us. Part of the issue, is that you have said "This is the amount of money we need to do everything" not " Here is a good base, we can expand from here"
You have far too many things that are absolutely required to release this game, and I believe it is in part, due to the fact that you have already assembled the team, promised wages and asked for money after the fact, rather than asking "What is a realistic goal, and if we exceed that, who can we hire to take on the extra workload"
We can't have a team you know and trust to be able to do the work, and a team who we hire when we have the money. At the moment, everyone here knows the score, and everyone is here because they want to support either Mech Games or HG. If no-one can get paid even enough to eat, then there will be attrition, sure, but you can't have this both of those ways.
The comment about scaling back to something simpler but clearer is a good one, but people have as much said to us "Not doing it if not singleplayer" which leaves us in the tough spot you're talking about. We can shuffle stuff to fit in the current budget by changing priorities, but fitting the minimum that people want in a lower budget? We'll need to look at it, regardless.
I would appreciate it if you didn't assume anything about my knowledge in this regard.
UE4 is a sought after engine due (in part) to Unreal Script, allowing less technical savvy people to get involved (Like say, a modding team) this was my assumption due to Stompy bot consisting of an ex modding team.
I apologise if I've inferred anything here, but I wasn't making a sudden assumption - you don't appear to know a lot about UE4, that's not an insult to your character, knowledge or intelligence, it just appears to be the case (and is fine, it's unlikely anyone would know anything about it if they hadn't worked with it). UE4 for example is almost entirely C++ with epics own functions on top, there is no Unrealscript at this time. I don't mean any offense by any of this.
I said rescope. I am not asking you to make the current game for less money. I am telling you to make less game for less money, and if people support you, and if you reach critical mass, people may give you the money to make it how you have it set up now.
I used to have a chat log with a university friend of mine. Annoyed that I cannot find it at the moment. I had linked him to a similar discussion on the CBT forums where a novice animator was claiming that it took 2 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to create a single model similar to the mechs in MechWarrior Online. This feels like the same conversation. I may have been out of the industry a while, but I know what can be done, especially if people are happy to sacrifice for their craft. The numbers were an example only, based on what I have seen other kickstarters do. I can never know your exact costs, without known all of your exact expenses. Normally when planning a project I would use my best estimates of the time it takes to create a asset, based on feedback received from the artists responsible. Shadowrun Returns had half of your initial goal and made 1.8 million dollars. I know that their team is approximately the size of yours, and they had about the same amount of media attention as you. What's the difference?
I am pretty sure that Harebrained Schemes have other games in development, so they can afford to task staff to other projects if Shadowrun Returns had failed to produce that amount of money. However they have already blown through all the kickstarter money, and have also used traditional funding and good old savings to bring us something they want to make. So the question isn't can you afford to make a game for 100,000, it is can you afford to have a higher starting price, knowing that the more you ask for leads directly in to less exposure on kickstarter.
The rescoping part will certainly be looked at - as for the Shadowrun examples: this really isn't that comparable with us - There is a big, big difference, of course its easier if you have millions of dollars to cover any shortfalls you have and make up dips in coverage. Shadowrun Online before Shadowrun Returns did its kickstarter is a fairer comparison.
I never brought any of these numbers up on the facebook page, I cant even find my questions any more, but they were more general questions asking about how you intended to run the company, your general background and if the project failed, would there be refunds.
My numbers are an example, and you argue the example but not the lesson, you need to ask for less money, or fund yourselves traditionally and come back when you can afford to ask for less.
But aren't you so nice, to come on here and insult my intelligence when your friends wouldn't even bother.
I apologise if I've insulted your intelligence somehow by missing the point, but again, I wasn't intending any offense here- simply stating the kind of question that's likely to get snubbed (not just us, from anyone). Questions about team members or refunds should absolutely have been no problem to answer. I don't think we'd be having a conversation anything like this if you weren't intelligent
F2P is sort of like crowdfunding on the other end. I know that you say you aren't going to do it, but people don't want to pay upfront to help you launch a game, that will nickel and dime them once they get in.
You would do best to give kickstarter backers something really massive, like permanent premium accounts that ignore the F2P system. And to make that around the 50 dollar tier. Not the 3 month premium, but show them that if they get in at that level, they never have to worry about F2P. And going forward from that, make the tiers above, attempts to lure those people into higher tiers with swag and gifts.
It was silly, maybe helpful but I felt you had a right to know how it looks from here. I still wouldn't recommend this to anyone.
I don't want to argue "what you should have done"
I only know what you have done, and how that was presented to myself. And its on this basis that I have formed my opinion.
I thank you for trying to peel back the curtain, but it isn't really helping.
I don't begrudge you your opinion, you made it with the best information that's available and I can see how it might go that way. Maybe the new team-members like me would consider dumping the mekpak without thinking too much about it (IMO, it was pretty good but old now), but remember the older members of the mektek team have spent up to 10 years on that thing. Of all the things you'd say about those guys, would one of them be "They're not stubborn"?
Holy crap, I had noticed this myself, but didn't really know how to put it in to words. Contrasting to the language from Harebrained Schemes, which was very self deprecating and thankful, HG does sound somewhat bragging.
Not to mention wrong, over the last couple of years we have had a handful of successful online mech games.
OK, to reasonably respond to this I'll have to step out of the Dev shoes again for a sec..
I do think the spin can get a little thick sometimes, I'm not personally much of a fan. Vote for me to write instead The base of a lot of the stuff I agree with, though. I.. can't.. name.. names.. but they've been disappointing as mech games. Some cases I'd go as far as to say they're not actually mech games and more team action FPS games instead. Nothing wrong with that, but not a mech game. I do know "Someone" might be worried about what this kind of game might do to their market share, but I see our main competition as being "Someone Else" entirely, we're not talking about the same kind of game or gamer in most of these cases.
This has been a really helpful place for responses, I'd like to invite you guys to join our focus group. They email stuff out for you to do a survey and give responses before stuff goes live which is a big bonus at the moment because we're still hardly telling anyone anything - so hopefully that'll become less of a draw soon
Email johnn(at)stompybot(dot)com if you're interested.
..That didn't feel much shorter.
Brandon - I never thanked you for sharing this around. Well done standing fast against the Earthers, brother! (We'll get them to Terra Nova yet)
I too will try to keep it short. If I didn't reply to one of your comments, its due to it not being necessary for me to agree to it, or because I hate repeating myself and feel that cyclical arguments serve no one.
Well I had no idea, which is a problem with crowd funding.
But as someone who frequently pops in to and out of battletech related forums, I would have thought I would have known. Kickstarter has been running for years, was it considered?
No kickstarter for this - Mektek Studios is Canadian and has been pushing to be able to put something on kickstarter for some time. That's part of the reason for the launch timing (though we could've delayed it). It's open to US or UK organisations only (although backers can come from anywhere)
Theres a French company on there at the moment, I think the trick is to set up a US bank account, and perhaps incorporate in one of the states where it is cheap\free to do so. Perhaps this wasn't an option for Mektek? I don't know enough to comment.
You have this in reverse. Not enough people saw it, because no one shared it. No one shared it because of the above, and numerous other reasons. A tiny miniatures company recently made 12,000 dollars in 30 seconds, because people loved what they were selling, and they had a well thought out kickstarter, and people pledged, and shared with their friends, and they shared it and so on.
That's an interesting and I think probably accurate point. One of my arguments has been that we're not showing enough information about the game for people to use as ammunition to explain it to their friends. One of the earlier posts here mentioned Techs being listed in a lot of stretch goals, but never really explained - this prevents people from understanding what that is, and seeing how it can have clear value to them (and therefore be worth that particular goal). I might build up a wiki so that people can see further details on a lot of this information - I know one of the first things I do when getting a new game is to go through skill or equipment lists and try to work out what stuff I'll be aiming to use together.
I agree, but it might be an oversimplification. Kickstarter is simultaneously driven by self interest and group think. People first of all want to get something, your game is free to play, and the pledge levels don't deliver, so that isn't an interest. Secondly people want to be involved in something that will succeed, and as you aren't tracking towards success for reason 1, you aren't tracking towards it due to reason 2.
That's correct. It shouldn't be the same game. You have failed to market the current one to us. Part of the issue, is that you have said "This is the amount of money we need to do everything" not " Here is a good base, we can expand from here"
You have far too many things that are absolutely required to release this game, and I believe it is in part, due to the fact that you have already assembled the team, promised wages and asked for money after the fact, rather than asking "What is a realistic goal, and if we exceed that, who can we hire to take on the extra workload"
We can't have a team you know and trust to be able to do the work, and a team who we hire when we have the money. At the moment, everyone here knows the score, and everyone is here because they want to support either Mech Games or HG. If no-one can get paid even enough to eat, then there will be attrition, sure, but you can't have this both of those ways.
The comment about scaling back to something simpler but clearer is a good one, but people have as much said to us "Not doing it if not singleplayer" which leaves us in the tough spot you're talking about. We can shuffle stuff to fit in the current budget by changing priorities, but fitting the minimum that people want in a lower budget? We'll need to look at it, regardless.
This is I think part of the problem. You guys have a done all this team assembly, market research and asset development, and now that you have had contact with the proverbial enemy, you are too rigidly structured to adapt to it. It is difficult to send home people who are die hard supporters if you were to change your plan. However you tackled this as if you were heading to a publisher to seek funding.
It is old news now, but I have always felt that Stubbs the Zombies development should become the model for practically the entire industry. The team was small, with flexible goals, and anything they were unable to produce was given to a contractor they brought in. Their post mortem is a Good Read
I would appreciate it if you didn't assume anything about my knowledge in this regard.
UE4 is a sought after engine due (in part) to Unreal Script, allowing less technical savvy people to get involved (Like say, a modding team) this was my assumption due to Stompy bot consisting of an ex modding team.
I apologise if I've inferred anything here, but I wasn't making a sudden assumption - you don't appear to know a lot about UE4, that's not an insult to your character, knowledge or intelligence, it just appears to be the case (and is fine, it's unlikely anyone would know anything about it if they hadn't worked with it). UE4 for example is almost entirely C++ with epics own functions on top, there is no Unrealscript at this time. I don't mean any offense by any of this.
I wasn't aware that UnrealScripting was being deprecated for UE4. It is still listed as a feature for UE3. Between US and Kismet I have seen a team of script monkeys produce a decent quality game, and it is this that I assumed was your intention.
The rescoping part will certainly be looked at - as for the Shadowrun examples: this really isn't that comparable with us - There is a big, big difference, of course its easier if you have millions of dollars to cover any shortfalls you have and make up dips in coverage. Shadowrun Online before Shadowrun Returns did its kickstarter is a fairer comparison.
I don't think they have "millions of dollars" to make up for shortfalls.
I will put it like this, Shadowrun Online is what you were trying to do, and they only barely scraped home.
Shadowrun returns would be by far better to emulate, in that they asked for $100,000 less than SO, and raked in 3 times as much money in the end.
Holy crap, I had noticed this myself, but didn't really know how to put it in to words. Contrasting to the language from Harebrained Schemes, which was very self deprecating and thankful, HG does sound somewhat bragging.
Not to mention wrong, over the last couple of years we have had a handful of successful online mech games.
OK, to reasonably respond to this I'll have to step out of the Dev shoes again for a sec..
I do think the spin can get a little thick sometimes, I'm not personally much of a fan. Vote for me to write instead The base of a lot of the stuff I agree with, though. I.. can't.. name.. names.. but they've been disappointing as mech games. Some cases I'd go as far as to say they're not actually mech games and more team action FPS games instead. Nothing wrong with that, but not a mech game. I do know "Someone" might be worried about what this kind of game might do to their market share, but I see our main competition as being "Someone Else" entirely, we're not talking about the same kind of game or gamer in most of these cases.
The spin is very thick, but its not humanizing at all. As far as your layperson sees, this is a AAA games company with its hand out for preorders for something that is free anyways. Shadowrun returns on the other hand, was the former creator of a property, revitalizing it as a game that people wanted to play, years later, with a small dedicated team, and if you like, you can help out and be part of the fun. Its a clear difference. And another reason to lay off, cancel the kickstarter, and come back in 3 months time with a better idea of what to expect.
As for other mech games, the market is suddenly saturated by them. I don't really see much in the way of a call for an "eSports Arena" mech game
Here is another question(s). You may not be able to answer, that's fine.
Are you being paid yet? Is there already money in this project? And if so how much? When the kickstarter finishes(presumably, with the refunding of all backers), will development continue?
I ask because, if you don't want to take advice, you would be better going the MechWarrior Online route, that is to say, taking preorders for premium accounts just before beta, not at the beginning of development.
P.S. I hope your marketing company is no win - no fee
You can run a KS out of the USA even if you're company is from abroad,
but you need a USA shell company, 'office' and bank account and setting this lot up (if you can) takes a lot more time than you imagine
Raging Heroes (the french company I think you're refering to) had been working on their KS plans for 9-12 months when they released the info in Jan 2013,
they expected to be able launch on 4th March 2013, but 'administrative delays' (ie trouble setting up the USA end of things) meant it launched 4th June 2013
so 3 months extra on top of whatever time/effort/waiting they'd put in to that side of things already.
So (i'm speculating here) if MekTek were in a situation where there was no money coming in and funds were running low that might have been time they didn't have
I said rescope. I am not asking you to make the current game for less money. I am telling you to make less game for less money, and if people support you, and if you reach critical mass, people may give you the money to make it how you have it set up now.
People keep asking them to de-scope, but one thing that's being missed is that making an Arena based game may be what they are passionate about - it's what they want to do. There's no guarantee that if you make a 'descoped' game that it will be successful - there's a very good possibility that it may not make back it's development costs, because that's (traditionally) been a tough market. That's why everybody else has gotten out - it's just not profitable. And further, there's no guarantee that any good-will from the first game will translate to the second game - you could legitimately claim they don't know how to to FPS, they only made a strategy game! Etc, etc.
I'm happy for SB to make a Arena FPS - it's not something that would capture my interest for an extended period of time, but I played WoT for a couple of months, so they'd get that from me at least. Sure, they would be competing with MWO - but the play styles would be different enough they might be able to co-exist.
Ah well, it's a moot point. They aren't going to hit their KS, so I suppose I just get to wait for Titanfall.
That's a good point, IceRaptor, but crowdfunding isn't all that different from pitching to studios: if what you want isn't close enough to what the backers want, then you're going to have difficulty securing funding, no matter who those backers are.
I second the talk about backer swag: make it really meaningful and permanent. I'd personally advise against too many physical goods, since they can easily eat up funds that would've been much better-spent on development.
I said rescope. I am not asking you to make the current game for less money. I am telling you to make less game for less money, and if people support you, and if you reach critical mass, people may give you the money to make it how you have it set up now.
People keep asking them to de-scope, but one thing that's being missed is that making an Arena based game may be what they are passionate about - it's what they want to do. There's no guarantee that if you make a 'descoped' game that it will be successful - there's a very good possibility that it may not make back it's development costs, because that's (traditionally) been a tough market. That's why everybody else has gotten out - it's just not profitable. And further, there's no guarantee that any good-will from the first game will translate to the second game - you could legitimately claim they don't know how to to FPS, they only made a strategy game! Etc, etc.
I'm happy for SB to make a Arena FPS - it's not something that would capture my interest for an extended period of time, but I played WoT for a couple of months, so they'd get that from me at least. Sure, they would be competing with MWO - but the play styles would be different enough they might be able to co-exist.
Ah well, it's a moot point. They aren't going to hit their KS, so I suppose I just get to wait for Titanfall.
Titanfall... AKA Heavy Gear by a different IP.
Well if they are passionate about this game, they should make it. Crowdfunding has not been successful. So the other option they have is traditional funding. If they cannot get that, and they are unwilling to rescope for crowd funding, no game gets made at all.
Well, I've pulled my pledge as a vote of no-confidence.
Agonarch, I appreciate you coming to the boards. I really REALLY hope you guys listen to the feedback that people have been giving you all. Go back to the drawing boards, maybe rein in your ambitions a bit, create a nice, streamlined, organized, and coherent vision, demonstrate that you've got the leadership to make it happen, offer fans a game that they really want, and we'll see if we can't make it work next time.
I'll be clear: I WANT A GOOD HEAVY GEAR COMPUTER GAME AND WILL GIVE YOU MONEY TO HELP MAKE IT HAPPEN.
The writing's been on the wall for a loooong time. I wonder if today was just the final punctuation; it looks like quite a few others had the same thought as me:
HG: Give us money, without any assurances.
Fans: What about Kickstarter
HG: We don't need Kickstarter, this is a "Soft Launch"
Fans: No money then.
HG: Kickstarter!
Fans: What about (Laundry list of reasons this Kickstarter will fail)
HG: We haven't had enough exposure
Fans: No, Really.
HG: We are a single player game now.
Fans: That's nice, but what about the people who pledged on your website, also, it still sounds like a F2P game, just with missions you do alone. That's not what we want. Why don't you go away and come back when you have something we want.
HG: The real issue is that you don't understand, our F2P system is different from all those other games, in that it is exactly the same.
Fans: *crickets*
HG: This Kickstarter isn't over until the end, anything can happen.
HG: Kickstarter is cancelled.
What to take away: If you haven't already, fire your marketing department/company, stop acting like you are EA and don't need our money, and come back when you are ready for crowdsourcing.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
Gearhead wrote: The writing's been on the wall for a loooong time. I wonder if today was just the final punctuation; it looks like quite a few others had the same thought as me:
Holy crap gearhead, I think you may have been the last straw.
Your comment on the kickstarter is not only 100% correct, but was the last one they had for a day or so, and 2 hours later they cancelled it.
Gearhead wrote:
Hello everyone. I'm sorry, but I'm retracting my pledge. I know the project won't hit it's goal, but I'm doing this as a vote of no-confidence.
Here are my feelings on the matter: Heavy Gear is pure awesome, and I really REALLY want to see another computer game for it. The fact that StompyBot and MekTek want to do one is good, but this is a very bumpy start, and I honestly think that they need to pull back and overhaul the project. For the love of Pete, LISTEN to what fans are telling you: This is too big, too ambitious, and so far, too vague. Start smaller, and do something based more on what people tell you they want to play, and not quite as much on what you want to make; whether it's a big publishing corporation or a gaggle of fans, you're going to have to make changes and compromises to please them in order to get funding.
PLEASE, learn from this experience. You want to make a Heavy Gear game, I want to play one (oh, how I want to play one!!) but this isn't it, and so far the team hasn't demonstrated to my satisfaction that they're ready to make it happen yet. Yes, there is experience and talent, but I'm not seeing a good, solid, unified and planned-out vision yet.
2 Hours Later HG Kickstarter wrote:
@Everyone: Thank you for your dedicated support. We appreciate and highly value everyone's opinions here which is why we have decided to cancel this KS campaign and continue crowd funding on heavygear.com. We believe very strongly in resurrecting the Heavy Gear franchise and giving the fans what they want. We are currently evaluating other strategies to raise awareness regarding Heavy Gear and looking at multiple means to get the Heavy Gear name out there. Thank you for your support everyone and stay tuned.
The "Continue funding on HeavyGear.com" part is the most worrying thing. That needed to be cancelled and refunded more than the Kickstarter.
Alright, now that this is done, let's get to the actual content.
Anybody could see this KS would be a failure after the first couple of days, yet the team decided to soldier on until the last week. Interestingly enough, despite such a visible failure, the official word hasn't changed, it's still "only a matter of communication". If anything they're downplaying the importance of the KS and (at least officially) this isn't going to affect release. Seriously ? Why even bother with such a campaign, then ?
In the interest of fairness, I have to give the team that one bit. There are issues with the communication.
Not only has too little been posted, but what little has been posted, as more often than not, increased doubt about the project and its management. For a project that's been supposedly in the works since at least late 2012, the repeated statements about changing course at any time based on fan feedback is ominous to say the least. There is a big, crucial difference between being able to change course when needed, and looking like you haven't set the course yet. Everything so far seems to be pointing to the later, which is a sure way to scare away would-be investors and backers !
P.S : GBL's summary of the project so far, while not complete, feels painfully accurate.
Holy crap gearhead, I think you may have been the last straw.
I wondered about that. They had already lost a couple hundred dollars before I pulled out (I didn't think to look at Kicktraq until afterwards) and then they lost more after that, but I was the only one to announce it and say why. Maybe the cancellation was to stop a potential flood of other backers doing the same, which would've looked even worse.
The "Continue funding on HeavyGear.com" part is the most worrying thing. That needed to be cancelled and refunded more than the Kickstarter.
Very much so!!
Agonarch, I hope you're still keeping a eye on the thread, because there's one more thing I want your team to understand: if this project fails, it will be YOUR guys' fault. Not the fans and backers, not poor communication or weak support, or an inexplicable lack of buzz being created by a legion of dedicated people like BrandonKF spreading the Gospels of Stompy Bot and MekTek, or market saturation, or competition or anything of the sort. YOURS. A good team with a good project, good leadship, good vision, a good demonstration of technical and creative knowhow, a good understanding of how do work with fans and backers, and a good record of creating on-time and in-budget will (I say again, WILL) generate all the interest, buzz, support, communication, and backing that you need.
It's all on you guys, and once again, I really hope you go make it work.
Automatically Appended Next Post:
NoseGoblin wrote: Well, if you guys ever want to make a game with my big stompies in it... just let me know
Screw that, the universe would probably collapse under all the awesome!
Alright, now that this is done, let's get to the actual content.
Anybody could see this KS would be a failure after the first couple of days, yet the team decided to soldier on until the last week. Interestingly enough, despite such a visible failure, the official word hasn't changed, it's still "only a matter of communication". If anything they're downplaying the importance of the KS and (at least officially) this isn't going to affect release. Seriously ? Why even bother with such a campaign, then ?
Once again they are acting as if they don't need our money. Apparently they are as big as EA and don't even need crowdfunding. Its more pre packaged marketing BS. I actually think they will be back, but if they communicate like this again, it will fail again.
Gearhead wrote:
Agonarch, I hope you're still keeping a eye on the thread, because there's one more thing I want your team to understand: if this project fails, it will be YOUR guys' fault. Not the fans and backers, not poor communication or weak support, or an inexplicable lack of buzz being created by a legion of dedicated people like BrandonKF spreading the Gospels of Stompy Bot and MekTek, or market saturation, or competition or anything of the sort. YOURS. A good team with a good project, good leadship, good vision, a good demonstration of technical and creative knowhow, a good understanding of how do work with fans and backers, and a good record of creating on-time and in-budget will (I say again, WILL) generate all the interest, buzz, support, communication, and backing that you need.
It's all on you guys, and once again, I really hope you go make it work.
If thy deliver, once, they wont have this issue with crowdfunding again.
I still think the idea that Agonarch floated, the hiring of an external marketing company, is most likely the problem with their communication
GBL wrote: I actually think they will be back, but if they communicate like this again, it will fail again.
I hope more than anything else they understand this - more than anything else they've had a complete breakdown of marketing. They really need to think long and hard about how to position themselves, and find a marketing team that can make sure their 'new ideas' - their passion - comes through, instead of the amateur hour that was shown in this KS campaign (and before).
GBL wrote: I actually think they will be back, but if they communicate like this again, it will fail again.
I hope more than anything else they understand this - more than anything else they've had a complete breakdown of marketing. They really need to think long and hard about how to position themselves, and find a marketing team that can make sure their 'new ideas' - their passion - comes through, instead of the amateur hour that was shown in this KS campaign (and before).
Or perhaps realize that their vision doesn't actually match what the market wants and (most importantly) is willing to pay. The inability to sell me a prosthetic tail isn't a failure of marketing... no amount of marketing, catchy jingles, or celebrity spokespeople will make me want to buy a prosthetic tail right now let alone pay for one in advance.
I wondered about that. They had already lost a couple hundred dollars before I pulled out (I didn't think to look at Kicktraq until afterwards) and then they lost more after that, but I was the only one to announce it and say why. Maybe the cancellation was to stop a potential flood of other backers doing the same, which would've looked even worse.
No, don't worry - it's been a decision that's been a little while coming (it started when updates halted), don't feel responsible in any way. As for the money in and out, we had a surprising amount of movement in and out over the course of this kickstarter - quite a lot of people pledged and cancelled every day, trending up very slowly. The decision was made that releasing further information wasn't going to be worth it - it wouldn't affect the final spike as much as we'd have needed to reach the goal, so it's probably a better idea to polish it more and show it when it's ready. For my perspective I don't completely agree with this angle, I would've liked to at least release the gearbay walkaround video so people could see that the videos we're showing aren't just cinematics - complain at me if you like to give me ammo to get it shown
Agonarch, I hope you're still keeping a eye on the thread, because there's one more thing I want your team to understand: if this project fails, it will be YOUR guys' fault. Not the fans and backers, not poor communication or weak support, or an inexplicable lack of buzz being created by a legion of dedicated people like BrandonKF spreading the Gospels of Stompy Bot and MekTek, or market saturation, or competition or anything of the sort. YOURS. A good team with a good project, good leadship, good vision, a good demonstration of technical and creative knowhow, a good understanding of how do work with fans and backers, and a good record of creating on-time and in-budget will (I say again, WILL) generate all the interest, buzz, support, communication, and backing that you need.
I clearly am, I'm enjoying this thread - you guys have been nothing but honest with your opinions to me and I truly appreciate that. I need to argue with some of this statement, though. Firstly, if it fails it's mostly our fault, sure - but the fans do have a big influence on this - you can be for it or against it, but whichever you are does matter, other people will read your opinion and use it to make their own, so make certain you're happy with it before you say it. I am (obviously) one of the ones who want to have a lot of fan interaction (I think it's a plus for both me and you guys - tell me if I'm wrong). I was one of the ones pushing hard for more information releases, but I couldn't justify it (we just didn't have the numbers to make any difference at that point) which I regret. As for the last part about a good project with the right team - it's just wrong - I can think of Fallout 3 (Van Buren) and Baldurs Gate 3 that didn't get released off the top of my head, and Arcanum and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines which released but didn't get the interest, support or buzz they deserved (making the company bankrupt). The poor communication I was talking about was from us, not from fans, to clear that up. Fans have been great in my experience with this (sometimes mean, but so far not unreasonably mean. If they're justifiably mean then that's more my fault than it is theirs in my opinion, anyway).
It's all on you guys, and once again, I really hope you go make it work.
I debate "all", but I can say for sure that I've done everything I could think of at the time to help, at least. If we make this then we can extend it into a much larger game and even do other HG games, if not then it's likely that the HG people like me will leave and Mektek goes back to MechWarrior (which is OK, but I'm really not that interested in MW). It's too soon to be calling it dead or doom and gloom at this point - this is far from ideal, sure, and I'd have liked it to go differently, but hey, at least we got some information out to you guys and a ton of information from you guys, we've shed a marketing team before (hopefully) they did too much damage - it's a start. Once we've shown playable demos to VCs there should be a bunch more info for you guys.
HudsonD wrote:Anybody could see this KS would be a failure after the first couple of days, yet the team decided to soldier on until the last week. Interestingly enough, despite such a visible failure, the official word hasn't changed, it's still "only a matter of communication". If anything they're downplaying the importance of the KS and (at least officially) this isn't going to affect release. Seriously ? Why even bother with such a campaign, then ?
At the moment, this isn't the final option, but it certainly will have an affect (it's not good for morale, at the very least). It was a nice option, and I personally would've preferred to focus much more heavily on this as an option (I'd like to come back with a wiki for all the detail stuff that people can check if they're interested and relaunch - let people start planning and minmaxing their builds in advance of alpha), but that's only my opinion. Our position for showings to VCs are certainly stronger for having held stuff back, and this isn't my area of expertise, so I have to defer to experience. Time will soon tell if this approach was correct or a mistake. At least you've got front row seats to whatever happens, I'll keep you informed as best I can for as long as I can.
GBL wrote:Once again they are acting as if they don't need our money. Apparently they are as big as EA and don't even need crowdfunding. Its more pre packaged marketing BS. I actually think they will be back, but if they communicate like this again, it will fail again.
You know my opinion on this - I agree. On the plus side, if we do come back to kickstarter it'll be because we didn't get the funding we needed elsewhere, and by then there'll be nothing to lose by going all in and doing kickstarter properly. From my perspective this is actually a fairly good position right now - either we get funding there or we get to finally lay our cards on the table, both of which are good things.
Thanks for all of your guys time and thoughts, I'll be checking in here as often as I can but we're pretty busy just at the moment so I'm likely to be intermittently here again. I noticed a PM when I got here which I'd missed, when I check this thread I'm often not logged in, so if you PM me it might take longer than posting. Still, PM if you think a PM is more appropriate, I'll get to it as soon as I can.
The "Continue funding on HeavyGear.com" part is the most worrying thing. That needed to be cancelled and refunded more than the Kickstarter.
Very much so!!
What? Why? The project hasn't been cancelled. If it's cancelled then sure, but until then, why?
Look at it this way.
You took peoples money once, for one product.
The community seems to feel that you need to change your angle to produce a game with crowdfunding.
If you do change, and keep peoples money, who you promised a different product to, that is immoral at best, or (at least in Australia) completely illegal.
So as you can see, the best we can view the money already raised, is as a massive anchor to the projects potential. To be above board you either have to make the game they paid for, without modification, or refund all their money.
Agonarch wrote: I can think of Fallout 3 (Van Buren) and Baldurs Gate 3 that didn't get released off the top of my head, and Arcanum and Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines which released but didn't get the interest, support or buzz they deserved (making the company bankrupt).
True, but I was talking about crowdfunding to get them started in the first place, which is a completeld different (and new) beast.
Right GBL, I see what you're saying now. At the moment we're still not planning to cut things out from what we've already promised on the website and kickstarter, but if that changes and the product we're intending to make is different then absolutely, that'll need to change (people will at least need to be contacted and offered refunds, if it were to come to that). At the moment, we're not at the point where it's that dire.
Gearhead wrote: True, but I was talking about crowdfunding to get them started in the first place, which is a completeld different (and new) beast.
Righto, misunderstood, I can think of the Dizzy game, the Ecco game, the Pitfall game, the Road Rash reboot and The Guild (a promising looking adventure game, and the only original IP in that lot - came to mind when I thought that adventure games seem to do well on kickstarter), Hero (Project Awakened). The problem with kickstarter from that perspective is that games that failed because I people didn't hear about them I probably still don't know about.
I'm not trying to excuse our failure here, I'm merely giving you some examples so you can see it's not so simple as you're suggesting. Luck and media coverage still play a big role.
Wow.. a bit of a development in the 4-8m tall robot video game genre today. Apparently, Warmachine's video game that was shown off a few years ago at E3 and then largely forgotten about has had some similar problems getting funded via the traditional publisher route and have opted to go a different route both in terms of the scope of the game as well as the source of funding. I am curious to see how successful the approach (turn based strategy ala xcom) that I've been advocating since HGA was first shown.
Soon, we will launch a Kickstarter campaign with the hope of raising the capital necessary to fund development of WARMACHINE: Tactics, a turn-based, squad-level strategy game for PC and Mac. WARMACHINE: Tactics will include a single-player campaign as well as synchronous and asynchronous online multi-player play. The game, which will be expanded with downloadable content over time, will ship with two playable factions in multi-player to start—Cygnar and Khador—but our first stretch goal will allow us to also include Cryx and The Protectorate at the game’s launch.
Obviously WM is a more popular tabletop game currently by far (it's the #2 one out there according to ICV) but HG has the benefit of fans from the actual video game side due to two previous successful video games that WM doesn't. It'll be interesting to see the differences between these two similar kickstarters in how they're run, the content types they show, and the funds raised in the end. I'd much rather have a HG turn based squad level strategy game as I'm not a fan of the steampunk look of warmachine overall.
Holy crap, that was eye-opening. It seems that Agonarch is pretty much the only guy that hasn't got his head lodged firmly up his backside.
I'm done with those clowns. Anyone with an ounce of sense would know better than to cop that kind of attitude with people who are trying to give you honest feedback. Someone said earlier that they were acting like they didn't need people's money, and here's one of their staff straight-up TELLING someone that they didn't need their money!
Posted 12 July 2013 - 03:51 PM Quote
Can't speak for other people, but I've personally supported Robotech w/$170, the Least I Could Do series pilot with $500, and a boardgame for $40.
Admin: It's your money, don't play the blame game with me when it's your decision where you spend it.
Saying you're funding other projects doesn't help us, and in the spirit of the 'HGA discussion' is a completely off-topic post. Alot of people might or might not chip in, you being one of them. Or have I missed the point of your excuse?
Or should I have said "OMG, your own money? *gasp*"
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And despite your bitter comments, I might yet pay for Heavy Gear. The jury's still out on that one.
Admin: I am certain I can't scare off a whole crowd of people, since it's called crowdfunding, and not taking these ultimatums from "i might chip in $5 but i'm skeptical and your tone makes me want this game less and less" whistleblowers. You're here for the game, not discussing creative processes included behind the game.
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I also loaned $5000 of my own money on the side to a KS project, just because I liked their attitude
Admin: What I see in this post here is "I can't give $5 or $$$ because you're not being friendly to me and i'm funding alot of other KSs on my student budget, but if we become friends and I get to like your posting attitude instead of your quality programming and making sure everything is up to certain standard I might drop a bucketload of cash" then... I do not know what to tell you, other than what I already said. It's your money. Stop flailing it around, noone will die over that sum, and it won't make an imminent change so why give yourself weight of someone who is deciding to drop $0.5mil into the project. Oh, my bad - loan that money to the project.
And having said that, I will heed the wisest advice I have at this moment - "Developers don't talk to communities, community managers talk to communities". The more you say my honesty is hurting the project, the less of it will appear up on here, it's that simple. I can't risk my posts to get in the way and invalidate months of work. I want this game to succeed. It's my chance at a better life, so to speak.
"Thank you, quite alot, really." to everybody that donated, "I knew it" to everybody that said they will, but didn't, "Can't blame you" for those that do not want to, or changed their minds.
Yeah, I'm done. I want a Heavy Gear PC game really bad, but all indicators say that StompyBot hasn't got the acumen to publish it, and MekTek sure as hell isn't the crew to do it. These guys just don't get it at all, and all they do is whine and blame and tell us that we don't get it.
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