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Feeling pretty meh about the update overall, it didn't help that we've already seen most of those minis (and that's pretty much all I care about from this nowadays), plus the whole tone of the thing (to me anyways) seemed to be 'You're getting all this extra for free, so shut up about how long it's taking.'

Also, between the suspiciously generic, un-Kingdom Death-like original Crimson Crocodile sculpt, and Poots almost "forgetting" he's releasing the Sodapop crossover figure (Something that looks like it's already garnering him a ton of goodwill), I'm just feeling massively cynical about the whole thing now.

Maybe it's time for me to just ignore the whole thing until stuff starts arriving in a few years?

And then imagine it arrives and you are hit by customs, lol

Really? most feel new to me, I may not given as much attention as it was needed.

 PsychoticStorm wrote:
Really? most feel new to me, I may not given as much attention as it was needed.

Yep, apart from the part sculpted armour sets and the plastic showdown board we saw all these minis in the July 2019 update.

Which kinda highlights the glacial pace at which this Kickstarter moves.

Had we seen full shots of the new intimacy couples and the people of the sun plastics?

That silk assassin looking model on the showdown board was new.

We got a lot of sprue shots too.

There was a ton of artwork shown off as well.

Plus the ever continuing drip of info and hints of what's to come.

Don't forget that he said there's a chance the pinups will ship out sooner than Wave 3 as well!

They were sculpted but I don't think we ever saw sprues or at least complete sprues.

I think i'd rather just get a refund at this point.

Anyone remember what the estimated delivery was before this most recent delay? Early 2021 is what I was expecting anyway, I could have sworn we were told in August last year that development alone was going to take another 12-18 months, let alone production and quality control.

So that was a pleasant surprise for me, provided it comes to pass. Not overly pleased that he's umming and ahing about adding another monster to CoD, should really just save the Devilweed Slenderman for a white box like the Gigalion and apparently upcoming Nukalope.

Seeing that owl is a bit aggravating though. Between messing around with creatures for post-Kickstarter content, going to the trouble of re-opening the store in the middle of a pandemic for one miniature when he says they don't need the money, fething around with the King's Coin, and then turning around and saying that he's two months behind where he thought he'd be by this stage of the lockdown, it's getting tedious. Hard to take any sort of apology for poor time management seriously when it's unapologetically followed up by examples of what he has been poorly managing his time to work on. I get the need to be constantly working on different things, but maybe keep quiet about them until you've made tangible progress on fulfilling what people paid for?

I'm, uh, pretty cranky at the moment. The amount to which this is showing off what normally is just a given (yeah, they need to print and test the sprues that we've seen: this isn't news) really indicated to me how slowly things have moved. There was almost no new content in this bland, defensive, nearly self-pitying announcement.

But at least there'll be sacred backer time posts coming soon, yay?

Are refunds an option at all? Might as well ask for money back that was pledged for the adventure book and the Hyper Light Drifter mini, which as far as I can tell and remember hasn't been shown off or mentioned since it was added to the campaign years ago.

 spiralingcadaver wrote:
I'm, uh, pretty cranky at the moment. The amount to which this is showing off what normally is just a given (yeah, they need to print and test the sprues that we've seen: this isn't news) really indicated to me how slowly things have moved. There was almost no new content in this bland, defensive, nearly self-pitying announcement.

It's pretty understandable. I'm one to realize it could take quite a while for Poots to release this but useally when he has some delay there's lots of stuff to show why.

Outside of COVID, which is understandable, most of this was just defensive and not really much as too why he seams to have done very little in 6 months.

As has been mentioned in the past, this is a project that would greatly benefit from a creative director.

Personally I am on the "when it is done" camp, had the same mentality on the previous KS.

I would be a lot more sanguine if I knew what the eventual shipping costs would look like. Somehow, I expect to get it in the shorts.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Somehow, I expect to get it in the shorts.

Isn't that... appropriate for a KD project?

Ha!

Imagine what the costs would have been if it was close to on time - only a little late? - compared to what it is going to be when it is done and actually shipping - sometime in 2022 or beyond...

I'm just glad that Poots hasn't caught the virus. Although he has a team, including his wife, a risk of KS that isn't often mentioned is that many projects are a "one man show".

The due diligence with KDM is that "it's ready when it's ready". Doesn't hurt that I only pledged for the base game and Gambler's Chest, and the base game (and in-print expansions?) have already been delivered.

Wave 4? We may actually have CoVid behind us by then...!

Nothing unexpected in that update, at least to anyone who pledged in or researched the first kickstarter they ran. Fully expect it to take another 2-3 years to finish.

Someone on Board Game Geek made a good point about wave 4 probably coming a lot faster than the wait for wave 3 has been.
Everything new is being set up with wave 3, whereas wave 4 is just more stuff that already builds on that.
The Gambler's Chest and the Campaigns are where we're first going to see all the new encounters and advanced stuff. It's building the foundation for wave 4's expansions for the most part.
Wave 4 is more about changing up the variety of how those things operate.

Not sure why the onus is being put squarely on the shoulders of backers to have seen this running incredibly late, and not on the people actually making it for not learning from the past experience to do better?

The estimated completion date for the original was 10 months, and it became 3 years. That it ended up being late is no surprise, because 10 months was just an impossibly small amount of time for a project of that size, even if things run perfectly. That it blew out to 3.6 times longer is acceptable only for the fact that it was a first time Kickstarter.

Anyone doing their research back in 2016 could fairly assume that the 3 year estimated delivery for this campaign was based on the creator now having a better understanding of practical game development. Delays are forgivable, that absolutely goes without saying, but there's a caveat attached that the delays really ought to be primarily unforeseen circumstances, and largely not self-inflicted via questionable work ethic and prioritization.

Anyone who backed this project despite expecting it to take 6-7 years is exceedingly generous with an admirable sense of lenience, but I don't believe that's the standard all backers should be held to.

Yeah, I find the caveat emptor claims really counterproductive: I think it encourages this frankly irresponsible behavior (what about doing what you said you would, polishing it, and delivering it roughly on time, instead of adding a bunch of stuff that wasn't promised?). This is hardly the first time I've seen it, but it still gets so tiring to see irresponsible game designers' egos stroked by their cult.

 highlord tamburlaine wrote:
Someone on Board Game Geek made a good point about wave 4 probably coming a lot faster than the wait for wave 3 has been.
Everything new is being set up with wave 3, whereas wave 4 is just more stuff that already builds on that.
The Gambler's Chest and the Campaigns are where we're first going to see all the new encounters and advanced stuff. It's building the foundation for wave 4's expansions for the most part.
Wave 4 is more about changing up the variety of how those things operate.

Faster than some might expect, but perhaps not for that reason. We know that some Wave 4 expansions are already "done" (Black Knight and Screaming God both had functional demos a while ago), and I have to believe they aren't the only ones that were being worked on. But I don't think Gambler's Chest and Campaigns of Death coming first means all that much, because they were both fairly light on development initially, with CoD being just a book and Gambler's Chest being a collection of additional gameplay and extra rules that weren't enough to be a full expansion. They underwent massive scale creep since then, and if that had any effect on the Wave 4 expansions, it'd be altering the plans for those too and making them take longer. Given that they're both expansions now, being entirely optional, I can't see them being inherently linked with any Wave 4 content beyond compatibility matters, especially since they've not been declared essential for anything else the way we know some Wave 4 expansions are with each other. That back-and-forth of concurrent development is going to be nasty.

Yeah, it's entirely possible that changes cascade and affect what was previously in good shape, as just as likely as it is that it facilitates things.

Given Poots' working style, it seems far more likely that he won't be able to stop himself and will change something that was previously tagged as complete.

Once more: this project needs a real manager.

Does it though? managers, in general, rarely manage to do anything right and are usually unable to connect to the core of a product and deliver something the customer really wants.

Ok they may hit deadlines and deliver a dead husk as it has been shown many times in the CG industry.

To answer your question above though, yes, I think the average backer behavior does not make the project deliver faster, but I also think the average backer backed it with the expectation of a few years delay in delivery before the campaign ended.

I am not sure we encourage the delays, more we expected them and it has not, yet, passed the, internally expected, delay most of us expected.

Irresponsible from us? maybe.

Even with a manager since the creative force is the owner of the business it is unlikely it would do much good,

The fans certainly aren't helping matters.

There's a pretty big chunk of the fanbase who seem to take a weird sort of pride in Poots inability to meet the basic standards other Kickstarters are held to, batting away any criticism with a 'Poots is gonna Poots' and waffling on about how his artistic vision cannot be compromised, like he's creating some culturally significant masterpiece and not a decent boardgame with snazzy minis.

While I doubt any amount of backlash would have an impact at this point (Not only is it a bit too late, Poots also seems to be believing his own hype nowadays), had the fanbase been a bit more critical and not always trying to suck up to him, maybe he would've been less willing to spend years tinkering with things.

None of us here that backed the first KSer expected him to be on time and did use "Poots is going to be Poots" many times. I'm one of them and still fine with saying that when he actually gives, in my opinion, valid reasons for the delay that also usually benefit us with more stuff for free like most of the 2019 updates. Lots of things shown off, lots of progress, talk about throwing away the progress and what's new.

While this update had some of that it was very anemic for his past ones and makes you wonder what side projects he's working on in secret (like the videogame) as it really seams like not much has been done in 6 months outside of stuff on the factory side.

Aku-chan, yeah, summed up nicely. Also, FWIW, what seems like only an escalation of believing his own hype, as you put it, makes me pretty reluctant to approach a third KS :/

 Tim the Biovore wrote:
Not sure why the onus is being put squarely on the shoulders of backers to have seen this running incredibly late, and not on the people actually making it for not learning from the past experience to do better?

It's been my experience that, if a project funds, it's business as usual, with Palladium and Gamezone (and some saying Mythic and CMON) being poster children.

EDIT: fwiw, I guess you could also say that Fred Henry of Monolith changed how he was selling the Conan IP after the Beyond the Monolith KS failed. I guess CMON learned their mistake with charging higher "actual" shipping costs unannounced during their Bloodborne KS when backers failed to fund the subsequent Trudvang KS campaign after the EB's were gone (?).

 aku-chan wrote:
There's a pretty big chunk of the fanbase who seem to take a weird sort of pride in Poots inability to meet the basic standards other Kickstarters are held to, batting away any criticism with a 'Poots is gonna Poots' and waffling on about how his artistic vision cannot be compromised, like he's creating some culturally significant masterpiece and not a decent boardgame with snazzy minis.

If this were just another boutique miniatures KS or boardgame, I would have skipped it. While I'd play KDM ahead of other campaign dungeoncrawlers (because of the settlement), I really like Gloomhaven and don't need another campaign boardgame.

Well, we have an update from Poots regarding "Wave 3" fulfillment.

Pinup Collections 1-5 are finished and waiting to board a cargo freight to make their big trip across the ocean. I have been warned that this year is going to be the most insane year for logistics our planet has ever seen. I don't know what that means or how it might effect us yet. But consider yourselves also warned.

Work still continues on Campaigns of Death and Wave 4 stuff.