“Sierra… well, it was the poor victim of a hostile takeover by criminals”

> In Mass Effect you save the entire galaxy from robots, at the cost of forever losing the ability for FTL travel (and stranding a lot of people where they are in the galaxy).

There are different ways you can save the galaxy (you can also fail to do that, and the world goes on, organic life gets reset). You can just destroy the robots, along with all other artificial life forms - some of them are those for whose right to live you just fought (if you choose so). You can resolve the issue by performing what amounts to a galactic-scale rape, changing everyone without their consent. Or you can risk becoming the very force you tried to destroy, hoping that you have enough morality in yourself to not go dark yourself.

I spent something around 20 minutes just sitting there and thinking those choices through. Which one is the right thing to do?

I think they did a good job of taking the "save the world" trope and turning it into a huge moral conundrum for the player.

How much of that is a product of circular reasoning, though? What is a "AAA game"? Is Civ 5? Are the games in the Total War series? Is this a case where, because of perception, in order to be considered AAA a game needs to reach for the "cinematic"?

A lot do, but then you have to think about what it means to be a AAA game. Basically, what is it that causes a game to require a huge budget?

A huge budget is generally due to a lot of assets. A lot of assets is generally very high detail models and cinematics, the tools to tell a story.

The other thing is technology, things like creating an MMORPG is technologically expensive. But look at your average MMO and note how they generally lack on the story side of things.

Gameplay on its own is pretty lean. You can't put a team of 100 designers together and get a great game in 1% of the time, but you can do something (with good direction) somewhat similar with artists. You can have one guy doing the rocks, and one guy doing the hair, and a few guys doing architectural stuff, and some people doing monsters, and they can all fit together.

With gameplay though, it's too much the essence of the game to be split across too many roles and still work well.

So you look at something like The Order: 1886, and you complain about how cut down it is because it's so expensive to make. But think about what that game is. It's a game to sell PS4s essentially. Each new generation of console gives access to great new graphics and performance. But when you have the ability to render the movement on the hairs on your characters arms, you have to hire someone to put hairs on peoples arms and make sure they act correctly in the wind.

You can certainly make games with lower detail, but then what is the point of the new generation of console? This is why I think the majority of games out there for the next gen consoles are either cross-releases with current gen consoles with some moderate performance or upscaling, or they are pretty but underwhelming.

The best stage to be creative is in the small teams of the 80s, and the more recent indie resurgence. When you employ a battalion of creative people to make your game, you absolutely need to sell it. You can't take a risk. And not only do you have to sell it, you have to sell big.

On the other hand, if you're a team of 4 people, sure you don't want to go broke, but you can afford to make something that you think might be niche. The especially cool part about that is that sometimes these teams discover something that we never knew we always wanted. Take minecraft, little hobby project that can be done only because it's a little hobby project, but ends up earning millions and being sold for billions.

And now it's on the PS4 too.

The problem isn't the game industry. It's the AAA game industry and the pressure to sell consoles with more power than people need to play a fun game. The more detailed the games are, the more expensive they are to make. The more expensive they are to make, the less risks they can take creatively.

This (and the internet) is the reason the Indie scene is pretty forefront right now.

I personally liked Act 1 (even if the puzzles were a tad simple) and I'm really looking forward to the Act 2.

Now, I personally see backing on Kickstarter as Patronage. I'm giving money to artists because I like what they've done in the past or because I think that they should do well but I'm not looking on a return of investment. For me, I'm giving money in order to support arts that I like and in the hope that more of the kind of arts that I like is produced but I fully acknowledge the risks and the fact that I'm paying a lot more as a backer than if I just waited to pick up the game on sale a few month later.

When they got ten times as much funding, it came along with hundred times larger expectations which caused the scope to grow a hundredfold equivalently. Tim's fear to meet those expectations caused him to make the game he wanted and knew people expected instead of the one he pitched. Scope grew to include hand-painted art, professional voice overs, orchestral music score, and a much larger team for a longer time so they could make a longer, more polished game. On the first few documentary episodes their struggle to match perceived expectations with the actual budget is clear, and the wishful thinking on estimates and plans also clear in hindsight.

All this because it turns out that, after all, $3M is not a large budget for a triple-A game, specially when you remove kickstarter and amazon's processing fees, rewards costs and shipping, and the costs of the documentary. Consider a team of developers, designers, artists and animators that are needed to build such game, each costing a conservative estimate of US$100k+/year to the company, then add all external assets and services. The burn rate is big for a project on that scope.

All in all, I'm fairly happy on how it turned out so far, and looking forward to part 2. I back independent games on Kickstarter to encourage the shift on the stagnant producer-driven market and don't treat it as a pre-order. Broken Age turned out to be one of the better ones I got (Book of Unwritten Tales 2, Wasteland 2 and Shadowrun Returns were the best ones, Takedown was probably the worst, glad I skipped on Clang).

In fact, I think the documentary alone is worth the $30 I dropped in the pledge. If you haven't seen it, it's available for purchase for $10 and they started releasing episodes publicly for free recently: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIhLvue17Sd7F6pU2ByRR...

If software development or game design are things that interest you, go see it now, it's very good.

A lot of Kickstarter video game projects have failed to deliver on time, but they were also extremely aggressive in terms of time and money (even if they didn't say so). You cannot make a game today for $500,000 without cutting corners (such as salaries). Even the "massive" amount of money that Broken Age raised would only cover 30 people's salaries for a year. AAA games today have hundreds of people on the payroll, with development cycles of 3-5 years.

I'm not mad that they were over-eager and more than a little naive. A lot of these projects were from people who hadn't made a game since 1998. Game designers like Tim Schafer (and Jane Jensen, Charles Cecil, Aaron Conners and Chris Jones, Al Lowe, Ron Gilbert, Lori and Corey Cole, Ragnar Tornquist and others) should be able to work on what they excel at: making (adventure) games. With some exceptions, they weren't able to do so for more than a decade. It would be nice if all of the games from these projects were released (and were good), but I don't feel any sense of outrage if it doesn't work out that way.

Imagine if creating a painting cost $1 million, and Picasso had spent the last fifteen years of his life twiddling his thumbs instead of pursuing his art. Or better yet, look at Orson Welles's late career, where he could barely get anything produced. If only someone had just handed him a blank check, how many more Citizen Kanes could have been made (or Touches of Evil for that matter)?

There's a lot of outrage when a publisher interferes with an anticipated game, by rushing it to market broken or changing the creative direction or outright canceling it. Kickstarter backers have shown themselves to not have a whole lot more patience, although at least they don't wield as much power. I presume that we've seen the end of adventure games on Kickstarter, given all the bad blood. That's too bad.

Creative endeavors are notoriously difficult to budget and plan and bring in on a deadline, and even more so when it's on the cheap -- in short, shit happens.