AKA, Shut up and take my money! inXile Entertainment, the makers of Wasteland 2, launched their Kickstarter on Wednesday for the spiritual successor to Planescape: Torment, set in Monty Cook’s Numenera world. (No, it doesn’t involve the same characters.) This time, rather than, “What can change the nature of a man?” you examine “What does one life matter?” Chris Avellone, the lead designer of Planescape: Torment, put up a highly encouraging video on YouTube (linked at the above Kickstarter page), and they have a great crew.
People threw money at them, they hit their $900K goal in 6 hours, set a Kickstarter speed record for making $1 mil, and are over $2 mil now, with 4 stretch goals achieved. Oh, and they’re pledging 5% of post-release profit to fund other people’s Kickstarters as part of the Kicking It Forward initiative.
I think I’m more stoked about this than I was about Obsidian’s Kickstarter for Project Eternity.
I meant to post this myself, and point out that at the 45$ level you get a copy of both Torment AND a copy of Wasteland 2.
The only issue for me is that I’m concerned I might lose my login information by te time the game comes out.
Edit: Also, the game looks insane. It’s a crazy mashup of Planescape themes, a twistedly dark world designed in part by Monte Cook, and Magic: the gathering’s diverse color-based alignment system. In other words, it’s made of sheer, bone-crushing awesome.
This game has already shot to the top of my personal “Kickstarter Project Least Likely to Meet Expectations”, easily defeating Wasteland 2 and the Ouya.
Seriously. I have no words for this level of ambition.
It’s pretty frikking impressive how much money they’re making.
I’ve backed it, but I’m more interested in supporting Pat Rothfuss (favorite author contributing to the content) than in the game itself. I can be convinced, but I don’t have any preconceptions of how awesome it will be or not.
They just might hit the final stretch goal, as they’ve decided that any PayPal income until the end of April will count. Presumably, this is because PayPal won’t disburse it until then. I do like this; I’ve noticed several times that the team seemed to be absolutely eager to do this and were effectively rooting for their own stretch goals.
I would also note that the stretch goals themselves should more than cover the additional content needed. I’m pretty glad about in fact. I’m not unhappy with the idea that the team would get ample pay during the project. Game creation can be a rough business, but these people are known for the quality of their work.
Once in a while I remember that this is still not out yet. It appears to have been almost four years since I put in my contribution. It sure looks like an excellent example of exactly what I thought I’d be getting, and I’m glad they put in the time. Not that I was disappointed with the quicker turn around for the other games. But giving them the luxury of getting it right is among the things that excited me about the whole Kickstarter deal.
I preordered but have never fired up the early access version. I regretted doing that for Pillars. It was fun to mess with the systems, but it was a good 15% or so chunk of the game that I wish I would have waited to experience on my playthrough.
I played a bit of the beta about half a year or so ago. I then got distracted with other games and realized that I’d rather just play the whole finished project then replay parts that I played in the beta anyway.
Personally, I’m interested in this game because I really like the Numenera pen-and-paper RPG setting. I’m not all that crazy about the actual game mechanics, but the worldbuilding is some of the best I’ve seen.
But seriously, I don’t know whether they’ll pick up another $100k or so before the deadline.
