Quoting: scaineStay clear of stretch goals, definitely. They would be great if and only if you could pledge based on the stretch. So I pledge my £25, but we don't meet the stretch, but that's okay, my money isn't used.

Stretch goals are a bit of a pet peeve of mine. How often do you find a list of stretch goals where they arranged 5 stretch goals, the first 4 of which you couldn't care less about, but you REALLY want the 5th to happen? To the degree you actually don't want the game at all if it's not getting funded? Like the 5th goal being the Linux port, after such super important things like localization for countries you never heard of before.

So yes, the only logical course of action is to wait and see if the 5th goal is likely to be reached and then (only then!) pledge. If it's not reached after all, cancel your pledge on the last day. No, that's not a nice thing to do, but neither is supporting a platform only as a stretch goal. *shrug*

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: AnxiousInfusion

Quoting: GuestNever have and never will do crowdfunding. Don't do pre-ordering either. Crowdfunding to me just makes no sense from the consumer's standpoint.

Crowd funding is no place for consumers. Consumers will have to wait until after the product comes to market.

Sorry, but that's complete rubbish. Crowd-funding was invented -specifically- as an alternative to venture capital or similar means of funding. Its very point is to allow regular customers to band together and fund projects that otherwise might not get funded by traditional means. People don't seem to get the idea that crowdfunding is nothing but small-scale venture capital funding. It involves risk. There is no guarantee that you will get anything back. And if you can't afford and/or stand the thought to lose your pledge then you need to stay away from it, indeed.
But for many of us, it has worked nicely and will continue to do so. As Liam's article pointed out, the art of crowdfunding from the customer's perspective is proper vetting. Telling projects with good chances of success apart from the doomed ones. That's really the gist of it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: liamdawe

Quoting: KimyrielleIt's funny how they needed longer to "assess the feasibility" of the port than making the actual port.

Again, people don't seem to understand what feasibility means. I did explain it before, but to explain again.

Checking the feasibility of a port doesn't mean it isn't being worked on, it means they may have hit unexpected problems they were trying to overcome. I don't know any specifics, but it's clear it was being worked on for some time to be able to arrive so soon.

I know what feasibility means. And I find it...funny...that it took two or three months for them to decide whether or not they can make the port. All source code can be ported by definition, and any porting house worth their salt should know if a Linux version of any middleware components used in the game is available. Closed source components are pretty much the only real obstacle for a port I can think of, and researching that part doesn't take months. I don't know what the problem -really- was, but "feasibility" wasn't it. At least not only.

Anyway, water under the bridge. We get the port and that's what matters.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

It's funny how they needed longer to "assess the feasibility" of the port than making the actual port.

But glad to see it's coming!

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Great news. I know that some people are opposed to VP's "ports", but personally I don't care what makes a game run as long as it FEELS like a native port. That and the Linux porting scene can use some competition. Right now it's Feral carrying most of the burden, and as much as I like them, but they can't port all games all by themselves. For the time being we really need 3-4 porting companies churning out both legacy and brand new AAA Linux ports on a monthly basis.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Quoting: SnowdrakeThat's some good news for sure !
Did anyone know if codeweaver is still putting some effort on D3D11 support ?

I don't know, but proper DX11 support should be one of the higher priorities for WINE right now. Maybe the only one for the time being. WINE is getting increasingly irrelevant for gamers, as it's currently unable to run most modern games. Not even with the usual hiccups we're used to when running games in WINE, but simply not at all. Games are using DX11 these days and have been for a while. Meh, even older ones are sometimes losing WINE support these days, when the devs make updates to their graphics. Elder Scrolls Online and Star Trek Online used to run in WINE and no longer do.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Well, it's certainly not doomsday, but I'd still have thought the large supply of Linux games we got in the past two years would have at least helped us to grow -at pace- with the other platforms. But our market share doesn't seem to change at all. One of these days we need to break though the threshold of marginality if we want more publishers to support us. I would think dev studios not supporting Linux are watching our market share - but if we stay below 1% forever, they won't see a good reason to change their attitude.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Still, working on Windows games having a native port available is an odd decision, given the dozens of high profile games NOT having a Linux port. One should think it's the lowest possible priority there is. If working on that game helps -other- games running better, the logical choice would be directly working on the -other- game.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Dungeons don't necessarily have to have better rewards than open-world content. That's one of the things about MMOs I never understood - why do people think all the best stuff needs to drop from scripted boss fights? It's not a law of nature just because WoW did it that way.

View this comment - View article - View full comments

Thanks for the update, Liam!

While I have no doubt that this game will be fun for some, this still doesn't sound like a game appealing to larger audiences to me. Personally I have never seen a sandbox MMO that didn't bore me to hell inside 5 minutes. The recipe for success in these games is usually joining the largest guild that will have you and dominate the game with numbers. And that's really all there is to them. On top of that you get intellectually challenged 15 year old boys dancing on your corpse yelling "PWNED U, N00B!!!", after they managed to gank your character from behind, while you were collecting crafting mats.

In short, not my idea of fun.

The MMOs that can hold me all have one thing in common - good storytelling and lots of quest content to explore. The really great ones have good crafting and playing housing systems ON TOP of that. But crafting can't really carry a MMO on its own, and guild PvP will lose its appeal quickly once you realize that it's really all about numbers.

View this comment - View article - View full comments