Shroud of the Avatar – Lord British Discovers Kickstarter

Wasn’t I  just talking about remakes?  Here comes another.

The Lord British countdown has completed, and his announcement has been made.

Technically not a remake I suppose, as Lord British sold all the rights to his Ultima work to Electronic Arts for a dump truck full of money.  So now, his fondness for EA aside, he has to do a remake under a new name, Shroud of the Avatar.

Of course, he will be up against another avatar.

EA’s remake of the Ultima games… or Ultima IV specifically I guess… is Ultima Forever: Quest for the Avatar.

EA has their budget battling with their inherent corporate limitations, while Lord British has his reputation which comes up hard against the “what have you done lately?” question that plagues so many early bloomers.

Still, I have no doubt that Lord British will meet his Kickstarter goal based on reputation alone.  He is asking for… say it all together now… ONE MILLION DOLLARS… in order to make his new game.  He doesn’t have any stretch goals yet, but for a $10,000 donation you can get a rare copy of Akalabeth and a visit to his home.

How this both multiplayer online AND offline single player game develops will be interesting to watch, which I plan to do from the sidelines.

It will also be interesting to compare how this plays out with what Mark Jacobs is up to with Camelot Unchained.

Lord British is going with the announcement and Kickstarter launch on the same day, while the wily Mr. Jacobs is building up slowly to a Kickstarter campaign by building a lot of ground work around his plans.  Lord British probably has more name recognition, so perhaps felt he didn’t need to get people ready in advance.  We shall see.

Will you be donating to either, or both, of these games?

Addendum:

A more detailed description, interview, and vanity post about the game and its history, where the word “innovation” is thrown around, is available on VentureBeat.

Maybe the best reaction I saw on Twitter… from Jeff Green of course.

Lord British has a Kickstarter? The dude lives in a castle and has been to outer space.

— Jeff Green (@Greenspeak) March 8, 2013

After I support Garriott's Kickstarter, I'm looking forward to supporting others in need of funding, like Trump, Gates, and Zuckerberg.

— Jeff Green (@Greenspeak) March 8, 2013

“Innovate!” is the Mating Call of the Lazy Gamer

There was a cartoon that ran in the New Yorker years ago.  I wish I could find it.

The cartoon featured a man dressed up in a clown suit on a television studio set.  He was on a fully dressed sound stage with back drops.  There was a large studio audience.  Cameras were pointed at him.  Studio technicians were off on the side.  A boom mic hung above him.  Everything was in its place.

And on the cue card was the phrase “TELL A FUNNY JOKE.”

That seems to be what Tobold is up to today.  He is kvetching that game studios with revenue goals and investors and expectations and all the baggage of big business aren’t reading his cue card, which simply says, “INNOVATE.”

Well, that and the idea that the past is bad, which is why it is in the past.  Only fools put on rose colored glasses and bask in nostalgia or some rubbish.

So he doesn’t just want a funny joke, but he wants it to be a new joke as well.

But there are no new jokes.  There are only new contexts in which to tell them.

In entertainment, as in jokes, remakes, reboots, re-imagining, and telling the same damn story in a slightly different way is what sustains us.  Using old material was old hat when Shakespeare (or whoever) was cribbing his plots from the Greeks.

And the more familiar the story, the more of our dollar votes go towards it.  Avatar is where the money is, not Primer.  Or, if you want the “higher” arts, the music of Mozart or Beethoven get more performances and sell more albums than that of Rachmaninoff or Prokofiev.

The problem is that we’re not used to this being the case when it comes to video games.  The video games industry is pretty young.  It hasn’t just been a business in living memory, it became a business in my lifetime.

It went from a cottage industry of single person or very small development teams, when what ever they produced seemed new (though they borrowed heavily) because we had never seen such a thing on a computer before… or in some cases, even a computer… to the big business it is today in something like 40 years.

We are just reaching the point where remakes have become the norm.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I have my doubts that something like Wasteland 2 can deliver on its promise.  A lot of what made the original great was in the context of the time and the limitations of the hardware.  But it could still be a decent game.  On the other hand, I am quite happy that somebody is going to fix up Age of Empires II and bring a great game into the 21st century.

And it also doesn’t mean that there is no innovation.  There are plenty of developers trying to tell stories or create situations in new contexts that challenge and amuse us.  They just so rarely show up from big studios that looking for them there seems to be the real fools errand.  Games like Journey or Katamari Damancy will always be the exception on that front.

It is the so-called independent game studios that will likely foster any innovation we see.

If you are complaining about no innovation and ignoring them, then you didn’t really want any innovation in the first place I guess.  Heaven forbid you get off your ass and go find something new.

Addendum: And then later Tobold said we need to pay more for niche titles.  So I guess I win.

Age of Empires II – HD Edition

Keen tipped me to an announcement today that Hidden Path Entertainment is working on an updated version of Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings.  It is called Age of Kings II: HD Edition.

The game will include both the original content as well as The Conquerors expansions and will add the following features:

• Re-mastered for high resolution displays 1080p+.
• Enhanced visual engine with improved terrain textures, water, fire and ambient lighting effects.
• New Steamworks features: Achievements, Leaderboards, Matchmaking and Cloud support.
• Share user created content with Steam Workshop support.

All of which is curious timing because just last week I posted about Age of Kings getting an unofficial expansion.  It will be interesting to see if the team at Forgotten Empires will be able to (or even want to) include some of the changes they have done to the game via the Steamworks user content option.

This is such big news that Microsoft even has a page up about it.  Maybe this means that they will update their ancient Age of Kings page.  It still has ads from 2001 running on it.

Anyway, I have no doubt that Hidden Path, who made one of my favorite tower defense games, will do a good job bringing this classic into the 21st century.   But we will find out in about a month, as it is slated to ship on Steam (and only Steam I gather) on April 9, 2013.