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Shadow of the Eternals Kickstarter Relaunched

Precursor needs to prove itself before asking for other people's money. Even most ED fans don't trust the old SK guys anymore and giving yourself a new name doesn't change that your studio is still run by the key staff that ruined SK during the last generation. Instead of reaching for the stars at this point, they should focus on much smaller scaler games of high quality to build up new trust.
 
Precursor needs to prove itself before asking for other people's money. Even most ED fans don't trust the old SK guys anymore and giving yourself a new name doesn't change that your studio is still run by the key staff that ruined SK during the last generation. Instead of reaching for the stars at this point, they should focus on much smaller scaler games of high quality to build up new trust.

Yeah. Here's hoping they relaunch the game as a small-scale horror adventure. I don't need no CryEngine.
 
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/cf.shacknews.com/podcast/wknd_confirmed_060713_168.mp3

This is an episode of Weekend Confirmed Denis appeared on about 2 months ago. People should really take the time to listen to it and see what he says about the game. He's definitely no PR expert, but he does come off as genuine and he really has some interesting ideas for the game.

Yep this is what you listen to if you're interested in hearing him apologize for being negative on internet forums.

If two bad games and a bad lawsuit instantly disqualified game designers from ever working again in the industry, we'd have lost quite a few more than Denis Dyack.

My opinions:
Too Human was the same Microsoft trap that Rare fell for with Grabbed By the Ghoulies--jump from Nintendo over to the Microsoft ship and suffer there (interestingly, both fell for the "I can make right-stick combat work" gambit).

X-Men: Destiny is another example of the Activision trap of slavish work on a licensed property that has killed studios like Bizarre with 007 Blood Stone, Eurocom with 007 Legends, and most recently High Moon which was gutted after Deadpool's reception. If you include unlicensed you got Neversoft killed by Guitar Hero and Radical killed by Prototype 2. As an un-owned second-party developer, Silicon Knights (also hit with the lawsuit judgement) didn't survive any better than did these studios.

Any deal with Activision without having all the cards in your hands (Bungie?) seems like a deal with the devil, IMHO.

I'd like to challenge the "because Dyack" folks to say What The Fuck and buy a copy of this thing at $25, and give Dyack another chance, and see What The Fuck happens. Because the anticlimax of this thing just not funding is just too much of a bummer. It's like a story without an ending.

Welp. That's my appeal, you guys. I think if this gets funded and comes out, it keeps Nintendo interested in doing a direct sequel as well. It's the way for this franchise to live on. That's my estimation. Thanks for reading.

P.S.: Thanks so much to those that complimented my video. I swear part two is almost there. It is literally the youtube upload that is fighting me now, it kicks the video out of HD towards the end. I am re-encoding, this shit is hard to do quickly in nights and weekends. Hopefully will post a link to pt. 2 soon.
 
well, their goal is way too distant, pity.... I wanted to see what they can do (and I actually enjoyed a lot Silicon Knights' Too Human)
 
I appreciate their pluck, but the math is getting difficult. Their best day was the first, at $91k. They now need ALL FIVE of the remaining days to do $95k+ in order to reach the goal.

A countdown livestream seems masochistic.
 
They are doing another Twich livestream tomorrow at 5 PM EST. I urge anyone with doubts about the project to check it out and you'll see why many of us are excited about this game.

Interesting tidbit from a Nintendo Life Interview:

NL: Are there elements of Eternal Darkness that you look back on and think “well, we certainly could’ve done that better” that you hope to revisit for Shadow of the Eternals?

Dyack: Oh, for sure. One of my biggest regrets in Eternal Darkness, and I love the game to death, is that we didn't really have what I call a sustainable economy between magic, sanity and health. Essentially, what happened was that if you ran around, over time magic would just regenerate. Rather than just it being a time-based thing, we'd rather have an economy where players determine what attributes they have left. There's going to be a completely different underlying mechanical system to this game; we want a true economy for the gameplay that goes very deep and is under the player's control rather than just, as an example, if you're out of magic, go off in a corner and run around in a circle, heal yourself and then go back in. [In ED] it wasn't horrible, but it certainly as good as it can be, and those are some of the things that we really want to go forward on.

Another one, which [can] already [be] seen in our demo, we want to be doing things in outdoor as well as indoor terrains. We've got a lot of exciting directions we want to take the game; back when we did Eternal Darkness we were really confined by limits of technology to mostly indoor terrains.
 
Precursor needs to prove itself before asking for other people's money. Even most ED fans don't trust the old SK guys anymore and giving yourself a new name doesn't change that your studio is still run by the key staff that ruined SK during the last generation. Instead of reaching for the stars at this point, they should focus on much smaller scaler games of high quality to build up new trust.

Maybe something of the style and scale of Blood Omen 1?
 
Precursor needs to prove itself before asking for other people's money. Even most ED fans don't trust the old SK guys anymore and giving yourself a new name doesn't change that your studio is still run by the key staff that ruined SK during the last generation. Instead of reaching for the stars at this point, they should focus on much smaller scaler games of high quality to build up new trust.

Yup. Definitely this.

Shadow of the Eternals is too ambitious for its own good.
 
Can't say that I feel sorry for Dyack, he dug his own grave, and a flowery apology on Weekend Confirmed doesn't exactly even up. Especially with the recent Neogaf doc fresh in people's minds.
 
Can't say that I feel sorry for Dyack, he dug his own grave, and a flowery apology on Weekend Confirmed doesn't exactly even up. Especially with the recent Neogaf doc fresh in people's minds.

So it's more important who you were than who you are?
 
So it's more important who you were than who you are?

Some people here really hate Dyack. They don't realise a team of passionate developers is also hoping this KS succeeds. Dyack is someone that got the spotlight on these forums, I'm sure there are many developers out there that are 'loved' that did much worse things.
 
Some people here really hate Dyack. They don't realise a team of passionate developers is also hoping this KS succeeds. Dyack is someone that got the spotlight on these forums, I'm sure there are many developers out there that are 'loved' that did much worse things.

It really doesn't matter what Dyack did here, though.
This Kickstarter isn't living or dying because of NeoGAF. This is the entire internet looking at the history of this company (not even Dyack in particular) and giving a huge pause to wanting to invest (which is what this is) in this project.

And, really, as amazing as this game looks and could very well be, I can't fault anyone for not wanting to support this. For multiple reasons.
The biggest being that they have proven they can't manage themselves very well.
 
I still don´t get it how he just creates remakes of locations in eternal darkness and calls it a valid new game he would like to have fundings for..
 
Dyack of course. Haven´t followed this project much, but if i remember the initial trailer correctly, they just remade the church in HD. Everything was in the same place like in ED.

This is not a bad thing for me at all. I was glad the follow-up would be very much aware of its predecessor, one way or another.

It's not like they are just Eternal Darkness assets reused. It's a beautiful revisit of the familiar location.

It's like the Kobiyashi Maru for this team I swear. That demo was gorgeous.

It's based on a real life church.

Wow didn't know that either neither. Cool.

But I guess once bitten and all that..

...They must hate Dyack.

There is no bad feelings between Nintendo and Dyack. Eternal Darkness simply didn't sell well.

It's a niche, cult title, the kid of thing that gets funded on Kickstarter if its coming from Double Fine, InXile, Peter Molyneaux, and any other number of brand new unproven teams and industry veterans alike.
 
They talked about that in the livestream on Friday(?).

Oh man I've been working editing video and fighting encoders so much I haven't watched the streams yet.
 
So it's more important who you were than who you are?

Presuming that he has undergone a complete metamorphosis. Sure he's trying to 'keep his mouth shut' going forward, but that doesn't change much beyond his own ability to self censor and avoid picking fights publicly.

I don't even really care that he targeted Neogaf specifically, but it informs a pattern. He has been a rampaging asshole egotist for well over a decade, ran SK into the ground was harmful to the Canadian development community, and is probably only playing nice, whether he realizes it or not, because he burned all his bridges. And honestly people aren't jumping to sponsor this not just because of Dyack, there are many valid reasons to take pause about how well your investment will actually yield a return under 'notsiliconknights'.

And yes a lot of people don't want to give their money to the project when this man is in any way involved, let alone the face of the project. The developer history is shaky enough, but I'd be more inclined to kickstart it if Dyack had nothing to do with it. Still not sure if I'd do so, but it wouldn't hurt its chances.

Some people here really hate Dyack. They don't realise a team of passionate developers is also hoping this KS succeeds. Dyack is someone that got the spotlight on these forums, I'm sure there are many developers out there that are 'loved' that did much worse things.

Probably not actually. certainly not to such a level spectacular.You're also speculating that the public things Dyack did are his only sins, on top of implying that other loved developers have just managed to keep as much as or more of their own issues secret. It's a shaky premise.

However we'd weigh better and worse in the first place.
 
Gotta say, I feel for you guys who were looking forward to this as there's really nothing else like it on the horizon.
 
Well if one fan's hard work and passion could possibly move the needle at all, I'm doing all I can.

It's officially done and uploaded with the HD stream processed so please check out part two of my series of videos celebrating and highlighting Eternal Darkness, in support of this project.

This one is pretty much an Eternal Darkness primer that spoils and lays out everything good about the first game:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTaGn4fKsiM

Hope you guys enjoy and please consider contributing.
 
Eternal Darkness only has cult popularity. Hardly anyone even knows that game exists let alone ever played it.

ED is very popular. It didn't sell as much back then but with the used market and Dolphin on PC, a lot more people played it. The game itself garnered critical claim.

People aren't backing this because of tge multiple issues SK has had. They became arrogant and were not able to manage themselves. As long as the core member are in charge, people will be skeptical of their company. If they were internal designers/developers with someone else at the head, then maybe they could do more.
 
Have they said either way what's going to happen if the KS fails?

Five days left, only about a third funded. This is do or die, and it's looking like the latter, even if I am about to pledge $25 to it (it prolly won't help any, but the thought is what counts, right?)
 
Probably not actually. certainly not to such a level spectacular.You're also speculating that the public tings Dyack did are his only sins, on top of implying that other loved developers have just managed to keep all of there's secret. It's a shaky premise.

You realize you just chided someone for implying something totally unsubstantiated while implying something totally unsubstantiated, right?
 
It really doesn't matter what Dyack did here, though.
This Kickstarter isn't living or dying because of NeoGAF. This is the entire internet looking at the history of this company (not even Dyack in particular) and giving a huge pause to wanting to invest (which is what this is) in this project.

And, really, as amazing as this game looks and could very well be, I can't fault anyone for not wanting to support this. For multiple reasons.
The biggest being that they have proven they can't manage themselves very well.

I agree it's not because of GAF. The original Eternal Darkness just isn't that well remembered. It was a modest success on a 'failed' platform.
 
The developer history is shaky enough, but I'd be more inclined to kickstart it if Dyack had nothing to do with it. Still not sure if I'd do so, but it wouldn't hurt its chances.

I feel the opposite and I'd say that's the catch-22 that kills the project. Dyack's the only one I'd trust with the project considering the role he played in the creation of the original, and yet at the same time, I wouldn't trust him with any project. I'd be happy to see it completed, but barring a lottery win, I don't see it happening just because of who the man is.
 
I feel the opposite and I'd say that's the catch-22 that kills the project. Dyack's the only one I'd trust with the project considering the role he played in the creation of the original, and yet at the same time, I wouldn't trust him with any project. I'd be happy to see it completed, but barring a lottery win, I don't see it happening just because of who the man is.

See why aren't you reassured that he is in charge in only a creative capacity? He's got to follow Paul Caporicci's orders like anyone. He didn't want to respond to the Kotaku article and Paul ordered him to do it for the good of the project.

The biggest fallacy of how people are treating this project is ignoring all the comments he's made about how much he'd like to just devote himself to the creative, that he wasn't good at PR, the he made a lot of mistakes running the previous studio.

He's not running this one.
 
I just think it's important to remember that Dyack is not the head of Precursor Games. He's not the one calling the shots. And people make mistakes and hopefully learn from them.

What matters to me is the game looks cool as hell and the team has more than convinced me that they have the chops and passion to pull it off.
 
I feel the opposite and I'd say that's the catch-22 that kills the project. Dyack's the only one I'd trust with the project considering the role he played in the creation of the original, and yet at the same time, I wouldn't trust him with any project. I'd be happy to see it completed, but barring a lottery win, I don't see it happening just because of who the man is.

Pretty spot on.
 
I was really hoping this would get funded. I think Dyack knows he's made a lot of mistakes, and he wants to regain the trust and respect he used to have. Maybe it might be time to consider a publisher... Everything they've shown about the actual game so far seems pretty cool.
 
The hate GAF has for Dyack is hilarious. Really seems like its kept alive just to milk that one time 'shit got real' for all its worth.
 
Did you guys like my video? Did it remind you of why we want a sequel to Eternal Darkness in the first place?
 
It's a niche, cult title, the kid of thing that gets funded on Kickstarter if its coming from Double Fine, InXile, Peter Molyneaux, and any other number of brand new unproven teams and industry veterans alike.

To be fair, the "niche, cult" KS titles are not asking for $750,000. Unproven indies are making games for $50,000 or less. Even Double Fine -- a studio with a much better track record than SK/Precursor and none of the baggage -- asked for $400k their first time out.
 
they should've did it right the first time and put themselves up on kickstarter immediately after announcing the game. they really slopped this crowdfunding attempt.
 
Sucks that it's not doing well. I don't know if it would be any good or not, but I liked Eternal Darkness enough that I would give it a try if it got made.

I'm not donating a penny to them, though, because I don't trust them to make it even if they get their funding.
 
To be fair, the "niche, cult" KS titles are not asking for $750,000. Unproven indies are making games for $50,000 or less. Even Double Fine -- a studio with a much better track record than SK/Precursor and none of the baggage -- asked for $400k their first time out.

That's not entirely true. Satellite Reign, a game from an unproven Australian developer, got over 755k in funding from Kickstarter+Paypal just a month ago. The difference is those games that were funded were appealing to PC gamers with PC genres, they seem to be the only gaming demographic consistently pledging high amounts of money to projects.
 
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