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[nenjin]

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/524168447/the-stomping-land

The Stomping Land (such an odd name) is a 3rd person action game, where you play a mostly-nekkid primitive living in a land before time. Your goal is to live with a fully belly. To do this, you must hunt the many dino species that roam the game space, from smaller, man-sized looking herbivores to brontosauruses, triceratops and of course, the T-Rex. While smaller dinos can be hunted with your bow and arrow, larger dinosaurs are immune to such trivial tools. In order to take down the really big game, you'll need to devise hunting traps and coordinate with other players.

There's also a second bit of meta-gameplay at work. Food is the resource of note in the world, and the more players hoard food stocks, the less there is for everyone else. (i.e, more food held in reserve, the fewer dinosaurs to hunt.) The plan is for this to drive inter-tribal warfare. After all, in terms of the most effective survival strategy, theft is often more resource efficient than hunting for stuff yourself.

The game looks like it has a lot of promise, and met its paltry $20,000 funding goal in just two days. They obviously low-balled their funding goal. Unfortunately, their stretch goals are rather practical instead of interesting.

$75k : Part-time designers who will help progress the game's content.
$175k : Dedicated artists for creating an immersive gameworld.  These guys will amp up the game world with better visuals, as well as ensure technically optimized content.
$200k : Full Oculus Rift support.  What better way to complement a beautiful environment than to get completely immersed into it.  The Rift was made just for that.

For a first stretch goal at 3x the initial funding, you'd think they'd have more to say than "will help progress the game's content." Those aren't exactly goals that get people motivated to pledge/increase their pledge.

Still, dino hunting and cooperative hunting games are themes that I don't feel like have really been done to excellence. So I'm looking forward to this.

[PrimusRibbus]

The thing that really worries me about The Stomping Land is that, for a game that seems pretty far into production, there seems to be very little information about the developer's vision for it. I had to delve deep into the Kickstarter comments just to find clarification on whether the game was going to be played on central servers or not (it appears that you will be able to host your own servers, and the game will not be done MMO-style).

From what the developer is saying, the end-game of this is that you hunt all the dinosaurs to extinction and starve to death... Or is that just a mechanic for PvP? Is this game intended to be round-based, or played on persistent servers? Are there different gametypes (i.e. survival and vs mode)?
Just a lot of very basic gameplay questions that need to be resolved.

Also, what's the deal with the Halo-style jumping and shooting?

[nenjin]

I think there's no extinction per se. What I gather is that's the PvP mechanic to force conflict between players. For well-organized groups that can stockpile food, they'll reduce the amount of available hunting for everyone else, and motivate those players to raid them instead of trying to survive of depleted herds. The size of the herds is dynamic based on the total amount of food all players have stockpiled.

And as an aside, now that I think about it, "The Stomping Land" sounds like the exact kind of name the DF generator would spit out.

[Rakonas]

The title excited me as I've always wanted a good sim of being a dinosaur and hunting to survive but nope.

[BigD145]

I'm reading it uses the same engine as DayZ. Jumping over a stegosaurus seems pretty OP.

[Cthulhu]

It sounds pretty cool but I get what you mean about the central vision.  Watching the video it didn't seem all that organized and didn't do a good job of really summing things up, it just kind of listed features in a steam-of-consciousness, like the guy was playing the game and naming off features as he went.

[postal83]

Reminds me of that game "B.C." that was supposed to come out but was cancelled back in `04.

[nenjin]

It sounds pretty cool but I get what you mean about the central vision.  Watching the video it didn't seem all that organized and didn't do a good job of really summing things up, it just kind of listed features in a steam-of-consciousness, like the guy was playing the game and naming off features as he went.

Which is why I'm a little bugged by their stretch goal descriptions. For a game that isn't really articulating its vision succinctly, having ambiguous stretch goals running all the way out to x10 your initial funding goal doesn't fill me with confidence. Compared to other Kickstarters that seemed to know exactly what they're going to do and demonstrate that with planned features and detailed description... this one seems to ask you to assume they know where they're going based on just purely the video.

[Moogie]

Sigh, so many "dino-killing" games. Not a single "you ARE the dino" game. Come on, world. It's been, what, easily three decades by now? So where is it? Hmm?

I want to play a proper dinosaur game, damnit! Every time I hear about a new game like this, I hope and pray that it's not human vs. dinosaurs. And it always fucking is. I swear, Turok started this trend, that bastard. I want to scavenge, hunt, flee, hide! I want to be part of the herd, migrating across plains to stay ahead of the drought, fending off starving predators as they pick off our numbers one by one; I want to be a pack alpha, tracking scents and stalking through jungles, coordinating with my packmates to surround our prey; I want to glide over lakes and scoop out fish, without being trapped in the hulking jaws of a prehistoric leviathan! Does nobody else want this? Does the entire world only want to kill dinosaurs?!

Ugh... Sorry for the outburst. The game looks great. I mean it. I really enjoy survival games and this looks fresh and interesting. It's just... I really fucking want everyone to stop killing my favourite animals for a change.

[BigD145]

Sigh, so many "dino-killing" games. Not a single "you ARE the dino" game. Come on, world. It's been, what, easily three decades by now? So where is it? Hmm?

Primal Carnage

[alexandertnt]

Does nobody else want this?

I do, I completely agree with you.

Sigh, so many "dino-killing" games. Not a single "you ARE the dino" game. Come on, world. It's been, what, easily three decades by now? So where is it? Hmm?

Primal Carnage

That is not enough (and is a deathmatch game, not really a survival-type game like described), there needs to be more.

[Moogie]

Sigh, so many "dino-killing" games. Not a single "you ARE the dino" game. Come on, world. It's been, what, easily three decades by now? So where is it? Hmm?

Primal Carnage

Just another dino-killing game.

There's only one semi-good dinosaur game in existence, and it was a PS1 game called Jurassic Park. It was mostly a platformer, but the aim of the game wasn't to slaughter humans; you were simply trying to get through the level. The Compy level was the best: snapping up dragonflies to feed, avoiding predators, and making a perilous journey through a canyon, surrounded by towering Brachiosaurs. I still have PTSD from getting squished by those massive feet so many times.

Even the T-Rex level, in all its chaotic "oh my god stop shooting me for two seconds" panic, was fun. Gobbling down dudes whole and ripping into the carcasses of Stegosaurs to keep your health up.

There was 1 (maybe 2, I forget) human levels, and they were easily the worst in the game. Swing over spiked pits, shoot the bad people/animals with gunblams and 'splosions.

[BigD145]

Sigh, so many "dino-killing" games. Not a single "you ARE the dino" game. Come on, world. It's been, what, easily three decades by now? So where is it? Hmm?

Primal Carnage

Just another dino-killing game.

And FPS's are just human-killing games. Also, you ARE the human. In Primal Carnage you ARE the dino half the time. What else would you do in a dino game? Eat grass and leaves before .... oh no... here comes a predatory meat-eating dino! Ooops, it just became another dino-killing game. Let's start over. You're munching on leaves when .... here comes a meteor! Darn, just another dino-killing game.
Living organisms dying. Whodathunkit.

[Moogie]

We're talking about a game's main focus. If the main focus is killing shit deathmatch style, I'm not interested.

[Eotyrannus]

Sigh, so many "dino-killing" games. Not a single "you ARE the dino" game. Come on, world. It's been, what, easily three decades by now? So where is it? Hmm?

Primal Carnage

Dino D-day, too
although that's more crazy-awesome than dinosaurs