Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[vikingefar]

Could find no thread. Sorry if i am just bad at using the search function.

Wasteland 3 has just been funded on the slightly controversial funding platform fig.com! So i guess we should stay tuned for stretch goals and the actual game and stuff like that. I haven't really been researching why this platform is shady. Something with investments being held by the SEC, and Tim Schafer being a hack fraud. Maybe somebody can illuminate the matter further?


For people living under rocks:
Wasteland 1, created in 89 i think, was the game that spawned the Fallout franchise. Wasteland 2 was one of the first Kickstarter success stories, and was lead by Brian Fargo, the same guy that made both Wasteland 1 and Fallout 1 and 2. The third one is also set to be made by his company InXile.

Stuff we already know about the game is sparse:
It will be set in Colorado.
It will have multiplayer co-op.
It will feature cars.
And it will have you creating a Desert Ranger base from scratch.

Figstarter:
https://www.fig.co/campaigns/wasteland-3#about

Gameplay mock-up:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9SvLO27K7g

Brian Fargo being silly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IsGh_L4eKro

Official page:
https://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/

Interview:
http://www.mmorpg.com/showFeature.cfm/feature/11204/Wasteland-3-Is-Coming-Its-Going-Rocky-Mountain-High.html

[Aklyon]

What even is fig and how is it controversial?

[nenjin]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFX0f_YUn1I <--- A good breakdown of Fig. Skip 4:00 min in to forgo background on Tim Schafer and Double Fine.

In a nutshell, a crowdfunding platform set up by Tim Schafer and friends where you can get returns on your pledge after the game has gone gold and everything else. It's shady due to the terms they set up, the math behind how much games have to sell for you to turn even a penny, and the fact Fig is part of a network of shell companies set up to funnel Fig money back to Tim Shaefer and friends. They put their games up on their own crowdfunding platform and can essentially redirect funds from that game to other games/developers/etc... without any real oversight. It's a conflict of interest to control the site where you also put up your own crowdfunding campaigns (i.e. changing the rules to benefit your campaigns when you see fit.) It feels like a conflict of interest to both have your campaigns to worry about, investors to make returns to, and control over allllll the money coming in through the site for other campaigns.

It's just all very fishy. Feels like a sucker's bet too, investing both as a fan of the project and as someone hoping to make a profit. They're leveraging fan loyalty along with potential profits and it all just gets funneled through different companies to come out and get used who knows where.

[vikingefar]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFX0f_YUn1I <--- A good breakdown of Fig. Skip 4:00 min in to forgo background on Tim Schaefer and Double Fine.

In a nutshell, a crowdfunding platform set up by Tim Shaefer and friends where you can get returns on your pledge after the game has gone gold and everything else. It's shady due to the terms they set up, the math behind how much games have to sell for you to turn even a penny, and the fact Fig is part of a network of shell companies set up to funnel Fig money back to Tim Shaefer and friends. They put their games up on their own crowdfunding platform and can essentially redirect funds from that game to other games/developers/etc... without any real oversight. It's a conflict of interest to control the site where you also put up your own crowdfunding campaigns (i.e. changing the rules to benefit your campaigns when you see fit.) It feels like a conflict of interest to both have your campaigns to worry about, investors to make returns to, and control over allllll the money coming in through the site for other campaigns.

It's just all very fishy. Feels like a sucker's bet too, investing both as a fan of the project and as someone hoping to make a profit. They're leveraging fan loyalty along with potential profits and it all just gets funneled through different companies to come out and get used who knows where.

Wow that is way more of a mess than i thought! All i read was some disgruntled, but not very informative, posts about the SEC in the Wasteland 3 forum, and some loose comments hating on Tim Schafer and allso the SEC on the Rock Paper Shotgun article. Too bad really. I would like to pledge to WL3, but not like this. Guess i will just buy on release.

[Rince Wind]

That video is from 12.2015, I think I read somewhere that the most serious problems were adressed by now?

[LeoLeonardoIII]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFX0f_YUn1I <--- A good breakdown of Fig. Skip 4:00 min in to forgo background on Tim Schaefer and Double Fine.

In a nutshell, a crowdfunding platform set up by Tim Shaefer and friends where you can get returns on your pledge after the game has gone gold and everything else. It's shady due to the terms they set up, the math behind how much games have to sell for you to turn even a penny, and the fact Fig is part of a network of shell companies set up to funnel Fig money back to Tim Shaefer and friends. They put their games up on their own crowdfunding platform and can essentially redirect funds from that game to other games/developers/etc... without any real oversight. It's a conflict of interest to control the site where you also put up your own crowdfunding campaigns (i.e. changing the rules to benefit your campaigns when you see fit.) It feels like a conflict of interest to both have your campaigns to worry about, investors to make returns to, and control over allllll the money coming in through the site for other campaigns.

It's just all very fishy. Feels like a sucker's bet too, investing both as a fan of the project and as someone hoping to make a profit. They're leveraging fan loyalty along with potential profits and it all just gets funneled through different companies to come out and get used who knows where.

Can we just invest in a satellite to drop iridium javelins on Tim Shaefer and people like him?

[Majestic7]

You mean the people who shat on people who funded Spacebase DF-9 are involved in a shady crowdfunding platform that actually reads a little like a pyramid scheme? Somehow I'm not surprised at all. A shame that a game like Wasteland 3 is involved with it, though.

[Neonivek]

My issue is that Wasteland 2 had some serious problems... after reading a guide on how to properly play the game I kind of was blown back at how broken a lot of it is (Yes, even with the EE update)

It actually FEELS like a game from the 80s being transported into the modern day... with all the forgiveness that comes with it.

Yet I have a feeling they aren't going to address the issues with the second game.

Then again that is only my issue because, as always, I refuse to play games with guides pasted to my eyeballs.

[Harry Baldman]

My main gripe with Wasteland 2 was how impressively ugly it was (the character models in particular were completely fucking awful both in that and Pillars of Eternity), and it looks like they've gone a ways toward addressing that, so I'm reasonably stoked for WL3.

Hope they don't get ridiculously overfunded, though, or that they're at least better at managing the feature creep than PoE was.

[Vilanat]

I have written about Fig and Wasteland 3 here

In Wasteland 3 case, i believe it is a fairer dividend sharing model (hard to tell since there isn't an official offering circular for Wasteland 3 yet), however, what wasn't shown in that excellent video by nenjin, is that with Psychonauts 2 they basically made it so investors actually invested in Fig rather than in Psychonauts 2. not as a formality, Fig actually get to keep the greater share of the revenue from Psychonauts 2 minus the developer share for itself. (Fig get 30% of the revenue, and then out of that money, investors get 30%. which makes it such a small share, that Psychonauts 2 would have to sell around 2.3 million units, in full price, until investors break even. needless to say that Fig would break even far earlier, that is, if they had invested any money out of their own, but no, the money is being invested by the non accredited investors, not fig and not its parent company, so Fig has no risk and no investment to break even with), i decided to stay away from any campaign they will ever run.

[forsaken1111]

After Wasteland 2 I wouldn't touch this with someone else's 10 foot pole tied to the end of my own

[Krevsin]

My issue is that Wasteland 2 had some serious problems... after reading a guide on how to properly play the game I kind of was blown back at how broken a lot of it is (Yes, even with the EE update)

It actually FEELS like a game from the 80s being transported into the modern day... with all the forgiveness that comes with it.

Yet I have a feeling they aren't going to address the issues with the second game.

Then again that is only my issue because, as always, I refuse to play games with guides pasted to my eyeballs.

I concur (despite having gone through the game without needing a guide but I've played through a lot of old crpgs so I'm not unbiased), but my problem with Wasteland 2 isn't so much in its balance (hillariously unbalanced items given out as prizes? sign me the fuck up.) or even the overly long, dull and ponderous first mission (though holy shit that was annoying), but rather with some truly outdated design choices that feel like they needlessly complicate a game, like pointless division of stats into multiple pointless subskills (lockpicking and safecracking as separate skills, THREE DIFFERENT persuasion skills, perception and trap defusal skills as separate skills and so on and so forth)

What also did not help were some truly baffling and outdated choices with the UI, like the need to individually select a character with the appropriate skill, select the skill and use it on a point of interest. A mind-numbingly stupid amount of clicking instead of say just having a drop-down menu appear.

I liked the writing in most of the game (the starting quests are shite and the story doesn't really get rolling until you reach the second half of the game), but I found the visuals to be very generic postapocalyptic fare with some notable exceptions (the MAD monks and some parts of the second half come to mind).

And of course, the combat was serviceable and not much more.

I will buy Wasteland 3 when it comes out, but I do still anticipate some of that same old crpg weirdness. However, the change of setting to the icy wastes should bring some fresh new visuals (hopefully, though early concept art still shows the same "man in jacket with greeble" approach to character design that's endemic to post apocalypse media nowadays) and I do hope they decide to build on the strengths of Wasteland 1 and 2 (the story, the setting and the writing) and get rid of some of the weaknesses (pointless skill division, outdated UI design, mediocre combat).

[nenjin]

(like pointless division of stats into multiple pointless subskills (lockpicking and safecracking as separate skills, THREE DIFFERENT persuasion skills, perception and trap defusal skills as separate skills and so on and so forth)

This actually wouldn't have been too bad except for a couple points:

1. There wasn't enough content tied to each specific skill to make them feel useful, interesting or character defining.

2. Often any thing could be done two ways, further reducing the usefulness of certain skills.

3. You'd get characters with WAY higher skills than your starting party, who by necessity had skills spread out to cover all the different things you could do. So when you got a character with 6 science right out of the gate, you're left with two choices: refactor the party member you'd already started investing in or forgo other characters because of this one character with a stupidly high skill level in something.

Also that lasers were essentially useless for half the game due to the paucity of robotic enemies.

There's just a lot of things that were done average, not well. And for the amount of money the game pulled in, I just expected it to be better and less dry in a lot of areas.

Also the dialog system is nothing like what they promised in the Kickstarter.

So yeah. Not going to touch this. I'm not down with the brown frown post apocalyptic look, but I like it better than snow-themed post-apocalypse.

But here's the bottomline for me: in the era of indie sequels I fully expect them to rip as much design and content out of WL2 as they can. Because that's how you work cost efficiently. Reusing your engine is just good sense for every developer in the sequel business unless your original engine was completely fucked. But the graphics, combat system, character system....these are things developers tell themselves were "iconic" in their first game and beloved, and they just reuse them wholesale. They make some new music, their writer writes, artists and developers code new scenes using the same logic, you get a couple new enemies with visuals, some new special effects, some new/possibly renamed gear. And from THERE they decide if they want to go further.

With how obsessed with money Tim Schafer seems to be, this is what I expect of WL3. WL2 with a new story. And I just didn't enjoy WL2 enough to either finish it or want to play more of the same. I wanted to like WL2 but there was always something flat about it overall, in every area.

[Neonivek]

(despite having gone through the game without needing a guide but I've played through a lot of old crpgs so I'm not unbiased)

It isn't that it was needed.

So much that if you read a guide for builds, what attributes you need to raise and to what point, and all that... Then boom! half the issues with the game might as well don't exist.

[Sergarr]

Tim Shaefer

Wait... is he the same Tim Shaefer that was the lead developer of Civ V?