Kickstarting (and not Greenlighting) traditional RPGs
This is a weekly column from freelancer Rowan Kaiser, which focuses on “Western” role-playing games: their stories, their histories, their mechanics, their insanity, and their inanity. The rise of indie gaming has been fantastic for platformers, good for adventures and strategy games, great for puzzlers, but not exactly a windfall for role-playing games. There are certainly some out there, but RPGs don’t have the level of variety that the genres I listed above do.
We can see how this manifests thanks to the rise of crowdsourced, publicized successes and failures. Two of these have garnered a great deal of attention so far this year: Kickstarter (and other similar ventures, like Indiegogo) and Steam’s Greenlight. The former has had plenty of press, and this writer is certainly excited to see the end results of Wasteland 2 and Project Eternity, as well as Shaker (when it comes back) and the currently-campaigning pseudo-sequel to the Quest For Glory games, Hero U: Rogue To Redemption. But these high-profile funding campaigns are notable because of their profile – they’re RPGs made by people with expertise and previous success in the genre. It’s rare (but certainly not unheard of) to see this kind of single-player, epic, story-driven quest outside of blockbuster games.Continue reading Kickstarting (and not Greenlighting) traditional RPGsKickstarting (and not Greenlighting) traditional RPGs originally appeared on Joystiq on Mon, 29 Oct 2012 19:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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