SCL: Stumbled coming out of the gate or simply fallen on it's face?

[BoldItalic]

SCL hasn't disappointed me, nor do I feel that the pre-release publicity misled me. Indeed, it's because of that publicity that I haven't bought it and don't expect to. Feel free to stop reading at this point.

It was obvious early on, when it was first announced, that the developers of SCL believed that "D&D is a game where the DM gets his kicks by killing the PCs." Once you realise that, a lot of the design decisions make sense.

Now, I don't play D&D that way. For me, D&D is about collaborative story-telling and SCL isn't designed for doing that, so it's not very useful to me. That's not to say that it isn't useful and fun for other people, just not for me. I'm getting the impression that there are people who only realised too late, after they ordered it, that it was also the wrong product for them too. It would have been better if the SCL publicists had made it clearer early on, what the underlying assumption was; but to be charitable, it probably didn't occur to them that not everyone who plays D&D plays it the way they do, so it didn't occur to them to spell it out.

SCL was promoted as a successor to games like BG and NWN, but it isn't and that in itself has disappointed some people. BG was all about the story. NWN was about making up your own stories (people forget that originally NWN was conceived as a toolset, and the single-player campaign was written as an illustration of what you could do with it). One of the strengths of NWN was its open-ness; Bioware not only allowed people to publish custom content (new monsters, new tilesets, new races and classes, and so on) but actively encouraged it. SCL isn't that. Story-telling is not what it is designed for and custom content is expressly forbidden. So not only is it not what I want, but it can't be made into something I want.

I've saved my money and I'm content.

 

[Corpsetaker]

SCL hasn't disappointed me, nor do I feel that the pre-release publicity misled me. Indeed, it's because of that publicity that I haven't bought it and don't expect to. Feel free to stop reading at this point.

It was obvious early on, when it was first announced, that the developers of SCL believed that "D&D is a game where the DM gets his kicks by killing the PCs." Once you realise that, a lot of the design decisions make sense.

Now, I don't play D&D that way. For me, D&D is about collaborative story-telling and SCL isn't designed for doing that, so it's not very useful to me. That's not to say that it isn't useful and fun for other people, just not for me. I'm getting the impression that there are people who only realised too late, after they ordered it, that it was also the wrong product for them too. It would have been better if the SCL publicists had made it clearer early on, what the underlying assumption was; but to be charitable, it probably didn't occur to them that not everyone who plays D&D plays it the way they do, so it didn't occur to them to spell it out.

SCL was promoted as a successor to games like BG and NWN, but it isn't and that in itself has disappointed some people. BG was all about the story. NWN was about making up your own stories (people forget that originally NWN was conceived as a toolset, and the single-player campaign was written as an illustration of what you could do with it). One of the strengths of NWN was its open-ness; Bioware not only allowed people to publish custom content (new monsters, new tilesets, new races and classes, and so on) but actively encouraged it. SCL isn't that. Story-telling is not what it is designed for and custom content is expressly forbidden. So not only is it not what I want, but it can't be made into something I want.

I've saved my money and I'm content.

They knew "exactly" what they were doing. Coming out with a demo and then letting people pre-order after that would have been the smart move because it would have allowed people to make up their minds instead of locking them in to a game they may not like. They essentially made it where in order to play the demo, head start, we needed to pre-order the game first so if you didn't like it then you were stuck. They didn't make their non-refundable policy clear at all because they had it mixed in with all the other stuff in their disclaimer. What happened was it all blew up in their faces and were left with no choice but to refund people. Luckily for some Steam has it's refund policy, but for people like me, I bought directly from the website so I had to fight for my refund. Lucky enough I paid with Paypal and opened up a dispute with them.

This is one of those CEO situations where he claims he didn't know what was going on so we have to look at two things, neither which are good.

1: You are either so unobservant that you have failed in your role and therefore should be let go.

2: You are lying.

I'm sure N-space did their research and knew that people wanted a game that was as close to the rules as possible. I think what we have here is another example of trying to push something else across the table despite telling them it isn't what we want.

 

[Jester David]

This is one of those CEO situations where he claims he didn't know what was going on so we have to look at two things, neither which are good.
1: You are either so unobservant that you have failed in your role and therefore should be let go.
2: You are lying.
I'm sure N-space did their research and knew that people wanted a game that was as close to the rules as possible. I think what we have here is another example of trying to push something else across the table despite telling them it isn't what we want.

How would they have done this theoretical research? Do you remember seeing a survey up? Did you ever answer a survey on what type of D&D you game you wanted? Did N-space have a booth at GenCon polling gamers?

You see deliberate maliciousness, I just see general ineptitude. They made the game they wanted without seeing if it was what everyone else wanted, if it was what their primary audience wanted.
I didn't see a lot of community management either. Which, now, strikes me as being really out of touch. They didn't even reach out to ENWorld or Morrus and focused on video game sites. They did nothing to manage the false expectations for the game and sell what it actually was. They likely had no community or social media staff, or had the marketing people doing that but no idea what they were doing.

People don't set out to make a bad game. And this game has a lot of flaws divorced from the divergence from the D&D rules. Really, they likely tried their best to make a game, and just were not up to the task. And that's going to hurt. As you asked in the first post:

I'm not sure if SCL will ever get out of this hole because first impressions are always important.

And that's the issue. Can they get out of this hole.
Well, it looks like a LOT of people cancelled their preorders or sought refunds. And their play numbers have been declining regularly. They've maybe sold 5,000 copies of the game and might get a few more sales when it moves to consoles. It really doesn't look like they'll make much money from things. Well under a quarter of a million dollars.
Given they had to pay for the D&D licence and a lot of staff:

It's no small team. A few million dollars in expenses easily.
To get out of the giant financial hole, they need to fix the game and get people back in. Which is super hard. Or they need to double down on DLC to milk the people who did sign up. But given the small numbers, there seems to be insufficient people to even support a skeletal team making DLC, let alone paying off debts.

This might end up a very costly venture.

 

[darjr]

Well now they are saying that the play style and mechanics were ok'd by WotC and that they worked very closely with wotc every step of the way.

 

[Jester David]

Well now they are saying that the play style and mechanics were ok'd by WotC and that they worked very closely with wotc every step of the way.

We knew they worked closely with WotC and there was oversight. I don't know how much authority WotC had to veto changes. But there was a lot of talk of the game on the official D&D podcast.
(Not that the D&D staff would have said the game was terrible even if they hated it. I don't even think they'd be allowed to remain silent. They pretty much had to hype the product.)

Regardless, the problem isn't that the play style and mechanics were bad or didn't work, it's that we thought they'd be closer to the actual rules. The problem was one of expectations.

 

[Reinhart]

According to Steam's API I think at least 64,500 licenses for SCL have been sold and not returned. That's unfortunately still less than they had at their peek two days after launch. Of those, it looks like about 50k actually installed it. Those numbers sound good compared to 5,000, but it's not a great return, especially when you consider that Valve gets a distribution cut on all of those sales. The above is not a huge development team, but they are skilled workers that will easily cost several million dollars to employ during a couple of years of development. So I agree with Jester, it's possible that they're still in the hole, and it's not clear there's enough income to justify supporting this product unless something dramatically changes.

 

[Reinhart]

We know they worked closely with WotC and there was oversight. I don't know how much authority WotC had to veto changes.

Regardless, the problem isn't that the play style and mechanics were bad or didn't work, it's that we thought they'd be closer to the actual rules. The problem was one of expectations.

WotC at least had editorial power over the story and dialogue elements of the game. That much has been revealed by the players who have cracked open the scripts and found edits and comments left by WotC staff.

 

[Jester David]

WotC at least had editorial power over the story and dialogue elements of the game. That much has been revealed by the players who have cracked open the scripts and found edits and comments left by WotC staff.

Do you have a link? I'd love to look at that and see how much they responded to WotC's feedback. And what feedback was left.

 

[Mirtek]

(Not that the D&D staff would have said the game was terrible even if they hated it. I don't even think they'd be allowed to remain silent. They pretty much had to hype the product.)

Remember how one of the DL creators was praising the awful Dragonlance animated movie in Dragon Magazine just before it's release

 

[darjr]

I too would love to read those editorial comments.