WotC Reveal Exodus, a New Video Game from the Decelopers of Mass Effect and Neverwinter Nights

[Ruin Explorer]

Paizo's Starfinder is in its second edition, and it has published a lot of titles. Then it hasn't worked so bad. Is Fading Suns "space fantasy"?

Starfinder is notably unpopular. It's frequently discussed in Paizo communities, because people are disappointed about how extremely unpopular it is. So that has "worked so bad", actually. Fading Sun is RPG that almost no-one plays, so if that's the level of success you're looking for, great!

WotC could publish its space-fantasy RPG, something like a retro-vintage version of Star Frontiers but add some mystical elements, something style 80's Saturday morning cartoon.

Cool! It could fail completely miserably like every single other '80s Saturday morning cartoon-style RPG, videogame and even actual cartoons (like both revived He-Man cartoons - notably She-Ra took a very different tack which had more in common with genuinely modern cartoons, and featured young characters, and was pretty successful). But yeah that's an amazing recipe for failure. What's particularly sad is people always say they want that, if you ask them, then you provide, and they don't actually buy it/watch it.

Sci-fi has worked very well in the videogame industry, specially shooter subgenre.

Actually, sci-fi shooters flop hard with some regularity, and it's usually a good way to do worse than "tactical gear fetish" shooters like Call of Duty. Sega lost well over $100m on a sci-fi shooter recently, Hyenas, and the list of failed sci-fi shooters is lengthy - a few easy examples: Lawbreakers, Battleborn, Titanfall 2, Shadowrun (2007), Agents of Mayhem (also fits under "80s cartoon"), Battlefield 2142, Battlefield 2042 (which has caused EA to revise their thinking about the entire Battlefield franchise), Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (one of the few CoDs that genuinely underperformed, maybe the only recent one), Evolve, Anthem, The Anacrusis, Disintegration, Bleeding Edge, Crucible, Wolfenstein: The New Order (the only genuinely sci-fi one, the rest being dieselpunk), Hyperscape (which Ubisoft lost crazy money on).

That's a tiny fraction of the the total.

Hell if you just look at any "list of failed AAA games", it'll be littered with sci-fi shooters, including

There are exceptions - you can certainly do okay with sci-fi, but you're taking a much, much bigger risk than you are with tactical fetish stuff, which has more of a guaranteed audience.

I hope be not off-topic but we should remember the potential influence of the UFO and conspirancy-theories "mythology". Somes of these theories could be used by players for their homebred settings (and this doesn't mean those believed to be true).

This isn't the 1990s, when conspiracy theories were just harmless fun, dude.

Today we have countless millions of people devoted to all sorts of bizarre conspiracy theories as if they were reality, even in developed countries. It's very likely such an RPG would end up as modern fantasy, not SF (as Dark*Matter did - it was also extremely odd in the conspiracies it chose, but that's a whole separate discussion which there are entire websites devoted to).

* = Games with the asterisk were also extremely good games, so it was particularly shocking they failed,

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Is the glass half-full or half-empty?

If Starfinder has been a failure, then they hand't published so many titles. And let's watch the content by 3PPs.

Fading Suns hasn't been so popular, but there is a new edition now. That should mean something, and it is not my cup of tea all. I don't like certain tropes.

Of course a sci-fi cartoon with 80's vibes would be a bomb like the Guardians of the Galaxy. The key is a right work of production.

There is a saturation of videogames, and this has been fatal for the online market, but if the shooters are produced, there should be a reason.

* Yes, today the Dark*Matter setting published now would be "updated" with the new theories from internet, or at least the players would do it. Why not?

* My theory is the evolution of the online videogames will be something like the current Fortnite, where different titles are only mode within a bigger title. Let's remember LEGO failed with online videogames some times, but now with LEGO Fortnite they shoul enjoy a new opportunity, because those titles share the same plataform. The cosmetic elements bough for a videogame also can be used in other mode.

 

[Parmandur]

Ok, I've found the press around the starting of the studio, but none of them mention a table top version of the game. So it's probably just speculation that turned into assumption/hope.

Personally, I hope there is a table top version...provided it's decently fun.

Wizards of the Coast Announces Archetype Entertainment to Develop New RPG - IGN

Headed by ex-BioWare devs, the new studio is developing a story-driven, sci-fi RPG for multiple platforms.

www.ign.com

Wizards of the Coast’s new game studio is making a new sci-fi RPG with BioWare vets

Archetype Entertainment joins the D&D and Magic: The Gathering company

www.polygon.com

Wizards of the Coast’s new Archetype Entertainment studio is making a sci-fi RPG

Wizards of the Coast announced today that its new Archetype Entertainment studio in Austin, Texas is working on a multiplatform sci-fi role-playing game.

venturebeat.com

No, Cynthia Williams said something about a tabletop component at some point, but it isn't easy to find right now.

 

[Parmandur]

One hopes not. It's always a huge waste of time and effort that about 10% of the playerbase actually engages with, at most, and makes balancing any kind of ship combat nearly impossible.

The developers came out front in the interviews that dripped with the announcement and said there is no ship combat or flying aspect to Exodus.

Based on the website lroe, time dilation appears that it will be basically central to the story.

It's bizarre writing, that might fit a linear action-adventure game like TLOU or something, but is terrible for a sandbox-y open-world RPG.

I know you are talking about Fallout, but in relation to Exodus, aside from all the Bioware alumni, their team also has a bunch of Naughty Dog people who worked on The Last of Us. So it does seem that this game is setting up to be Mass Effect meets The Last of Us, not Starfield.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If Starfinder has been a failure, then they hand't published so many titles. And let's watch the content by 3PPs.

That's a question for Paizo, that only they can answer. It would hardly be the first not-very-successful RPG that nonetheless got a lot of material. Even an unsuccessful RPG from a major company like Paizo is probably more successful than successful RPGs from a lot of obscure indies.

That should mean something

No. It doesn't inherently mean anything.

Of course a sci-fi cartoon with 80's vibes would be a bomb like the Guardians of the Galaxy. The key is a right work of production.

No. Guardians of the Galaxy isn't a cartoon, nor emulating one, nor is it '80s. It's based a comics run that started in 2008. It was barely eight years old when the first movie came out.

I'm guessing you're confused by the fact that Peter Quill was kidnapped in the '80s or early '90s? But it is in no way an "'80s Saturday morning cartoon" or indeed '80s at all beyond the music, which is actually just fairly deep cuts from Gunn, who has incredibly good '80s musical taste, which he's deployed in other situations too (Peacemaker, for example).

There is a saturation of videogames, and this has been fatal for the online market, but if the shooters are produced, there should be a reason.

The reason is that the "tactical gear fetish" shooter market is swamped, so the only obvious way to sneak into the shooter market it to target the smaller, less successful, sci-fi shooter market. It usually fails. Often at vast cost. The same isn't really true with RPGs - you still have better odds launching a fantasy RPG than an SF one, I'd suggest.

Yes, today the Dark*Matter setting published now would be "updated" with the new theories from internet, or at least the players would do it. Why not?

Because it'd be in incredibly bad taste to do that? And WotC just would not do anything that risky. They haven't done anything that risky in over 15 years. I'm not against "bad taste" RPGs, but the idea of super-corporate WotC doing them is laughable.

My theory is the evolution of the online videogames will be something like the current Fortnite, where different titles are only mode within a bigger title. Let's remember LEGO failed with online videogames some times, but now with LEGO Fortnite they shoul enjoy a new opportunity, because those titles share the same plataform. The cosmetic elements bough for a videogame also can be used in other mode.

This isn't an "evolution" of videogames, you're just describing the sort of F2P videogames played by children. There's absolutely no sign of this kind of approach being successful with people aged over about 16 though. And it's been around for a long time, more than a decade, so if that was going to change, it already would be.

It also makes absolutely no sense. Why would you do that? You want to sell more cosmetics, not fewer.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Let me explain it about Fortnite as a videogame plataform. The free-to-play videogames earn money selling cosmetic and those things, but if the game is closed, then those cosmetic elements are lost forever. But different titles share the same cosmetic elements, then even if a mode was closed, those could be used in other mode within the same videogame. The bet would be a lower risk.

Why not to add the black-eyed children and other urban legends in a possible update of Dark*Matter?

You can say your opinio, but that doesn't mean I have to believe you being right.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

That's exactly what I was suggesting lol dude come on.

And you were suggesting they needed an SF RPG, which y'know seemed to indicate something more specific than "just any plan at all".

It doesn't need to be SF, it just has to be not-fantasy. But there are already signs of other companies jumping on the SF bandwagon, as the most obvious alternative (with superheroes on their way down).

 

[VelvetViolet]

Did anyone ask "why didn't WotC revive Star Frontiers, Star*Drive, or any of the other scifi IPs they own" yet?

 

[Parmandur]

Did anyone ask "why didn't WotC revive Star Frontiers, Star*Drive, or any of the other scifi IPs they own" yet?

Yes, because they wanted to hire Ohlen (lead designer for the OG Baldur's Gate and BG2, Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age: Origins, and also involved heavily with Mass Effect) who had thrown the towl in on the video game industry, and he named his price and conditions including his own full creative control on a new Sci-Fi IP.

 

[VelvetViolet]

Yes, because they wanted to hire Ohlen (lead designer for the OG Baldur's Gate and BG2, Knights of the Old Republic, Neverwinter Nights, Dragon Age: Origins, and also involved heavily with Mass Effect) who had thrown the towl in on the video game industry, and he named his price and conditions including his own full creative control on a new Sci-Fi IP.

Pity. Hasbro owns more IPs than they know what to do with.

reads through the incredibly generic sounding descriptions released so far
Hm... did he bother reading about WotC's various scifi IPs before making that demand? Star*Drive has all the tools he seems to be looking for. Not identical, but it has pretty all the scifi tropes one could imagine and has a complex political situation that could be easily mined by a crpg veteran like him.

But no, let's make yet another new IP when our screwed up copyright law has created a sea of IPs languishing in limbo because the evil Mickey Mouse wanted to steal our cultural heritage from us.