Are those mutually exclusive? Are you saying that Lore Forge folks couldn’t possibly be both former players at a convention and game designers in their own right?
That aside, I think it’s normal to feel skeptical about any announcement for timelines on Prime War. But if you’re looking for reasons to be reasons to be reassured about it outside of “just wait until it’s ready or get your refund”, I would wager you won’t find much satisfaction. If you’re on the fence about the game, just wait till it’s ohysically released and decide then if you wanna purchase it.
From what I have seen personally, I’m pretty excited about the direction the redesign went, and I’m content to allow GTG to hold my original Broken City preorder to get the new game because I think the wait will be worth my time. If that’s not you, refunds are available.
I specifically asked Lore Forge Games on July 5th on their facebook page anouncment about their experience, as I did not want to presume on their individual or group prior experiences. I asked "can you tell us anything else about your company and what you have done otherwise?"
Their response: "Sure! We're a board game design and development firm based in Virginia Beach who love the Sentinels lore and gameplay, and this will be our first published game! "We're so excited to have everyone play this game, and we can't wait to show off the progress that's been made over the last year. "As to what we have done? Hmmm... we've traveled, cooked, studied law, biology, engineering, psychology, pet a lot of dogs, played a goodly number of games, placed second in the last competitive game published by Greater Than Games, and have been working hard for the last year or so to make Prime War the best game it can be! "I hope that answers some of your questions, and we'll have a time dedicated to answering Prime War questions sometime in the near future!"
As I've said elsewhere on these boards I'm retired and can let my money ride to see what develops and I have paid for my seat at the table to comment and question the progress. I will state facts as I know them and have verified, I welcome correction when I am wrong. I try to express personal conjecture and feelings as that of my own opinion, explaining how I reach those conclusions. I know this weekend GTG and LFG focus is appropriately on GenCon and demos and testing there, and I look forward to seeing what may come out of those sessions. But I have no illusions on the past history of this project and will be at best reservedly hopeful for the results rather than the optimism I used to put in GTG products.
I have to admit I'm getting a little disillusioned with >G. The original company was Christopher, Adam, and Paul. Christopher and Adam did the game mechanics (and let's be honest, that was mostly Christopher). They made SotM, which was fantastic, but what else have they done? Tactics was competent but flawed to the point where they decided to start over rather than continue the line. Prime War is being developed by Lore Forged. The RPG is being developed by Critical Hits. Spirit Island, Bottom of the 9th, Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Exoplanets, Fate of the Elder Gods, Lazer Ryderz, all developed by either other studios or freelancers. >G isn't a developer anymore, it's a publisher. And that provides very little insight into the quality of their products.
That was my original point exactly. I wish nothing but good things for them but I don't think the evidence supports the conviction that they'll always produce great games. They mostly seem to produce podcasts now.
I would actually be inclined to argue that the mere existence of Prime War is proof of GTG’s appreciation of its customers. And here’s why:
The Broken City/For Profit pre-order campaign did noticeably worse that the Villains of the Multiverse pre-order campaign that they ran in-house at the same time. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I do remember thinking that it had done significantly less well, meaning that GtG brought in a LOT less $ for Broken City than they did for Villains. They then spent at least a few months working on the game, with us knowing from The Letters Page that at the very least they developed a good chunk of story.
Then came the disappointing sales figures for Tactics. (In fairness Tactics would’ve had lower sales numbers prior to the Broken City pre-order campaign, but from what they’ve mentioned publicly we do know that GtG spent a fair bit of time/energy/money promoting Tactics by running tournaments at various cons, and that those promotions did not result in the sales numbers they had been hoping for). So now we have a game that’s not doing as well as SOTM within the GtG fan base and is performing poorly in retail. Poorly enough that the company had lost money on Tactics. Based on comparing pre-orders between Villains and Broken City, it was likely going to take more than just a new expansion to fix Tactics’ problems.
Now, in the Fall preceding the OblivAeon release GtG was really struggling cash-wise, so there wasn’t much they could do. Until just after OblivAeon.
Speaking from a purely financial perspective, the best thing in my mind that GtG could have done after receiving their OblivAeon cash is immediately cancel Broken City and provide full refunds to every backer. Why? Because this would have been a LOT cheaper than what they did instead. And what did they do instead? They spent the next two and a half years working on tactics/prime war. I’m sure there was a very large amount “back burner” delays in there, but even the back burner costs money. I think it’s safe to say that whatever money they got from pre-orders was fully used up a long time ago.
Which brings us to today. As it stands GtG has now spent years developing two different products. It’s not doing another Kickstarter/pre-order and therefore has no way to gauge demand for the product in advance. So they’re going in blind, spending yet more money up front on a thus-far-unprofitable product line with poor sales, poor pre-orders, and a non-insignificant number of angry customers. That does not sound to me like a recipe for success.
One of the basic principles of investing is “never send good money after bad”, and GtG has been doing that with Tactics/Prime War for YEARS, with no guaranteed payout at the end and most available data seemingly suggesting there will be no payout. (Again, financially speaking, Broken City should have been dumped the second they received their OblivAeon cash.)
So, why would GtG spend years sinking money and time into Tactics/Prime War? Well, it could be that (1) C&A love Sentinels so much that they’re convinced Prime War will somehow succeed because they love it so much, and have convinced everyone else that this will somehow work; (2) the GtG staff are simply blind to the facts; or (3) they appreciate the fact that a bunch of customers wanted the product and were willing to pay in advance for it, and come hell or high water they’re going to deliver some kind of product to those customers.
Those three possibilities aren’t mutually exclusive, and there could potentially be other reasons I’m missing, but I have no reason to believe that C&A/the GtG staff are either too in love with their baby or too stupid to see the plain facts in front of them, which for the moment at least leads me to conclude that #3 is the reason we’re getting Prime War at all.
Of course, none of this means that Prime War will be any good, or that it will perform well even if it is. It also doesn’t mean that GtG couldn’t have communicated much better throughout the process. Or that we should take their shipping estimates as written in stone. Questioning all of those seems perfectly reasonable. What I don’t yet have cause to question is GtG’s motives/appreciation for its customers.
(On a semi-related side note, I recently read an interesting article about how NASA’s can-do attitude and spirit of optimism cause it to continuously and gravely underestimate projects costs and timelines. It was a very interesting article, and almost every other paragraph made me think of GtG in some way).
So, why would GtG spend years sinking money and time into Tactics/Prime War? (1)…(2)…(3)…
(4) They didn’t. To me it seems they’ve been pushing it off repeatedly in favor of other projects, thus taking a long term interest free loan from their customers and paying it back piecemeal as individuals request refunds or they someday complete it. I’m not saying their intent was never to fulfill Prime War promises, just that it appears to me to have been repeatedly given lowest priority and now we’re informed outsourced for a year.
Additionally, we don't know what their arrangement with Lore Forged is. Given that Prime War is their debut effort, it may have been as simple as, "Do what you can, and if it's good when you're all done, we'll help you playtest and publish it for you, in exchange for a cut of the profits." In that case it would have cost >G no money and very little time.
Actually, I got that list by going through their store page, which sorts by Most Recommended. GSF is near the end of that list.
I wouldn’t speculate on the contract between GTG and LFG without additional info. There’s no point in it other than assuming they both think it will be beneficial to themselves.
I love an interest-free loan as much as the next guy, but I don't think there were enough pre-orders for "interest-free loan" to be a meaningful reason for any extended period of time. Up until Fall 2015 they were still promoting Tactics heavily, so putting Broken City on the back burner wouldn't have made sense. And come Feb 2016 they had OblivAeon cash. There probably were a few months in late 2015 where this was the case, while the company was really tight on cash and it had become clear that Tactics was underperforming, but that's about the only time-frame during which I see "interest-free loan" as being a significant motivating factor.
And we do know they were doing some work on it. Clearly there was a fair bit of story work done, and the playtesters have commented at various points about getting stuff to playtest, including revisions. Heck, even if all playtest coordination and rules changes were being worked on by an unpaid volunteer, that was all time and effort that could have been devoted to a more profitable/more promising product.
As for the game being given lowest priority, I have no illusions that Tactics/Prime War has spent the last 3.5 years on the front burner and never the back one. But that's not inconsistent with my reason #3. "I want to get this product to you, but it's going to require a lot of my limited time, and OblivAeon is paying the bills and has 40x the number of backers, so I'm going to have to make that happen first."
In effect, I do think Tactics/Prime War has probably been on the back burner for a while, but it's still been on the stove [long past the likely point after which it became financially inadvisable for GtG to keep it there].
I played a demo version of Prime War at GenCon. The PvP was fast paced and the combat system was a lot better than Tactics in many ways. I enjoyed it much more than I was expecting. It has a similar feel to Tactics character-wise but gameplay-wise it is better. To me it felt like what we were expecting from Tactics originally. They had all new characters in the demo, so I am curious as to how the original characters will feel in their system.
Considering the only thing used from the old game that will get used inthe new game is the miniatures. definietly not worth it. Heck considering that the people making the new game have never made a game before and have already been at it over a year are 2 very bad indicators that the new game is worth anything. 3 years is my limit, time for refund.
I don't understand your problem here. I think it's that people who have never made a game before have taken over a year to make something that is going to begin intensive playtesting soon?
So everyone who ever makes a game has to have made a game first? Who then makes the first game? And what’s wrong with taking over a year to make a game? Try making one yourself. It takes a lot of time as you learn what is good and what is bad, what needs fixed, what needs improved, and what parts of the original idea you just don’t like anymore. Coming up with the idea for a game is just the first step. And in the end, although the core idea may remain, the outside no longer resembles what it was originally.
As I said before, I have played the game. Multiple times. And it played better than Tactics. I’m not some schill. I am someone who loves Tactics and wished they had continued with it. But they didn’t, and Prime War is a better version. So, if you liked Tactics, you’ll find this one works better, IMO.
Show me an example of long development times leading to worse games and I promise I’ll provide triple the examples of the opposite effect. I got the time If you do.
I’m squinting as hard as I possibly can and I still can’t see how you could possibly ground this argument in something resembling reality.
