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Welcome back to the weekly Kickstarter gaming campaign round-up, where I point out some of the interesting things happening right now on Kickstarter.
As always we start with updates on previously covered campaigns, and we’ll start with the good news. Goodwill, The Bird Told Me to Do It and A Little Less Desperation have completed their campaigns this week, successfully, both finishing on Dec 2nd. Agony meanwhile has 4 days to go, and has made over double its target – so we can hopefully expect great things from that game if things go to plan. DämmerLicht has also already reached its (admittedly very small) target since I covered it last week, so well done to the developers of that game. Finally, Dragon Skies VR, the campaign that was offering the game for $1 to every person who backed has finally concluded with a total of $811 pledged. While not an intended use of crowdfunding, it’s an interesting and clever way for them to build a small community for their game off the bat.
Of course, as always there are some campaigns not doing so well. Space Jammers is just over halfway to their target with only 70 hours to go; and the campaign for Overstep was cancelled 3 hours before time of writing as the team behind it felt that they needed to regroup to better explain the game in their next campaign. However this week we have a first in that one of the campaigns I previously covered now redirects to a page saying the the campaign is unavailable due to an intellectual dispute – Bergnein. As the game is based on a real-life place, it’s possible that the owners of the club were not happy to have their club represented without permission and have contacted Kickstarter about it. Stay tuned for more news on what the future will be for this game.
First up, we have a VR game that retells a well known game from another point of view.
We’re all aware of that classic dot-munching game aren’t we? This game tells the same story but from the point of view of one of those dots. Bitdude sees you play as the ‘bit’ aiming to collect and liberate your other bit brethren before ‘Chompman’ can get them to try and satisfy his everlasting hunger. You’re also able to eat the fruit before Chompman too.
Bitdude has a $125 goal, and has made $85 of that so far. It has 25 days to go.
Next up we have a simplistic little 3D platformer.
Blanco is a little platformer made in Unity, made to be simple and not overly complicated. There’s not a great amount of information available on the page, but the developer wants to make 32 unique levels for the game. They estimate a release around mid-year of 2017, but say it depends on how well the campaign does.
Blanco has a $1,000 goal, of which it has 29 days left to make. It has yet to raise anything.
A popular genre, Project: Liberty sets you in a world where you are free to do as you please – be a citizen, join a faction, travel, work, scavenge. The developer is not planning to add any sort of story because they want the players to have full freedom in what they do in the game. The world of Monroe will be populated by other players and actions will have effects on not just the player but the area around them, other players and even players who happen upon some stuff later on long after the actions have taken place.
Project: Liberty has made $150 of a strangely unrounded total of $147,592. It has 28 days to go.
Lastly we have our card game of the article, and one about telling stories. Something I can always get on board with.
One Up This takes the social gathering situation where a group of friends starts telling stories about things they’ve seen or heard happen, and makes a game out of it. Each card has a situation on it such as “Tell a story about a bad date” and then each player takes turns to tell a story relating to it. The group then votes on the best story of that round and at the end the person who won the most times is the over-all winner of the game. Simple really.
One Up This has 27 days to go, and has made $1,093 of its $12,000 goal.
It seems that recently the PC release of the remastered Darksiders games has been suffering a few performance issues, mainly on cards made by AMD. Now THQ Nordic say that they’ve managed to fix the issue and released a patch.
Players were experiencing some frame spikes on AMD cards, with a few getting particularly severe ones. Now that the patch has been applied, people are beginning to report that the frame rate is keeping a lot more consistent around 60FPS. This bodes well for people who were previously having issues, and unless you hear reports of something going wrong because of an update, it’s always a good idea to keep your games and software up-to-date anyway.
The patch has also fixed an edge case where players couldn’t save their keybindings if they already had a pre-existing configuration set. However, there is still a memory leak issue that hasn’t been quite stamped on. Games seem to be able to run for around 2 hours before crashing to desktop, but given that custom-build PCs are always different to each other it varies wildly from machine to machine. THQ Nordic are still working on the leak issue.
Either way, if you have the game on PC, best log into Steam and let it do its updating work. It’ll save on patching time when the memory leaks do get sorted out after all.
Blizzard’s doing their part for charity this festive season by pledging the money you use to purchase a pet in World of Warcraft towards helping sick children live out their dreams if you buy one before the end of the year.
Mischief, the Fel kitty, is a release in line with WoW’s current expansion Legion which sees an awful lot of demons and the Fel-tainted popping up everywhere causing trouble. Mischief himself isn’t that bad, costing you only £9 or $10 to adopt and have ready to stand by the sides of all of your characters tied to your Battle.net account. And all of that money, 100% of it, will be given as part of the donation Blizzard will be making to the Make A Wish foundation.
If you’d rather have a softer, more physical version you can do that too. There’s a plushie of the Fel kitty available in the Gear store for $25. Not all of that goes to charity, but at $14 that’s still more than half of it going to good causes.
If you want to support Blizzard’s efforts, you have until December 31st to buy the pet in-game.
Overwatch gets special limited edition content released for big events or holidays, we know this now. First it was the Summer Games content for the Olympics, then we had Halloween’s Dr. Junkenstein’s Revenge. Christmas content is inevitable and some eager gamers have been sneaking a look through datamining.
What’s been found so far are references to new maps, something that could be the holiday’s potential special gamemode (ala Lucioball or Junkenstein’s Revenge), which characters are getting new festive skins and even the menu music.
On the subject of the maps and gamemode, the file references seem to suggest something like the Halloween gamemode with a specialised map for it. Some other maps might also get a little Christmas decoration too for the length of the seasonal event.
On the cosmetic side, every character will be getting a new spray, voice line and victory pose through the Christmas loot crates, but just as with Halloween only not all of them will be getting a skin, emote or highlight intro though the loot crates. Those characters getting at least ONE of the three will be Widowmaker, Reinhardt, Mercy, Symmetra, Reaper, Sombra, Roadhog, D.Va, Ana, Soldier: 76, and Lúcio. The ones getting TWO are Winston, McCree, Mei, Pharah, Zarya, Tracer, and Zenyatta; however Torbjorn will be getting all THREE from the loot. This hints that maybe his character will be put into an important role for the new gamemode possibly.
We should see when the event kicks off. December the 13th is the estimated date of release right now, which would take it through to January 3rd if it ran for the same three-week period of time as other events. However, keep your eyes on the official channels for more information as Blizzard release it.
It’s December at last, so finally Christmas is allowed to be absolutely everywhere. Including in video game launch trailers apparently.
As the tale “Twas the night before Christmas” is read, we get a load of footage of the sort of gameplay the Dead Rising series is famous for – slaughtering huge packs of zombies in the most creative and strange ways you can. And, as the trailer confirms, Dead Rising 4 will be out on December 6th, well in time to make it under many peoples’ Christmas trees. The Xbox team will be doing “something” in London on Monday to mark the game’s release as well, so keep your eyes and ears open for what that is.
DR4 is going to be revisiting the start of the series in this game, but will come with the new weapons to make and photos to take that you’d expect from a new entry into any game series.
