Soldak Entertainment: Zombasite on Early Access *wince*

[x4000]

I think that comparisons like that get to be meaningless anyhow, to some extent.  If a company is doing well enough for themselves that they can keep doing their thing and live without too much paycheck fear, then what else matters?  By that logic a lot of larger companies that have high operating costs are "less successful" than smaller ones with next to no overhead.  I guess I'm referring to ROI % as well as amount of excess working capital compared to monthly expenses.  You can tell I'm in a stability-based mindset at the moment, I suppose.

[Wingflier]

https://steamdb.info/app/219990/

Compare it to Grim Dawn, the same genre, has similar graphics and price.

For reference, Drox Operative (Soldak's last game) only has about 10,500 owners on Steam.  Din's Curse has about 15,000. 

I don't think they are expecting Zombasite to do Grim Dawn type numbers.  Soldak is a 1 man studio.  Crate Entertainment is substantially larger.  This comparison isn't really fair.

Not an unfair comparison.

Crate Entertainment was founded in 2008 by former Iron Lore lead designer Arthur Bruno with the goal of continuing to create deep gameplay, with creative integrity, in original fictional settings. At a time when some were still proclaiming the demise of PC gaming, the founding of Crate was, to some degree, a way to keep working on the type of more traditional, complex PC games that we love.

In late 2009, Crate acquired the rights to the Iron Lore codebase and began working on a new Action-RPG that would become Grim Dawn. For the first few years, Grim Dawn plodded along with only two full-time developers, supported by volunteers. The team grew and work accelerated thanks to a successful Kickstarter campaign in May 2012, the alpha release of Grim Dawn in May 2013 and the game's debut on Steam Early Access in November 2013.

Crate Entertainment was started by 1 man back in 2008, and through a successful Kickstarter campaign (and successful marketing), slowly became what it is today. In other words, Soldak has access to all the same opportunities that Crate has had.

[Castruccio]

No, Soldak did not have access to all the same opportunities crate had.  Crate acquired the rights to the code base of an AAA game (Titan Quest) designed by a major studio (Iron Lore) and funded by a huge publisher (Take two). They also inherited the Titan quest fanbase.  They explicitly built and marketed Grim Dawn as a spiritual successor to TQ.

I would venture that a developer who starts with an AAA code base and an AAA fanbase does not have the same starting point as a  one man developer who created his code base and fan base and brand from thin air by himself. 

[eRe4s3r]

Yeah I also agree those 2 are not really comparable, Iron Lore was owned by THQ and when they killed that studio, the Crate devs had INCREDIBLE luck to get their hands on the engine and codebase. Which is easily the most precious thing you could ever wish to get. A ready made 3D ARPG engine complete with custom physics, particle systems, scripts, streaming level loading system and everything else that makes an engine (networking code!) isn't something you can just "buy" or "get" anywhere. Crate marketed itself well, had successful KS and this was the reason they could do Grim Dawn with that. Without KS money they wouldn't have been able to do anything with it.

If money is an issue then I guess even Unity 5 wouldn't really give you any benefit, since that definitely isn't a ready made ARPG engine Didn't consider that before.

[Wingflier]

I didn't realize they were using the TQ engine for Grim Dawn. Pretty impressive considering how dated it is. They must have made a lot of improvements on it.

[Wingflier]

Anyone who has played Zombasite, can you explain some more about the different 'faction' mechanics?

One thing I both liked and disliked about Drox Operative was the way the factions were handled. It was really neat playing in a universe of rival factions, and joining them/playing them off of one another. However, in the end you simply allied with the most powerful factions and eliminated those you couldn't bring into the fold.

This made the depth of the game's major mechanics, which seemed complex at face value, rather simple once you figured out how to manipulate it. There was very little in the game to prevent you from doing this mission after mission, which once again, made one of the main concepts of the design rather moot.

Does Zombasite suffer from the same problem? What's to prevent the player from allying with the most powerful faction(s) and simply eliminating all the rest? Are there lose conditions?

I'd love to know more.

[Castruccio]

I cannot say whether you can exploit the factions because I haven't tried it yet.  What I do know is that there are now bonuses to being allied with certain factions.  For instance, of you ally with the faction called 'heart of gold' you get bonus gold.  Alliances with other factions will give you bonus damage, food, etc.  This adds unique incentives to thr political part of the game. I think the faction AI has been improved as well, although again I have not tried exploiting it.  You could post this question on the Soldak forums and you might get a better response there.  My general impression is that the faction system is more complex than it was in Drox.  I don't know whether that added complexity addresses the exploit problem you mention.