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Grimoire

#1
So perhaps you feel that four or five years is too long to wait for a small-team game to be finished.

How about 20 years?

Grimoire is finally being released. (The link here is to the Steam version.) Here, let me just quote the features text:
After more than 20 years of development, the greatest roleplaying game of them all is finally ready for release! Grimoire is an homage to the classic dungeon blobbers and is inspired by Wizardry, Might & Magic, Lands of Lore, Anvil of Dawn, DungeonMaster and the Eye of the Beholder games!

  • 600 hours of play possible in a single game
  • Lush Colorful 2D Hand Drawn Artwork
  • Retro style MIDI music and 8 bit sound effects
  • 244+ Maps in the game to explore!
  • Turn-Based strategic combat
  • Multiple Beginnings, Multiple Endings
  • 144 context sensitive magic spells
  • 14 races, 15 professions, 50 skills
  • 64 intelligent NPCs with 8000+ Words in Vocabulary
  • Full Sentence Communication with NPCs
  • 240+ monsters each with special powers and defenses
  • 1000+ items, Carry Containers, Global Party Inventory
  • 30 conditions, from Confusion to Disease & Lycanthropy
  • Automapping, Autowalking, Autohealing
  • Global Map Atlas With Position Marker
  • Quest Journal, Hint Prompting, Help Facility, Mini-Quests
  • Complex LockPicking Interfaces for Doors & Chests
  • Challenging Puzzles and Rich Interactive Dungeons
  • Browsable Character Library for up to 100 characters
  • Up to 12 Commented Postage Stamped Savegames
  • Multi-themed GUI and customizable screen layouts

And if you buy it the week it comes out (Aug. 1), it's 10% off. About which, the developer has something else interesting to say:
I have decided it is just a nice thing to do for people who have been waiting years to play my game if I offered a 10% discount on the game during it's first week. After this ends, I want to assure anyone waiting for the game that Grimoire will never, ever sell at a discount at any time it is on the Steam store ever again. I won't permit it to be sold below it's retail value for any reason. I am too proud of my finished product to permit it to be turned into simply another commodity in a Steam sale. If Valve ever decides that sales of the product no longer justify it having a page then I will move it to another venue - but as the author I will never offer my game at a discount again anywhere. I'm not a corporation that turns out games like sausages and computes their price curves over rates of decay in market value. Grimoire is my unique and proprietary product and I only want to sell it to the most hardcore fans of the genre. I was never targeting the mass market or casual gamers. It is in the first paragraph of the original design document I wrote more than 20 years ago when I was putting a proposal together that described the entire game end-to-end in both story, design and implementation. It was an aristocrat's manifesto when it was written and the language was specifically that of an aristocrat declaring the game was not going to be designed to appeal to the masses. Only fans of the genre.

I don't know if I'll spring for this myself. But it seemed ambitious enough that RPG fans here might find it worth a look.
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Re: Grimoire

#6
I'll buy a boxed version of the game with all the physical goodies. To be a truly old-school ultimate game it should have all the trimmings. ;) :angel:



Edit: Of course you might want to do a little research on the developer before you splash the cash. *chuckle*
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Re: Grimoire

#7
Yes, after doing some research into the guy, he seems a narcissist and a big child. :P Also apparently believes he's a superhuman with an IQ of 190, yet at the same time, he expects an impending apocalypse and prophesies about it. He also did an indiegogo for his game (that failed rather spectacularly). His attitude seems to be terrible and very all-important/self-aggrandizing (for instance, he's compared his game to the Sistine Chapel). I'd take everything said with a grain of salt, and wait to see if it's actually any good before you get it. Given that he claims 600 hours of gameplay, I'd wait around half a year (so people have time to play it all) and see where opinions on the game are by then. :P

He also says he'll never put it on sale after this initial 10% off. I'm more and more skeptical.

The game itself looks fine, even fun. It's the man himself I don't trust.


edit: Also worth noting that he has claimed the game was "almost completed" for the past fifteen years. He's done a terrible job of making himself seem trustworthy. The game might be fun, but I wouldn't expect anything groundbreaking.


Regardless, I'll be keeping an eye on it out of curiosity. I want to see how well it does. The demos he released did well enough in the past, apparently.
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Re: Grimoire

#9
Victor Tombs wrote:
Tue Jul 25, 2017 8:22 am
Talvieno wrote:
Tue Jul 25, 2017 7:39 am
He also did an indiegogo for his game (that failed rather spectacularly).
Bear in mind that one can never fail on indiegogo, Nathan, which is probably why he chose that platform. :angel:
And yet he did multiple attempts at his crowd funding. And kept droping his goal by an order of magnitude, and STILL kept failing.
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Re: Grimoire

#12
So, out of morbid curiosity, I decided to take a look at Grimoire's reviews and forums on Steam. Holy hell, it's a mess. There are legions of reviews spewing literally nothing but praise with a few dissenters giving negative reviews. But the negative reviews are so bad. Buggy resolution settings causing the game window to turn black, horrible UI choices requiring loads and loads of clicking just to progress fights, the Indiegogo backers are apparently not receiving their keys yet since the dev didn't actually have a system in place to distribute them, there is no manual (it's coming Monday apparently :lol: ) Steam updating doesn't work, there are crashes, the list goes on and on. And the fans are just toxic too, often going out of their way to find everything they can possibly insult about anyone with anything but praise for the game. What a disaster!
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Re: Grimoire

#13
The dev is also apparently banning people from the forums and steam community left and right, deleting posts at his leisure. People have reportedly gotten banned for as little as expressing doubt that the game would actually be good. It's small wonder the community is so toxic and defensive - they've never had to deal with negativity.

Catastrophic disaster of megalithic proportions. :lol:

Not hearing any complaints about the actual gameplay, though, just the UI and... everything else in between.
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Re: Grimoire

#15
I think it's too soon to know for sure. People very frequently compare the game (favorably and not) to Wizardry 6 and 7, so my guess is that if you played that game and liked it, chances are you'll enjoy Grimoire as well - provided you can get it to run of course. There are fixes for the 4k resolution bug, and it's possible to fix other issues with the game, but if he updates, it requires a reinstall if you want the patches. If you're okay with all of that, and you're a Wizardry fan, then it seems like this is 100% a good game... but for the price? That has yet to be seen. I'd still avoid the community as much as possible, though.

And, for the record, I'm glad you posted it. It's proved extremely interesting to me to follow. :) I feel like I would've missed out if I hadn't been aware of the saga of Grimoire. It's a classic tale of how much one can benefit from proper QA and PR, and it's always good to be reminded of how important those are.
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