Broken Age: Act 2 is finally out, so we can all get off Double Fine and Tim Schafer’s grill, right? Well, maybe not. Quite a few Kickstarter backers are incensed at the game’s repeated and lengthy delays. After all, when Act 1 came out last year, we were told to expect Act 2 in a few months. It should have been out about a year ago, and now that it has finally arrived, Tim Schafer has the gall to tell everybody to play through it again so we can remember everything that happened. If it had come out when you said it would, Mr. Schafer, we wouldn’t need to do that!
If the delays were Broken Age’s only issue, it’d be relatively easy to forgive. After all, good things come to those that wait. Unfortunately, as Angelo noted in our review , the puzzles in Act 2 take a fair bit of shine off the game. In responding to criticism from Act 1, it feels like the development team corrected course too far. When trying to make more challenging puzzles, the team ended up making a bunch of tedious trial-and-error puzzles and neglected to give players proper contextual clues to avoid the kind of tedious guesswork that put many of us off old-school adventure games in the first place.
Here’s the thing, though. We asked for the problems associated with Broken Age’s release. How? By gleefully taking part in the Kickstarter revolution and its revolt against traditional game publishers.
Don’t get me wrong. I criticize said publishers all the time. I’m primarily a fan of so-called niche game genres, the kinds of games that the likes of EA, Activision, and Ubisoft often refuse to touch. I wish these large publishers would make more room in their catalogues for small, experimental, and niche titles. I wish publishers would spend less time getting involved in the creative side of game development, forcing developers to turn inventive ideas (or even forehead-smackingly ordinary ideas like having a female protagonist) into so much dull, recycled mush.
At the same time, good publishers are a very important part of development once a game’s team is bigger than one basement programmer. They provide proper funding for a game, because even the three million raised by the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter isn’t really sufficient these days. They can also step in when a developer’s project management fails. Sometimes, you just need somebody to say, “Hey, stop tinkering with this game. You need to get it out or we’re going to stop giving you money.” Sure, publishers can sometimes do that unreasonably, but on the other hand, some developers need to have that big bad boss breathing down their necks. It feels like Double Fine is one of those developers.
When it comes to Broken Age ‘s other big problem, being steered poorly by player feedback, we as gamers definitely share in the fault. Like MMO players who erroneously feel like their monthly fee entitles them to act as co-developers, Kickstarter backers often carry an inflated sense of their own importance and game development ability. Worse, many developers actively encourage that sense of over-entitlement by promising to let all the backers act as full development partners. It doesn’t take long for that promise to fall flat when it turns out that everybody has their own opinion about the direction a game should go, and of course everybody gets extremely upset when a developer decides to go in a different direction. Even when certain complaints, like the complaint that Broken Age: Act 1’s puzzles were too simple, are both common and reasonable, altering a game’s development to answer these complaints is a rocky road. It’s quite possible to over-correct or to end up giving gamers what they think they want, but not what they actually need.
I think Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites are an important part of today’s gaming landscape, and I’m still glad I backed Broken Age . However, I think we all need to be realistic and take a long, sober look at what crowdfunding is and what it means. It means that we’re taking a chance that a developer has poor project management skills or that a project simply goes off the rails and fails. In the traditional publishing model, many projects fail in that manner, but before we consumers have spent a dime on them. We also take the risk that a game we’ve funded doesn’t turn out to be the exact game we dreamed it’d be when we funded it. The developer is almost certain to make several decisions that we don’t agree with, since no developer can please all the people all the time.
Broken Age , the harbinger of the great Kickstarter revolution, is finally complete, and its development was far from perfect. The thing is, the game’s problems are exactly what we asked for when we funded the it: development issues due to a lack of publisher support and design issues inspired by perhaps too much backer input. The question now is how to learn from Broken Age and transform crowdfunding into a better, stronger, faster model.