Dreamworld

The Boulevard of recycled store assets

A promise is something that we tend to hold sacred in modern society. Even if we like to alleviate the importance of such an evanescent curtsey, there's something deeply primal about how troubled we become when promises are broken, or made in ill faith to begin with. We feel as though some sort of sacrilege has been summoned upon us, something utterly poisonous to fell us, because trust once laid has been exploited and spat out. That's why I feel that even in it's most well-intentioned, the telling of a lie is considered at best condemnable and at worst absolutely unforgiveable. It's the reason why even after all of these years and despite considerable effort for reparations I still recoil in disgust a little whenever I see the name 'Sean Murray', why I wince and close my eyes whenever I hear the name 'Cyberpunk' or think of any of the artists who were involved in making that one of the biggest disappointments of all time, and the reason why Kickstarter scams are some of the most reviled of any drifts out there in the world today. (Unless you're making 'Star Citizen'; that's a literal fake-it-till-you-make-it story in progress.)

Growing up as a suspicion-filled kid with very little money to waste certainly did instil into me a sense of dubiosity when it came to giving away funds to frivolous pursuits. Having someone explain to me in great detail the things that they think they can accomplish, even with the power of experience and past accomplishments behind them, holds little sway with the current me, and thus I'm not really one to jump onto the whole Kickstarter trend. Not that I begrudge those who do, the very reason I celebrate and talk about Kickstarts I think are cool is because I recognise I'm unnaturally stingy with my money and that there are others out there with healthy financial relationships. Although given how the old saying goes about fools and their money, I'm certainly happier to be on the side of 'too stingy' than 'too giving', because there's certainly a lot of folk out there who are eager to take money for services they cannot render and then run before anything can be done. On an extremely related note; Have you heard about Kickstarter?

A platform dedicate to helping fans donate to upcoming projects on the ground level and become 'backers', Kickstarter and GoFundMe have served as the lit matches to a few modern success stories out there for products that might not ever have been made if left to the whims of the uncaring profit driven investment wolves. Sticking mostly with games, we can thank Kickstarter for the existence of Obsidian's Pillars of Eternity, Chuklefish's Starbound, Gun Media's Friday the 13th and Cloud Imperium's Star Citizen. (So you know, so hits and misses there.) The thing to remind yourself when considering Kickstarter, is that the games I've mentioned are the exception to the rule of an overwhelming majority that fail, for whatever reason, to live up to their promises. Such is what happens when you create a platform that runs on promises made with cash upfront; folk overpromise what they're capable of, or run away with wild imaginings of what they want to do without working out the specifics of how to get there, or just straight up lie to people for some quick cash. Now one could argue that it's up to the consumer to have the due diligence to look into these most obvious of scams, but in an ideal world this wouldn't be necessary at all and isn't that what crowdfunding investment sites are all about? Creating an ideal world?

Whatever, I'm just trying to figure out who's more to blame for Dreamworld. (Visit the link if you want to see it, I'll not have a single screen on this blog) You heard of Dreamworld? I'm hoping the answer's no, because good lord I feel terrible ever since I heard about it. Dreamworld was sold as, hold on let me read this word-for-word, "The last game you'll ever play". Is that right? Sort of sounds like a threat, doesn't it. And you know what? Zach and Garrison might be onto something here, Dreamworld might just be the last game I ever play because I'm not sure I want to play games after looking upon that which they've made. I think that I'm just about ready to hang up my joypad and move for good into the real world where I can deal with- nah, actually the real world is incredibly boring and one dimensional, I'll stick with any game other than this one, thanks.

So what is Dreamworld, you might be asking. I don't know. Honestly and truthfully, I have no idea what this game was trying to sell itself as on Kickstarter. Or, more appropriately, I don't know what this game successfully sold itself as, because after asking for $10,000 the campaign hit over $63,000 with more than 600 backers. (Why are we still here? Just to suffer?) At it's core I can say that Dreamworld pitched itself as being an MMO game that would fit hundreds of thousands of players onto a procedurally generated world, that's at the base level. But everything else in this Kickstarter ranges from inconsistent fluff to fanciful garbage. I'd recommend you read for it all but here are a few of my favourite excerpts for you: 

"Evert Genre, Every Style, Every game type there has ever been and will be." What does that even mean? Is you're game going to be a clicker/punch-em'up/schmup/Souls-like/Strandgame/ActionPlatformer/turnbased/survival/battleroyale/Roleplaying/Moba game? If you can't even be bothered to sit down and decide what type of game you're going to make, how is the rest of the world supposed to sit down and fund it? 

In another part of the pitch where they disclose how assets will be built by players using ingame 3D creation tools (essentially outsourcing the game creation process to it's players) there's a fun bit. "Create your own 3D models... Imbue them with useful functions such as lighting, Extra damage, low weight, Knockback, and a plethora of exciting magical properties!" You really have to read the pitch yourself to appreciate this fully, but none of the examples listed there mean anything because the game itself hasn't got an identity. Whatsmore, they start off by talking of object 'functions', which is an actual term used in game asset design, and then ended the sentence talking about magical properties which obviously exists within the game world. It's a little nitpick, but it shows how these people aren't even familiar with the terminology and lingo surrounding game development, let alone how launch a full development cycle themselves.

And the kicker. The best line from the pitch, when talking about where the team is currently sitting at right now: "2 Full time Devs, 1 part time Dev, 8 months of development." For an MMO? A MMO that's going to encompass every game genre there has ever been or will be. You have 2 developers? One of which (and excuse me for pulling from another source, their website) describes themselves as a "Superstar Ex Google Engineer", Whatever the heck that means, and the other is a "Serial Entrepreneur with 9 years of game development experience." Two red flags there. 'Serial Entrepreneur' sounds like he's incapable of launching a successful business or sets up crappy quick-sale companies deliberately for cash, and he hasn't labelled any of these games he's been working on so that's likely nonsense too. Great start guys.

Yet somehow, inexplicably, they've received 650% of their goal on a pitch that sounds utterly moronic and a trailer composed of entirely premade Unity Store assets that they've bought and thrown onto a pre-purchased map. At this point can you honestly be upset when you've been scammed out of money that you've spent so stupidly anyway? One of the backer tiers, which is now sold out, was $2000. Someone threw this insanity 2 grand! Why not just flush it down the ocean and into the sewer, it ends up in the hands of sewer rats either way! But the fact that this got funded isn't what blew everything out into the stratosphere. Oh no. It was the fact that this game actually got out there into the public.

"So you mean they delivered on their promise?" Oh no, but people still got exactly what they deserved. The Dreamworld Alpha has been in the hands of the public for a while now, and to even so much as call it a game is charitable. What Dreamworld is, in it's present state, is a featureless expanse filled with prebuilt store assets and some incredibly rudimentary UI elements tacked ontop. Its- well quite honestly it's an embarrassment to even call it an Alpha. Even pre-alpha seems generous. This is a state that literally no game with any direction in life is ever at, because it's not meant to be the barebones of a game at all. But what did you expect from a MMO made by 2 people off the back of $10,000 asked for dollars? They wanted to hire 10 more devs and continue on for another 6 months to finish up a working beta build. 1 year and 2 months of development with 12 staff members for an MMO?! Am I the only one with alarm bells ringing right now? Either these guys are malicious or delusional, and I think it may be a bit of both.

I've touched barely a fraction of this trainwreck, and I'm sure so much more is going to happen in the weeks to come. I'd strongly suggest you go out and do some looking for yourself because it's just so juicy no matter where you decide to dig in. Whether you want to touch on their hair brained scheme for getting around paying server upkeep costs, which has led to glaring security issues from the getgo. The way that they distributed the Alpha, through publicly accessible Google Drive and unlimited use keys that were shared everywhere instantly. The sob story that the Kickstart video brings up of the creator's tragically broken relationship he sacrificed for this game, which has been torn apart systematically in a video by his ex finance. It's just a total mess, plain and simple. At in the middle of it is a 'game' that defies coherent definition and reasonable logic promising, drunk on it's own hubris, to fill your every last desire and be 'the last game you ever play'. Well these people may represent the height of pretentious ineptitude, but they nailed that one promise because this entire saga has just about driven me insane. ($63,000... How?...)