A team of developers that formerly worked on Fallout: New Vegas is creating a new town-building game called Steam Bandits: Outpost. While the term “town building” is one that scares off many hardcore gamers, the team behind the game assures fans that Steam Bandits is more Civilization than Farmville, calling it a “pay to style” game along the lines of League of Legends or Team Fortress 2 as opposed to the “pay to continue playing” model of Zynga games.
“If we make money, great, but I just want people to play,” creative director Jason Fader told IGN. “I hate pay-to-win, I hate pay-to-continue-playing. I’m in it for fun. If people want to spend money they can, but they never have to pay to have fun.”
This philosophy is just one way that Fader’s Iocaine Studios is looking to bring hardcore ideas to a traditionally casual market. Fader previously served as lead producer at Obsidian, working on Fallout: New Vegas and its downloadable content, as well as a sci-fi RPG that never saw the light of day and a canceled next-gen project codenamed North Carolina. Prior to that, he spent time at Blizzard and developed the Atari-published ThreadSpace: Hyperbol. Fader knows the hardcore audience, and so does his team.
Many members of the team working on Steam Bandits are veterans of multiple rounds of widespread layoffs at Obsidian that took place over the past two years. Regarding reports that Obsidian layoffs and bonuses were affected by the Metacritic score for New Vegas and that developers continue to hire based on that metric, Fader said the practice isn’t fair. “Why Metacritic?” he asked. “It’s like saying ‘you must have an IQ of 140 or higher’ on a job application. We like distilling things down to numbers, but scores vary, and there are opinions and preference involved. Royalties are fair, but Metacritic isn’t fair. I hope [that practice] goes away.”
Looking back to his time at Obsidian, Fader also noted that many of the employees affected by the layoffs were female. While he doesn’t think the layoffs were based on sexism (many of the most junior team members just happened to be female, and senior members were kept on since they’re harder to replace), Fader did mention that many of the female employees had trouble finding jobs post-Obsidian.
“If you took two artists, one male and one female, that applied for the same job, the male could end up getting it while the female never even got called back for an interview,” he said. “You don’t want to believe discrimination like that goes on, but statistically it does.” Many of those women have now been brought into the fold at Iocaine, where 10 of the 12 current team members are female.
According to Fader, the team at Iocaine is mostly ex-Obsidian, but has also been built on the connections of team members who knew other developers looking for jobs. “If someone had a friend who was a good fit, they’d fill a role,” Fader explained. When it comes to friendships, Fader is loyal to a fault. When he was at Blizzard around the time of World of Warcraft’s launch, a game he worked on independently with friends who didn’t have full-time jobs in the industry yet was nominated for an IGF Award. After an interview regarding the game appeared in a local newspaper, Blizzard gave Fader a choice: keep working on the game and leave the company, or stay at Blizzard but stop working with his friends. He chose his friends. (Fader notes that in the years since, Blizzard has changed its policy on outside projects.)
As the industry continues to embrace free-to-play, Fader said he expects all games to adopt that model in the future -- including consoles (a prospect that Microsoft appears to be looking into). “I’m surprised there aren’t more. The console market is already prepared for it,” he said, noting that “Microsoft Points already exist” and would make perfect sense for quick micro-transactions. He feels the problem is that there’s a “long list to satisfy for consoles” in terms of development, which “creates a barrier of entry for indies.”
For now, Steam Bandits: Outpost is seeking funding on Kickstarter, which Fader notes will support one of the three locales the team has envisioned. An original version of the Kickstarter sought three times as much funding, but Fader notes that the current funding goal will allow for one one locale, and Iocaine will be able to add in the other two areas and additional new features if the funding goal is exceeded.
Concept art from Steam Bandits: Outpost.
Fader and the team at Iocaine have big plans for Steam Bandits, and if Outpost does well, the plan is to follow-up with multiple games in different genres. In the next game, players might play as an airship captain in a League of Legends-style real time strategy game. Players in that game could run missions for players in Outpost, with money and items transferrable between the games. It’s an ambitious idea, but Fader believes if anything can allow it to happen, it’s Kickstarter.
“Kickstarter was our first choice for funding,” he said. “It’s sort of like when iTunes came around for MP3s. It cut out the record label and distribution, allowing music to be delivered directly from the people making it. Crowdsourcing works.”
As of this writing, Steam Bandits: Outpost has approximately 25% of its $30,000 goal on Kickstarter, with 17 days of funding still remaining.
Andrew Goldfarb is IGN’s associate news editor. Keep up with pictures of the latest food he’s been eating by following him on Twitter or IGN.
Source : ign[dot]com
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