The Dark Triad: Dragon’s Death Kickstarter Campaign Canceled, to Relaunch on May 6th

The latest Kickstarter update for The Dark Triad: Dragon’s Death brings the sad news that the campaign is being canceled due to the sluggish pace at which it managed to raise money after its first day. It’s not all bad though, as, also going by the update, the team has a very clear idea of what was done wrong with the campaign and a new campaign with a lower funding goal, a clearer pitch and better thought-out reward tiers will be launched on May 6th:

The days after have been a dire struggle to usher more potential backers to our KS page. The problem has been ours in part, as we hadn’t secured the services of a PR agency to spread the word properly. Second, this weekend PAX East was held, and next week it’s the GDC’s turn. This means that no matter how much money we would spent on PR right now, it would be almost impossible to be mentioned on gaming sites when the big boys on the block are gearing up to announcetheir coming games for the Christmas season. Besides, we launched after Torment: Tides of Numenera and Shroud of the Avatar were on KS, the two biggest projects since Wasteland 2 and Project Eternity. This may have made things more difficult, especially as backers might have supported both games and now would not have the money to spend on other smaller-scale projects such as ours.

Also, we must be critical of ourselves and recognize that we haven’t done a good job of conveying what the game is about. Yes, you know it’s a CRPG, and that there will be combat and dialogues, but the way we’ve explained it all has been confusing to say the least, and there was a lack of information regarding the main gameplay mechanics from the beginning, which we think hasn’t helped. It hasn’t helped either that some texts were not properly proofread due to a lack of coordination with our editors and translators because of the hour difference, which resulted in some glaring typos cropping up.

We are currently preparing a pitch and gameplay video that will explain much better how the combat and dialogues work, and what options are available in them. We’ll also redefine the story. Many of you said it was too convoluted, and maybe contained too many elements. Besides, we want to remove some important limitations, like that fact that the party member characters had to be from a certain race and classes, or that you couldn’t play with a female character on your party.

We will also adjust the initial scope of the game. We wanted to add many things, but we think it’s better to focus on the two main aspects of the game: a good turn-based combat and a nice non-combat skills system. We will maintain and improve the graphic quality of the game, but we will reduce the game map extension. We can’t attempt to put in as many 3D assets as Baldur’s Gate, but we will maintain enough content for the game to provide dozens of hours of play. At the same time, this reduced map will allow us to reduce our pledge by almost half. And this is important, as we think that if potential backers see that we are near the funding goal, they will feel more confident in backing the project. Our goal is to expand the game content as soon as The Dark Triad is available for purchase.

We have also detected a clear imbalance with the rewards. Once you create a tier and at least one backer has pledged for it, Kickstarter won’t allow you to add new rewards into it. We forgot to tell you that the downloadable version of the game will be DRM-free, and even though we put it on top of our main page, many people didn’t see that. We could only communicate new reward additions through the updates, but for new backers this is important information that should be clearly visible. Also, we wanted to include boxed edition tiers and we saw that first we needed to adjust the digital tiers content, and we couldn’t do so due to the aforementioned restrictions.

In the meantime, the team has launched an IndieGoGo flexible funding crowdfunding campaign to tide them over until the relaunch, which admittedly is a bit of an unorthodox strategy.