Ever since I first put the disc for Giants: Citizen Kabuto into my computer and started to play it I instantly fell in love with its quirky humor and colorful characters. Which is why when I noticed that the people behind that game launched a Kickstarter for a spiritual successor I couldn’t back it quick enough. Unfortunately, while some things went right with First Wonder a lot went horribly wrong, which caused the campaign to flounder early on. In the end they decided to just cancel the project and regroup. As of right now the status of the game is in the air.
First Wonder is a great concept on paper. However, we never did get to see much of how the game will play out or much about the characters and plot. The lack of information is one of the main reasons why the campaign couldn’t gain traction. Of those of us who did pledge we did so out of nostalgic reasons. Because they had almost nothing to show for their work. The best we got was some gifs showing off some brief action and a very brief plot overview that told us very little.
Another major problem with how First Wonder ended up was with the funding goal. Half a million is asking for a lot of money. Especially in today’s crowdfunding environment. Even back in 2012 when Kickstarter was still fresh and had untapped potential it wasn’t easy to get that far into six digits. Today, unless a game is being ran by big names in the industry you’d be lucky to get five digits. This one couldn’t even break fifty thousand. Less than 10%.
The third major contributing factor, and this is evident by the quality of the pitch, is that they weren’t ready to go prime time yet. They rushed the campaign out to coincide with TwitchCon. And the pitch video showed just how not ready they were. Eventually they reworked the video but the damage was already done. Honestly, you launch when you’re ready…not to coincide with any specific event. If you can make it, great. But don’t force it out when you’re not prepared. It’s sloppy.
Finally, and I’ve been seeing this way too much lately, the developers just weren’t talking to backers or about the game. Since it launched, First Wonder has exactly eight updates and 67 comments. I can forgive the lack of comments. Not everybody’s as talkative as myself. But, they really needed to up their game on the updates. Of these eight most didn’t talk about the game at all. In order to get a good picture of how it’s going to turn out we need more information. If you can’t get it in the pitch at least divvy it out piecemeal throughout the month-long campaign. To this date I still have almost no clue what the game’s about.
With all of that said, though, they’re not done yet with First Wonder. It’s already been pushed through Greenlight and they now have an existing fan base. They’ll still work on the game, but the future is still unwritten. Whatever they decide to do they’ll let people know and when they do I’ll be sure to spread the message on here. I did ask them to make sure to keep me abreast on any future developments after all.
