When I saw Avorion on Kickstarter my first thought was that the developers were being a little optimistic with a goal of €15,000. However, after coming back to the Kickstarter and having a deeper look I actually think it has potential. Avorion is a sandbox game in space where you can choose what you want to do and who you want to be. Reading the description I was reminded of two of my favorite time-sinks; Spore and Windward. You can choose to battle, explore, build ships etc but what I liked was that you can act different ways. If you want to be a mercenary and help convoys go ahead, if you want to be a sleezy merchant and smuggle things illegally you can do that too, or just wander the galaxy aimlessly.
I like exploration games, and Avorion’s soundtrack or at least the sample was perfect for me. The developers said something that has me a little bemused, though. There’s a mechanic to harvest materials and build your own ship, but they said to treat your ship like a character in an RPG. I’ll confess I have absolutely no idea what that could mean, but it’s definitely intriguing. The game is hopefully going to have dynamic events and if that is executed properly and combined with the procedurally generated world I can see a lot of replayability.
The developers also mentioned the universe would become more hostile the closer to the centre you got. Perhaps we’ll find the almighty Spode.
Avorion has been in development for a while, four years in fact. Apparently the developers have been feeding their money into this beast for a while which makes the funding goal more sensible to me. The game has already been Greenlit, which is always reassuring to me when I look at a Kickstarter and they have a demo (though they mentioned it is stripped of a lot of features). It seems highly likely that there won’t be a DRM-free version since this game is being distributed via Steam and the developers specified you’d need a Steam account. This might be a drawback for some, but they also mentioned they’d be making ‘a lot’ of the lua game code available and would have day 1 modding. The developers seem to have a plan and an idea of what to do which is the main thing I look for when it comes to Kickstarter. I think Avorion is definitely something I’ll be adding to my wishlist, but what about you?
Track the progress of the Avorion Kickstarter in our Campaign Calendar.
