Honestly, ambitious is a pretty big understatement with this one. There have been some incredible success stories in the short history of Kickstarter, with small groups of devs making millions of dollars to make their dreams a reality. It is entirely plausible for a group of people to raise over $2 million through crowdfunding, having already happened 63 times. That can technically seem like a lot of projects passing the mark, so you can see how Playcastle, the Korean developers behind the new “FPS masterpiece” Spirit, might see a $2 million campaign goal as a real possibility. The second you see the pitch, though, just…I don’t even know.
There’s just way too much going on with this one to really unpack it. This is what I was to understand through the broken English: Based on the success of Shenmue 3, the man behind Spirit, an honest to god member of Mensa, wants to create something along the lines of Crysis, fused with an epic Star Wars storyline, with a revolutionary multiplayer to boot. The main sell is the use of guns that can shoot in a spread, kind of like a shotgun, but with more precision and the ability to switch between horizontal and vertical shooting. And while on paper that sounds like an alright idea, everything about this thing just feels so wrong and unrealistic, it’s something you just have to see for yourself to really get.
[embedyt] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26uBv41jz5o[/embedyt]To be fair to the devs, crowdfunding is just starting to break into the Korean market, having only technically become legal in the country last year. But Jesus, there’s no way anyone, especially a certified genius of all people, can be so blind to the obvious faults with this campaign. But then again, it’s happened before, and it’ll probably happen again. It’s pretty safe to say that this one won’t get funded, so I’m sorry if Spirit actually does something for you. I can only hope that future Korean developers interested in crowdfunding look at this inevitable flop and learn from its mistakes.
