Last news : Little diorama : https://www.instagram.com/p/CkXtG1po7Zm/ Video from Ontabletop: Massive Mini Add-On For Warcrow Adventures - Giant Mornmab!
I backed Defiance because I wanted some nice mini's and also because I wanted a dungeon crawler for rainy days. It mostly failed on the dungeon crawler side. The campaign wasn't bad, itself, and the delays didn't bug me so much as the bad layout/ readability of the manual.Played a few test games and set it aside. (And yeah, painted an army of Shasvaasti :) TAGRaid looked cool, but as an unsupported game, it seemed like something I would never use. If I could have only bought the mini's I wanted, I'd have gotten it. So yeah, I don't hold previous kickstarters of theirs against this one, I'm just not sure I want to bother with an app driven chinese mini dungeon crawler that I'm sure won't be as well done as Oathsworn (which I didn't even bother getting). I like the aesthetics actually, love the goblins, but may as well wait for the skirmish. Mostly though, it doesn't feel like getting full value. If the core game is $120+shipping, someone will probably sell it for $80-90 with free shipping. So I lose out on a bunch of heroes, but otherwise? Not that big a deal. I'm in for $1 either way, so I can punt the decision for a bit.
There's also the obvious issue that they say "2-4 players" when it's 4 characters that can be played by however you want to split it up. Solo player, dual players, whatever. They clarified it over and over, but never changed the graphics.
Last video : Last 24 Hours! Warcrow Adventures Kickstarter Ending Soon New stuff : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/corvusbelli/warcrow-adventures/posts/3651226 Mailing with recap of pledges : https://mailchi.mp/corvusbelli/warcrow-adventurs-is-on-14222647?e=1704b257e9 https://mailchi.mp/corvusbelli/warcrow-adventurs-is-on-14222783?e=1704b257e9
Yeah, same here. I know it's not universal, but I feel CB deeply underestimated how many people wanted an actual game. I already owned a few dungeon crawlers, but I really wanted a sci-fi crawler. At the time, the only semi-palatable option was GW's Blackstone Fortress, but I'm really not a fan of that universe and the GW gameplay of throwing buckets of dice is not my thing either. So the option to have Infinity aesthetics in a sci-fi crawler just sounded great, even if I knew in advance many other things wouldn't be on par (including the tiles, one aspect where GW tends to be really good). I did expect some rules difficulties (I do play Infinity after all!), but not the mess we got. I also did not expect CB to be so casual about supporting the product. This was a really expensive purchase for me, and while I got decent value from some of the "alternative enemy packs" add-ons (really, minis for my armies), I still wanted a game I could play. And when I say "play", I mean out of the box: my friends are not CB fans, they don't take lightly to having to make up stuff on the go... Anyways, I'm repeating what many have said elsewhere, at this point, I'm beating on horse bones. Somehow, it's still raw, and this I'll say again in case someone "up there" is reading this: this is not the usual grumbling, you screwed up big time and we're still waiting for you to make it right (and heck, to even acknowledge it). Think about that next time you ask "the crowd" to fund your new mess.
Well... basically you can resume every CB's Kickstarter post-Defiance to this: Anyway, with campaign closing today, hopefully we'll now finally get some proper info on the wargame in the upcoming weeks.
Last day for KS and Yesterday Belen did an spanish interview that could answer several posts on this topic (think to enable autosubtitles) : S03E03 | MARKETING AT CORVUS BELLI
Yeah, I'm totally watching a two and a half hour video in Spanish to read into the crappy autogenerated subtitles and figure out what you meant by "answering several of our questions". Shame to see the marketing strategy is by Belen, their "new, better CB" hire from back when they started the N3/N4 shift - this means most of what I'm complaining about is unfortunately intentional and there's little to no hope for change. Such a shame, maybe time to just stop watching this train wreck.
I'm not holding my breath here, mate. Also, 4hrs to go, 410k EUR, seems like they are going to reach the exact same level as TAG Raid. Yay, much success.
And miss out on all your opportunities to be the biggest troll on the forum? You'd never give that up.
Well, not want to be salty, cause.... well... i am not very interested in the game, but it seems to be profitable enough to keep doing that. Getting more than 400k from people for a project is not peanuts, and it looks good to say the least. If CB is succesful with projects like that, i am fine with that. It´s just unfortunat, when after release the buyers be left standing in the rain. And i am not a big fan of starting new projects with "old ones" still running. Everything seems incomplete, rushed,..... On the other hand: I don´t know, if that all is planned and works like a swiss clock and as intended, everything is way more fine than some screamers want us to belive or know. Hard to deside, what is white noise whining and what is justified criticism
As long as we assume the total cost of production was indeed 150k EUR and all rest is pure profit. Which I'm not buying at all. But let's assume it's true. It may look "good" if CB was a publicly traded company and had to report to shareholders first and foremost, like GW does. They're not and the only ones they have to look "good" to is us, the customers. And between them bungling the editing and writing of Defiance, completely ghosting us on the FAQ for it, us not even seeing the quality of TAG Raid before being asked to shell out for WarCrow Adventures? It doesn't look a tad better than the "meh" they got from the community during the TAG Raid campaign. It seems that the exact same people / amount of them bought into WarCrow Adventures as TAG Raid. If this is seen as "good enough" by CB, then OK, I guess? But neither this, nor how they are handling N4 updates / Wiki / rules do not do any favours to customer goodwill overall. Because it is, they're very likely financing current expenses with the additional revenue from the Kickstarters. With the COVID crisis, shipment going to merry hell, prices and delays rising in China, embracing Siocast, they need spare money. And we're being taken for suckers, asked to literally credit the company's finances on 0% interest rate, for 1,5-2 years before the actual product arrives. If anyone thinks this current 410k+ EUR kickstarter will finance Warcrow Adventures production, IMO you're naive. Expect another KS next year and another one after that. CB seems to have realized it's easier and cheaper to kickstart a game costing them XYZ to produce, have 2 years to do it, get twice the money for it, up front, no questions asked, no interest rate than to go to a bank and ask for a loan. Best case scenario - they get money to deliver the game, they get a lot of spare money to upkeep the company where it's in the red. Safe case scenario - Kickstarter succeeds, but barely, they get the money to deliver, in two years, maybe. Safe case scenario #2 - Kickstarter fails, no biggie, worth a shot. Worst case scenario - KS succeeds, but they cannot deliver the game on time or at all - still no biggie, KS is "no guarantee of delivery" and the community will still adore them as they do. They just cannot fail because gullible people will still credit them with their hard-earned money. I would be perfectly fine with this if they delivered a quality game and supported it well with FAQ/errata. They fixed production issues with the missing tokens and misprinted map pieces, because they could just contractually force the printer to do the job correctly. But then they went complete radio silence for how long now on the unplayable rules and scenarios that the community still cannot figure out completely. They keep promising FAQ is around the corner and been doing that for the last three years since the Defiance KS.
The reason I give CB a lot of credit is because they made Infinity, which is by some distance the best game I've ever played. All this overheated "naive" "gullible" "stupid" "suckers" talk misses that pretty simple fact. People like CB for good reasons. I think on balance they ran a good campaign, in particular the swift and numerous responses to questions on KS, and their willingness to change positions based on feedback. Not perfect but good. And I do think Warcrow looks to be a different beast to Defiance and Tagraid, which are both one-and-done games. For a start the rules look pretty well thought out and polished! And a longer=term commitment to the world bodes very well for the game's balance and health. As an owner of Defiance myself I agree that the lack of an FAQ is a real problem, and they shouldn't think that it will just go away, and should just fess up and spend the week of work it would take to sort that issue out. But that negative doesn't obscure all the positives with the company. Finally: back their kickstarters or don't back em, but please don't scream blue murder because CB are making use of the KS business model. It's part of the landscape now.
Honestly, I think Defiance just needs a new book. Instructions are horrible, lots of issues, and the entire thing needs a rewrite. A PDF would be fine I suppose. Yeah, it's a cool thing for them to gauge things with a long term preorder for something new, but since they're already planning to make the skirmish and dungeon crawler, it's not really as needed as the one shots. I'd vastly prefer they move away from China though. Looks like it gives them a good shot at making various projects. It's interesting, going by kickstarter comments, the game seems to have a lot more spanish interest than the other kickstarters. The dice system seems more Aristeia! related as well, which is very popular there.
Yep, a corrected and reprinted rulebook would be best. A fully corrected rulebook in PDF at minimum is a must. Are you seriously happy with the state of the game in N4? Have you been happy in N3? Has the community been happy in N3 and N4? The proliferation of wildcards? The canning of many armies for years on end? Armies being off-theme in rules and sometimes in minis as well (Morats, most recently)? Armies being completely forgotten and left out of updates? Late and lacking updates to the Army software? Non-existent updates to the Wiki for the longest time? The "quality" of editing in writing in everything that wasn't Aristeia? It's great that you have a pair of rose-tinted glasses. Good for you, enjoy the game if you do. Not everyone shares that perspective, especially of the company as a whole. I love how a set of opinions is instantly "heated" or "angry" just because they are negative. I also didn't call people "stupid" or "suckers", this entire hyperbole is your own making. And people like CB because they make excellent quality metal miniatures and have a very promising game concept. At the same time, CB has started to fail in the first regard (PCV Aristeia, first iterations of SioCast failures, now Wacrow KS being entirely PCV of unknown quality), as well as so far utterly failed on delivering Infinity as a complete, finalized product. The rules interactions are arcane as ever and themselves points of heated debate, discrepancies between Spanish and English wording constantly crop up. Aside from the fact that not even tripling your stated goal is a broadly acknowledged failure of a campaign actually "kickstarting". Yeah, they got the same amount of money as TAG Raid. This will pay for the game and whatever else they need to. But it's not a "good campaign", especially with the goal reveals and finish being untimely and disappointing at times. It's definitely not just "a week's worth of work". But it should be done, nonetheless. If this was the only negative, right? Firstly, quit your hyperbole again. Nobody is "screaming murder" here. People have the right to discuss how the company they support conducts business and how it finances itself. Also, no. Absolutely NO. It's exactly the same as "subscription model is part of the landscape" and you get auto companies leveraging car seat heating or engine performance based on whether you paid your monthly due. Or the critical state of private ownership since most everything nowadays is "rented", "credited", "subscribed", "loaned", etc. Or the right to repair when companies are forcing you to scrap your electronics (e.g. Apple), cars (e.g. Tesla), farming machines (e.g. John Deere tractors) or repair them at high cost only in their "licensed" service points, where most often the response to a simple defect is "pay us $LARGE_SUM or buy a new one", while a local store could fix this for cheap if they weren't blocked from buying tools and parts or locked out by software and sensors. Any bad business practice should be named and shamed. The company, any company in the world, is not your "friend". Their one and only goal is making more money. The only way to make them do what we wish them to do is to indicate that money is not coming their way if they don't fix things. To put things bluntly - you know why the Defiance FAQ hasn't been a priority for CB for three years? Because they've found out that they can get a sweet half a million dollars from us, not only without fixing Defiance, but even before we know if TAG Raid is not similarly broken and unplayable. After Defiance they did not deserve that trust and yet y'all paid up. Why? Think on it.
Seriously? Since late 2019 we've had how many Android versions? Let me check. Yeah, we were on Android 9. We're on 13 since August, 14 comes in a year. Do you seriously believe CB, with their Army and Wiki debacles, with their inability to fix the Forum logout issue for the last what, eight years, had any IT capability through the last 3 years to bug test, fix, upkeep and update an Android app throughout four Android system updates? You must be joking. And I fully expect the Wacrow Adventures app to be a steaming crater within a year of release. If it won't be updated regularly and kept compatible, it will be dropped from Google Store. And as presented, without it the game is actually and literally unplayable, a heap of waste. But CB is a nice company and they had your KS money for two years already before release and have made several new Kickstarters in the meantime. We all love the Company! Tell me, on Warcrow Adventures release day, if Defiance was actually fixed by then, OK? ;)
I mean... In theory it would fix a lot of Defiance problems. Like unclear instructions, mission triggers, hacking inputs etc. In theory. But yeah... I'm pretty sure I know how it will end as well. I don't even care for an FAQ anymore. Sure, It will give a sense of closure, but I doubt I'll play any more campains. (And I asked like fifty questions there, I hope at least some of them would be answered) Eh. It was a one time weakness, I won't fall for that again. Besides they pulled a real d*ck move announcing all these shiny exclusive resculpts (like Kusanagi or Gromoz) that people were waiting for ages back then. Who would have thought that retail version will come out sooner?
