Mighty No 9 - The Prodigal Son Returns...

[Austin]

An update from my end--I got to what I think are the last couple of stages in the game the other night. So far I'm not terribly impressed with them. They make you switch over to a different character with differing abilities for a stage, which really hurt the flow. I was having a blast with the first nine levels, and then the instant switch halted the gameplay completely. Then afterwards they make me switch back to my main character for another level, but this stage is entirely puzzle-centric relying on you to experiment and figure out the correct special ability to progress. I guess it's fine they did that, but it's another flow stopper. For the core robot masters (I'll just call them that), the gameplay was really damn fun though. I haven't finished the game yet but the last couple of stages are more of a pain than anything and aren't very fun.

[KeeperofLindblum]

They make you switch over to a different character with differing abilities for a stage, which really hurt the flow.

 

The Call level? I'd say it's complete shit really... especially for just a one shot level. Making her kinda sneaky but then not giving her real sneak abilities?

That and just not designed very well. Should have taken a different approach to the boss too.

 

You happen to try the Vermillion Destroyer level? I thought it was super weak for a DLC.... I think it's just one REALLY short level with multiple fights against the same boss with the same moves.

[Austin]

 

The Call level? I'd say it's complete shit really... especially for just a one shot level. Making her kinda sneaky but then not giving her real sneak abilities?

That and just not designed very well. Should have taken a different approach to the boss too.

 

You happen to try the Vermillion Destroyer level? I thought it was super weak for a DLC.... I think it's just one REALLY short level with multiple fights against the same boss with the same moves.

 

If that's her name, then yeah (I haven't really paid attention to the characters, I've been skipping through all the story, haha). Don't get me wrong, I finished the level on my first try and it was playable. It's just a complete flow killer, totally unnecessary and something the later Mega Man X teams didn't understand. They kept trying to force needless crap into the games that didn't need to be there, and it's the same with MN9.

 

Vermillion Destroyer--I have now. Is it free DLC? If not I'll probably pass.

[KeeperofLindblum]

Vermillion Destroyer--I have now. Is it free DLC? If not I'll probably pass.

 

It's only free to backers I believe. Everybody else pays $5 for it.

 

The Vermillion Destroyer level is kinda pointless. Very boring straightforward level with a boss you fight three times in exactly the same way. (Changes very little between every fight... basically no change.)

 

However, beating the level lets you play as an alternate character with an alternate play style.

 

Which would be cool, but it seems to have mixed opinions in the reviews. Most people don't like the play style. I haven't tried her separate campaign, but I'm unsure how I'd actually feel about the style change. Seems to be kinda like Zero but with a twist.

[guppy]

 

But is it really a "budget title"? With over $4M and three years in development, it sounds like a big budget production. I understand that a lot of the hate is overblown nerd-rage, but the lackluster reviews are mostly spot on: the game does not feel fresh and original as hyped, and the graphics and visual style seem cheap -- and that's even before mentioning the over-hyped tone-deaf advertising campaign and the broken and mismanaged release.

 

That said, I haven't played the game nor did I backed the funding campaign, but I have been following the progress of the project and have not been very impressed.

 

-dZ.

 

These days, $4M is pretty low budget for a AAA studio. Major games today would have a budget around 10 times that, easily.

 

For an indie studio, it's still a lot of money, but if you divide $4 by the size of the team, by the number of years they worked on it, it might not end up being all that much. And in any case paying someone more money doesn't make them more talented. At some point the project's fixed costs for development are reached, and then everything above and beyond that raised by the kickstarter ends up being (seemingly) pure profit... until the project runs into delays and they have to keep paying people to work on it.

 

Let's say you're doing an indie game and you figure you need to raise $50k, so you do a kickstarter and instead of $50k, you end up with $5M. You didn't promise anything more for all that extra money, you just happened to strike the right chord with your pitch and got a vastly larger pre-order than you expected. So you can crank out that $50k game, but now it's been mega-hyped because of the amount of money raised, and so people's expectations are up. Then it turns out that everyone saw your pitch slightly differently, so everyone has different expectations for what the game will be, but everyone wants it to be amazing, and you just can't please everyone. And by trying you end up disappointing everyone.

[leods]

 

These days, $4M is pretty low budget for a AAA studio. Major games today would have a budget around 10 times that, easily.

 

For an indie studio, it's still a lot of money, but if you divide $4 by the size of the team, by the number of years they worked on it, it might not end up being all that much. And in any case paying someone more money doesn't make them more talented. At some point the project's fixed costs for development are reached, and then everything above and beyond that raised by the kickstarter ends up being (seemingly) pure profit... until the project runs into delays and they have to keep paying people to work on it.

 

Let's say you're doing an indie game and you figure you need to raise $50k, so you do a kickstarter and instead of $50k, you end up with $5M. You didn't promise anything more for all that extra money, you just happened to strike the right chord with your pitch and got a vastly larger pre-order than you expected. So you can crank out that $50k game, but now it's been mega-hyped because of the amount of money raised, and so people's expectations are up. Then it turns out that everyone saw your pitch slightly differently, so everyone has different expectations for what the game will be, but everyone wants it to be amazing, and you just can't please everyone. And by trying you end up disappointing everyone.

 

You're just defending the project with meaningless arguments that take the whole situation out of contenxt. Games that have 10 times the budget of MN9 have decent cutscenes and are properly optimized. The options in the menus work as intended. Not to mention, the original artwork and prototype footage of the game looked better than what was delivered at the end. The game under delivered in comparison to what was promised, not because of crazy expectations, but because things really were promised by the developer. And finally, 4 mi is certainly enough money to make this game work. But as you said, incompetent people will burn through the money and not be able to deliver what they should.

 

Of course, people who donated to the cickstarted should be glad. Anything is better than nothing. They donated to a project that didn't need money to begin with. They were founding a dreem that doesn#t need to be founded. And they even got a decent game at the end. Maybe they should learn to not donate to crap that no one really needs. But if people would ever learn that, they would already have learned that 2000 years ago.