Even though the Fig campaign for Nightmarchers has failed, it looks like the team is still moving forward to make Nightmarchers and to make it better
Last week we saw Nightmarchers Fig campaign come to an end and then the latest video for one of the gods in the game. Sadly, it did not look like the funding goal was met but that has not kept Wyrmbyte Studios down as they are pushing forward with development and taking in all of the feedback and criticisms they received to make it a better game. Although this does look like we may not see a final version of Nightmarchers until the end of 2018 or possibly even 2019. It is how games go sometimes, but they are rolling with the punches it seems and not just abandoning the idea and title. There is a bit of the good news for it all at least.
All of this came from an email update that was sent out last week to those who signed up for updates on Nightmarchers, you can also see it below, and it also details some of the other aspects of the game that the team is looking to improve on or add. One of the big things people wanted more of for the game was more of the Hawaiian lore and culture mixed in. There was already a lot in there but it looks like there is more than they want to try to get in there. I am not sure how well that will go as early players did have an issue with the size of the world and number of outposts that were out there. Those are going to be reworked as well and maybe even reduced, so maybe that is where all of the other things can be crammed in to please everyone.
In addition to that, it looks like there was a huge request to bring Nightmarchers away from being a PC only title and to bring it to the various PS4 and Xbox One platforms out there. It has not been completely confirmed by Wyrmbyte Studios that this will be a thing for the game, but it is something they are looking into so even more gamers out there can enjoy Nightmarchers when it does finally come to market. That would push out the time that it takes to bring the game to market, but I think it would pay off well if it can be done. I guess we will just need to sit and wait for now though.
Nightmarchers Where Do We Go From Here?
With the Fig campaign having come to an end I wanted to share some thoughts from the team of what we learned letting press and streamers get there hands on an early version of the game.
First off, it was amazing at the amount of positive feedback we received. We were all very encouraged by most people’s reactions to the game. Obviously not everyone liked it, but I don’t know that 100% of people agree on liking much. 🙂
What stood out to us most was that people really seemed to enjoy the Hawaiian setting and lore and that we should focus more on the fantastical elements of that as something that will make Nightmarchers stand out more from other games. More powers, more cool Hawaiian creatures, more spirits.
Also, the map was too large, too repetitive, walking around could be boring. Certainly without all the content we want to add we figured this might be the case but we still think it’s just too big to be fun and interesting while exploring. We are reworking our map to find a way to keep the awesome realistic scale of key locations but leaving out much of the island that could feel repetitive. I think we are making great progress on this. Once we have something we like we will share it with everyone.
Along these lines most people reacted very negatively to the amount of outposts we had planned and the way they would limit the story reveal. We are redesigning how outposts will be integrated now and will be significantly reducing the amount of outposts down from our 50 outpost design from before. This will allow outposts to feel more unique without becoming tedious.
We learned so much from watching streamers struggle with missions or bugs and have addressed much of what we saw during gameplay. We also had a massive performance push, especially on lower end hardware, that is all completed now. The game runs at 60 FPS at 1080 resolution will the graphics settings on epic as well as a solid 30 FPS at 4k on higher end cards (NVIDIA geforce 1080 level) and can also run at a solid 30 FPS at the lowest settings on cards around a 4,500 graphics mark score (GeForce GTX 1050 or Radeon RX 560 range of cards). We also saw a number of animation errors from watching the players that are all fixed as well. All this work really brought another level of polish to the game so we are very excited about how the game is performing.
There were a number of players who asked about console so we have prioritized that now on our engineering team to start that process quickly to get us up and running on both PS4/Pro and XBox One/S/X.
We will be reworking our island for a bit so I won’t have a lot to show off, but once we get through this phase we will have a bunch of exciting new content and ideas to share with everyone.
Our plan is to still finish this year, though likely later in the year now.
What do you think about all of this for Nightmarchers here and are you glad to see that they are still plugging away at the game even with the campaign failing? Do you think that reducing the number of “repetitive” outpost will be replaced with more of the Hawaiian culture or will it all be truncated down and just filled in more? Was the PC only thing a factor for your interest or will it just open up the market for more gamers to pick up the game and not affect you at all? Let us all know down in the comments and then feel free to discuss. For more on Nightmarchers as we get it, be sure to be here. We will keep those updates coming so you will not miss out.