Cleve Blakemore presents: Grimoire (an Indiegogo project)

He is famous for bragging about a game that he has been unable to produce over a 17 year time frame. What kind of jobs does that kind of frame bring? Seriously?

Cleve would have exploded under all the criticism by now. HHR is just a guy that hopes Grimoire will be a good game if it's ever released, but at this point is pretty much just playing the role of contrarian troll.

No, as shown in another thread, HHR is just a guy that doesn't quite live on the same planet as the rest of us. And believe in make believe stories. Like Cleve's.

http://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/grimoire-kickstarter.75724/page-87#post-2501046

Tomorrow is a holiday here, hopefully it gives me time to try it out.

Drag queens? Seriously?

Man, it's so surprising that the crazy racist is a homophobe too.

This is like waiting for the rotten milk man to bring the rotten milk. Man, you guys who said he'd never deliver the rotten milk are sure gonna feel stupid when tomorrow I have rotten milk and you don't.

This is the Codex audience he was speaking to there after all, or as Swen Vincke put it:

I for one can't wait, if a demo comes out we'll be moving from the denial phase to the denial phase.

Yeah, calling imagined enemies 'drag queens' is totally just "imaginative language" and not a slur in any conceivable way.

Are there any bounds whatsoever to your apologism?

I wasn't supporting this, it's just that as a member of the community myself, I know that coarse expressions like these are par for the course.

Cesspits do tend to be full of sewage, yes.

I think any benefit of the doubt evaporated sometime in the 1990s.

Will the Earth stop spinning?

NOT A SINGLE FATAL BUG/TRUE PROGRAMMING ERROR REMAINS

That is the most hilarious statement I have ever seen a programmer with more than, say, a week's experience make.

It's even true! In a codebase that doesn't exist, there are no bugs!

You can go par yourself right in your course.

Any more mentions of that forum and they're going to start pouring in here like they did at Qt3.

"Very dramatic beginning in the Desolation of Popamole at the Fortress of Decline."

IN THE DESOLATION OF POPAMOLE

AT THE FORTRESS

OF DECLINE

Will you stop posting?

All this makes me picture is a lonely child setting up a cushion fort in front of a decrepit Whack-A-Mole machine and refusing to leave.

It's not dramatic enough unless the child is wailing and hurling obscenities.

The more I read this, the more it feels like meta-commentary on the state of Grimore itself.

Also, Popamole is the worst name for anything ever. The last thing you need to make your players think of while they're exploring a new land is 'exploding skin growths'.

The reason he cannot be forced to leave is because of his Neanderthal blood!

He almost has an updated demo available. That surely means that the full game release is close.* SUCK IT, NON-BELIEVERS! 1993 gameplay is coming BACK!!!!

* Please ignore that he also released a demo over a decade ago; in this case, he has that extra inspiration to finish it this time, FOR SURE, because he fleeced, I mean solicited money out of his supporters.

It is not his term, but mostly a forum meme, meant to illustrate the decline in gaming, exemplified among others by the gameplay of console games like Gears of War.

I remember playing games back in the good old days on my Commodore 64. There were a lot of shitty, derivative and unimaginitive games back then too. In fairness those shitty games only cost the price of a blank tape rather than 60 bucks but let's not pretend that in a world where games like Journey, The Void, Dishonored and Civ exist that gaming is in decline.

Ahh. So it's even more stupid than I thought. Thanks for clearing that up!

Also, I was going to post something about how the idea of 'I can prove the decline of gaming' (which you really never have, by the by) is, by its very nature, wrongheaded.... but I think IainC summed things up better than I could have.

Yeah, but... I mean... Gears of War.

Horrid games always existed, sure, but there is a category of games catering to more patient, hardcore gamers on computers which struggles a lot, and there is also a definite trend towards the simplification of genres in order to reach a wider audience, or a console audience. Although we have an indie scene that caters to such audiences, and some studios from Eastern Europe who still cater to that market, because it is so hard to fund mid-sized games, things are still a shadow of what they used to be. We haven't had for example an RPG that even approaches the level of features of a Darklands, Arcanum or a Realms of Arkania in a very, very long time.

Dishonored is a lot simplified in many respects in comparison to say Thief, and Civ V has been widely decried in that it felt like a regression too. Or look at Daggerfall versus Skyrim today. There definitely has been a paradigm shift, and communities like for example the Codex who crave for such things have been left out in the cold.

While it is true that the arrival of Kickstarter has given us some reasons to hope, it still remains limited funding that can only sustain a professional development team for a limited period of time, and thus it remains to be seen if it will truly produce another paradigm shift.

It's like Cleve coopted the Dwarf Fortress random stuff generator.

This is an exceptional wooden likeness of a demo. It menaces with spikes of popamole bone. On the likeness is an image of Cleve, depicted as a fanny pack, and four dwarves praying for enlightenment. Cleve is depositing Indiegogo funds.

I will trade 10 fucking Daggerfalls for one Skyrim.

Exactly. Skyrim, for all its flaws, was the first Elder Scrolls game I've actually enjoyed. Hell... I didn't just enjoy it... I played the shit out of it. Sure, I never completed the main quest line (either one), and I kept restarting due to alt-itis and thinking "ooooh.... *now* I understand how this game works, lemme start over & do it right this time." But that was kinda part of the of the fun.

Wait... where was I going with this? Oh yeah.

Skyrim was fantastic.

The point isn't whether your prefer modern Elder Scrolls titles or older ones, but rather that objectively, the modern iterations have lost a whole lot of features and have been heavily streamlined, and it severely displeases a contingent of dedicated fans who happened to like this kind of depth, and liked never having the game holding their hand. I say this as someone who completed every quest in Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim, and only tried the older two mainline Elder Scrolls games later. Overall, in spite of the more generic content and randomly generated exteriors, I was more impressed by Arena and Daggerfall. In modern titles there are skills gone, features gone, fighting simplified, a scale extremely reduced (although this is understandable), limited conversations, level scaling, character creation being simplified, a compass pointing to quest objectives, extremely tiny and simple dungeons compared to gigantic mazes, puzzles and riddles being made much easier, etc etc... all of those things add up, and ultimately the result is that modern RPGs and other genres are not what they used to be anymore. And this is the hitch that Cleve is trying to scratch. Whether you despise him or not, this is meant to be some kind of love letter to people who enjoyed what RPGs used to be, in contrast to what they have become.

It has really been a really long time since I can remember a single player RPG being really brutal and uncompromising toward the player, the last ones were probably the Souls series, which incidentally were hailed as a return to form by many, and probably Knights of the Chalice.

I frequently find myself thinking that Gears of War would be improved exponentially if the levels were randomly generated and there was a non-zero percent chance of you entering a level and immediately being in water with no exit.

I backed into Cleve while pulling out of a space at the grocery store in my pickup truck the other day. Being the superman that he is, he was uninjured, but unfortunately for me he did scratch my hitch.

Too subtle, Bahimiron.

Edited: well, Footmunch took care of that, didn't he?

You do know that the Daggerfall dungeons were randomly generated, right? And that if you got a bad seed the resulting instance was literally iimpossible?

I'll take small, hand crafted and architecturally logical over enormous random sprawls every time thanks.