Razorfist Presents: Razorfist Arcade - Underworld Ascendant

Last weekend, Razorfist held a livestream where he and Terran Gell took questions while playing through a very early demo build of Underworld Ascendant. He also showed that the studio working on this game actually knows how to handle the development of a game as well as create, maintain, and grow interest in it while you work on it.

As you can hear in the man's voice, he's a big fan of the old Ultima Underworld games. This is the same level of hype he has for the Elder Scrolls games (pre-Skyrim), so I know he's into it, and sine his taste in videogame RPGs is similar to my own then I know I'm going to want to keep an eye on it.

This is how you run a videogame Kickstarter. You allow your backers to play your builds specifically to get useful feedback from your intended audience. You allow them to make videos or livestream their play of the builds so they do your hype-building for you, and let them pass on useful feedback garnered to you in turn. You don't need to take time out to do it yourselves; you merely curate the ones done by your backers and spread those links around instead.

This is what real gaming, real gamers, real game design, and real game publishing looks like folks. This is how you do it properly, and not relying on millions spend on ad campaigns by people who don't know gamers or gaming or give a shit about either. Just as the tabletop gaming world doesn't need mass media mindfuckers to shill for thrills, neither does the videogame world; we can, we should, and we are better served by doing it entirely ourselves through direct word-of-mouth networking facilitated by a free and open Internet.

We don't need Fake Media and the Fake People that come with it. Time them to fuck off forever.