Thanks! And first of all, thanks hugely for the support and recs we're getting here, and for those buying the game! I hope you enjoy it :)

Hmm...I don't think it hurt our sales, having those bundles was a big help for a number of reasons. It brought in money, of course, but also helped spread our name and Cognition's name further than we could do purely on our own, so we gathered more fans and interested players as we went along. And it was often easy to reach those buyers with announcement emails or discounts on buying the later episodes, etc.

Logistically, once we had the whole season out there and on GOG and Steam, that's where things have gotten trickier, on the other hand. :)

OH NOES GOG, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!? Give the guy discounts on game that he wants and knows only, stop doing promos for other customers!
/sarcasm

I believe that in the end the bundle´s spreading was good for the devs (maybe they should had restricted it a bit more or gave more time between bundles). I take me as example: I prolly would never know the game if was not by IGS. I have only the first episode (played only recently, due to backlog), which grabbed my attention (already being a fan of Blackwell helped a lot) and now I´m temped to get the whole pack.

Bought the game! I've been eying the entire 4 episode pack, but didn't grab it during the insomnia sales. So now I did. :D

still.. adventures adventures adventures... what about something for non-adventurers, once ? ;-)

I really enjoyed this mini-series. Like Lhademmor said, first 3 episodes have intriguing storyline(s) and it was just a breath of fresh air. Something I felt from WadjetEye Games despite games using different approaches and being different in general.

I'm one of those that doesn't actually have the first two episodes, must have missed that bundle. Quite tempted by the offer and the trailer looked interesting, but I have a horrendous backlog.

How about something for adventurers for once? These so-called "adventure" games are not adventures at all. When someone (i.e., the game designer) has carefully mapped out every possible twist and turn, and you and N-thousand other people travel down the same limited set of scripted paths (with many using walkthroughs to get through at least parts of it), that's not an "adventure", that's just lame. (It's commonly called a "tour".) I want to go adventuring! I want to find and explore places that no one has ever seen before (or at least never left alive!). I want a world where events can play out in ways the game designers themselves never imagined (but in a "makes perfect sense" way, not in an "oh boy, this game is buggy" way). I want to have a truly unique experience. I want an open world where I really do choose my own adventure, not where someone else promises to let you "choose-your-own-adventure" but all you're really allowed to do is travel along the very limited number of edges in the plot-gragh they've created.

<sigh>

I hereby preemptively award the future designers and programmers of such a game with the medal of gaming awesomeness. Sadly, I don't see anything like this be made in any foreseeable future. A big studio could pull it off, perhaps. But big studios nowadays are too busy squandering their talent pool and resources on fancy graphics and the gaming equivalent of Oscar bait (completely disregarding the fact that video games are not movies).

The game that came closest so far to providing me with a "choose your own adventure" feeling is Skyrim. I've sunk somewhere around 200 hours into that game, and never even bothered with the main plotline past the first basics. Yes, you are technically supposed to embark on an epic quest as a Dragonborn, yadda yadda yadda. But I decided I wanted to be a Master Thief and Assassin instead. Then I went into land property, and built a lovely home for my spouse and kids. Then I became a vampire. In another incarnation, I chose to divorce myself from the cares of the material world, and devoted myself to the study of the arcane mysteries.

More seriously, though, Skyrim is probably the closest we're ever going to get to a free roaming RPG, and then only because that game is so freakishly huge.

yes yes yes. if we consider rpg traveling trought open world as adventure so i love it too. even despite of some higher bug rate potencial. thats reason why i loved daggerfall so much, mainly in last patched version.
i spoke just about adventures in accustomed word meaning i.e. linear click and point games that i don´t play but they are, say, prefered by gog, for promos, recently. i used term of "non-adventurers" like me or you in this sence, if you understand better now.
i know, my english sucks as hell. don´t hesitate to write what i used badly in english or how to say something correctly in english or in right words order. i would learn it very gladly! have a nice day there :-)

You don't need a big studio if most everything is procedurally generated (as was the case in Daggerfall -- most open land, cities, dungeons and side-quests were procedurally generated for that game).

I actually have plans for making such a game (as that appears to be the only way I will ever get to play it). You can see a tiny bit about the direction I want to go here. My "rpg design doc" (aka unorganized collection of notes) is currently about 70 pages long. (And I have different design docs for other genres, though some of them I could roll together. E.g., the procedural generation of puzzles I have in my "adventure game design doc" might be shoe-horned into my rpg to generate more "puzzly type" quests.) Unfortunately I won't really have time to develop the game until I retire (or at least decide to take a few years off).

Um, no. Skyrim is tiny. It's a pathetic 16 square miles. You can run from one end to the other in minutes. Daggerfall is 62,000+ square miles. (See here.) After trying Morrowind (which was an extremely claustrophobic experience for me after playing Daggerfall), I didn't buy any of the later Elderscrolls games. Bethsoft made a major wrong turn. IMO, from Daggerfall they should have gone even bigger, introduced more variety and smarts into their procedural generation, made improvements to the generic NPCs (e.g., adding some rudimentary AI and knowledge representation), and other changes along those lines. Instead they threw out nearly everything that was good in Daggerfall.

I understood what sense you were using. I was just using your post as an opportunity to rail against the way the words "adventure game" have been perverted by everyone to mean something that's not really adventure (just as most "role playing games" don't really offer much opportunity for actual role playing and the definition of "RPG" is now basically "has improvable character stats").

I don't think your problem is with procedural generation, but with poor quality procedural generation. Quality procedural generation can beat any team of human designers in creating a coherent, realistic world.

Keep in mind that "procedural" does not need to mean "produced via inane application of random number generator" and can instead mean things like "simulating a thousand years of history". Every building, road, farm or other item that exists in the world is then there because one or more NPCs decided it would be useful to them (and no other NPCs or natural disasters stole/destroyed it). Everything in the world then "makes sense" in relation to how the NPCs you actually interact with in the game behave.

The completely unrealistic high-density nature of Morrowind was one of the immersion-breaking "features" for me. While Daggerfall's dungeons may have crossed the insanity line, at least its towns were much more reasonably spaced, and there were farms that could plausibly provide enough food to support the population. Of course, a better game than Daggerfall could actually model the productivity of the farms, have farmers planting, tending, harvesting, hiring extra hands as needed, bringing crops to market, etc., and deciding where to have their farms in the first place based on the availability of water and the quality of the soil, etc. Towns could grow/shrink via NPCs actually migrating, dying and being born. NPCs could decide to migrate based on many factors, including the availability of food. Fill in the rest (smiths, artisans, guards, merchants,etc.) each going about and living their lives, and run that system for a (good long) while and you end up with a world that is not only plausible, but functional, and full of actual history.

Basically, for the kind of realism and scope I want to see, "hand-crafting" is not an option, not for anyone. Procedural generation (or procedural generation augmented with a bit of "godly guidance") is the only way to get there.

The touch of a designer is exactly what I don't want to have in a game. I want the world to feel natural, real, immersive -- not designed.

Great.. I will buy the Linux version when it comes out. I would like to get it somewhere else than Steam though (Humble Store?).

The phrase "adventure games" to describe this genre derives from a 1976 game called "Adventure" that was the basically the first computer-based text adventure, similar to how "roguelikes" are called that based on qualities they share with the 1980 game "Rogue". Just as the Thief series has little in common with a roguelike, being "adventurous" doesn't make a game any more or less of an adventure game; the genre labels are simply usages of the words that don't line up with their common meanings.

If anything, the perversion of the term is its frequent modern usage to describe any game in which you embark on an adventure (i.e. damn near any game). It's akin to how some people will claim that Halo is a roleplaying game because "you play the role of Master Chief", an even more tenuous claim to the genre than the one you mention (though I agree that most modern games labelled "RPGs" by the gaming press would be better described as "action games with RPG elements", if that's what you're suggesting).

I don't dispute that the adventure genre could do with a less opaque name, BTW; just clarifying why games of this sort have been traditionally referred to as such.

Let's not get into metaphysical questions, shall we? ;)
More seriously, though, I understand where our points of view diverge, but I'm actually with you on this point: I too would love a game that feels natural and real, and in which I could lose myself. However, what procedural generation has been able to achieve so far feels empty, repetitious and bland to me.
So far.
If one day procedural generation is refined to the point that it can churn out a believable world without any freakish hiccups and with the diversity of nature itself, then - apart from the fact that we would have an effective Creation/Big Bang/Universe simulator - we would indeed have the means to create a true adventure experience that would be unique to every player and have infinite replayability. But as I said before, I just don't see this happening in the near future, or even in the foreseeable future. It may already be achievable today technologically (I honestly have no idea about that), but it will take time before any studio with the resources to pull this off takes an interest in such an endeavour. As for making such a game yourself, like you said, it will take at least several years of dedicated work for a single person (and a hell lot of motivation and self discipline, let alone funding and a large spectrum of skills), and even then, I do believe your chances would be better if you teamed up with at least a couple of people. I do wish you success, however! If you manage to pull that off, it would be a great service to the video game genre, I believe. :)

Life is an adventure, ergo The Sims is an adventure game! :D

It's true that we could use some new nomenclature, since almost every game and their dog can be (and mostly is) classified as "action adventure".

And I love how games nowadays boast "RPG elements", when the elements in question are basically just upgradeable stats or something similar. The actual notion of "role play" has been lost in translation, as it were. Thinking about that, J-RPGs should probably be called something else as well: most of the time, the only role play you do in those is of the "you play play the role of the Master Chief" kind. ^^;