$23 on discount for an advertised harkening to adventure/RPG hybrids and old Sierra titles in general with zero voice acting. I imagine the other 4 chapters originally planned are not going to happen either? GG Coles, GG. Zero reviews on the page mentioned this that I saw either. Not that I'm not still going to play and hope to enjoy this, but geez. I expect a huge game here now at 1.2GB and no voice acting. At first I thought there was none because my character was having their own thoughts and being sneaky.

I get it, development costs money, even if you're one of the "old ones" from the glory era, semi wealthy or not; but there are literal clubs of voice actors who do this for a hobby and would likely do it for "cheap as free". Probably the first of these legends coming back via "indie" development that has neglected a key feature in this type of game since circa 1992ish, like voice acting. Some have failed due to lack of funds or personal life (SQ semi reboot) and more power to the Coles to getting through 2 and still releasing a product, I'm just very disappointed. It's well known that even at the "big boys", voice actors aren't paid well. I certainly wouldn't have expected kegendary voices, and the greats of that era are either dead (thinking Gary Owens) or too old to continue working for the amount of lines a project like this would be, but come on. Even SQII VGA remake was voiced, is free, and while certainly not great or keeping anything similar to the offical titles, it was passable. It makes sense the early EGA or even VGA games didn't have VO, the tech was new, cost around $1000 a word to produce if truly synthesized, and reproduction of digital audio wasn't quite up to par with consumer hardware when the production cost came down, but those aren't limitarions now.

Monkey Island 1, early LSL, KQ, even QFG, had no VO and the jokes were written to accomodate that limitarion. The jokes in this are word play puns which look like crap in text, but only make sense if pronounced. "I fixture lamp" sucks to read as a joke to returning a stolen lamp. Feels like being deaf. "Did you hear about the zoo with only one animal" "no." "yeah, it was a Shih Tzu" SEE, makes no sense in text!

I'm not quite sure what you're getting at. You seem to imply that $23 is high? That's about $12 in 1990 dollars, when Sierra sold Quest for Glory for $60 ($120 today). So we're charging one-fifth of the price for a game that took over five years to develop (as opposed to one year for each of Quest for Glory 1 - 3, and about 18 months for QG 4).

Sure, you can buy all five 20-30 year old Quest for Glory games here on GoG for $10. I expect we will discount Hero-U that much... in 20 or 30 years. If we do it now, there will be no second game because we'll have gone broke making this one. That's what happened to Sierra, LucasArts, Telltale, IQ Adventures, and hundreds of other companies. If people don't want to pay for games, game companies stop making them.

Are you recommending that we give the game away for (essentially) free and also add professional voice acting? At $23, we need to sell 50,000 units to break even on our development costs. Add 20,000 units to that if we include VO. At $15 list and $10 discounted price, we would need to sell 200,000 units to break even. Can you in your wildest dreams imagine that happening for an indie adventure RPG? Do you want every company that makes them to be one-and-done?

The VO budget for QG4 was over $100,000, and voice actors charge much more today. This game is also about 50% larger than QG4, so figure between $300K and $500K for professional voiceover.

Amateur voice actors? Not on your life. They would ruin the game. As it is, even with professional VO, I found I can't play Broken Age or Thimbleweed Park because the voices are too distracting. If we eventually do a voice-acted version of Hero-U: Rogue to Redemption, it will use professional actors. There is no better way to destroy a good game than with bad voice acting.

I honestly don't really need a game such as this to have voice acting, and in many ways I actually prefer no voice acting, since I can read much faster than listen to people talk. I doubt I would have completed the game a number of times if I had to listen to voice acting (and even if it were skippable, I'd probably still listen to them fully if the option were there, because I'm weird that way).

Additionally - and most importantly - I infinitely prefer zero voice acting to sub-par voice acting, let alone "amateur" voice acting. Especially if the voice is annoying and/or reads their lines stupidly (sometimes I find I can't listen to supposed "good" voice acting because the voice just grates to my ears). Did you play QFG2? Because I'm pretty sure that was full of puns (as all QFGs were) and also didn't have any voice acting. This game is roughly on par with that (pun-wise).

Not sure why these wouldn't make sense to you, unless you're not a native English speaker perhaps? Actually even then they make sense, unless you somehow pronounce words in your head differently to how you'd speak them? This is probably the most confusing thing I've read in a while...

As for the price: $23 for a game that could be completed with almost zero bugs from start to finish multiple times from launch day (and bugs were minor)? Yeah sure the bar has been set quite low these last few years (for those things to even be criteria), but I can think of at least two RPGs developed by larger teams recently that still feature massive, game-breaking bugs many patches in (*cough cough* Kingmaker). So by this (admittedly abysmal) standard alone, it kicks ass!

I do wish there had been a tad more puzzles and/or more difficult ones, and less emphasis on the combat (which although better than any (or all?) of the QFGs in many respects, feels like it's missing a few features - and related to this, the difference between the three "sub-classes" (for lack of a better word) is much less than I would have expected for a QFG-style game (almost made up by the fact that playthroughs can change quite a bit based on Shaun's responses/attitudes)).

Right, which is why I spent over a paragraph expositing on how I understand it adds costs . However, you cannot deny that production is cheaper in nearly all aspects for this industry than it was 30 years ago for what you get and can do. Comparing pure inflation alone is ridiculous. A 1920s model T cost "the same" as a basic compact now by inflation; you get a hell of a lot more out of a modern compact as far as what a car really is and considered now. Part of the reason the VO budget for QFG4 (or anyrhing then) was that high was certainly NOT the wages of most actors (I've worked in radio and VO as talent, I know how poorly it pays unless you're famous or very well recommended), but the costs associated with a studio, equipment, and recording and production engineers, all of which are far cheaper comparatively than they were 30 years ago, exponentially so. Making decent audio is almost dirt cheap now, look at any 25 year old youtuber that is actually decent at production and editing. They make fractions of a penny per view and the good ones more than get by. Ditto for workstations, software, and engines themselves. 30- years ago you had to actually program, now the same licensed engine suite can be used for everyhing from simulators like KSP, to this, to mobile time waster games instead of having to make a proprietary one for a single game or run of them. Sound had to be actually programmed before, it's scripted sets of sound dumps or indivual files for the most part now. As far as production time being longer, are your working hours longer than they were? Most who are young and "hungry" tend to put a lot more time and effort into their careers than 3 decades down the road hours per day wise.

If you're arguing Sierra went broke because they gave budgets large enough to explore the "latest and greatest" in tech with nearly every title was purely bad, I never suggested that be what direction you or anyone should go. However, yes, I'd rather see a handfull of excellent titles that endure decades from a company than have anyone turn into EA or what Bethesda has become or conversely, have underrated titles due to a lack of features common to an incredibly high percentage of games made in this genre or any now. I've seen zero topics about it when I serached the forums here and only a light number of forum postsings from during early production, but it's likely costing you some sales or interest. Most don't make posts or direct comments. You also received money from two crowd funding campaigns that met their combined $500k goal. Don't act like the price point at final sale is your only source of income here for the project. Plenty have abandoned projects after the crowd funding, I gave props for not doing so. 5 years is also about the time it seems to take for single person studios to make titles that sell millions of units at around $12 (pletny of those fail too). Their products are just as good in other ways and their margins are a lot better because of it. Coincidentally most of those titles don't seem to have VO, but I bet with a $500k budget before any sales, they may have. They're also not in genres known for having pioneered VO in games or novella sized amounts of text. One thing definitely done right here was the graphics, I can't knock that at all.

I'm only getting at that people like Gilbert or Schafer (it's fine to not like the latest out of doublefine, I personally haven't played them) seem to have accopmlished it by A) remkaing some of their older titles after either having foresight to retain IP control or lengthly legal battles or costly royalties and licensing deals, and B) being incredibly shrewed business wise (whether or not that's moral to do to a fellow coworker contracted or not is an entirely different discussion). While some of their later new IP titles may be "duds", it's not just because of VO you personally found bad. "The Dig" had pretty bad VO (mostly the mixing and production), but it didn't make it a bad game in any sense. The actor for Indy in fate of atlantis certainly wasn't trying to imitate Harrison Ford, but he made the character his own desipte again, some mixing and production issues. 7th guest had horrible VO even for the time and a clusterF of production issues, it still sold like mad and not just because it was the hot new CDROM game being shilled by even Bill Gates and being sold with PCs. Whomever owns the rights now is making money just off of releasing it prepackaged with SCUMMvm.

If several completely free titles in this genere can be made that feature halway decent nearly full VO, there's no way you would spend half a million unless you demanded stars or well knowns, which I, nor would I think anyone else, would expect. You could literally go to a radio station and probably hire decent voice talent for tens of thosuands, not hundreds of thousands. I wouldn't consider Heroine's Quest "ruined" by having amatuer VO. There's also plenty of pros who don't live in L.A., NY, or the Pacific NW, and can record and send files remotely from a home studio or local one, and are a lot cheaper. Most of the audio industry people I know are broke regardless of skill beacuse of how little it pays. Not sure who you're rubbing shoulders with or where they're recording to cost more than most make in 10 years for a VO budget. Seriously, dsimissal of VO actors for being "amateurs' is a cop out, and frankly a good way to destroy potential oppourtunities. Jukeboxes killed live bands because of that kind of attitude and now most music and audio are like most video games are becoming, cookie cutter. Not that I"m accusing Hero U of being so at all, but for being this much of an apparent audiophile, the music so far has been well scored, but repetitive. The new LSL attempt may be a non looker for me just because of its art style and rough look plus no Lowe, buy every customer's tastes are different certainly. I'd call the voices in the trailer for that bad choices, not bad VO. Casting and production are almost more important than "skill" depending on the role. You should keep in mind though, another good way to ruin a great game is treating customers poorly or assuming they don't understand your own concerns as the producer of the content. You cut out a mass of any potential VO talent because they don't fit your defintion of "professional" when VO clubs even have professional members doing side work for practice or exposure. In your world of hiring talent, how would anyone ever become a professional if those were the only people hired? If I were a jackass, I'd make a refund attempt just for that, but like I said in my OP, I still hope to enjoy the game. You find DoubleFine's VO talent choices grating, I find absolutely no VO talent in a point and click grating if it's not early EGA or VGA. After working all day for what you probably could never live on at this stage in life, I don't feel like reading a novel's worth of obvious phonetic puns. Hearing them wouldn't be so grating. Writing non phonetic ones would also be less grating.

I'm also saying for a "full" price title, it's quite a shock to have no VO whatsoever discounted or not. I don't think the price is "high", even the full price, but it is for having writing that only "works" in pronunciation not being voiced. Furthermore, it could be argued that Telltale went broke because of a series of poor writing and advertising choices that weren't choices (I personally found the Sam and Max titles they produced to be the only decent ones), Lucas because of several "bunk" titles failing to ever leave the star wars IP after a time (I'm saddened to think what disney is going to do with all the non SW IPs there), and a high percentage of companies fail in every industry, primarly because of not being able to balance costs and prodcut quality with price point. Being overly perfectionist is just as bad as not caring about quality and both waste budget or sales in the end. I'm assuming GOG also charges some amount for advertising, but I also imagine like a lot of costs, they're exponentially less than advertisemnt via magazine, brick and mortar stores, television, radio, or anything else was in the past for the amount of people you can reach. The only reason I even heard about this game was as a suggested title after browsing and purchasing old titles from companies that went bankrupt making good games, including QFG. The amount of "utility" out of the price is what's important. I paid about the same for this as I did for KSP in early access. I doubt this has the same amount of utility in replayability hours, but that's also not the only criteria to judge anything by.

I definitely have played QFG2, I mentioned Moneky Island 1, and compare the types of puns. They're written in a manner that doesn't require phonetics most of the time. The puns are almost all phonetic that I've seen in this. It's not having puns that bothers me, it's having puns that only "work" if they're said aloud (i.e., voiced because they all require mispronunciation instead of plays on multiple definitions). I think "amateur" VO gets a lot of hate for no good reason, and I think it's a huge mistake to cut out a large talent pool or, as I said, just have charged $20 more and had a big VO budget. As I have said, my issue is not the money itselt, it's the extreme disappointment at what's become a mainstay feature of the genre and almost all games. As for tihinking I pronounce things differently in my head or something, no not at all. it's that VO gives additional life to a character. I'm a musically and aurally inclined person, many are. Is Darth Vader as indimidating in his manner if your don't hear any voice and only see subtitles? Some people don't like their own character being voiced. That's fine by me too, but it can be worked around by having a narrator and the character speaking less (and more giving you impressions of what they see feel and get from intuition).

next paragraph is meant for post above but the forums seem to hate long posts and it won't append.

How many users does GOG actually have? I can't really find any number. Granted this is a "niche" genre, but let's say there's half a million registered GOG accounts (taking about 2x social media followers), selling 70k units is about 14% of that population, and I'd think that unlike steam, far more of GOG's users are interested in point and click adventure games (and I imagine you have some other store fronts as well). If your reading of my comment is thinking I'm "cheap", hardly, I own legitimate copies of many slitheriene products at full price. I willingly paid $80 for both of the newest Grigsby WWII titles after researching their features. I imagine that's a far titghter niche as I can rarely even find publlic games of BASPM to play (maybe 100 turns long, 50 on each side), let alone a few hundred turn WWII turn based hex strategy. I certainly would have complained about their price however if say, zero sounds of battle occured during battles in them because of an argument that professional WWII plane, gun, tank, and explosion sounds are too expensive to acquire or recreate. Would I have paid $80 for Hero U? No way, but I would have not cared about paying $40-$60 if it had VO (which should certainly meet your budget demands for pros assuming sales aren't drastically affected since you're presumably already selling at a profit point beyond the $500k in crowd funding plus any other rasied capital). Most of the shock is the general assumption that it would be there, it was an instant let down. Claiming you need $500k to record what is essentially, a long audio book requiring multiple actors and slightly better quality (from their persepctive of hte project and their role) is absurd. The same people can be hired for multiple characters, it's not like they all cost Morgan Freeman doing March of the Penguins money. When the big time stars are holding out for more money as they were around 10 years ago, there's a pool of budding talent waiting for work and that's true of almost any business.

Well now that you mention it, I do actually recall having to re-read a couple of the puns more than once because I didn't register the pun/joke the first time - but I put that down to me just reading it too fast. At any rate, I only noticed this a handful of times.

If they released a voice-pack add-on, I would most likely buy it; however, it's not a big deal for me personally for the reasons I mentioned above. One of my favourite games is Age of Decadence and that also has zero voice acting, so I guess this just comes down to you valuing voice acting much higher than me.

I do agree that voice acting, if done well, can enhance a game - possibly significantly so. However, despite the fact that it's definitely possible to get decent voice acting in a game, it's also possible for it to be really, really bad. However, since this game (like most similar iso-adventures) would undoubtedly have an option to skip it and/or switch it off, the worst case scenario would have not affected me at all.

That being said, compared to some recent games (which were more expensive), this game came out in pretty good shape, and in my view is definitely worth the asking price. Could it have been better, come out sooner, and/or had voice acting for the same price? Quite possibly, yes - this game has had a somewhat turbulent development when compared to games of similar size/scope; but it could have been a hell of a lot worse, and these days finding a good game that (mostly) works on launch day, with post-launch support, seems to be rarer than ever.

IMO a good comparison - and a game worth getting (assuming you don't have it already) if you like QFG-style games, especially if you like rogue-ish characters, and even more so if you like to role-play a bastard - is Quest For Infamy, which features three classes, multiple quest solutions, and full voice acting (though the quality of the VO varies a lot throughout - main character's VO is spot-on, narrator can be a tad annoying).

I am aware of quest for infamy. Was thinking about getting that too. Might in a month or two.

maddogg, you haven't addressed the basic point. How do you expect a company to make more than one game if they lose most of their investment in the first one? Why should we have the obligation to sell games at a huge loss?

Our cost to build this game was $1.5 million. Kickstarter covered $500K of that, so $1M needs to be recouped. But let's say we were only $300K over budget - that's where we originally expected the game to come in.

$35 list price. $23 on sale, lower in some countries, so figure $20 as a generous average. We get 70%, or $14 per unit. $300,000 divided by $14 is about 21,500 copies. We haven't come close to that yet, and aren't sure we will.

And yet you screamed at the idea of $23 on sale being too high. Let's do the math on "typical indie game" at $15 list price, discounted to $10 on sale. $7 to the developer - hey, that's easy, half of $14. We would need to sell 43,000 units to break even. How many indie games do you think hit that number?

In our case, we need to hit three times either of those numbers to pay back the money we actually borrowed and took from our retirement savings and life insurance. If we add voice, our house would be the next thing to go.

So basically, you're saying it's our responsibility to create games for you, then sell them at a loss. You are asking each indie developer to make one game, then go bankrupt. That's perfectly fine since there are thousands of other indies in line to do the same thing.

What kind of world is it in which creators are asked to open their veins and bleed to death for the privilege of delivering creative works to their fans? Oh, that's a combination of The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand. Spoiler - Those are not Utopian worlds.