GamesStrategyUnsung Story: Tale of the Guardians10 years on, the most infamous gaming Kickstarter of them all is still trying to reach the finish line: ‘I want to explicitly state that this project is not dead’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
GamesStrategyUnsung Story: Tale of the Guardians10 years on, the most infamous gaming Kickstarter of them all is still trying to reach the finish line: ‘I want to explicitly state that this project is not dead’When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Little Orbit)
Nearly two years after its last update and more than 10 years after it was Kickstarted to the tune of $660,126, the developers behind beleaguered strategy game Unsung Story have returned to declare it’s “getting back on track.”
Unsung Story is not the biggest failure in gaming Kickstarter history—that honor may belong to Clang, which pulled in more than half a million dollars in 2012 and wasdeclared dead two years later. But I don’t think any other Kickstarted game can match Unsung Story’s bizarre and grueling saga, from beingput on hold in 2016,sold to another studio, and finally releasedin a limited early access formin 2020 to practically zero fanfare. That release has been hanging over the heads of developer Little Orbit for the last four years, its recent update revealed.
“We shipped what we thought was a great start to the final game,” Little Orbit CEO Matthew Scott wrote. “But we were wrong.”
“Unfortunately, while there were a couple areas that players liked, most of the feedback from early access was overwhelmingly negative. In fact it put the project into a super weird limbo: Chapter 1 was clearly bad enough that continuing with the game direction was only going to disappoint the backers and fans of the project, but it wasn’t so bad that I felt we should abandon the whole thing.”
“2023 was rough for our studio or the game industry overall. I’m not going to detail all of our struggles here, but when things take a downturn, the effects can be disastrous across the board,” Scott wrote, saying that unpaid work for a partner left the studio “hundreds of thousands of dollars in the hole.” Little Orbit was working on rectifying the issues with the early access build in 2021 and 2022 but had to pause while the studio took on survival work.
Now, it seems, Unsung Story is going into development again. “I want to explicitly state that this project is not dead,” Scott wrote.
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Based on the early access feedback, Little Orbit has redesigned Unsung Story’s main character, replaced 3D model “bobble heads” during dialogue sequences with more traditional 2D portraits, cut down on excess dialogue, redesigned the UI, rebalanced the class system and added female character models absent in the original release.
I don’t want to jinx it, but it does seem like Unsung Story might truly be finished someday. In the meantime, you could do worse than playing and replaying the latest iteration of Yasumi Matsuno’s masterpiece Tactics Ogre,Reborn, which he oversaw.
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