UPDATE: SHADOW OF THE ETERNALS...Looking DIMMER and DIMMER

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Adam Zimmerman

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A mere month after excitedly writing about how a long awaited (spiritual) sequel to Eternal Darkness was in the works, it now appears that the project is in serious jeopardy. The developer of the game is also being a little shady as well.


As I mentioned last month, with Nintendo still owning the actual Eternal Darkness name, the folks over at Precursor Games, many of whom were on the original Eternal Darkness team, were taking matters into their own hands and were crown funding a spiritual successor. At the time when I wrote the article, they were not using any of the traditional crowd funding sites like Kickstarter, instead doing all of the fund raising on their own site.


Their fund raising goal was 1.5 million dollars for the first episode of the twelve that were planned. Despite a very good initial burst of donations, about 100,000 on the first day, the donations started drying up pretty quickly. They then decided to use Kickstarter as well as their own site in hopes of boosting donation. Sadly, it only worked a little. Four weeks into the six-week donation window, the donations on each site are only at about 150,000, for a total of roughly 300,000, which is obviously well short of the 1.5 million goal.

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This is where things start to get a little shady. Precursor posted the following message on their Kickstarter page on June 4.


"To our community,

Since we announced this Kickstarter campaign we have seen more support from our community than we had ever hoped for. Along with this support has come a host of a new exciting opportunities that will make the game better than we envisioned. As a result, we have chosen to temporarily take down the Shadow of the Eternals crowdfunding campaigns on both Kickstarter and our own website on Thursday, June 6.


This doesn’t mean we are going away -- far from it. We’ll be re-launching the Kickstarter in just a few short weeks with a reveal of these exciting new developments.


As we’re closing the current Kickstarter campaign not a single dime from this campaign will be removed from supporters’ accounts and everyone from our website’s crowd-funding campaign will receive full refunds via PayPal. As we re-tool our campaign and continue development, the forums on our site will remain open and active and any interested fans can still join the ‘Order of the Unseen’ to see our progress and join in the fun of creating content for the game themselves.


We want to thank everyone who has participated, volunteered, and spoken up to support us. You are our community and we value you more than you know. Stay tuned and we’ll be back soon!"


Paul Caporicci + Precursor team

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There are a couple problems I have with this message. The first one is that they don’t, and of as the writing of this article still have not, said anything about what those possible “exciting new opportunities” are. Further, they say they are closing the Kickstarter campaign, but they aren’t closing it for 2 days. They have the ability to close it right away but are waiting 2 days. If the campaign is being closed, what’s the reason for keeping the donation page open?

 Also, they say they are going to return all of the money that was donated on their website, but once again, they have yet to do so.


Another thing I want to know is, even if they they do re-launch in a few weeks with a re-tooled campaign, how are they expecting to even get all of the original investors back. For me personally, if I had been an investor, I would be a little weary of doing so again. I still have high hopes that this game will eventually come out and be everything they are promising it to be.


Despite my hopes though, I now have serious doubts as to whether this game will actually be released unless the exciting new opportunities involve either an actual publisher or at least a business partner of some sorts to ease the financial burden.

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Sources:

Image 1: Accessed On June 6th, 2013 ( https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/projects/514101/photo-main.jpg?1369419096)

Image 2: Accessed On June 6th, 2013 ( https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/000/561/806/18259f7fef87f6bb238920af46188d86_large.png?1367528822)

Image 3: Accessed On June 6th, 2013 ( http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-U6X0N55RgQQ/UYPvARiTraI/AAAAAAAAfsU/jsILacla60U/s640/SOTE.png)

Preview: "Eternal Darkness: Shadows of the Eternals." (2013) "At Long Last, Darkness is Returning"

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By: Adam Zimmerman

Nearly 11 years ago, one of the best games to ever come out for the Game Cube was released. That game was Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem.
  It’s survival-horror gameplay, and great sanity effects (hundreds of people fell for the effect that made it seem like it was deleting all of your systems memory) wowed critics and gamers alike. Ever since then, people have been asking if/when they were ever going to see a sequel.

Fans held out hope because Nintendo held onto the license. Alas, Nintendo still isn’t making the long awaited sequel. The fine folks over at Precursor Games however, are tired of waiting and are making a spiritual successor titled Shadow of the Eternals. Several members of Precursor Games worked on Sanity’s Requiem while they were employed at Silicon Knights, the developer of Sanity’s Requiem.


The game is schedule to release sometime in the third quarter of 2014 on the WiiU and PC. To fund they project, they are relying entirely on crowdfunding. Unlike other crowd funded games, they are not using any of the sites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo.

They are using their own site, and offering different levels of perks for those that donate. Donation packages range from $5 all the way up to $10,000. For those of you with a giant wad of cash burning a hole in your pocket, if you donate the max, you get a whole list of stuff including, but not limited to, the whole first season, the chance to work with Precursor to design a Sanity Event, exclusive in game content, and your very own personal dossier in the game.

 Anyone that donates will have access to the developer forums, which lets you talk to the developers and suggest things you would like to see in the game. Their goal for the first episode (out of a planned total of 12 for the first season) is 1.5 million. If they exceed their goal, the excess money will be put towards future episodes and possibly releasing on additional consoles.


Unfortunately with the game so early in development, there haven’t been many details released yet outside of their official press release, 9 minute gameplay video, and one interview with Dennis Dyack, the creator of the game. What we do know is that, like its predecessor, Shadows of the Eternals will cover a range of time periods, this time covering around 2,500 years of human history. Locations will include places like Egypt, England, Hungary, and the US.

The weapons you can use in each location/time will be era specific, so don’t hold out hopes for being able to mow down ancient Egyptians with a machine gun. Players will have to decipher what is real, and what isn’t. Those who played the original know to question everything you see and hear. Visually, the game will be powered by the Crytek 3 engine, which has been used in the Crysis games as well as many others.


Even though it is a long ways away, the gameplay that they’ve shown already oozes that great Eternal Darkness feel. I can’t tell you how excited I am for this game to finally come out. 12 years between games is about 10 years too many considering how good the first one was.


Our Honest View gives this extremely early look at Shadows of the Eternals a 9 out of 10. The only thing holding it back from a full 10 is that there are many details yet to be revealed, and nothing is certain until they reach their funding goals. If you would like to donate money, just head over to Precursor’s website, www.precursorgames.com/shadowoftheeternals/. In the first day of fund raising alone, they raised over $100,000.


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