Ex-Blizzard staffers launch Kickstarter for episodic horror action game
Broken is a new, story-driven take on horror action.
Several former Blizzard veterans have formed up at Kollide Entertainment to produce Broken.
An episodic third-person action game set in 2021, Broken tells the story of Navy Seal Logan Kyle and his family. Set in the wake of an extremist group's catastrophic global biological weapon attack, it posits a world inhabited by mutants.
The project was inspired by games like The Last of Us, Half-life and The Walking Dead, but Kollide's ambition is to make something unique. With narrative as its primary focus, it will be doing away with elements like "repetitive puzzle-based level design, arbitrary collection artifacts, obscenely difficult enemy spawn encounters and superfluous achievements".
The Kickstarter campaign seems aimed at those who want to support the team's vision rather than at gamers wanting to pre-order a finished product, as the $275,000 pitch is intended to gather the necessary funds to complete pre-production, positioning the team to pursue external funding.
As such, the videos and screens you see are not representative of any existing product, but of the concept - what Kollide is aiming for. None of the reward tiers promise to deliver a finished game, although most include access to the vertical slice-style demo Kollide hopes to produce at the end of the pre-production period.
The campaign materials include a breakdown of how the money will be spent. It's refreshing to see a pitch designed to help create materials for presentation to investors be so upfront about its aims; too many Kickstarters promise a playable game but fall down before the finish line, or disappoint backers who believed they were helping keep a team independent.
Anyway, there's a pitch video below if you want to take a look.