Corven: Path of Redemption Kickstarter Campaign Live

Following a good few years of development, Lycantic’s Ultima-inspired RPG Corven: Path of Redemption has finally made its way to Kickstarter. The game is positioned as a story-driven open world RPG and an unofficial continuation of the Ultima series.

The initial goal is set at $45,000, which should allow the developers to improve on their original vision for the game. And if you don’t enjoy uncertainty in your life, you can already play through a demo that highlights some of Corven’s main features.

Check out the Kickstarter video:

And here are some bits from the campaign description:

What is Corven?

Corven is a story-driven, open world, single player RPG inspired by our favorite RPGs from the 1980s and 1990s, especially Richard Garriott’s Ultima series.

We miss Ultima and its design philosophy and so we set out to create something similar.

Corven will let you explore an interactive open world full of secrets and surprises. Maybe even more important than that, Corven will deliver an engaging story with many interesting NPCs.

Our goal is to make you want to know “what happens next?” in the main quest. Or in side quests for example”why is the, married, mayor of this town sneaking over to this other woman’s house almost every night?” 🙂

This is a shift from many modern RPG’s in which character progression and combat are very clearly the main focus. Don’t get us wrong, we love those games too, but we want to focus on what made games like Ultima V, VI and VII so great.

We are also very proud to announce that none other than Richard “Lord British” Garriott, creator of the Ultima series, likes Corven and even helped with parts of the storyline. His alter ego, Lord British, will appear in the game and make Corven feel even more like its great inspiration, Ultima.

Don’t worry, Corven will also feature a fun real-time combat system which is entertaining, but won’t take up most of your play time. You will learn many exciting spells and some of them will even interact. Like a fireball which does 100% critical damage on targets afflicted by your freeze spell. You get the idea.

[…]

The Demo

We know that releasing a demo of the game at a very early stage of development is risky. Some people might expect a completely finished experience and that is, of course, not the case. If we would be done with the game we would not need a Kickstarter campaign 🙂

So we kindly ask of you to be aware that the demo shows the game early in development.This means not all features are implemented yet and the game is not polished yet. A few examples:

• NPCs which are not relevant for the main quest in the demo are not implemented yet
• Side Quests are not implemented yet
• Dialogues are unfinished
• not all non-combat wildlife is implemented yet
• not all sound effects are implemented

You get the idea.

We provide the demo so you can see in which direction the development is going and what you can expect from the game. Even though the demo shows a very early version of the game, we think it also shows that we are capable of creating the promised game. We provide the demo so you don’t have to blindly trust us, but have a some form of proof that we can create Corven.

Please use the demo as a basis for giving us feedback. We have a Feedback section in our forums and we greatly appreciate all your thoughts about Corven. For example, if you hate the font we used, let us know 🙂