What is waiting Beyond the Gates of Antares?

The Future is a mystery to all of us. 

It stands with its back turned, silent and 

unknowable until we reach it. 

Those who can predict it are often wrong,

 simply because they cannot see all the details

 the Future holds up its sleeves. 

Those who aspire and push forward may fail 

for the very same reasons. 

Because Future does not reveal its secrets easily or 

warn us of dangers ahead. 

Beyond the Gates of Antares is an extremely ambitions and promising project by Rick Priestly, the father of Warhammer and Warhammer 40000 universes. The renown and legendary game designer left Games Workshop in 2010 to pursue new goals as a freelancer. So far he created and participated in number of successful projects, like Bolt Action (WW2 squad-to-company size wargame) and Fanticide  (a homicidal warband tabletop top game). The latter was successfully promoted and launched using Kickstarter, and apparently gave an inspiration and confidence to repeat the experience with BGoA.

For the selfish purposes i will post a video of Rick  Priestly, John Stallard and Rik Alexander (Warlord Games) interview were they describe the "sausage" or the bright palns for new gaming universe to the Beasts of War website. In short and to save you one hour of listening i will summarize the goals of project as quite ambitious.

First of all they are trying to merge Massive Multiplayer Online game with table-top wargame, and give players a real-time online mirror of their table top efforts. So while you are playing the game with your mates and feed result to the website, the script (or admin) will change the big picture of entire universe.

Sounds revolutionary, at least. What is comforting is that big picture will be controlled by the company narrators. 

Secondly, the game mechanics (so far) is similar to tested in Bolt Action system of activation and units status, though system is still in development to adjust for the far far future, sometime couple of million years ahead.

Thirdly, the combat will be affected by pool of command action and every unit will react to enemy actions according to situation and impact, which promises to deliver a very intense game where both players are constantly engaged in the game.

That is IF the project will find required amount of supporters on Kickstarter. At the moment of writing this post, BGoA have collected 31% of £93.492 pledged money and it had 36 day to go. And if would be behind this project i would be worried. Unfortunately i'm not the only one who sees realities of BGoA.      

Blogger Mr. Zweischneid's (dont ask me how to pronounce this name) in his brilliant analysis describes the most obvious reason for worries. Check it yourself, http://pinsofwar.com/rick-priestleys-kickstarter-fail, and you might agree that at the moment, Beyond the Gates of Antares is an incomplete product. To summarize Mr. Zweischneid's post, 

• BGoA will be funded only if will get at last £5000 in donations each day
•  if the vision of game universe will suddenly became clear and focused so that people will know what exactly they are supporting 
• if game mechanics will be finished to at least 90%

             

Looking at the current situation of definitely an interesting project I wounder what might happen in likely case if project will not get requested amount of support.   

1.  Rick Priestly stated: "that this the game I've always wanted to create". We may believe in his commitment to the project, which mean that he will continue working on the game regardless of financial situation. That is promising. 
2. Warlord Games support: John Stallard (the boss) clearly understands that IF this project will take off, and people will start playing BGoA as they play MMOG these day, then his company will become a second Games Workshop. 
3. Arrival of undisclosed investor: frankly I'm speculating, but project of such novelty and potential could attract a third party investor, which means it will get required amount of money and production schedule will be met.