It's pretty safe to say that the Kickstarter for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night has been a massive success. The spiritual successor to the Castlevania series will now be coming to nearly every current-gen console and the money still keeps rolling in, practically guaranteeing that this will be the gothic Metroidvania to end them all. Due to the fact that there are only five days left, at the time of writing, Koji Igarashi has opted to reveal all but the last stretch goal and it appears that there's plenty to look forward to.
The next stretch goal at $3.75 million will see several orchestrated tracks making it onto the official soundtrack. Considering that IGA is bringing along Michiru Yamane - a veteran composer for the Castlevania series - to do the soundtrack here, we could certainly be in for quite a symphonic treat. Past that, $4 million will see a real-time online multiplayer mode added in. Not to be confused with the asynchronous multiplayer that's already confirmed to be in, this mode sounds like something akin to the Smash Run mode from Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS. Players will be dropped into specially designed stages and be tasked with earning points by finding items, killing enemies, and collecting materials.
$4.25 million will see a third playable character being added in, who this will be is anybody's guess considering that this game will be introducing an entirely new cast of characters. Regardless, more gameplay variety is never a bad thing and IGA will likely see that each character will have plenty of unique traits to differentiate them. $4.5 million will see a retro-styled, bite-sized prequel game being released on consoles a little bit in advance to set up the story for the main game. Though it will be sold separately, backers that have pledged at least $28 will receive a free copy. Finally, at $4.75 million, the prequel game will see a release on the 3DS and Vita.
While it does seem a bit of a stretch to believe that the highest of these goals will be reached in less than five days, only time will tell. After all, major Kickstarter projects historically have had massive spikes at the very beginning and end of the term.
What do you think of these new stretch goals? If you haven't backed it yet, will any of these convince you to do so? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
[source kickstarter.com]
Comments 29
I can't wait for 2017.
Yes, now all we had to do is wait.
The wait for this is unbearable!
Agreed, now we'll just wait.
Back em and forget em. And eventually the time will come where your first backed project releases. After that, as long as you have continued backing projects which interest you, you'll start seeing a steady stream of Kickstarter releases every few months.
I've got Mighty No 9, Shantae Half Genie Hero, Earthlock- Festival of Magic, Hollow Knight, Little Devil Inside and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night. I also backed Salvaged and Source but those games were unsuccessful and never collected my pledge
Speaking of Kickstarter, Yooka-Laylee seems to be having trouble getting past the 2,000,000 mark — it's been around 1.8 million for a while.
$4 million sounds like a lot just to add 1 more character. They should be focusing on that before planning more modes
Give me that "Smash run" mode and I'm good.
@Goob Yeah, I noticed that it kind of stagnated. I think it'll just pass that last stretch goal, though.
Prequel on 3DS?! I'm going to finally back this project. I've meant to ever since I read about the Wii U release but the 3DS prequel has me sold
@JaxonH I believe that Adventures of Pip was my 3rd release out of 18 pledges to successful campaigns. At this point I'm done with Kickstarter, but probably not for why people might guess upon hearing that. I'm still excited for all the projects still coming, even though I know the odds favor some of them not coming to fruition, and I'm glad I pledged to all of them. And I absolutely love the theory of the crowdfunding model. But there are some major problems I don't see solutions to, and Bloodstained and Yooka-Laylee are making them worse. Development is expensive, for any game, but now that Kickstarter is past the worship-of-the-new phase no campaign that sets a realistic goal will be successful. Just ask Renegade Kid, and their campaign was during a more Kickstarter-friendly time. Read the Bloodstained campaign: the $500,000 goal was 1/10th the anticipated budget. The remaining 90% was from investors who wanted to see a successful campaign showing there was still demand. Five million is the basic budget. The campaign is considered an amazing success, but won't come close to that. What will, say, forty thousand make possible? Not much; but that's what campaigns that don't have Igarashi at the helm will have to settle for if they want to succeed.
Even then I've seen way too many interesting games with such targets go unsupported, even in cases where all they wanted was additional funds to finish development that was mostly finished on their own dime. It's almost the production version of mobile gaming; the consumer, having no clue what is actually involved, expects a lot for a little. And I don't want to be part of that. Those Indies that can secure funding and bring games to market I will gladly support at prices befitting the investment making that possible; but I won't Kickstart when my investment is no longer commensurate with what the final product should be.
We'll see if it's out in 2017, or Yooka-Laylee in 2016. I'm still waiting on SpaceVenture (from the Space Quest programmers) which I backed in 2012. Besides these three I only backed one more thing, iControlPad 2, which blew up when one guy essentially took part of the money and ran.
I like how that is the only image of Bloodstained so its used for everything
Hmmm....WiiU version or Vita. Probably WiiU....
3DS version?! Hmmmm...
@Goob They're at around 1.8 million pounds, which is about 3 million US dollars. It's a pretty decent result I think, even if they don't make any more.
@JaxonH my first kickstarter was the OUYA. Had a pretty steady stream of stuff coming in since then .
@Gen0neD Possibly the $5 million goal, but I doubt it. At least we get the prequel on the 3DS, if that gets reached!
Ugghghh.... Too long. I'll wait for something else in the meantime.
It's a shame I don't like what I've seen of the visuals so far. It's most certainly not as good as the best Castlevania art that I love; particularly the character designs. It looks more like a fan doing their version of Castlevania art imo.
Excited for this and Mighty #9 on Wii U
The inclusion of physical copies at $60 was a stroke of genius for these guys. This is why they have surpassed Yooka-Laylee in total cash, even though they're still well behind in number of backers.
If IGA and Inafune can do all that easy money, I'm gonna make a fundraiser to make a live action movie of this guy:
Apparently, people love knock-offs if they appear on Kickstarter. It doesn't have to be good, it doesn't have to be original, it doesn't even need to exist, it just needs to be crowdfunded to make money like a summer blockbuster.
Next, when Yoshinori Ono gets kicked out of Capcom, it's Movie Monster Fighter: The Massacre Resurrected. Gentlemen, start typing those credit card numbers on Kickstarter for the sake of mediocrity.
I can't wait. I just started playing Castlevania Symphony of the night. It's a very good game with great music. It still one of the best 2D actioni/rpg game. The NDS version they made were just terrible with very bad graphics! Ties with snes quality while NDS should've been much stronger handheld well I guess not. An other reason why I never got NDS. It's worse than Super Nintendo. period!
@Alucard83 If you can't wait, there are dozens of Castlevania games, available for all kinds of consoles, mobiles and PC. You say you can't afford a PC Engine Duo for Dracula X or an NES or SNES for all of the games? If you own a Wii or WiiU, you can have them. And you know what's the best about them, they DO exist already. They are good and there are many.
Do we really need another? If Konami would release a new one, same metroidvania style, they'll be awfully criticized and even their stocks would go down, but if it is in Kickstarter, poor people give money to rich people so they can make yet another game and make them even more rich for doing almost nothing.
BTW: You should get some glasses, the SNES wouldn't had been capable of having even the first of the DS games. If you didn't like those, why do want this? Oh, I forgot, because it's crowdfunded.
@PanurgeJr Kicktarter is not an investment, you are simply pre-purchasing stuff. When you invest, you get a share of the profits, when you crowdfund, you get a thank you e-mail with a download code at best, while the funded gets all profits. It is not an investment. That's not how capitalism works, is how con artists and beggars make a living. However, I'm OK with it when it comes to fund a guy who is indeed penniless, has a great idea and all he has is a computer in the basement of his parent's house; guys like this do need a Kickstart, but people like Inafune or IGA need our money as much as Angela Merkel needs more control over Europe. What they need is a retirement home. Scamming mediocre has-beens!
........harsh.
@Kirk You know what's worse? A fan could be making a more hearted, more competent clone for free.
I just hope the difficulty curve is better than what we have had for e.g the DS games.
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