Headed by someone called…Richard Nixon…Los Angeles-based indie developer Black Cloud, whose logo looks curiously like that of Fallout originator Black Isle, have launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund After Reset, an old school RPG in the vein of beloved titles like Fallout, Baldur’s Gate and Planescape Torment.
After Reset‘s story takes much inspiration from Fallout, in which Earth is united in an era of technological progress and prosperity. That all changes when the arrival of mysterious alien artifacts somehow prompts a nuclear holocaust that annihilates most of civilization. The survivors emerged a hundred years later, and slowly but surely a civil war between remnants of Earth’s government and survivors who had to make do on their own develops.
Black Cloud have stressed that they intend to give players maximum freedom in defining their player characters and having significant, meaningful changes to the game world and story based on their actions. To that end they have developed a character creation system of their own similar to Fallout’s SPECIAL system. This one, titled SACPIC, allows players to determine their race, gender, species, alignment, stats, skills, feats, appearance, background, professions, and augmentations.
Set in remnants of California and Nevada, the game promises to have a huge open world that will contain more locations than that of Fallouts 1 and 2 combined. Players will also run into companions that can aid them, and up to four of them can be in one’s party, although Black Cloud are hoping more can be permitted with extra funding.
The developers have stressed that After Reset will appeal specifically to fans of story driven old school RPGs like Baldur’s Gate and Neverwinter Nights, and will employ rule-based realtime combat much like Knights of the Old Republic and Planescape: Torment.
Of course, every indication suggests that After Reset will be a massive undertaking for Black Cloud, and to that end they are asking for a minimum of $35,000 to fund just the game’s prologue. The studio initially launched a Kickstarter last November asking for an astonishing $900,000 to fund the entire game, which failed. In spite of this, they were encouraged by the number of fans and interest they accumulated, and decided to instead focus on this smaller effort before working their way up the ladder. With 37 days left, the Kickstarter is well on its way to achieving its goal, and the prologue is expected to be released this October.
Black Cloud have provided an exhaustive amount of detail of their ambitions on their forum.