Returning to the Edge: Part III

Why Planet's Edge Rather Than Betrayal at Krondor?

A few years back, some of you saw the experiments I was doing with Blender and Amazon’s Lumberyard game engine and had hopes I was going to rebuild and re-release a new, improved Betrayal at Krondor. As I explained at the time, and reiterate here, I was mainly using Krondor as a kind of content guide to teach myself how to use the Lumberyard game engine (motivated in part because I was good friends with the person leading the engine’s development at that time). I did not have, and never had, the intention of building out the whole game for a couple of very important reasons.

Firstly, and foremostly, Betrayal at Krondor involves a big, expensive, and very complicated license with several other people / entities who would want great flipping wadges of cash. Even if I had the money to appease them all, I have zero doubts that some of those people would want some degree of creative control and changes to the content to align with what’s happened with the Krondor license since Betrayal’s release. If a remake was made, I would want to stick to BAK’s canon as established in the game and not as it was retconned for Return to Krondor or any of Feist’s book adaptations and subsequent sequels. I don’t believe that any of those other parties involved would allow me to do that.

Secondly, my philosophy with remakes / reboots in general is that they really should be a big improvement on whatever came before. I would personally hunt down and do bad things to someone who attempted to remake or reboot Forbidden Planet, for example. It is absolutely perfect as it is. You shouldn’t remake something just for the sake of remaking it. Betrayal could absolutely use a graphical upgrade, and there are a definitely a few things about the story and a few of the systems that could use massaging to make them better. But with all of that said, Betrayal is still a solid game. There are quite a number of people I know that regularly replay it. It’s not perfect by any means, but other than expanding on a few of the core concepts and making it prettier, I just don’t think it’s necessary. It’s an artifact of its time, and I personally think that it would be impossible to recapture the lightning we caught in the bottle the first time around. Still, for the legions of people who still want a new, Betrayal at Krondor flavored game, your best bet honestly lies in supporting indie developers making new games with new IPs like Call of Saregnar which I back through Patreon.

Planet’s Edge, by contrast, was a good game for its time, and it sold reasonably well, but the original version was full of design mistakes and half formed ideas. In retrospect it feels rushed, incomplete, and clunky. Nonetheless, it remains near and dear to my heart because it’s my first-born. Without having worked on it first, I wouldn’t have been able to do Betrayal or Dungeon Siege or any of the other games I’ve done since. But with PE, there’s a lot of room for improvement. Over the years, it’s the game I’ve felt most compelled to “fix,” partially because I wasn’t there to finish it. I left New World Computing to join Dynamix while PE was still in alpha testing. For that reason, it has always remained a matter of unfinished business for me, and the game that I know I can definitely make better today.

The next time around, I’ll be explaining more about what I plan for my Planet’s Edge remake.