Ground Branch Pledge
Watch the video, you know you want it. Pledge

Not looking good unfortunately .

3 days to go and only 1\4 way there.

I have not and will not pledge for Ground Branch. The reason for this is quite simple, because in my opinion at the end of the day Ground Branch is still just another shooter among the myriad of shooters already out there. Sure they want to go full realism, which i applaud, but lets face it playing the same maps over and over again no matter how randomized it is will get boring quite fast. The charm of lets say ArmA is that i can completley ignore the combat part and focus on, for example, flying people from A to B or maybe i help the team out with logistics. There is always something else to do besides fighting. Ground Branch does not offer me anything like this. It's the same old go in and kill the bad guys and then do it again.

Plus the community who wants to play serious shooters is already quite small. The community who wants to play under serious tactical game rules is even smaller. So the value of the multiplayer part is, due to the low player pool, already quite slim.

At the end of the day i have to ask myself, if i would enjoy this game long enough to justify a significant investment of my money and in the case of Ground Branch the answer is unfortunately no.

I do wish the developers all the best and i hope they find someone who invests in their project so that i might see the light of the world someday.

I didn't pledge for similar reasons to Rask above. I also don't believe the singleplayer part would be worth my time, assuming there even will be one.

I'm hoping one of the bigger companies adds some of the features to their own projects at some point.

A slightly more realistic Battlefield game or even additional ARMA features would suit me fine at this stage.

OK... thanks for what... not supporting? Not sure why you two had to share that with us, but this is a forum after all.



Too me, you obviously have no clue about shooters, action shooters, and tactical shooters with a uneducated statement like that.

Oh well, looks like the community has failed anywway... guess we can all go back to playing the CoD series, the BF series, the Counterstrike series, the MoH series, and the hundreds of clones... gone are the days of a true tactical shooter like AA, SWAT series, and OGR... really sad and disappointed.

I'm with you Magnum, I pledged but it seems like it fell through.

So sad.

High fidelity sims will go the way of Steel Beasts, pay a higher price for more realism.

The masses do not want hard, they don't want to read a manual. They want the cheat codes from day one and feel okay with themselves. Jesus we set an entire generation up for failure by giving them "participant awards".

I pledged and although it looks like it will not make it, I hope the devs can use the amount of interest shown and some of the feedback they received on SP to put together some future tweaked proposal with a chance to suceeed.

With ArmA2 the #1 selling game on Steam right now, and ArmA3 and Takedown due out next year, I think the death of the realistic shooter is HUGELY exaggerated. The genre is alive and kicking, arguably more so than ever before.

In my humble opinion, this campaign made a misstep in setting their sights so high. I presume the half-mil would fund much or most of their development costs. Takedown had a much smaller goal of $200,000 but clearly stated that their plan was to take that money to the bank and use it to demonstrate to potential investors that there is indeed a market for this kind of game.


And really, Takedown just barely squeaked by at $200,000. It didn't look like they were going to do it for a while - what makes anyone think Ground Branch could have doubled that? I have zero experience running a business let alone a game studio. But I hope the next Ground Branch campaign goes for a more attainable funding level, and shops around with that money to hook some VC and build a game.

At the end of that kick-starter campaign, we should count the amount of post that stated why it could not be done or why someone would not support it, as it was a tally from a vote. Yet, it vas not a vote but a call for volonteers!

As people enjoy resisting a motion or a dynamic and define themselves by the level of resistance they exercise against it.

Someone writes a post asking who wants to do XYZ and a bunch of people will explain away why they can't do it or why they won't. They Participate in absentia. They support/undermine by writing they don't like it, and they won't do it, but the question was who wants to do XYZ, not who does not want to do XYZ. The nature of the question is lost.

I remember a time, when they were looking for volunteers, and they would ask the volunteers to step forward. Consequently the volunteers would step forward. I don't remember the people not willing to volunteer stepping back. And they would not step back because that was not the question, the question was : Volunteers? one step forward!

Who cares why someone can't do it or won't do it when the question is an intellectual process to identify the doers, not the impotents!

They are always a thousands of reasons why something cannot be done, and a thousands of reasons why something can be done, as the two faces of the same coin. You've got light and you've got shadow, it's a balance. Yet, when I step into an airplane I don't want to be reminded the many reasons that contraption can go spiraling to the ground with me straped in its belly. I don't need to be reminded about it because I already made a decision based on the belief/vision that I will land at destination in one piece.

Because, it is a Forum it does not mean that anyone can go rain on someone else parade, especially when that parade is the base to collect money for a project. Which project is based on one perception from a public, that it can work. It is not based on the perception that that some of you guys know better, some of you have been there and have done that, and that it will fail! The public perception is generally fragile and easier to sway toward immobilism, and more so when it is about pulling money out of the public pocket in those uneasy times.

A lot of guys in that forum through what I read, are lacking VISION!

And vision of the future is what led the humans to progress from cavemen to organized society dwellers and their many benefits.

If there is no Vision of the future, it means there is no future to see!...But if you don't see it, it does not mean it is not there. It just means that YOU CAN NOT SEE IT!

So, the people devoid of vision in some areas of the world, please, don't pull down on the idea of what you don't see, there is no honor in it, don't listen to those critical voices in your head, there are no virtues in it!

Just relax, enjoy and observe the ballet and the traffic created by the activities of Doers, Dreamers, Potent people working on constructing a project based on simple ideas!...Then, if you want to do the same latter from having learned from watching builders, go ahead, the sky is the limit!

I must say I was really disappointed by the shortsightedness of quite a few of the self professed fans of the tactical shooter genre. Didn't they realize their ethereal ideal game will never be made by anyone except a smaller dev studio? Do they think EA, Activision, Blizzard, Ubi or any other major publisher will ever produce a tactical shooter? It was so frustrating trying to get people to support Ground Branch even though it was so much further along in development than a lot of other projects that easily get funding because they have something or someone "cool" attached to it with little more than an idea and some concept art.

All I know is that Blackfoot is the studio that should've gotten all of our support. I hear all sorts of people constantly claim they want an alternative to game companies like EA or UBI because they are aggressively monetizing everything they can get away with - offering unlocks, dlc, and "premium" services for more money, unoriginal and boring sequel after sequel, or just forcing stupid DRM scheme installations. Ground Branch had no launch day dlc, no draconian DRM scheme, dedicated server support, mod tools, no nickel and diming schemes, honest replies to gamers without any BS, great ideas and promising concepts for a neglected game genre and they still got no love. They got no support from the very people who've been clamoring for a proper tactical shooter! I wonder if people know what the hell they want?

I'm sure the next CoD will sell millions of copies. People will complain how easy and boring it is. They will howl about more paid content and dlc to fully enjoy the game and the unfairness of certain exclusive items. Then they'll voice their desire for a change. A real tactical shooter is what they really want. More realism and more challenging gameplay. Then they'll buy the next CoD sequel. How friggin' sad.....

Keep in mind that's due to the DayZ zombie mod.

Im with ID42928110 on this one, well said.

It really makes me sad to see this fail. Maybe it was the wrong time, too close after Takedown.
I don't want to say anything bad about Takedown, I pledged myself and hope it's awesome. But although Takedown pledged for less money, they didn't show anything much. It was more or less the same "we want to make it real tactical, yes it's like the classics" we hear from other publishers again and again upfront when they run yet another franchise to the ground, with no evidence to back it up. (Only this time we can believe )

Ground Branch had all that I would want to see from a Kickstarter, not just a concept thrown out, but an engine, working mechanics etc.
Most details have already been discussed in their forums, a lot can be shown, we have a pretty good idea what we can expect and what it will look like already. And still only half as much money was pledged with 1/3 of the backers.

Well tbh running a kickstarter is basically selling your product and to sell your product you have to aggressively market it and make a case for why I should part with my money for it. In the past month, about the only place I've seen Ground Branch mentioned is this very forum, and even then only a handful of people talking about it. Recall that Takedown didn't succeed until they got lots of coverage on RPS, Kotaku and Notch tweeted about it, reaching out to a magnitude more people.

+1 I was just typing that when i saw your comment, anything with zombie sells these days...

These forums are the only place I've seen Ground Branch mentioned.

That is not going to be a successful Kickstarter campaign.

Add ZOmbies to Ground Branch? :/ JK...

I've seen it on other gaming sites and even some of my youtube channels I subscribe to, but I just think the timing is a few weeks too late, every gaming site already had their "Kickstarter heartwarming story" a few weeks ago when some of the other titles were reaching goals or almost missing, and I don't think you can count on getting the same Kickstarter as a fad page views like you could even a month or two ago.

Personally I think the goal amount was pretty hard to hit without some significant partners coming in at a higher amount, there's only so many of us little simmers who are interested in the game and have $15-$50 to pony up for it, some of the other titles had lower goals or some larger investors step in to help.

Hopefully though this is not the end, and the project can find a way to restructure itself and still be made.

I'm not getting on you, but I just don't understand that line of thinking. I appreciate that ArmA is your thing and that's great. Bohemia does that very well. But you must expect a lot for your $15 or $25 (minimums to try GB out). So Ground Branch doesn't have the potential to provide more enjoyment than a large pizza?