I've contributed to a fair number of crowdfunded projects, and not all of them have been games. So far, none that were funded have actually been abandoned (many have been succesfully completed, and a few I've actually been quite thrilled with the results of).

That said, you have to be very careful about where you put your money, as there are some truly fraudulent projects that seem to sneak in under the radar of the various crowdfunding platforms. For example: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/crowdfunding-pseudoscience/. http://doubtfulnews.com/2014/01/ever-wanted-to-read-your-dogs-thoughts/

As far as games are concerned, I wouldn't put your money towards any project that is being run by an inexperienced programming team. A playable demo is usually a very good sign (Dungeonmans, for example, had a great demo even before the kickstarter, and the progress of the game has been impressive. I've been less impressed with certain other projects that I will not name, but none of them have been abandoned.

I'm a huge fan of Neil Gaiman's writing. It's a shame that this game doesn't hold up in quality to his more literary works. I strongly recommend the novel American Gods and his "Sandman" (and related) series of graphic novels if you want to see him at his best. He has several really good novels. But American Gods and his Sandman comic books are simply superb.

@oldtobie As I pointed out in another thread regarding the same game, procedural content is about as old as computer gaming itself. Some of the earliest games from pre-PC days contained procedural content: Rogue (the grandfather of all roguelikes and rpgs), and Empire (the grandfather of most 4X and war games) both had procedural content. What makes this game different is not procedural content, but the scale and complexity of that content. Truly, most mainstream developers abandoned procedural content for a long time in favor of hand-designed content, simply because creating INTERESTING procedural content that feels natural and non-repetitive is hard.

And yes, ALL random content is procedural -- as I pointed out, the only difference between what this game is doing and what most other games with procedural content do is that this game will only use a single seed, whereas others have multiple possible seeds so that no two games/worlds/dungeons are alike. I do agree with you that it's very misleading.

I'm not saying that this game won't be pioneering, But the word 'procedural' alone is not what makes it so.. Computer gaming has a long history of procedurally generated worlds

@PlatinumPaladin It's really unclear how some of the numbers were arrived at. Some numbers are probably easier to arrive at than others (like sales numbers and movie ticket sales). Anything based on surveys, no matter how good, are going to be off by an indeterminate amount. What is being counted, and what isn't being counted, how do you get the numbers for China, India, Russia, etc.? Does the guy at work who plays Solitaire during his lunch break get counted as a gamer? What about gray-market sales and pirated games?

I hardly think it matters in any case.

@Dannystaples14 I disagree. The mods add new content and make it a new game, but they wouldn't have bothered with the mods if what was there wasn't anything solid to begin with. There was plenty there to do, you just had to explore to find it. You happen to be in the minority of people who didn't like it. And that's fine. As I said, I didn't like Fallout: New Vegas, and a lot of people did like it.

My comment was a response to your statement that you found the game to be kind of dull. And the truth is that while there was tons of content there, you actually had to have the mindset of exploration in order to find it. If you don't like exploration (and it sounds like you want action instead), there were tons of mods to make the world more busy. or to give landmark locations pointing you at quests that you wouldn't have to stumble upon while exploring.

For example, there was Deadly Dragons, which made dragon fights more epic, increasing the number, variety, and frequency of Dragons. Then there was Wars in Skyrim which made overland travel quite a dangerous proposition at times. You apparently didn't like exploration, well those are two mods that could make exploration quite an adventure (btw, I just checked and it seems that Wars in Skyrim has disappeared from Skyrim Nexus -- not sure why).

@BrunoBRS Maybe a better measure would be using standard methods of travel (not counting 'magical' gates or whatever passes for fast travel in your game) is how long it would take to circumnavigate it, In a 3d world, like Elite: Dangerous, you'd have to have a different kind of scale (not sure what though). Also, that wouldn't take into account that some more 2d worlds have artificial boundaries that make distances FEEL longer (impassible mountains and forests and oceans, for example). Plus some 2D games are less 2D than others, giving you the ability to go anywhere you can manage or explore under water, or into deep caves (eg. Moria) and dungeons and tall castles.

Any way you slice it, there's really too many variables for any measurement or comparison to be entirely useful. So you have to be arbitrary at some point and decide on a method to measure, and say 'with all of these many caveats, and by this particular criteria, this game is bigger than that game'

@Dannystaples14 That's why you need to play Skyrim (and any Bethesda RPG since Oblivion) on the PC with mods. I think of the game as more of a beach, where some peoplle are building fantastic sand castles, and others are buidling forts and digging caves, and others are filling the beach up with monsters and new dangers, new people to meet, new activities, and making it all look much prettier than it did at the start. It's not one game, it's a nearly infinite number of games, with each combination of mods that you use creating a different experience. It was the same with Oblivion, Fallout 3, and Fallout: New Vegas (granted I didn't play New Vegas all that much because of a variety of reasons, mostly that I didn't like it, but that's ok also).

Malevolence: The Sword of Ahkranox, a 1st person roguelike game in Early Access on steam claims to have an infinite world -- as I pointed out in the game's forums it's not technically TRULY infinite, due to memory and datatype constraints, and the future heat-death of the universe, but it it's about as close as you can get at this time. It's procedurally generated but since all players use the same seed to generate the world everyone does play in the same world. Every time a player visits a new section of the world, it gets generated as needed, so if you want to be really technical, it's not infinite, but it can grow dynamically as people explore outwards. You can even travel to random parts of the world by various methods.

@pongley For the most part you are correct. That said, there have been methods imagined where the ship collects the energy for travel as it moves. For example, Light Sails: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_sail, and Ram Scoops: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ram_scoop

Forget about space compression, these technologies are actually more within the realm of known science. Furthermore, in science fiction, we have the concepts of hibernation (where people are somehow stored in a way that preserves them for long periods of inactivity) and generation ships (where a huge ship simply travels for so long that generations live and die on it before they come to their destination). The first, of course, requires the technology of either freezing or something similar, or time stasis (like in Larry Niven's Known Space, which brings us back to technology which may never exist because it's either impossible or impractical). Even Hibernation, for now, is beyond us, much less generation ships, which would require a mostly closed self-sustainable system. But the propulsion systems themselves are not too far off from what we can build today (essentially, they are more engineering problems than science problems). And they don't require the carrying of huge volumes of fuel.

Remember that you don't have to get there in the lifetime of an observer on earth for it necessarily to be practical. That's not the real limitation.

@rogerpenna The Forever War was excellent, and educational as well. There's also an excellent short story by Larry Niven called "Neutron Star", which was my introduction to tidal forces. Essentially, if you are in a space ship that is traveling close to a very massive object, the difference in the gravitational pull on different parts of your body could be strong enough to, essentially, rip you apart, if not the space ship you are traveling in. (Being contained within a structurally strong ship would not be protection). It's also the explanation of why massive planets often have rings -- the tidal forces at certain distances from massive planets are strong enough that they exceed the structural strength of rock, so moon formation cannot happen within that orbit. Instead you get ice particles and dust. (For anyone interested, that's known as the Roche limit, the distance from a gravitational body at which point you can't have a stable planetary orbit).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roche_limit