[the.raven]

I wanna play

[General Battuta]

Years if ever I'm afraid.

[CT27]

Years if ever I'm afraid.

A while back you said if the team ever got to a point where it felt like BP would probably never get finished in the near future you'd write out a plot summary so at least we'd know how things would have ended.
Is that still the plan?

[General Battuta]

We did more or less. Anyone can ask any spoiler question they want in the BP Oracle.

[Colonol Dekker]

Aww.   That's sad

[Iain Baker]

We did more or less. Anyone can ask any spoiler question they want in the BP Oracle.

How about tweaking it to be a follow up to the 'Morrigan' stories on Clarkesworld? The second story ended on quite the cliff hanger :-)

[Nightmare]

Years if ever I'm afraid.

Is it because there's still so much work left to do or because the team has little time to work on it?

[The E]

Is it because there's still so much work left to do or because the team has little time to work on it?

Both.

[Soulrheever]

Reading this has hurt me SO deeply... Blue Planet is one of the most beautiful, powerful, amazing stories (not to mention some phenomenal game play) that I've ever played, and it's absolutely ruined my week to hear that it's in limbo. 

I wish I was fabulously wealthy so I could just offer the team so much money they'd have no choice but to quit their jobs and finish it. 

[TechnoD11]

Reading this has hurt me SO deeply... Blue Planet is one of the most beautiful, powerful, amazing stories (not to mention some phenomenal game play) that I've ever played, and it's absolutely ruined my week to hear that it's in limbo. 

I wish I was fabulously wealthy so I could just offer the team so much money they'd have no choice but to quit their jobs and finish it. 

+1

[CT27]

Reading this has hurt me SO deeply... Blue Planet is one of the most beautiful, powerful, amazing stories (not to mention some phenomenal game play) that I've ever played, and it's absolutely ruined my week to hear that it's in limbo. 

I wish I was fabulously wealthy so I could just offer the team so much money they'd have no choice but to quit their jobs and finish it. 

Could that cause some legal problems though hypothetically?  I don't know if Interplay would be happy if they saw people making money off Freespace.

[Nightmare]

Interplay wouldnt care about it as long as you're not taking money for the product.

There was also some talking whether Battuta would get paid for working on BWO, but nothing came out of it (so far), and some people got indeed paid for their work in the past IIRC.

[starlord]

Given the (at least according to my tastes) extremely approximate quality of gaming nowadays, I for one would be delighted to pay for mods with the narrative power of BP or BWO.
As far as i’m Concerned, there’s no questioning the investment.

[QuakeIV]

Yeah I actually have money and a job at this point so I too would have some interest in that.

[The E]

Reading this has hurt me SO deeply... Blue Planet is one of the most beautiful, powerful, amazing stories (not to mention some phenomenal game play) that I've ever played, and it's absolutely ruined my week to hear that it's in limbo. 

I wish I was fabulously wealthy so I could just offer the team so much money they'd have no choice but to quit their jobs and finish it. 

Could that cause some legal problems though hypothetically?  I don't know if Interplay would be happy if they saw people making money off Freespace.

Interplay isn't the problem here, not really. They barely exist as an entity.

No, the issue is that once we start taking money, we need to figure out how to pay everyone who would be owed their fair share. BP wouldn't be what it is without the works of dozens, if not hundreds, of people who have contributed to the FSO asset pool over the years. We would need to negotiate licensing for every piece of community art we used, we would need to figure out how to administrate the funds so that none of us gets into trouble with whatever tax authority is responsible for us (BP is a very international project: Its core contributors come from Australia, the US, Canada, Germany, Sweden....). There's a lot of overhead involved in taking something that was a for-free hobby project into something that can accept money (at least if you want to do it properly and without ****ing over anyone in the process), so much so that unless we basically make enough money that some of us could quit their jobs and work fulltime on this, it's thoroughly unfeasable.

[Nightmare]

But the current team is just a handful people, or?

I think BWO (atleast intended to do so) paid people for accomplished tasks, so it would be more "earning addontional money in your freetime" rather than "quitting your job for FS".

[The E]

We did just that for the voice acting. Battuta paid a few actresses and actors out of his own pocket to get that done.

The problem is, if we don't quit our jobs or reduce our hours, we won't be able to work on BP. When we take donations from you, you have a reasonable expectation that your donations will, in some way, speed up the process of getting more BP to play, and at the moment, we just cannot guarantee that.

[Colonol Dekker]

It was a lot easier when we were all kids right?  Free time was abundant and noncommitments. #adultbadtimes

[Iain Baker]

Keeping my fingers crossed for a bit lotto win then ;-) "Here is £1,000,000. Is that enough?" 

[Nightmare]

Has anybody thought about recruiting new members? I mean, it won't be easy to find people capable to work on BP, but if you're asking for help you atleast have the chance to draw some veterans back in. Of course that makes only sense if people from the original team have time to give people joining guidance/motivation by working themselves but it's been almost 3 years since the last release so even if parts of the core staff aren't always having time, others might have. BP started as Darius' one-man project, and a lot of people went in, but over the years quitted/don't have time anymore, so it might be worth an attempt to get reinforcements?