Alaloth - Read before buying!

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The devs of Alaloth want to clarify a few things:

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Read before buying!

"It looks like a blend of early Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook art, Baldur's Gate, and Dark Souls" [PCGamesN]

Hello Champions!

We decided to open this new update with one of our fav quote ever for a reason. Autumn Sale started yesterday on Steam, and we were thinking it was a good moment to clarify a few things, as we already did talking about localization recently. It's nearly 5 months since we've released Alaloth in Early Access and we are super happy with the work done, with our amazing community, with the feed we've got day by day here and on Discord. Despite this, we had to deal with a few issues on the way, in regards of what Alaloth is and how we push it to the players. You know we've decided to adopt a very clear and straight forward approach to communication and PR. We always answer to people asking, we can easily say we can be considered one of the most active dev around and this time there is no exception. Since when we've got back our game publishing rights, we've tried to explain our vision, our approach to development, our long term plans. We've told everyone what to expect, what Alaloth is and what Alaloth is not [and will not ever be]. We've posted FAQ following AMA, we've gone through every single post here, answered almost every good and bad review and so on. Apparently, this is not enough. We thought a lot about posting an update like this, but here we are. Being a super small indie team, self publishing its game, putting personal money in, means that we have to carefully weight everything, including the way we handle PR but this doesn't mean that we follow the common habit of passively accepting criticism coming from people saying wrong things, just because "players are always right". We think this is not always true. Sometimes players happen to be not 100% right and if for big guns this means nothing, for a small studio getting bad reviews without a proper reason it's a huge problem instead, impacting sales, available resources and the team itself. Just to be clear: this doesn't mean that bad reviews are not accepted or bad feed are not correct. Everyone has the right to say whatever he/she wants about the game, destroying it the way he/she prefers but we've set just one rule internally, about this. Getting a very bad feed, insults or whatever is fine somehow, but all of this has to reflect reality and not to be just random words dropped through a keyboard. In these cases, we've always [politely] answered, trying to explain things at our best.

So, just to recap a few things, we would like to tell you once again what the game is, what you should expect from the game and how things work in Alaloth, trying to avoid wrong feed based on the fact that devs have not been clear enough [even if we've been], as any kind of disappointment in players that decide to support us. We thought to quote a few sentences from reviews, refund notes, Discord posts and board topics:

"Devs said it was inspired by Baldur's Gate but it's not Baldur's Gate"

So true. This is not Baldur's Gate. This is Alaloth and it is in between old school classics and modern action RPG. This is how we've pitched the game and this is what comes out of a ton of reviews, good and bad. Point is that bad reviews focus on the sentence above because BG has been taken as an inspiration. Yes it is. The game is inspired by Baldur's Gate as it is inspired by The Lord of The Rings, Willow, Dragonlance, Shannara, Game of Thrones, The Wheel of Time, other games like Diablo, Mount & Blade, Dragon's Dogma, Ultima Online, Pillars of Eternity etc. Books, movies, games, TTRPG. Inspiration means exactly what it means. Inspired by Baldur's Gate does not mean it is Baldur's Gate. Inspiration is not doing the same thing 1:1. So, again: Alaloth is not a CRPG and is not Baldur's Gate as it is not a book, a TTRPG or a movie. Alaloth it's a unique game inspired by these experiences. And yes it is even inspired by Baldur's Gate and Infinity Engine games. That's why we use an iso camera, for example.

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