The ultimate single player first-person immersive sim. Explore, talk, fight or sneak through The Churchill Tower in 2042! PC/XB1/PS4
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The ultimate single player first-person immersive sim. Explore, talk, fight or sneak through The Churchill Tower in 2042! PC/XB1/PS4
About this project
As of February 19th, 2016, this crowdfunding effort entered into an intermission period. It was not cancelled.
For more information on the project, please visit thetowergame.com
Consider signing up for our mailing list to keep up to date on this project and all Consortium related development and activities!
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From the creators of CONSORTIUM ...
“Consortium offers a solid sample of what we’ve been saying games have the potential to do for a generation.” - Rock, Paper, Shotgun
“The game subversively twists your expectations until you're left wondering who mixed the Deus Ex chocolate with your Stanley Parable peanut butter.” - The Escapist
“The game establishes an intriguing premise set in a deeply realized world and gives you a great degree of agency to leave your mark upon it.” - Hardcore Gamer
- This crowdfunding campaign is about to enter an intermission. Pledge now at the Initiate level or higher to be eligible to become a SUPER BACKER when the campaign resumes! Details in the latest update!
- Characters are the lifeblood of The Tower experience. This update delves into the characters, both new and old, who will be appearing within The Tower.
- Let's Talk Consortium includes the detailed narrative chart and post-mortem for CONSORTIUM Game One.
- The Factions at War for our Allegiance update goes into discussing factions and the Bishop classes and how it all ties into gameplay.
- In the Consortium Bishop Combat 2.0 update , we dive deep into how combat in The Tower will be dramatically improved over the original Consortium combat experience.
- Our fourth update goes into how The Tower will be both a standalone AND continuing experience.
- Our third update is up, and this time we take a closer look at The Churchill Tower itself.
- In our second update, we get DEEP into discussing how Diplomacy and the Spoken Word will be a major part of the gameplay.
- We just released our first update: The iDGi Mandate. In here Gregory discusses the nature of Interdimensional Games and what drives us.
The experience of The Tower is one of absolute freedom of movement, speech and action, within a single-location, sandbox environment. There will be no cut scenes, and full control will never be taken away for “gamey” reasons. Immersion is absolutely paramount, and to that end the world within the Tower will feel realistically alive and reactive to however you choose to approach each and every situation.
A branching, “waterfall” narrative and dialogue system should appeal to those looking for a truly replayable experience, and will ensure that your decisions are plentiful without feeling cheap or obvious.
Diplomacy is a key way of traversing the narrative. Choose to speak anytime and anywhere with the push of a button. While rather difficult, you will be able to play through the entire experience without raising your weapon. Trick, bribe, scare, hire, or simply convince potential combatants to disarm, all while developing relationships with your crew, other Consortium officers, the London Police, and any other characters you meet throughout the experience.
The Bishop’s arsenal of customizable, futuristic gadgetry gives him immense freedom of movement. Run faster, jump higher, glide through the air, breathe underwater, and fall from great heights, all while exploring every nook and cranny of the Tower.
The Bishop can also utilize highly experimental, potentially dangerous stealth technology, such as invisibility and sound dampening.
Find yourself in the middle of intense firefights, and choose to either kill or incapacitate all those in your way. The Consortium officers working with you will praise you for using non-lethal means, but will react with increasing alarm should you too often resort to murderous violence. There may also be other factions interested in aiding you through the Tower, should the Consortium turn its back on you.
As with CONSORTIUM before it, many events within The Tower will play out regardless of your interaction with them, creating an environment cultivated for immersion and replayability. Your chosen actions (and inactions) within this environment will cause ripples, dramatically impacting the unfolding narrative in major ways.
We aim to simulate not just the Churchill Tower, but the people inside it and the world around it. In many ways, we are striving to realize the "One City Block RPG" idea purposed by Warren Spector.
The following video takes a deeper look at some of The Tower’s core mechanics, while also demonstrating three different ways the world press could respond to your actions as Bishop Six – is he a diplomat, ninja, or lunatic? Featured is Kiril Angelov, antagonist from Consortium Game One, and he's just been asked to comment on Bishop Six's “recent behaviour."
This 2042 is connected on an unprecedented scale. Due to the unusual nature of the Churchill Tower hostage situation, there are literally billions of people watching your every (visible) decision unfold. We want you to feel as though your choices as Bishop Six carry weight on a global scale, and that those choices actually mean something.
Crowds have formed around the tower, hundreds of police and reporters are on the scene, and you are at the centre of it all.
The Tower is a role-playing game in which you play as yourself, and you are being given the opportunity to physically control a man in a parallel world. His code name is Bishop Six, and he’s a field agent for the Consortium, a powerful peacekeeping force in the not-quite-utopic future of 2042.
When a hostage situation suddenly erupts within London’s monumental Churchill Tower, Bishop Six and a team of Consortium officers are sent in to subdue the terrorists, and rescue the hostages. It sounds simple enough, but when the layers peel back you'll find that they just keep peeling. Everyone seems to want the Bishop on their side, but none are very keen to reveal just what "their side" truly stands for.
Discover the source of an unnatural earthquake originating from below the Tower. Find out what's really behind the Tower's malfunctioning builder nanites. Befriend or manipulate the London Police to your advantage, or have them turn against you. Attempt to uncover the truth about the Consortium King (a sentient A.I., and the source of our connection to their world), his creator, the terrorists, your crew, and the Tower itself. Even gain the attention of a mysterious benefactor whose "alternative" ideas and perspectives will begin to make you question your definitions of "friend" and "foe."
We're excited about creating an atmosphere where you're in the middle of a conflict for your trust and loyalty, with multiple sides struggling to keep your attention.
To further complicate matters, an old enemy of the Consortium tells us that within this “great tower” a global event is about to originate. The King demands our help in dealing with this, claiming multiverse-scale destruction if we refuse. Does his understanding of who we really are affect his judgement? And is the Consortium really the selfless peacekeeping organization he claims it to be?
Without warning enemies seemingly become friends while multiple factions vie for our assistance in unraveling a mystery stretching back thousands of years. Amidst all this chaos there is one question that only you, as the Bishop, can answer: Whom can you trust?
- The Terrorists have taken over the Churchill Tower Power Facility, and believe it to be capable of arming a globally banned orbital bioweapon – they’ve been sent in by unknown parties with instructions to prove this to the world through the use of the press.
- The Consortium's main concern is the securing of the civilian hostages being held in the center of the Churchill Tower, and they are relying on you to make this happen as quickly as possible. Despite assurances that the Power Facility houses a safe, modern fusion reactor, the Consortium King is worried about it being tampered with and causing a devastating explosion that could destroy all of London.
- Mysterious Benefactors encourage you to actively rebel against the Consortium. Potentially join them after gaining their trust, uncover their identity, and discover their claims of truth about the Consortium King and his officers.
- The London Police are at first warned to keep their distance while the Consortium handle the situation. As things progress, the Police Chief can end up as friend or foe entirely dependant on your actions and interactions with him.
- The Churchill Tower itself will sometimes seem to be working for or against you: state of the art security systems, initially controlled by the terrorists, and the “malfunctioning” builder nanites will need to be controlled and understood before they interfere with your mission.
- Civilians populate the various sections of The Tower, and include the hostages and any other people remaining behind after it was evacuated. As with everyone else, every civilian you meet will be a unique, fully fleshed out human being.
1) Add-ons can only be added at the $20 tier and higher
2) Simply choose what you want, and add the amounts to your pledge amount. Keep track of what you chose, as come survey time you’ll need to tell us what add-ons you wanted.
3) Shipping charges to the U.S and Canada are *included* in these numbers, but other places in the world may have to pay additional shipping charges (to be worked out post campaign).
- T-shirts. $60 for one, $80 for two
- Additional copy of the Backer Special Edition of Consortium: The Tower. $15
- Full name (or name of your choosing) used somewhere in the lore/gameworld. $50
- Vidal's physical journal. $110
- Poster of The Tower signed by the team. $80
- Non-signed posters, choose from two designs. (Spirit of Consortium and the C-3800 Command Vessel Diagram): $70 for one, $90 for two
- Backer Special Edition DVD pack for Consortium: The Tower with soundtrack, 16 page hint-book, etc. $60
- Interactive Screenplay physical copies for both games "pack"... $250.
Players of Game One: It is important to note that ALL of your completed saved game data will be fully importable into The Tower. This means that what characters ended up where, inventory, decisions, relationships, and many conversational choices will be preserved as they were at the end of Game One, and in turn will affect situations and dialogue throughout The Tower.
New to the Franchise: An update will go into more detail on this, but for now you can rest assured that you do NOT have to play Consortium Game One in order to fully understand and enjoy the Tower from start to finish.
- The A.R.G. is packed with heavily layered backstory and lore for the iDGi-1 Trilogy through interactive media of all types. This particular rabbit hole goes as deep as you’re willing to dig, but is absolutely not necessary to fully understand and enjoy Consortium and/or The Tower. To dive head-first into our Alternate Reality Game, started in 2010, click HERE and choose "Experience.”
- For the latest from the A.R.G., click HERE and then select “CONSOLE” in order to access the iDGi-1 Command Line Interface. This is the first version of this console, and contains a single release of documents mostly pertaining to the Churchill Tower and events surrounding The Tower’s story. Keep an eye out for hidden codes, and attempt to uncover a video the Consortium King does not want you to see!
Making games is expensive.
We will be gauging the success of this campaign to help us understand how much interest there is out there for this type of game, and of course how far you want us to go in realizing this project. We know exactly how to do it, and we're capable of going the whole way, but we can only do that if YOU - the global gaming market - WANT this type of game to be realized to the fullest extent possible.
Other than what we established with Consortium, The Tower does not follow any specific formula or genre staple. Funding these kinds of projects using only traditional channels is difficult and would require us to make compromises, or at least oversimplify what we want to accomplish in designing this simulation.
Simply put, we do not want to compromise on the vision of what we know can be accomplished.
We learned a lot from running the first Kickstarter for Consortium, and we feel more confident than ever that we can do this right on all fronts. The success of this campaign will quite literally Kickstart the production of The Tower and give us the means to fully produce it.
- 70% of all money raised here will be spent on the salaries and invoices for the artists, programmers, designers, sound/foley folks and immense amount of voice production required to build this game. More money means larger workload, longer production cycle, and/or more employees to pay.
- The remaining 30% will go towards all the various production and business expenses that are necessary, such as licensing fees, legal, accounting, development hardware / software, backer rewards and studio space. We have always been a partially-remote company, meaning we can hire from anywhere in the world, and employees are able to "work from home." This in turn saves a lot on office expenses most companies pay a great deal for.
We built Consortium Game One over a long period, and on a budget that was very small considering what physically went into it. We've become very good at ensuring that everything goes where it needs to go in order to get the game made. This is a passion project for us, and so the game always comes first.
We do have various options for investors beyond what we raise here, but it really does entirely depend on the overall performance of this campaign to determine what kind of deal we can get. We want to make the ultimate version of this game, and therefore want its development budget to be as high as possible. No surprise there :)
Given our experience with making the first Consortium on an extremely tight budget, we are confident that we would be able to comfortably produce a great game with the minimum amount we're asking for here.
Risks and challenges
Unlike the campaign for our first game, this time around we are asking for a much larger portion of our total budget, and are therefore taking a bigger risk with launching this campaign. With the CONSORTIUM campaign we had already largely completed the game and required help to get us to the finish line (our CONSORTIUM Kickstarter goal covered about 10% of our total budget). With the larger scale of The Tower we are aiming for a larger total budget with a much larger portion of that coming from Kickstarter.
We already made CONSORTIUM. All of the core user interface, characters and game mechanics will be making a return in The Tower, albeit with a great deal of polish and improvement. This means that a significant amount of development risk is reduced compared to your typical project that has to make everything from scratch.
Learn about accountability on KickstarterFAQ
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One of the most common complaints leveled against Consortium was that it had a fairly short average playtime. So the answer to this question is a giant, resounding yes! We are aiming for at least double the average playtime when compared to Consortium. With a much larger-scale environment to play with and more involved story beats, we want to make sure that everyone walks away from each and every playthrough feeling completely satisfied.
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We're huge fans of VR here. We backed the Oculus Rift originally and are looking forward to getting our hands on the consumer version of it. Unreal 4 natively supports VR. So, this means that you will get BASIC VR support for The Tower out of the box. If you don't get sick by running and flying around in the game in VR mode, then you'll be good to go.
However, CUSTOM VR support that is designed with VR explicitly in mind is a more serious proposition, and it's something we've been thinking about for a long time. It is, in fact, a stretch goal.
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All backers will gain access to the backer-only discussion forum, where we will be making daily progress reports. You will literally get to track what each team member is doing on a daily basis, and witness our production process first-hand. We will also be very responsive on this forum and will take all thoughts and ideas from backers quite seriously! Engage us in discussion, and we will engage you back.
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http://thetowergame.com is going to be the site for all things related to this project moving forward. On it, you will find links to the previews already published about our game.
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Steam, GOG.COM and Humble Bundle will be our primary detail retailers of choice for the PC/Mac version of The Tower.
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Yes, we will be offering backers a completely DRM free version.
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Backers at the CONSORTIUM ROOK level and higher will have access to alpha and beta builds when we make them available, yes.
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PC / Mac / XBox One / PS4
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There are countless games out there that focus entirely on multi-player experiences. We, on the other hand, remain dedicated to advancing what is possible with a purely single-player experience. Your choices and decisions will shape the world and events around you. The iDGi-1 Interactive Storytelling technology relies on one human brain to function… add any more and it might just break. :-)
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We would offer that The Tower may just end up being the most replayable narrative driven game ever created. The original Consortium could be played many times over to find new content and different story threads, and so The Tower will simply be pushing that even further.
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Yes to Mac, tentative yes to Linux as well. As long as the Unreal 4 engine supports it, we will support it...except for mobile devices.
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It is a DLC pack that unlocks 59 tracks of developer commentary in game. So there are nodes you can click on in-game and you'll hear one of us talking about various production challenges we encountered for that part of the game.
See a video of this in action here: https://youtu.be/Nkm3YRrXjT4
Rewards
Funding period
- (32 days)