As promised, Corv has launched the Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund completion of Corven – Path of Redemption today. It’s only a few hours in, and has already raised — as of this writing — $6,348 USD toward its $45,000 USD goal.

For those of you just tuning in who aren’t familiar with Corven, it is an independently-developed RPG that grew out of the cancelled Ultima IX: Redemption fan project. Per the Kickstarter page, Corven is:

…a story-driven, open world, single player RPG inspired by our favorite RPGs from the 1980s and 1990s, especially Richard Garriott’s Ultima series.

We miss Ultima and its design philosophy and so we set out to create something similar.

Corven will let you explore an interactive open world full of secrets and surprises. Maybe even more important than that, Corven will deliver an engaging story with many interesting NPCs.

Our goal is to make you want to know “what happens next?” in the main quest. Or in side quests for example “why is the, married, mayor of this town sneaking over to this other woman’s house almost every night?

Excitingly, there’s a playable demo of Corven available via the Kickstarter page. Of course, before you dive in and check it out, you would do well to be mindful of a few caveats:

We know that releasing a demo of the game at a very early stage of development is risky. Some people might expect a completely finished experience and that is, of course, not the case. If we would be done with the game we would not need a Kickstarter campaign 🙂

So we kindly ask of you to be aware that the demo shows the game early in development.This means not all features are implemented yet and the game is not polished yet. A few examples:

• NPCs which are not relevant for the main quest in the demo are not implemented yet
• Side Quests are not implemented yet
• Dialogues are unfinished
• not all non-combat wildlife is implemented yet
• not all sound effects are implemented
• You get the idea.

We provide the demo so you can see in which direction the development is going and what you can expect from the game. Even though the demo shows a very early version of the game, we think it also shows that we are capable of creating the promised game. We provide the demo so you don’t have to blindly trust us, but have a some form of proof that we can create Corven.

…

This demo was not optimized for old hardware. To play at 60 fps we recommend at least:

Nvidia GTX 1070, 16 GB RAM, i7

Anything below a Nvidia GTX 960 will be too slow to allow for a fun gaming experience.

I’ve had the chance to play both this version of the demo and also a pre-release version of it, and I will say this much: even in the short couple of weeks between those two play sessions, Corv was able to add a good bit of polish and improvement to, especially, the demo’s performance.

It’s a gorgeous-looking game, of course:

The minimum spend to get a copy of Corven as a “thank you” for backing it is $20 USD; that will net you a digital copy of the game and a mention in the credits. Rewards increase from there — digital copies of the soundtrack, in-game items and scenery objects, etc. — and physical, boxed copies of the game (cloth map included!) are available for pledges of at least $128 USD.