The Phoenixian

I think the silhouette of the new proposal is significantly improved. The gears and mechanical parts stand out in this version where before they were much subtler elements that only stood out on closer inspection. Overall, there's significantly more balance between the natural and mechanical elements now. The text of the logo does interfere with the largest gear silhouette, but I'm not sure how much of a problem that is or isn't. As far as style and detail goes I'm torn. The proposed new logo does highlight the elements of the game more, but it doesn't match the color and style of the game itself. It feels somewhat caught up in trying to display the nature and mechanics of the game, (blocky wood, temporal gears) over the basic ideas. If you're trying to draw imagery to the rust world, the living world, and the connections and contrast between them, it might be worth drawing a shaper divide in imagery. Clean angles for gears and mechanical parts vs more flowing and organic shapes for the, well, organic parts.

I would like to add on a bit more and say that, while I'm a voice with a very brief exposure to the community, over the last decade and change I've been following live development projects, the two most visible (to this user's eyes) and most damaging causes of failure I've seen devs make are lacking a clear sense of direction and unnecessary refactors. Trying not to get too caught up in just jabbering aimlessly, I do feel like what I've seen of Vintage Story has a very clear sense of exactly what it wants to be and where it wants its development to go compared to many other projects. Especially as some of the reading here reports starting the game over a difference of opinion over exactly what kind of game the founders wanted to make to begin with. There's always risks, but nothing here strikes me as making this studio and project particularly susceptible to them even with the announcement. Certainly it's no post-minecraft block game vehicle shooter, turned world of tanks, turned battle royale, turned... I could go on, but that alone should make the point. It hasn't been chasing new trends every five minutes and the creators' history indicates there's a very particular idea of where they want to go. Refactors and their ability to cost years a pop are their own issue of course, for many and more technical reasons, but during my brief exposure to it, Vintage Story appears very well set up, and nothing I've seen so far seems particularly likely to run into the kinds of issues I've seen pop up elsewhere. It's very clear that the game has had a lot of thought and care put into what it's trying to be, where it's trying to go, and how it would like to get there.

This seems fairly reasonable for what it is. Absent accidentally hiring the AI box of thought experiment fame, moving from 18 people to 21-22 does seem like something that isn't likely to drown the team in new hires while also being a decent core of people for the side project. My main point of curiosity is wondering just what roles skillsets end up hired on, but I imagine that information won't exist until everything has already gone through. So, my hopes it all goes well.