Prior to All Quiet on the Martian Front, Rick Priestly tried to launch a very ambitious Sci-fi game on Kickstarter called
Gates of Antares that was asking the community not only to fund it, but to help generate ideas, test the Alpha and Beta rules as well as feed back on model concepts. the eventual aim was to produce a gaming system that covered multiple scales with one ruleset and incorporated a living, breathing universe that evolved based upon players submitting game results and planning their next actions through Guilds.
It was a grand plan that eventually got withdrawn as it was probably a bit too ambitious (*sad face*) and generated arguments from various forums that were utterly conflicting and confusing. Some people claimed they were pandering to too many ideas, others claimed the same ideas weren't being listened to... I'm not sure how those can both be true! I felt sorry for the guys as they were putting a lot of effort into the game and it was shaping up to be really good. I do, however, think that pulling the kickstarter to go back and rethink their strategy was probably a good thing to do.
The forums have been dwindling, kept alive by a valiant few mods and users despite the endless waves of spam. Today, the forums received a major overhaul in terms of structure which is an interesting development as there were a few adverts saying that GoA will be demo'd at the Warlord Games open day in a few weeks time... Fingers crossed that this means there's still life in GoA!
