Everyone, listen up. This is important.
You might have seen today that the demo for a new monster catching game,
LumenTale: Memories of Trey, has been released. This game is made by Beehive Studios, which, under the alias of WeedleTeam, also made Pokémon Xenoverse, my favourite Pokémon fan game. (In a way, this new game is sort of a spiritual sequel to Xenoverse without the Pokémon branding, because the protagonist, Trey, might be the same Trey who acted as a rival to the player in the aforementioned fan game.) The game was put up on Kickstarter a few weeks ago, and it reached its goal and went above it - all of this with 10 days to go until their fundraising campaign ends.
Unfortunately, I have not been able to test the demo. The first time I ran it, it closed without so much
trying to run. I opened it again, and it worked, even if it was (as I found out later through watching others play the game on YouTube) running at a slower speed than usual. Five minutes in, my laptop just... shut down, and it has not been able to boot since; the light on the charger even flickers, suggesting a voltage issue. It was an old laptop, but it had been functioning well prior to running the game, and more than fulfilled all the requirements for running it (64-bit, Intel i5, 8GB RAM.) I have heard that a patch was released to fix some issues with the game, but by then, it was too late for me and I have no way of testing whether the issues reported had any relation to mine.
I know that correlation does not imply causation, and I thought it an unfortunate coincidence at first. However, I
did have a previous sour experience with another one of the company's games - the infamous mobile game
Donarush. A year ago, when I had just gotten into Xenoverse, I gave it a try because it featured some of the Fakemon from that fan game. Again, 5 minutes into my playthrough, my phone slowed down to a halt and began to heat up. Thankfully, closing the game solved the problem. At my own risk, I tried playing again later to check if it was an external problem, but no, the game itself was causing these issues - on a new (8 months of actual use), capable phone. I promptly uninstalled the game and left a review on Google Play asking for the developers to fix the game's optimization issues. To this day, they have not been fixed, and I haven't even gotten a response from the developers. Due to this experience, therefore, it's not hard for me to believe that
LumenTale might have bricked my computer due to its poor optimization, or at the very least exacerbated an existing issue to its breaking point. If it hadn't been for my previous experience trying out Donarush, I would have perhaps have let my problems with
LumenTale slide and let bygones be bygones.
Speaking of
Donarush, I called the game "infamous" because its release also stirred up a controversy and highlighted Beehive Studios's... questionable practices. A few months after said game released, Élite4, the group of artists that were involved in the making of Xenoverse and this game,
cut ties with WeedleTeam and Beehive Studios due to not receiving compensation for the use of their Fakemon designs in Donarush. As Élite4's statement puts it, it's true that the artists did not profit from the work they did on Xenoverse (as they should). However,
Donarush is a monetized game with microtransactions and does not bear the Pokémon brand; these facts should entitle Élite4 to some kind of royalties for the use of their hard-worked-on designs, and yet they didn't get said royalties. I would have likely not played or kept supporting Xenoverse if it hadn't been for their amazing artwork, so to learn that they hadn't been appropriately paid for their involvement in an external project left me
baffled. If the issue has not been settled yet, Beehive Studios/WeedleTeam needs to remedy that, at least to show their backers for
LumenTale that they do plan on compensating the game's artists for their work.
These issues (and other more personal ones) with the game prompted me to write this warning: if you are going to support
LumenTale, do so
at your own risk. I provided a first-hand account of what happened to me alone, but in the end, it's your call. I know that after this, I will not support Beehive Studios/WeedleTeam's games beyond Xenoverse (which I keep supporting mainly due to Élite4's involvement, as said above.) The issues are too many for me to keep doing so, and I have a feeling I'm only just starting to scratch the surface. If you've stuck with me this far, I invite you to share your experiences as well, and I thank you sincerely for reading. This has not been easy to write due to my deep love towards Xenoverse, but I feel that other people have a right know the risks of supporting this company's original works.
