Announced today the Tomorrow Children will be shut down on November 1st. Since the game is online only this means there'll be no way to play it.

I can't say I'm too surprised. While the game has a good style, I tried playing it multiple times during alphas, betas and demos and it was just never very good. Other players would constantly phase in and out and there was never a sense of achieving anything.

You could work towards building a prefab house or putting some signs up around the town, but then when you come back the next day it'd all have been changed or destroyed. Towns lived and died in a matter of hours.

The tools are incredibly slow to use, unless you paid for the good ones - which will still break on you meaning you've to rebuy them.

It had some neat ideas, but it also seemed really underwhelming and nowhere near finished.

That's a real bummer, it looked like it had promise but was hampered by some bad mechanics. Real shame.

One cool thing you might not have known is that this game uses one of the most (arguably THE most) sophisticated lighting system ever put in a game, called "voxel cone tracing". The promise of voxel cone tracing is real-time global illumination with fully dynamic scenes, which is like the holy grail of lighting technologies. The technique has been known about for a few years, but as far as I know The Tomorrow Children is the only released game that's implemented it (and they use a slightly simplified version). You could see it in the game, it had a real cool look to it. It achieved the kind of lighting in fully dynamic scenes you only really see in static ones previously.

Clearly some talented people working on it, hope the studio lands on its feet.

Communism doesn't pay.

Freedom triumphs again!

That's cool, the game looks amazing and is really unique.

Fucking communists Stole my money ! I paid for this shit :P

Wait, did this actually come out? I haven't seen anything on it since the trailer at E3 however many years ago.

Took way to long to come out. Micro-transactions made it stupid too.

I think they may have shot themselves in the foot with the way they released it. I remember there being some sort of paid/premium tier that got the game a month or so before the free-to-play version opened up for everyone - or maybe they marketed it as people who bought it got access to an early beta, I don't know. Anyway, I remember hearing about it before release as a F2P game, and then when it came out and there was some press for it, only the $20 or $30 version was available. And then the buzz was that it wasn't very interesting, and by the time the free version came out I had forgotten about it.

The launch of this game was confusing and not at all well communicated. Most people I was aware of thought the game was either in early access, canceled or still awaiting release... when I told them it was out and free to play I was met with confused faces.

I hope they take that art-style and re-apply it to some sort of single-player game. The game was f'in gorgeous but nothing about it looked fun to play.

With all due respect, I'm not even remotely surprised this game is shutting down; if anything, I'm shocked it lasted this long. Every video I ever watched made the gameplay seem like a (suitably Soviet) thankless grind, and I really have no idea who this game was for. It was a really original take on the Minecraft-esque voxel mining/crafting sort of game, but in the sense that all of its original ideas seemed unfun and bad unless you went for all of the Michael Transactions.

Visually it did look really neat, though. It seems like the devs came up with a lot of cool visual tech for this game, which unfortunately was wasted on this game. Hopefully they show off those tech advances in future projects.

Surprised about this too, I just remember seeing teasers and early access stuff about it, had no idea it had actually gotten a final release.

@themanwithnoplan said:

Back in mid-2016 there was a period where I believe you could buy some kind of Founder's Pack that was basically a way to pay your way into the beta. I believe the game officially came out later in 2016 to absolutely no fanfare, as a free to play game. I don't think there was ever a period where the game was successful or popular. My impression was that its player numbers were always on the low side and it wasn't really clicking with the gaming population at large.

I didn't know it came out ether. Always sad to see something be shut down. Maybe one day someone will figure out a way to play it again like how phantasy star online is still playable in weird ways on the net.

Wasn't this the game where you had to stand in line if other people were using the crafting stations, and then when you finally got to the crafting station you had to solve one of those sliding tiles puzzles that everybody doesn't like to craft anything? Of course you could also just use the real-money currency to skip those things, but that seemed kind of sketchy.

Does this means this game has become The Yesterday Children?

It's a shame that the game part never came together because it has such a polarising look. There's just nothing else like it but reviews absolutely panned it and it just seems that it never gained much of a following. I'm curious if it would've latched an audience had it been available on PC.

The way people are talking about this game (thankless grind, boring etc.) is how i've always viewed Minecraft and it's ilk. I guess there are limits to what people will go through to watch things get bigger. This game seemed like it was always designed to be knowingly tedious and felt more like a social experiment than a game. What a weird thing.

(especially considering this was made by the PixelJunk people)

I thought it wasn't even released yet

wow so quick. It looked beautiful, but i wonder if the whole focus on 'communism experiment' should have included more fun aspects to actually keep people playing.

Like i think they made a pretty interesting game, but i don't want to actually play it. And for a commercial product, that 2nd aspect should have more priority to actually keep the lights on.

@boozak said:

It definitely felt more like a weird social experiment that might've been designed by a Jason Rohrer-type, except inexplicably the idea was attached to Q-Games where they put a bunch of effort into some boundary pushing visual effects. It seems like the kind of project where surely any business person could look at it and see that its unfun main gameplay loop is only for a very specific niche crowd, and it just kinda made no sense for a Q-Games-sized studio to put it out.

Hopefully the designers and visual artists are happy with what they learned from making the game, because I really can't imagine the biz dev people and studio owners at Q-Games are super happy, because I have to imagine that everything to do with Tomorrow Children was an enormous financial loss for the company if they had to close it up this soon after launch.

@gkhan: It may be the only game to rely so heavily on it but other games have made use of the same sort of tech to deliver GI in a more “optimized” manner.

But they are just shutting down the japanese servers.

Or is it globally?

@opusofthemagnum: Oh, certainly, there are all sorts of techniques to achieve GI. If you have lots of static geometry and static lights, you can get extremely high quality global illumination by baking lightmaps. The Witness is a good recent example, it's why its lighting looked so awesome. "Baking lightmaps" basically means doing all the super-advanced lighting calculation before you release the game, and embedding how the light looks into textures. Basically, let a powerful computer sit for a few days calculating how lighting looks in every part of the game, and then ship the result as part of your product. This obviously doesn't work when you have non-static geometry, because you have to do the entire lighting calculation again.

There are a few different algorithms for semi-dynamic scenes for doing it (Radiosity, Spherical Harmonics and Light Propagation Volumes are examples), and ambient occlusion is a good way of "cheating" the problem. But none of other algorithms for "real-time" GI is can really produce the kinds of high-quality results you want. Jonathan Blow made this point on Twitter in 2015:

The part where he's missing is Voxel Cone Tracing, which is a technique that can ACTUALLY do this, and The Tomorrow Children proves it: it's a game with fully dynamic geometry with extremely high quality global illumination lighting running on a PS4. It's an incredible achievement for The Tomorrow Children, and it's remarkable that (as far as I'm aware) the only game to have implemented it is a relatively small game like this.

This game looked fantastic, had an amazing style and even some semi-decent gameplay ideas but man...the microtransaction stuff was insane and some of the design choices seemed more like cute ideas than things you'd want to actually put into a game.

Then there was the fact that once a town was completed it just kind of vanished, which really emphasized the pointlessness in what the game was having you do. Which in turn does not interact well with the mictrotransactions, since you're spending real money for...nothing. a temporary boost for unfun gameplay that accomplishes nothing of significance.

Like, if they had just made a 5 hour singleplayer story where you go collect stuff and build a town with some fun characters and the same art look, i would have bought that and probably loved it. Or if they had made some fun gameplay or...just anything.

I'm torn between whether this was a weird art project or just a victim of the "games as services" hype. If you're going to sell a game as a service you need to have a pitch for what that service is. Tomorrow Children definitely did not.

But that style though. So much wasted potential.

@bigsocrates: Your single player idea sounds great. No matter how many times I tried to get into this game I just felt like I was accomplishing absolutely nothing. Even if I played Minecraft and just dug a big hole in the ground at least that big hole stuck around.

RIP TTC

While I hadn’t played it too much the latter half of this year, it was definitely my favorite game of 2016. Everything that everyone seemed to hate about it is why I loved it so much. It just felt so great to just chill and let this game wash over me.