The writing was on the wall, given that they couldn’t even get a quarter of their modest (in comparison to similar projects, anyway) goal, so it should not come as a surprise that TSI Games’ Seven Dragon Saga has halted its funding campaign.

Announcing the news in the game’s latest update, president of TSI, David Klein, broke the unfortunate news:

We’re postponing our Kickstarter campaign. No, TSI is NOT giving up on Seven Dragon Saga! Quite the contrary. We’ve done some serious reflection and come to the conclusion that we can’t create the level of RPG today that we know we’ll be able to create tomorrow.

Given its heritage, SDS needs to set a new standard for the RPG genre. Not a ‘style over substance’ AAA standard. A standard that delivers a fresh, compelling and truly satisfying RPG experience. SDS deserves no less. And that goes for you too, our wonderful, loyal supporters.

We launched this campaign at “veteran difficulty” (what some call “a high funding goal”) because wanted to be sure that we would do SDS justice. We knew there would be a lot of you that remembered the classics or would appreciate our efforts to build a fresh RPG, but we underestimated how much new content we’d need to show in the middle of the campaign to engage people that were less familiar with the older games.

We’d thought we could talk about core mechanics when it is clear that you want to actually see those mechanics in action. We need to show off more than we had ready right now. There came a point where it became more tell than show.

We’ve had incredibly positive results from this Kickstarter. The press awareness, fan response, and community feedback has been tremendous. We’re taking that feedback and what we’ve learned to refine our work further. We’ll be coming back as soon as humanly possible, with a better, more refined Kickstarter, and some code you’ll actually be able to play, along with killer videos and artwork.

Once again, we are extremely grateful for all of your encouragement and support. We will continue to follow our progress by signing up for our newsletter on our website: http://www.tsi-games.com/ and by following us on social media. This way, you can hear about our Kickstarter re-launch when it happens. And it WILL happen!

As much as I loved (and still adore) the game, I believe the lackluster gameplay video hurt their campaign more than it helped. The rigged animations, the washed-out colors, the awkward GUI that looked like a poorly drawn up placeholder…it made me cringe when I first saw it. Perhaps it could have passed as a crowdfunded game back three years ago, but with such a high level of product being produced by the site now, I believe many felt Seven Dragon Saga wasn’t far enough along to give money to.

Whatever the reason, we’ll have to wait until TSI comes back to try again. Hopefully in a way that will get fence-sitters excited about handing them their wallets.