Summary
: Before we start this dunk, I need to talk about this idiot. His name is Ragnar Tornquist, and he’s a game director with right around 25 years of experience at the time Dustborn released.
: Now, I don’t know Ragnar. I’ve never met him, and I probably never will given that he lives in Norway. But I can tell you two things about him: the first is that he’s not a good writer, and the second is that he’s not a good director either.
: Ragnar started out at a Norwegian developer called Funcom in the mid-90s, where he took on his first project as a director on 1999’s The Longest Journey (seen above). This is the peak of his career.
: He has the sole writing credit on the game, which had a team of over 200 people and a relatively huge budget behind it. The game got near-universal acclaim at launch, with IGN calling it “the Doom of adventure games”.
: I played it myself a long time ago and don’t remember much about it at all, which usually isn’t the hallmark of a good game. I do remember it being a buggy mess.
: In 2006, Ragnar directed a sequel to The Longest Journey called Dreamfall. Dreamfall is pretty indicative of what the rest of his career is like: it released to 6/10 and 7/10 reviews. I have it on Steam, and remember that I had the game glitch out on me a few hours in and didn’t feel like replaying.
: Dreamfall was the start of Ragnar’s “experimental” phase and wasn’t so much a point-and-click game as it was a game about walking around and talking to random people until the plot advanced. It had combat, which most reviewers decried as frustrating and pointless, and was generally not a great game.
: By the time Dreamfall released, Funcom had pivoted hard into being an MMO company, and this is where Ragnar works on his biggest project yet: an MMO called The Secret World.
: The Secret World is a weird hybrid of puzzle game, ARG, and standard-ass WoW clone. It also got middling reviews, and most places only scored it as high as they did (by which I mean they didn’t give it a 3/10) because of the weird puzzle-ARG content. All the reviewers, even the ones who liked it, agreed that the combat and core MMO gameplay was trash.
: I think the game is still up in some form, but fucked if I’m ever touching it.
: In 2013, Ragnar Tornquist leaves Funcom and starts Red Thread Games, which he is the CEO of. Their first project is a Kickstarter-funded episodic sequel to Dreamfall. I wonder why they’d choose to do that.
: Total mystery. Dreamfall Chapters releases in 2014, gets dunked on by reviewers for being a blatant Telltale ripoff, and once again scores the dreaded 72/100 Metacritic score.
: Ragnar, buddy, you peaked in 1999. Give it up. You’re done. You’ve got a wife, you’ve got kids, go enjoy your life.
: Instead, he persists. Red Thread’s second game is 2019’s Draugen, a first-person walking sim written by our buddy Ragnar. What does almost every review about it say? The art style’s great, the music’s good, the writing sucks and weighs the whole thing down. 7/10.
: The twist is that the main character is schizophrenic and Ragnar is ripping off A Beautiful Mind. Saved you $20.
: So now, let’s sum up Ragnar Tornquist’s career. He’s worked on a total of six games, five of which he directed. Three of those games are point-and-click adventures, one is a walking sim, and one is a failed MMO. The sixth game is the failed 2001 MMO Anarchy Online, which is still around and still charges a subscription despite being in maintenance mode for probably 15 years.
: It’s safe to say at this point that Ragnar Tornquist is an industry veteran who should know better. Keep this in mind as we go through Dustborn, because he’s about to make a bunch of mistakes that would be inexcusable by rookies and cost his entire studio their jobs.
: Just like the Allansons, Ragnar Tornquist never learns anything. Now that we’ve got our history down, I am going to rip Dustborn to fucking shreds.