Articy:Draft is a must have product for anyone interested in game design. Make no mistake; there is a learning curve to this tool as with any professional grade software. Once you've learned it, the productivity you'll gain will more than make up the initial learning time. I used the team version of Articy:Draft 2.1 in my Game World Creation class, and what it enabled the class to create is beyond anything I was expecting.

Pros:
It can handle just about any game design task you can throw at it. Complex branching dialogs? Easy. Detailed NPCs with complex relationships? No problem. Have a massive game world with many areas interconnecting? Have at it. And once you're all done, hit the export button and get a nice XML file with all your text content ready for use in your game engine of choice.

♥♥♥♥:
* Price. You get what you pay for, but you will pay for it. Regardless of how awesome it is, $200 is a steep price to pay if you're doing this as a hobby. Knock that up to $300 if you want to go commercial.
* Export Formats. While I did list this in the Pro section, it's also a ♥♥♥ as well. The docx export is difficult to read, almost to the point of being useless as a general purpose document. The xml format will take some serious digging through and studying to fully understand how Articy:Draft is linking things together. The product could really use some polish on this aspect.
* No resizing of areas. When you draw a zone in a location, there's no resizing it, other than grabbing it point by point and moving them around. This was a major source of headaches in my class as many groups discovered they had scale problems and needed to resize things. Much gnashing of teeth was done that day.

Bottom Line:
If you're serious about game design, buy this software. You will not regret it.

This is one awesome tool which I use to detail my RPG campaigns. I can create character sheets & monster sheets with ease, detail the flow of the campaign using Flow Fragments, and using the nesting feature, I can detail the scenarios with supporting documentation.

The best and most important feature for me is cross referencing. This allows me to link my maps, NPC locations, NPC images as well as monster images to all the campaign information previously created. Audio & video can also be linked, providing previously recorded dialogue/movies to be used as a gaming session is played.

During game play, I constantly refer back to the articy: draft campaign document to keep me grounded in the campaign design while allowing me to create and record impromptu additions to the story and plot lines, as rquired by the PC's actions and motivations.

This software has been developed with great care and effort. At first I didn't really like it for planning out my game but now I've come back to test out the new features and I must say this software is awesome.

If you're a game studio or indie game developer then this software will help you to lay down and plan out your ideas. I recommend this gem.

Well done devs

Absolutely amazing software. I cannot comment on the SE version, as I have SE2. From what other people are saying, if you are really serious about requiring a very in-depth 'story-boarding' software with a whole host of additional features that can be utilised far beyond just games and stories, then get the upgrade; it will be invaluable.

Its versatility as a 'story-boarding' software is seemingly unlimited. I use this to write reports, plot stories, create a game before it has been made, create programming process trees (OOP), conduct and evaluate research, plan complicated sequences of components for woodwork/metalwork/and the like, and the list goes on. Resource management at its finest!

It's an easily accessible professional software that has a pleasing GUI, Articy:SE 2 removes the need for 3-4-5+ drab looking "functional" software, and combines them into something that is a pleasure to work within.

EDIT:
Customer and community support is second to none! Just take a browse through the "Community Hub"! You're not just getting a well supported software, the customer is supported well too!

10/10 with cherries on top!

TL;DR: This tool has been amazing to work with and has really helped organize my content but is laggy on lower spec'd machines.

I had a system to managing my content, flows, and notes with a hierarchy of folders and files and that system was working to a degree. But it was still more effort than I wanted and keeping track of all the different files and documents was becoming a daunting task.

When I saw this tool I wasn't sure what it would do different for me, but even having a single organized source of all the data was a selling point. Then I looked more into the customizable templates, data validation options, visual maps, character maps, and most importantly the journey flows that you can create and was thrilled at the features.

That said, I use this on two machines; my dev machine while developing and a laptop when I am out and about and want to log thoughts/ideas. On the dev/gaming machine it runs incredibly smoothly, no issue whatsoever, but on my laptop it is laggy. I won't argue the minimum requirements, but it has not been a solid experience on my lower spec'd machine.

The sharing and collaboration options are also very exciting, though I have not had an opportunity to test those out yet.

The 1.5 version is the "HALF" version.

What i wanted to mean with half?

Well, the SE2 comes with a text editing feature, WOW.

So, something that is simple and BASIC in any function and program, is just avaible on the "newest version" of this software, and i really can't accept features like this to worth another Articy Draft whole price.

It's just like some other games you have already knowned.

They make a whole game, fragment it into a 70 and 30 portion, than sell the 70 as the whole part and then the 30 as a DLC for a nice amount of cash claiming that this last one are a new version, program or DLC

Steamers aren't stupid, we are already veteran in the art of "knowing what is really a new feature".

I'm not complaining about the price, i'm complaining about a feature that should have been added in the most basic version. Text editing is basic everywhere.
One thing is you sell a full car and then a turbo charger as a dlc, another, is to sell a car without doors and then sell the doors as a DLC.

OBS: I known that all the negative feeds to this post are from the dev team.

I decided to rewrite my review to actually be a review.

So primarily: what is Articy, and who would want to use it?

Articy is a game and story design tool (operative word: design. There are some things you can do with the export tools, but it is for the most part an outlining tool, not an actual development tool.) used to outline and plan player/plot interactions and events. It can be used as broadly or as specific as is required for the project, and is flexible enough for just about any type of project.

The second question is one of the more common questions regarding high-priced software like this. Why would I want this for that price; what would it have to do for me to buy it at that price?

This is most certainly not for the average user. This is for something that has a lot of different assets that need to be organized in one concise place. For example, a story-rich game, or an asset-rich game, a visual novel, an elaborate tabletop game; even a regular novel can all be organized using this tool. If you think you yourself 'why do I need this if I can just use wordpad or openoffice/ms word?' when you read about this program, then your project isn't big enough to require software like this and you shouldn't buy it lest you waste $100-200 on something you'll never use.

The main issues, if you still feel this software might be useful to you, involve a lack of autosave (in the works, allegedly, but I'm pretty sure nevigo works on valvetime), some clunky ui features that take getting used to, and a somewhat poor asset interface that gets confusing when asset numbers get large; even just small thumbnails would be useful. The templates you use to define different aspects of items or characters could use with more effective design that makes it easier to customize parts of it.

Overall, if you need this software, then you'll know it. If you're not sold on the idea, then it's probably just not very useful for your purposes, and there's no point to buying it.

The tool can be helpful, but is too restricted in some aspects to be something I'd wholeheartedly recommend to everyone.

Or at least, that was going to be the review. Now it's "Articy:Draft has been an adequate tool until it completely, irreversably, made my main project vanish and the dozen hours I worked on it are now gone too".

Luckily, I do have backups, but I would still advice you to stay away from this if at all possible.

A bit of a learning curve for those new to this sort of set up, but I find it extremely useful. I can see this is very useful for other things aside from game making, though that's the main thing I'm using it for. I've yet to get into the scripting and complex/back end stuff, but the upfront storyline, characters, dialogue, locations and so forth are fairly quicker to learn to do and once you get started, it becomes much easier and faster to move along. I went and got the more advanced version because I may eventually get into more complex stuff later, but for now the simplier parts are easy to work with and do what I mainly need for now. I do highly recommend this program to others if they are wanting to do serious projects or personal projects seriously (especially if you're the only person doing the project), free or commercial.

First of all, this review assumes that you have the update to version 2. Also, the template features were broken (though they are working now after applying a fix supplied by their support), so I did not have time to try out these yet. Before, I was using tools like Scrivener and Twine, that are both really great. What I like about Articy Draft is that it allows you to write in screenplay format similar to Scrivener and then convert the script to a node based format like Twine. This is the only application I am aware of that allows this workflow. Also, the (screenplay format) scripts and (flow/dialog) nodes are integrated with a database, so if you change the name of a character, it is instantly reflected everywhere. Really nice. Though, there is still room for improvements. The application only runs on Windows, and if you are a Mac user like me, you have to find some workaround like using Steam streaming or dual boot. Unfortunately, it does not work in CrossOver. Also, the scripts you can write are a bit limited, so you can't intermix dialog fragments with actions or camera angle switches, and the conversion works one way only, so you can't edit the nodes and then continue editing the script. Full freedom to work in parallel from both node and script point of views would make this an amazing application. Also, the node graphs are inherently flowing from left to right, so unlike Twine, it is not intuitive to create a spacial map where each location is represented by a node. Overall, I highly recommend Articy Draft.