mesoian

@Mumrik said:

So, what didn't go as planned?

Were they off schedule on the MMO, did Reckoning tank, or did they just have no idea how much money they were spending?

Yes.

I'd be all for more enemy types, but there's nothing inherently wrong with the setting the feel. Variety is something this game could use a lot more of though.

@Karkarov said:

@Mesoian said:

You remember Lydia,

I hate to ruin it for you but hire any other female houscarl. They all have the exact same dialog, even the exact same skills and stats. They do each have a different voice actor though. See Lydia only had personality because they let the voice actress sound bitchy, the character actually has no personality at all and there are something like 4-6 other NPC that have the exact same dialog right down the punctuation. I also can't remember crap about the greybeards other than that they were old dudes who didn't talk much. I remember Caius Cosades though, that ol skooma addict blade that he was!

Oh totally. Lydia's "arch" for me was so interesting because I hated her initially, seeing her as mostly a poorly designed boon. As she traveled with me, I came to think of her clumsiness and her poor AI as character traits, and eventually, I started to enjoy her company. I was really shocked and saddened when we got jumped by 6 spriggans in a swamp and she didn't make it out alive. It was seriously impressed that the game could make me sad by removing what is essentially a poor string of loose scripting. Eventually I ended up teaming up with Arrianna Lennith after her god abandoned her and she felt useless. Her over aggressive combat AI and regal nature eventually felt like character traits too and I came to really enjoy having her around. Stuff like that I find dramatically interesting. DD has some of that, but...well the fact that you can make your team takes a little bit out of it. They no longer feel as unique as they could because there's no preexisting structure surrounding them. And there's nothing wrong with that, it just doesn't have the same punch.

But then, that's why Skyrim is successful even though the combat is pretty bad, how you interact with that world is super cool. DD's world feels like a combat arena because everything else is so blaise. As...crazy as it sounds, this game could do some amazing stuff with DLC beyond the, "escort x to y", "kill 10 x", "gather 20 y". Well constructed, well thought out mission sets that aren't just dropdown menus could be pretty amazing.

But then Capcom's never been much to put effort into DLC.

@murisan said:

@Mesoian: See, I hear things like "an ogre grabbed my pawn and RAN OFF" and I feel like that's almost personality enough.. if you could go back, would you still buy the game? I'm considering it but it seems SO middling.

Oh no, see that'st he thing, the combat is FANTASTIC. They spent a lot of time and polish making enemies behave in interesting and unique ways and that plays on the fact that you can create your own character types. That stuff is REALLY cool. That being said, there is NOTHING that matches it when you're out of combat. Everything outside of combat seems SO much more drab when compared to the fighting because the fighting is so good. You need to have a mixture of both, otherwise you get bored. Motivation for why you're fighting is important, especially in games like this. That's why RPG's with shit stories don't get a lot of traction by me. FF12 ranks low for me because, while the combat was amazing, the story was so boring (not bad, just dull), same thing with Star Ocean 4 and Grandia 3. What makes Skyrim and DD different is that the main narrative is one you create yourself, in your head, which is unique to you, so it's almost okay if the story is shitty. But that doesn't mean I don't want the characters to be well defined and interesting. I want this game to make me care about things other than leveling up and getting the best gear and finding the next dungeon and watching out for random epic class characters. I want a narrative that makes me feel something. Skyrim, somehow, managed to do that for me, based on the stuff that I had done throughout that game. There's nothing in DD (THUS FAR, I'm only like, 17 hours in) that makes me feel that way.

I feel like indie games are putting big budget massive games like this on the spot. I felt more playing Bastion for an hour than I have the 17 I've been playing this. But the combat in this game is AMAZING and super fun and it keeps me coming back. The traversal doesn't even bug me any more now that I learned you can cheat fall damage with the double jump.

I suppose a better way to put it is that the game has plenty of personality, the but the story and narrative have none. Everything interesting and worth seeing thus far has nothing to do with the plot. I kind of hate that fact. But I'm still enjoying it.

And yeah, i'd still buy it knowing then what I know now. I knew more than I should before the game came out, so that didn't sway me too too much. But still...::shrugs:: I hate that all the characters are so bland.

Magick Archer. I like it, has some really cool dagger attacks. My bow is a little underpowered at the moment though. It's amazing, I found all these amazing lvl 60 and 70 longswords and nothing for my or my pawns vocation.

@thomasnash said:

without wanting to be a dick about it, it kind of sounds like that is personality? I haven't played the game, and I know that I'm basing this off you describing one isolated incident, but you know, if that kind of stuff happens a lot...

Not that I'm denying the story is rubbish or whatever, like I say, I won't be able to see for myself until tomorrow. I do wonder though whether there is something self-fulfilling about when people say the story is worthless. I feel like it's common for people to say "oh the story is bad so I skip the dialogue.." so...you don't know whether some awesome shit is happening in that dialogue, actually?

I feel like I saw this with Dark Souls myself - everyone told me there was no story to speak of, and also told me that the game didn't tell you anything about what or how you were supposed to tackle it, so I didn't bother reading dialogue or anything like that, really, the first time through. The second time through, though, I did pay attention to that stuff, and discovered that not only does a lot of the dialogue provide really useful information about what you're supposed to be doing, there is also a huge amount of story info to be had (particularly from the serpent dudes), either around the "main" plot or just little side-stories, and a lot of it is quite interesting, in an oblique sort of way.

I just wonder if it's a similar situation, basically, but I suppose I will get back to you about it tomorrow evening.

This game struggles to make you care about anyone in it. Minor spoilers, but not really, this game wants you to deeply care for Selene. It makes you want to identify with the family that's getting evicted from Gran Soren, it makes you want to fall in love with the princess. It does these things by showing the characters related to you once, maybe twice, and that's it. This game struggles violently to make you identify with anyone save your own characters. Hell, the person I like the most in the game right now is Madeline, and that's because she (although still being pretty 1 dimensional) actually has a personality. Everyone else seems like cookie cutter walkabouts who seem completely detached from what's going on. It makes skipping through big parts of the story really really easy, and that's a shame. Even in Skyrim, a game that has a story that's about as equally shit, you still come to remember the big characters. You remember Lydia, you remember the greybeards, you remember the werewolf dudes, you remember the Nightingales. I don't know what the Duke of Gran Soren's name is, but I know he's probably going to be a boss due to the dungeons I found while exploring the northern territories. However that being said, the best story that game is telling is the one you're telling yourself in your head. Skyrim still gets mileage out of me due to the story of the disgruntled hero and her deity abandoned lover that travel the countryside looking to make some sort of sense in a post Dovakin world. I really hope this game can deliver on that same aspect. Where Skyrim feels like you can take on the world and do anything you like, DD feels like you need to stay home, learn, plan, prepare and slowly extend your range outwards. It's a very different feel that provides for a very different narrative. It's cool. It's almost enough. but the set pieces in this world just aren't good enough, and that sucks. The last thing I did was Selene's story mission and it felt so hamfisted and the voice actors were so checked out and all the emotion was sucked right out of the scene, it was supposed to be powerful and upsetting and motivating, but it ended up just feeling dumb.

@TheSpoonyBard said:

@Mesoian said:

@TheSpoonyBard said:

I was fighting a pretty high level Ogre (I was taking out slivers of life at each hit) and found out women made him horny/angry. So my female pawns were screaming all about it as he was charging directly at them, which gave me (who is a male character) the opportunity to get on his back and start stabbing him. And then he jumped up, fell on his back, and killed me.

I love this game.

The first time an ogre picked up one of my pawns and RAN AWAY with her, I was struggling between laughing and trying to keep up so it didn't kill her.

So females make ogres horny then? :p I'm confused.

I...guess? The funny thing is, after we wrestled the pawn out of his hands, he charged us, fell off a cliff and died. So I guess it was thinking with the lower head, if you know what I mean.

@TheSpoonyBard said:

I was fighting a pretty high level Ogre (I was taking out slivers of life at each hit) and found out women made him horny/angry. So my female pawns were screaming all about it as he was charging directly at them, which gave me (who is a male character) the opportunity to get on his back and start stabbing him. And then he jumped up, fell on his back, and killed me.

I love this game.

The first time an ogre picked up one of my pawns and RAN AWAY with her, I was struggling between laughing and trying to keep up so it didn't kill her.

This game has some really amazing systems. I just wish it had a SHRED of personality. The gameplay is so much fun and most of the exploration is pretty okay. But every character in the world, and I mean every character, is so damn generic...

It's a pretty great first out though. Now that they know what htey have, I wouldn't mind seeing them try again with single player actually being the focus this time instead of having to be the shoehorned in end result.

Fuckin' drakes in the forest...can't even run from'em.

@Brodehouse said:

Maybe it's because I didn't play a whole lot of Monster Hunter but a lot of this game is weird. And impenetrable at first. They just tell you a whole bunch of stuff about how the systems work without telling you why you should do it. Almost Demon's Souls in terms of how many systems it throws at you immediately and expects you to know as soon as the window pops up. Like "go climb up that monster!". Will I do more damage when I'm climbing? Will I take less damage or more? There's all the loot on the ground, tree branches and berries and flasks of oil.. Why do I want them? I can throw oil at an enemy... is that more effective than just cutting them with my sword? It just seems like where other developers spend time cleaning up the UI and considering player experience, Capcom spent time increasing the complexity and creating suboptimal options.

I find that level 10 is the sweet spot for this game. Once you hit that, it opens up to a point where you can really start exploring without having to constantly worry about getting ganked.

And you want to collect EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING. And honestly, you can carry so much, there's no reason to not collect everything.

@RainbowKraken said:

Is it hard for anyone else so far? There have been a few quests where I have been getting my ass kicked hard.

It can get quite difficult. Wander too far off the story path and the game is ready to remind you just what's up.