Recently did a playthrough of Stonekeep, a seriously underrated crawler from Fargo's interplay days in my opinion. Understand it was plagued with development issues, cost a lot of money and delayed a long time before release. Fully voiced, moderately difficult with some decent puzzles along the way, highly recommend giving it a playthrough if you've never played it.
I own FOUR physical copies of the game That game indeed went through through an incredibly long (and most of all expensive) development period for a 1995 game. The very first PC magazine I picked up in 1993, had a very long feature about the motion capture and the game was not even close to being finished then. When it got released, the graphics weren't that impressive anymore and they started giving the game away with all sorts of graphics cards and computers which is why I have 4 copies of the game. If someone wants one, if they pay postage, it's yours.
It's quite a fun game but the early shiny 3D look never appealed to me as much as proper hand drawn graphics. Lands of Lore has aged far better as a result. God, I should make that my "Christmas game" this year - been 19 years since I completed LoL and I remember having a blast playing it.
Lands of Lore was pretty good back before Westwood went with EA though I remember the sequels then having the same crude early-era 3D graphics and mo-cap actors though some games also mixed the two styles such as Anvil of Dawn having 2D dungeons and character sprites and then the overworld was this blocky and nearly uniformly brown landscape ha ha.
Though this was all scanned 3d models, real-time 3D would take a while longer before that took off and the early games didn't age well at all.
Well hopefully Bards Tale IV will live up to some of the hype at least, think I got a mail yesterday which I guess is what Ankh's post above links to with some status update.
EDIT: Clunky gameplay systems and controls aside I do wonder if a older style RPG could do well, there's been some games attempting it with varying degrees of success but something like early Might and Magic or Wizardry would probably frustrate a lot of players with the sheer initially difficulty level requiring careful planning and slow progression building your character or party of characters from next to nothing and then death traps, deadly encounters and maze like lengthy dungeons.
Without perhaps stuff like "Consult the manual for journal entry #33" or having to import a part from the previous game to play the sequel which I believe Wizardry pulled for almost the first three installments straight.
(And the 4th one basically requiring the player to know how the game played from experience from the earlier installments because it would just kill you over and over if not, and it'd probably still do so because how unfair the game was at times ha ha.)
Even more accessible hack & slash games could suffer from this too, getting out of the dungeon in Elder Scrolls 1 Arena or Elder Scrolls 2 Daggerfall was a feat until you learned the map and how to deal with some of the encounters while being really weak and under equipped.
(Vague to non-existent puzzle hints, cryptic NPC's so you had no idea of what to go and what items might be important and several unwinnable situations.)
EDIT: Puzzle weapons, neat, though of course the elves had to be complicated.
Guess we're going mandolin combat style in Autumn then.
Or whatever Dandelion called it in his little Witcher 2 promo video ha ha.
Though it might just be poor puns and singing whether it's elder scrolls or south park style.
Elder Scrolls would be stuff like this way back in Daggerfall before ESRB and ratings were much of a concern.
EDIT: Or perhaps take a cue from D&D and a all-in-all that sucks equally on/at everything. Heh.
(Well they have their uses I suppose, occasionally.)
Though yeah classical dungeon delve adventure and rhyming riddle doors.
(Considering it's a door though just threatening to rip it's door-knob off ought to be enough really...)
I backed this a few weeks ago. Currently you get the original triology as a bonus. Runs via Dosbox but it's configured as a simple click on exe and play which is good. Always thought about going back and playing this, never got that far in the original Skara Brae BT1 and I bought The Thief of Fate even though I didn't even have a PC to play it on haha. It was one of those games which I really really wanted to play at the time, much like Command & Conquer that I bought too even though I had no means to play it .
He spent near 10 minutes trying to figure out why his rogue, in the back row, couldn't attack, despite each skill showing, in red squares marked on white snow, what area/enemies it hits. Some people are just...
Game looks surprisingly solid though! Looking forward to it.
I can never be free, because the shackles I wear can't be touched or be seen.
i9-9900k, MSI MPG-Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon, 32GB DDR4 @ 3000, eVGA GTX 1080 DT, Samsung 970 EVO Plus nVME 1TB
I'm not too convinced by the colorful and flashy look of the combat/interface either to be honest (they look almost..Blizzard-esque - not a compliment ). The core mechanics themselves however seem to be coming together nicely, I like the dynamicity of the characters and actual explorative bits with puzzles/various encounters.
Its Bards Tale so its a HUGE upgrade graphicwise.
But Im not so sure if I like the modernization tbh. I just have to wait and see when I get my hands on the alpha,
shitloads of new stuff in my pc. Cant keep track of it all.
Not bad, bard himself seems to have undergone a bit of a change but it's pretty good for a smoother look. Gramps looks a bit psyched too or perhaps it was psycho..
EDIT: Now, can he sing though.
(Which well the bard here isn't exactly singing I suppose...)
Nice news with those remasters, hopefully they end up as steam keys as I forgot this was even supposed to be one of the backer perks as I just remembered it being those emulated version of the original games.
It's cool that the character portrait is used to determine appearance.
I realize a lot of people probably hate that, but it would always drive me fucking nuts when playing Baldur's Gate / Neverwinter Nights / PoE when I'd create a character and couldn't find a nice portrait to match him. Ended up having to dig through portrait packs to find something that was close, but still not quite right.
I can never be free, because the shackles I wear can't be touched or be seen.
i9-9900k, MSI MPG-Z390 Gaming Pro Carbon, 32GB DDR4 @ 3000, eVGA GTX 1080 DT, Samsung 970 EVO Plus nVME 1TB
Hopefully you actually see your chosen character in cutscenes otherwise that is kind of a waste to have a fully modeled character that you never really see in game.
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That game indeed went through through an incredibly long (and most of all expensive) development period for a 1995 game. The very first PC magazine I picked up in 1993, had a very long feature about the motion capture and the game was not even close to being finished then. When it got released, the graphics weren't that impressive anymore and they started giving the game away with all sorts of graphics cards and computers which is why I have 4 copies of the game. If someone wants one, if they pay postage, it's yours.
.
