I haven't tried to redeem the original Alice code but it would appear like you can. I opened up my new copy of Madness Returns and there was a little sheet in there telling me that once I activate my online pass it'll give me the download of the original Alice for free. I'll have to try it soon and see what happens, I hope it works.
Thanks Ben!
I was real worried during that first couple hours that I wasn't going to like anything about Dragon's Dogma, it was a real bad start, but once I got out of Cassaris and even past the Encampment and towards Gran Soren it started growing on me and the systems began making sense. The combat is super fun. This game is weird and has plenty of problems, but it has a suprisingly solid foundation in the combat, loot, and pawns to create great gameplay loops and crazy moments like holding onto a flying griffin. I haven't been able to kill one yet, I was leaving Gran Soren at nighttime recently and a griffin swooped down and started wrecking us. We were barely doing any damage to it, and it soon flew off so I was glad.
I also recently did a quest at the Shadow Fort out west where you clear goblins out for a Wrym Hunt quest, and on the way there I ran into a dragon in the forest that murdered all of us. I've been avoiding that forest like the plague, maybe sometime in the future I'll be able to deal with it but for now it's like throwing oranges at a polar bear.
Another thing I like about this game is that the world is open but it's smaller and easier to digest, kind of like a Zelda. It's like an open-world-lite with amazing combat, and I've been enjoying it.
Thanks Rodney! I was able to grab Alice new on Amazon for $19.99, have you checked there?
I'm playing on 360. It's framey from time to time out in the wilderness, but it's never dropped low enough to be unplayable. The combat still feels fast and sharp. The bigger technical issue is pop-in, you have to wait on NPCs in town to pop up especially if you're running around, and out in the wilds enemies will often show up from thin air if you're running about.
I nabbed Brothers, Spelunky, and Beyond Good & Evil HD on XBLA recently and finished up Brothers last week. If you ever read Brad Shoemaker's review of the game over at GiantBomb my experience ended up being pretty similar to his. Don't want to say anything more than that, you should go into that game as fresh as possible.
Cool work Travis, I enjoyed this. Great questions, great homebrew dev and project. It can be fascinating hearing a passionate homebrew talk about a cool new game they're passionate about.
I bought Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen recently and have put several hours into it, so I could give you all some insight into what I've found so far. I've been slowly falling in love with the game in a few ways, but this game is full of caveats and contrast, it's a weird game, it's weird this thing exists. Maybe it's not weird it exists, but it's a weird piece of work and I can only hope that I can articulate effectively why it's so weird and in some ways outright rotten, but is making me love it anyways.
So, negatives. The first hour of the game makes a terrible impression. The first thing I noticed is that this isn't a very good looking game on the technical side, especially when you're in cities (and you start the game in a town). Many of the textures are pretty rotten even with the "HD texture pack" and playing it on an acceptable 1080p 60hz HDTV like the one I have. NPCs look awful just like you'd expect from the old RPG tropes. Lighting is head scratchingly bad in cities. Darkness itself is a big part of the game and a fundamental part of the design when you go out into the countryside at night and things are more dangerous, but none of those dangers apply when you're in a city so I really think they should've done good lighting in the towns so you can actually see things. The textures are ugly so maybe they're doing you a favor making everything so shadowed, but whatever. Bad lighting. I was trying to think like an artist and wrestled with the idea that maybe they wanted things to be dark for the purpose of medieval realism, everybody had only candles and lanterns and light doesn't carry terribly far from either of those sources, but if that was the case they still failed, it looks pretty poor.
On the positive side, Dragons Dogma gets much prettier when you go out into the country. The blues and especially the plentiful greens are bright. Draw distance is nice, so looking out to a distant mountain, forest, or castle isn't particularly sharp since this game doesn't have great texture work, but it's still quite colorful and appealing to me. The game can certainly still touch that part of your brain that says, "That vista is real pretty, I want to go to there." Also, the player character looks pretty great as it should. The character creator is the most customizable I've seen in an RPG and I was pretty easily able to generate a real attractive character that I'd be happy with for dozens of hours. Particle effects on spells and fire arrows look alright, there's still some artistically pleasing things to see in the game despite the ugliness in many places.
Scripting of quests is rotten and the game poorly communicates with the player. When there's updates it's often too noisy on screen with things in every corner trying to catch your eye before they all disappear together. The autosave icon spins and flickers, the quest update box is a little too rich and there's decals that district the eye from the actual text, there's a an XP counter, a Rift Crystal counter, and God help you if you have Pawn subtitles on during the game (turn those off as soon as possible), all at the same time. You'll have to do a lot of digging into the quest journal to get a clue of what you're doing, and even then the description might be vague and if your quest marker is an NPC the location will change depending on time of day. Simply doing quests can often feel longer or more confusing that it would in other games. When you finish a quest it prioritizes whatever is next on the list, not whatever is the next main quest or whatever is relevant in your chain of quests, so you have to check that journal all the time and prioritize it yourself.
On the positive side regarding the UI and menus, the bartering menus are slick. Buying, Selling, and Enhancing things at a shop is a fast experience and the menus are responsive and kinda pretty. It takes one or two inputs too long to equip new armor and weapons, and they don't explain to you the difference between clothing and armor, so there's caveats to that too. The macromanaging is pretty quick, but when you want to micromanage and compare individual pieces of equipment the functionality isn't there and you have to work around it. The system only compares how the item your looking at will affect your cumulative DP and resistance ratings.
The language and diction is awful in a way that's not funny because the game takes itself very seriously, it's the worst try at a type of medieval English I've seen since Two Worlds. In this game people use the word "aught" in almost every line, and in some sentences it doesn't work in the context they're using it. It pulls you out of the world every time and hangs you up with its cheesy uses of "aught" and "mayhap" among other things. It gets even worse when they try to do the diction of low born characters that use less sophisticated language, phrases, and shortened phrases.
Now the reason I'm starting to love this game aside from the pretty vistas and bright greens is the combat and the Pawn system itself. I have a Ranger class woman that only uses daggers and longbows and I've found it to be super fun when I have a full party of Pawns with me doing the other work strategically. I kill from a distance, cut down anybody that gets too close, and I create a party of mage and warrior classes to take care of tanking and healing. The third person combat is great both ranged and melee, it's quick and responsive, and the animations and sound are satisfying. It's the kind of real time combat I think could work great in a Dragon Age if you could also pause combat and give orders (which you can't in this game). Combat feels great, getting stronger weapons and armor feels great, it has those great RPG loops on the combat and loot side. There's a lot of challenge to find as well, it feels good to see characters that previously dominated you can now be hacked down with confidence as you get stronger, then a new bigger enemy puts you in your place again and gives you something to aspire to.
The Pawn system really appeals to me because you can customize your party and search for Pawns with specific skills and traits via a filter that's been fairly effective. You can spend Rift Crystals to hire Pawns that are higher level than yourself, but I've simply been hiring people who are equal level to me, which is free. Once you get a crew together you can go do a couple quests and level up once or twice, and then go find new Pawns because only your Main Pawn levels up with you and the other two need to be replaced often. It sounds like a time consuming hassle but it feels pretty good. Going on a couple quests takes a little while so you have time to bond with the Pawns you have, but by the end you're ready for a new group with stronger skills and an equal level to yourself. It's actually satisfying finding the "right ones" and then heading off into the wilderness together.
The world also isn't nearly as big as an Elder Scrolls game, so I think you guys will be able to digest it easier. It's a tiny bit like Twilight Princess or another 3D Zelda where the world is pretty big but it's not a whole filled out country like Skyrim is, but instead it's structured into big areas connected by paths. Kinda like Fable 2 without the loading screens, and if the paths in between major areas were populated with a few places and things to do along the way.
So Dragon's Dogma has a lot of caveats and some plainly rotten aspects that you may or may not be able to get used to or tolerate, but based on what I've done so far I can vouch that there's some pretty awesome stuff to redeem it enough to pull you in. Keep in mind I haven't even seen the big battles yet with griffins and other monsters. The first several hours have been mostly small potatoes in terms of enemies I've seen, so I might come back in a little while saying, "This game is even more awesome that I thought."
I started this series with Morrowind back around 2002 and played 4 & 5 a ton as well, and back when I was into Morrowind my dream was going to Skyrim, but that dream already came true so now it's time to focus on where to go next. I'd like them to choose a setting that can show a wider variety of weather and color palettes within the overall visual aesthetic. Each game has had its own unique visual style that's absolutely beautiful, but becomes harder to appreciate over time because it's all you see. Eventually the browns on Morrowind got old to look at, the identical green trees and gold hills of Oblivion got more bland over time, and even though I think Skyrim has my favorite geography and colors of all the games (I particularly love the aspen trees, autumn colored areas, the auroras, and the Yellowstone Park-esk area south of Windhelm with the geysers) the charcoal and blue still gets old to look at after a couple dozen hours.
I hope in the next gen they can find a continent that can show a variety of colors and weather instead of just, "This game is the one about sandstorms, this next one is the game about trees, and our next game is the one about snow." I wonder if they can find a single province to represent a variety of visuals and interesting conflicting cultures, or make a game where certain areas of multiple provinces are all in the same game. It'll be Elder Scrolls VI: Border Crossings.
On a side note I'd like to learn more about Akavir where the elves are, as well as Atmora where the humans originally came from but left because of an ice age long ago or something, and they left to migrate to Skyrim.
I'm running out of books again Tami so I'm going to ask my family for a few different novels for Christmas, I'll be really happy if I can get some new reads. Last night I bought Beyond Good & Evil HD on XBLA because Ubisoft is having a big sale on different things and BG&E is $2.50! I already have a PS2 copy but I've never played the HD version so I wanted to grab it.
Speak of the devil, I just played the demos for both of these games. I liked the music and artwork in Contrast but the camera and gameplay was pretty bad, I hated how she zooms around so fast and the levels aren't built for that kind of speed, it's really jarring to play. I won't be getting Contrast but I really want to get The Bridge.
The demo for The Bridge was really fun, I liked the puzzles and the artwork so I'm sure I'll grab that game.
