[Sigfried1977]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkP9XeGHvfY

I just love that song.

Got a preview copy of the game today. Pretty stoked about it too.

[swaaye]

I put a few hours in. It's sort of Half Life 2 meets Bioshock meets Dark Messiah. In fact I hear Dark Messiah sound effects occasionally. It plays as a fairly open experience with a hub you set out on missions from.

Visually it is PS360. Low poly objects and some mediocre textures. But they've used the semi cell shaded style that is all the rage these days and it works with the scene complexity. The city is visually impressive and developed. There is also a lot of attention to detail in the locations so there's opportunity to immerse yourself. The setting is certainly rather original.

Melee is simpler than in Dark Messiah and unfortunately they did not do the full body model so you are a head with arms.

NPC conversations have been basic so far. There are NPC stores. You can upgrade your stuff and buy ammo and items. Magic is interesting but I've only scratched the surface.

There are lots of nice game options. You can turn off all of the hand holding. FoV is adjustable. Mouse works well and I can map all my buttons. FXAA and MLAA are the only official AA options but of course since it's UE3 you can force MSAA and SSAA.

[Davros]

Not available from steam in the u.k until the 12th

edit: play.com have it now and its cheaper
Double win save money and not give money to valve....

edit 2: misread the steam price its the same but still a win..

[swaaye]

I wonder why they delayed it for the UK.

some pretty pictures

[banksie]

I put in just half an hour this morning when it unlocked on steam. So I am in the middle of the very first escape mission. What I have been impressed with is the attention to detail shown in the teaser - the guard on the balcony that overlooks the ship you arrived on has a specific line to say. This is a guard who isn't on the main path at all and I suspect many will ignore. The engineers working on the water lock mechanism have things to say that similarly aren't important but build the world and what is going on.

You can talk to the fellow prisoners and I wonder if one, who mentions slackjaw as a name, might lead to game changes later. Hopefully it does.

Heck the introduction has an optional mission with Emily.

It is a really impressive amount of detail work that many games sadly lack these days.

Be interesting to see if that continues through the game but the Rock, Paper, Shotgun reviews strongly suggest that it does.

Also playing on Very Hard is fun. Died thrice just trying to escape the prison and I have barely begun...

Speaking of dieing you can kill yourself in the introduction too. The game will let you fling yourself off balconies. So pleased to not hit an invisible wall there.

[swaaye]

Yeah they put thought into everything. It's Elder Scrolls ish in the detail. Like their other games.

[Grall]

Originally Posted by swaaye

I wonder why they delayed it for the UK.

Delayed?

It's been scheduled for the 12th in euroland for some stupid reason and people in the US have already finished the game. Stupid DRM shit. I hate it when companies can put stranglehold on when people can actually play a game they've already paid for and is sitting on their harddrives...

[fellix]

The game definitely brings some "Thief" vibe in the overall design and some gameplay tactics, but I still can't feel the stealth approach being well enough encouraged. Speaking of design style, it's not the "purest" form of steampunk setting -- too much electrification in there.

Graphics wise, I was forced to enable SSAA in the games' driver profile. Too much fine details and strong specular/shader aliasing are definitely getting in the way of appreciation of the otherwise nice visuals. The available post-process AA options in the game aren't enough, at least for me.

p.s.:

Speaking of Thief --

[Davros]

If that inspires anyone to load up theif2 dont forget
Shadows of the Metal Age - a full fan made expansion pack
http://www.thief2x.com/

[Silent_Buddha]

Originally Posted by Grall

Delayed?

It's been scheduled for the 12th in euroland for some stupid reason and people in the US have already finished the game. Stupid DRM shit. I hate it when companies can put stranglehold on when people can actually play a game they've already paid for and is sitting on their harddrives...

It has absolutely nothing to do with DRM.

US retailers release new media (movies, games, music) on Tuesdays.
Euro retailers release new media on Fridays.

It really is as simple as that.

So if you release during the same week, then Europe gets product "unlocked" for sales on Friday while the US gets product "unlocked" for sale on Tuesdays.

No conspiracies, no DRM, no weird things going on.

Regards,
SB

[Malo]

Who gives a shit if someone else has already finished the game or not? How does that detract from your enjoyment of a game?

[swaaye]

Fun little experimentation - I spent a few hours playing this on my 512MB 3870 at 1680x1050. I finished an entire mission. It runs pretty well on max settings with no AA, but vsync must be off or there's a severe frame rate hit. D3DOverrider with triple buffering does not help. I think the 512MB VRAM is causing problems as I also see the engine swapping low rez textures in and out at times.

Forcing just 2x MSAA results in ~5 fps. FXAA didn't seem to hit it very hard but frankly I'd rather have aliasing than blur and barely effective AA.

BTW, I remapped the mouse so that left click is swing sword and right click is block. I have one of my thumb buttons as magic/gun shoot and another as zoom. Works better than the stock setup for me.

[homerdog]

3870 should be a good bit more capable than a console GPU so that seems normal. I'd expect my old old 8800GT to run it very well like it does most games.

I suppose 512MB is still give or take about twice the VRAM available on a console.

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by homerdog

I suppose 512MB is still give or take about twice the VRAM available on a console.

Yeah but I think in console world they can more efficiently use their available RAM so that 512MB might not be as great as it comparatively seems.

I see lots of console games without vsync though for whatever reason.

[swaaye]

The game took me 20 hours to beat. I was thorough in my exploration until the last mission where I almost ran straight to the end. Overall I think it's a great game although I wish there had been more complexity to the combat (see their prior games). There is some replay value here because of the consequences related to your behavior during the game. Plus it's just a really interesting setting to see.

There are some amazing maps in the game. Don't let the whining about texture quality worry you because the scenery will occasionally blow your mind. Also, the reason it is reminiscent of Half Life 2 is because Half Life 2 art director Viktor Antonov was part of the team.

I think I have to go beat Dark Messiah again now...

[Davros]

Hmmm, not too sure about the length I may wait until the price goes down

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by Davros

Hmmm, not too sure about the length I may wait until the price goes down

yeah I think 1 or 2 more missions would have been a good idea.

[fellix]

I definitely felt the game a bit short, for all the masterpiece style and design in there. Now, I'm replaying it again, on the highest difficulty setting, trying to avoid fatalities as much as possible, and I dare to say that way the game is even more strikingly similar to the Thief series.

[HMBR]

I think I only killed one enemy intentionally...

I agree, the game definitely feels a bit shorter than it should.

[swaaye]

Because I hadn't read the controls thoroughly and had the tutorial/popup UI stuff all off, I didn't know about choke hold or how to use grenades until I had almost beaten the game. Heh. I'm working on my pacifist playthrough now.

I suspect this game will be seeing some DLC missions. Missions that should have been included from the start.

[banksie]

Originally Posted by fellix

I definitely felt the game a bit short, for all the masterpiece style and design in there. Now, I'm replaying it again, on the highest difficulty setting, trying to avoid fatalities as much as possible, and I dare to say that way the game is even more strikingly similar to the Thief series.

I am still on the first mission after escaping the prison. Simply because on hardest difficulty try to keep people alive becomes interestingly complicated. I initially thought that to bypass the light walls I'd just snipe the whale oil tanks distracting the watch with the explosion and providing an easy route through. Problem is that also allows the rat swarms through and they decimate the watch.

Similarly knocking out too many watch means the swarms that they normally put down become an issue for them. I was horrified to see after I knocked the second wall out one of the watch, in searching for me, went down towards cobble street (I think that is the name) and got jumped by rats. His screams then meant every other watch member started to head down there and get swarmed - net result was about eight guards dead because I knocked out the walls.

So that approach didn't work. But then if you duck up the side alley you have the conflict over the dead guard to deal with. If you leave that alone then at least one if not two of the three die in the ensuing conflict. So I had to sleep dart them...

My current save is just outside the High Overseer's office district and getting there has taken me about nine hours of play.

I am also pretty sure I am a bad person - I did Granny Rags' quest. The implications of that are going to bite me on the arse even though it did net me an extra rune.

There is a lot of mise en scene built in. Finding the mother who watched her family die and put them together into body bags only to die alone herself. The two who tried to hide above the fishmongers. Gwen and Andrew with andrew having died waiting for Gwen at the end of the bridge. The Doctor who is keeping a rat swarm in his pantry and fed a maidservant to them when she refused to help keep the rats...

So yes on hardest difficult not only is there a very Thief like feel to the world but the game lasts longer due to the difficulty of doing a proper non-lethal/ghost approach.

[Davros]

I was horrified to see after I knocked the second wall out one of the watch, in searching for me, went down towards cobble street (I think that is the name) and got jumped by rats.

Does the game blame you for that ?

[Sigfried1977]

^No idea, but I think it should.

[swaaye]

Originally Posted by banksie

I am still on the first mission after escaping the prison. Simply because on hardest difficulty try to keep people alive becomes interestingly complicated. I initially thought that to bypass the light walls I'd just snipe the whale oil tanks distracting the watch with the explosion and providing an easy route through. Problem is that also allows the rat swarms through and they decimate the watch.

You can go over/along the buildings in the area to get through there. You might need the double jump height ability in some cases though.

[banksie]

Originally Posted by Davros

Does the game blame you for that ?

I don't have direct personal evidence for that but I have seen game reviews, particularly the rock paper shotgun, talk about accidentally killing guards with rat swarms and it counting against their chaos rating.

It should count in this case as if you leave the light walls up then the guards will live. It was knocking them down and distracting the guards that caused them to die.