Discussion
  • ethelred August 12, 2011 at 9:55 am

    Between this atrocity, D&D languishing under Atari’s incompetent management (Daggerdale & Neverwinter MMO), and Obsidian’s Alien Crucible getting canceled, it’s not a good time for licensed RPGs. How sad.

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  • aidan August 12, 2011 at 9:57 am

    Really, though, has there *ever* been a good time for licensed RPGs outside of the old Bioware/Obsidian D&D games? Still, I had high hopes for this (no matter how sceptical I knew I *should* have been).

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  • ethelred August 12, 2011 at 10:54 am

    Outside of the old BioWare/Obsidian games? I think so. The D&D license has a much longer and richer history than that which started with Baldur’s Gate. We also had years of Gold Box and Eye of the Beholder titles. To go from that, to BG/ID/PS/NWN, to… Daggerdale and a Cryptic MMO? Well.

    I would also say the Star Wars license was being handled better than it is now in the RPG space, and then you’ve got Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines, the adaptations of Feist’s books (the Krondors) and the X-Men Legends games (not phenomenal by any stretch, but very solid co-op fun that puts the current Silicon Knights “effort” to shame).

    While it’s true we never had a time period consisting of widespread adaptations of various quality multimedia licenses, and literary adaptations such as Game of Thrones/Wheel of Time were even rarer, I still feel things were better off than they are now.

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  • krish August 12, 2011 at 12:54 pm

    I was never expecting much, so I’m not overly dissapointed. The only thing that could could get me interested in this, was if the RPG was developed by CDPR or FromSoftware, and the RTS game by Creative Assembly. But I could never really imagine the books as an RPG/RTS game, but more something like Europa Universalis.

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  • Phil August 12, 2011 at 3:49 pm

    Seriously? I agree with you 100% Aidan… I had great hopes for this one and now…

    The graphics are simply horrible… the only positive aspect of all this is the dedication of the development team at Cyanide…since I speak french, I’ve listened to the video interview and the guys seems to have put everything they had in the project and they had good ideas… sadly, from what I gather from all of this (graphic, gameplay, etc…) I don’t think they will succeed…

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  • Michelle August 13, 2011 at 6:00 am

    To me, most of those shots (following the link) are gorgeous. I’m thinking of games like Dragon Age and Oblivion on XBox 360 for comparison. Have the games that I haven’t played really advanced so far in comparison? What am I missing?

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  • brandonS. August 13, 2011 at 10:32 am

    Well, it looks no worse than WOW. Since the game won’t be coming out for a while, i’m guessing that this might be the early stages of development (I don’t know, I have not heard much about this game), but as long as the story and gameplay is good, than graphics might only be a weakness (instead of something that brings the game down).

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  • aidan August 13, 2011 at 10:35 am

    World of Warcraft was released six-and-a-half years ago. It’ll likely be seven or eight years old by the time AGOT comes out. Not exactly a ringing comparison.

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  • Daniel Abraham August 14, 2011 at 3:44 am

    On the other hand, it’s true that Dragon Age: Origins isn’t resting on particularly stunning graphics and is still a very good game. (Better IHMO than Dragon Age 2, which had better graphics but a lot of other flaws, especially in story structure.)

    Not saying the game won’t suck. Just that it’s early days yet.

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  • aidan August 14, 2011 at 8:44 am

    A fair point, Daniel. I put 85 hours into Dragon Age: Origins (on the Xbox 360, no less) and it looked even more bland and technically unimpressive than this. Bioware *does* have a track record that I trust, though, which is the big difference in my mind.

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  • Matthew September 2, 2011 at 3:45 pm

    Terrible logo; genuinely hideous screens. But, I imagine these are fairly early and the graphics will improve greatly. Early game screens are almost always horrendous.

    However, @BrandonS., it looks MUCH worse than World of Warcraft, especially after the recent graphical enhancements they made to it. WoW has always been cartoon-y, but it’s graphics were on-par with everything else when it was originally released, and they have brought it along well, I think. These screens, however, would have been counted as ugly if they had been on the PS2.

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