Dreamfall - The Longest Journey - First impressions

[Lateralus]

First thought when actually playing - Tomb Raider!

But that was merely a lol moment going on the initial looks of the game and its first heroine. Its a little clunky on the graphics side, but then maybe Oblivion has raised my benchmark a bit high; think more along the lines of GTA:SA.

Controls are ok, but leave a bit to be desired so far. I've taken to playing it on my PS pad since I generally prefer it for this type of game, but its annoying that the controls can't quite be mapped properly. Some things, such as accessing the inventory and certain puzzles, still have to be keyboard and/or mouse affairs, and having to put the controller down and pick it up again irritates me. This is especially true when there are at least 3 buttons on it that I can't assign. even more annoying is that some functions are better on the PS pad since the 4 symbol buttons are hotkeys mapped to changable actions, whereas in the keyboard and mouse setup you have to select the action with the cursor. Muttermuttergrumblegrumble.

For storyline etc I will report back once I know, but for over 5GB of unremarkable GFX, I'm expecting it to go on for a while. However, first impressions are good, and I'll certainly give it a good run.

One note on the GFX side - it doesn't work properly with the latest nvidia drivers. I was on forceware 84.25 but had to change it back to 81.98 for it to work and not look like digitised bile. It also didn't like the mild overclocking I'd done on my card with the software tweak, so had to undo that as well. Ho hum. Roll on the patch!

[Joose]

But that was merely a lol moment going on the initial looks of the game and its first heroine. Its a little clunky on the graphics side, but then maybe Oblivion has raised my benchmark a bit high; think more along the lines of GTA:SA.

what piss awfull graphics setting do you have it set to then? It looks lovely to me. Not quite as lovely as oblivion, but a damn sight lovlier than GTA.

I agree on the controlls thing though, they are a little odd. However...

in the keyboard and mouse setup you have to select the action with the cursor.

and our servey says....UH UHH!

Im using mouse/keyboard. You can use the keyboard direction arrows to select things in the menus. You can, in fact, control nearly all of the game without a mouse, bar looking about the place.

[Lateralus]

Like the man in the orthopaedic shoes, I stand corrected. I'll give it a fair go then and see how I likes it after that.

[Jinxx]

So far I like err...

So far I dislike: Poor voice acting. FFX and FFX-2 were atrocious, but at least they had the excuse of coming from Asialand. This has come from Scandanavialand and they all speak English better than we do. The acting in this game is almost completely emotionless, the characters waffle on boringly and they never shift their positions/facial expressions when they do. Did we learn nothing from HL2?

So far I dislike: Loading. The sections of map you wander around in are sodding tiny and when you have to run errands or aren't sure what to do, this gets tiresome oh-so-quickly. Did we learn nothing from Oblivion?

I'm not so hot on The Graphics. For a game that's supposed to be brand-damn-new, I'm left utterly lost at how some of the low resolution textures made it into the final game. Also, I've got strange graphics glitches (I also had some with TLJ1, I recall) where items in my inventory don't display properly. Also, some of the character models are really quite poorly made. Did we learn nothing from Quake 4?

I'm really hating The Camera. Whichever retard decided to reverse the x-axis on my mouse and then give me no option to change it needs to be severely beaten. Also, during fights, it always finds some object to obscure my view, so i'm utterly fucked. Did we learn nothing from Tomb Raider?

I'll kill someone if I have to do another fucking fight. The controls are utter wank (even on a joypad), the damage you receive seems to be random and the pace of it is so slow! Did we learn nothing from Tekken/Virtua Fighter/Street Fighter 2 Turbo Ultradeluxe Christ-On-A-Bike Edition?

The story isn't paced correctly, it moves at a snail's pace and then - while you're half paying attention - suddenly jumps so quickly through an important piece of dialogue, that you have to go rummaging through your notebook again for it after. Aimless chit-chat and dull voices telling you endless amounts needless things do not add colour and real-world flavour to a game. They make it fucking boring and a chore to sit through. Did we learn nothing from LucasArts?

This game could have been wonderful, but in all honesty, it's a medicore adventure game, a rubbish action game, terrible fight game, and a complete disappointment.

[Chickenz]

So far I like err...

So far I dislike: Poor voice acting. FFX and FFX-2 were atrocious, but at least they had the excuse of coming from Asialand. This has come from Scandanavialand and they all speak English better than we do. The acting in this game is almost completely emotionless, the characters waffle on boringly and they never shift their positions/facial expressions when they do. Did we learn nothing from HL2?

So far I dislike: Loading. The sections of map you wander around in are sodding tiny and when you have to run errands or aren't sure what to do, this gets tiresome oh-so-quickly. Did we learn nothing from Oblivion?

I'm not so hot on The Graphics. For a game that's supposed to be brand-damn-new, I'm left utterly lost at how some of the low resolution textures made it into the final game. Also, I've got strange graphics glitches (I also had some with TLJ1, I recall) where items in my inventory don't display properly. Also, some of the character models are really quite poorly made. Did we learn nothing from Quake 4?

I'm really hating The Camera. Whichever retard decided to reverse the x-axis on my mouse and then give me no option to change it needs to be severely beaten. Also, during fights, it always finds some object to obscure my view, so i'm utterly fucked. Did we learn nothing from Tomb Raider?

I'll kill someone if I have to do another fucking fight. The controls are utter wank (even on a joypad), the damage you receive seems to be random and the pace of it is so slow! Did we learn nothing from Tekken/Virtua Fighter/Street Fighter 2 Turbo Ultradeluxe Christ-On-A-Bike Edition?

The story isn't paced correctly, it moves at a snail's pace and then - while you're half paying attention - suddenly jumps so quickly through an important piece of dialogue, that you have to go rummaging through your notebook again for it after. Aimless chit-chat and dull voices telling you endless amounts needless things do not add colour and real-world flavour to a game. They make it fucking boring and a chore to sit through. Did we learn nothing from LucasArts?

This game could have been wonderful, but in all honesty, it's a medicore adventure game, a rubbish action game, terrible fight game, and a complete disappointment.

amen brother!!!!!1

what game we talking about???

[mrbobbins]

it doesn't work properly with the latest nvidia drivers. I was on forceware 84.25 but had to change it back to 81.98 for it to work and not look like digitised bile

The latest proper offical Nvidia drivers are 84.21

http://www.nvidia.com/object/winxp_2k_84.21.html

84.25 was a beta driver for initial oblivion fixes

http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=1356

There is a 91.28 beta driver out which has a new nvidia control panel, anyone tried this?

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downl ... 91.28.html

[Lee]

There is a 91.28 beta driver out which has a new nvidia control panel, anyone tried this?

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downl ... 91.28.html

Yes, the new control panel is completely unintuitive and most of the features from the old one are missing. I hope they make some huge improvements by the time it goes final or they might aswell go back to the old one.

[Joose]

Are you guys playing some wierdly gimped pre-release version of this, or are you just being crap?

Ive just had a quick test to make sure im not being delusional: The option for adjusting the horizontal axis on the mouses camera control is cunningly hidden next to "Horizontal Camera Axis: Inverted/normal"

As for the graphics, I really dont see what the problem with it is. Is it as shiney as oblivion? no. Does that mean its eye-breakingly hideous? no. It may just be that my machine is behind the times a little, so im more used to playing games on normal, rather than bleeding-edge graphics settings, but the game looks lovely to me. Like i said, the technology behind it isnt exactly amazing, but the style and design of the thing is very pretty. Its slightly on the cartoony side, rather than going for photo-realism, but I think thats intentional.

As for everything else: The voice acting isnt great, but its not that bad either. Certainly above the standard for most voice acting in games. In fact, I cant think of *one* game that has what I would call *good* voice acting, so you cant really slam this game for being slightly sub standard without slamming everything else too.

Loading times: Yes, they are quite frequent. However, (possibly because of this) they are fucking short, even on my slightly elderly set-up. We are talking about 10 seconds at the most.

Fight scenes: yes, they are rubbish. But ive got through quite a bit of the game so far, and theres only been 3 fights that you cant avoid with just a little thought, and all of them have been either against piss easy oponents, or just sparring, meaning you dont actually have to win it to progress. So its a milt irritation at most.

Facial animation: yes, they do change their expressions as they talk. What are you on about?

Im not saying its the greatest game ever, its not even that good, but its certainly not rubbish. Its good enough for me to want to keep playing it, put it that way.

Personally, so far, i'd give it a 6 out of 10. If i had to.

Jut to clarify, 0 being unplayable and 10 being the best game ever made.

[spoodie]

I'm using the 84.25 drivers I think and noticed no problems so far but I've only played for an hour. And I find the control system to be pretty good using a PS2 pad once I'd configured using the in-game system, all the buttons assigned as per on-screen instructions. The only problem is that when I got trained how to fight at the gym it said "Press [blank space] to kick" or whatever so I had to guess but it's not hard, just a button mashing affair.

I think you're being a little harsh putting this game down, it's not trying to be oblivion or quake 4 or HL2, it's a story driven adventure from a relatively small developer and I am quite enjoying it despite it's flaws.

[FatherJack]

I'm using the 91.28 drivers (switched to classic control panel) and haven't had any problems at all.

My PC wasn't capable of running Oblivion at particularly high settings anyway, so the areas seem nice enough. It's refreshing to see a few in-game levels which aren't based on a space station, factory or cave - not that there aren't any, it's just nice to see Morrocan and Japanese streets for a change.

However, that's about where my praise ends.

The size of the "levels" - that is, the bits in-between having to load - are atrociously small. If they looked utterly fantastic, or had huge NPC populations they could perhaps be forgiven, but they don't.

They don't come anywhere close to what is technically possible, in an attempt to be fair, I won't compare it to the cutting-edge sprawling vistas of Oblivion, or the state-of-the-art level design present in Half-Life 2, where medium-sized areas seem large due to cunning waypoint design - because compared to these, Dreamfall's levels are microscopic.

Stepping back a few years, lets compare the start area to the Morrocan multiplayer level present in No-one Lives Forever 2. Using now-dated technology they created a whole town of a level you could blast around at high speed, not quite as pretty or convincing, but still a reasonable size.

The Japanese train-station level was also rather stifling, lets compare it to Shenmue, which ran on the ancient Dreamcast. While the levels were roughly the same size (2 or 3 streets) they were fantastically detailed and absolutely stuffed with NPCs - you could waste hours just looking at stuff, talking to people and interacting with objects.

Given that the levels are (IMHO unneccesarily) small, they are nice enough and not the worst example ever - they're believable and memorable.

The fighting's a bit random, but not really what the game's about - it's about puzzle solving, and if you're fighting it's usually because you messed up a puzzle - infact sometimes choosing to fight will make progress impossible as some items don't get released correctly.

I haven't played any Tomb Raider games but have played things like Zelda and Broken Sword, so the puzzles were sometimes familiar and sometimes obscure. Everything has a very specific way it must be done, like at one point you can't open a window until you have a sufficiently long "rope" to climb down - which can be frustrating.

I've got stuck a few times, and after consulting GameFAQs the solution seems so obvious, but it's not a way I like to play games - if it were a console game it would be far less tempting to keep checking the websites.

The fact that StarForce is once again lurking on my system makes me want to beat this game and get it uninstalled, but once again I'm stuck, this time in some caves where I have to set some symbols on circular discs and logic doesn't seem to apply, resulting in a rather tedious trial-and-error approach. When this occurs in a game, I usually stop playing.

[Lee]

I'm using the 91.28 drivers (switched to classic control panel) and haven't had any problems at all.

Woo! I didnt realise that you could switch to classic until you mentioned it so I decided to have a better look for it, thanking you

[spoodie]

I've played more of this game recently but still not too far into it despite the fact that this genre used to be my favourite. I say "used to" because recent examples have been real disappointments for me (I'm looking at your Broken Sword 3!).

Fatherjack points out most of the bad points of this game and I think Jinxx covered one that is really bothering me; the very long and boring conversations between characters that have virtually no expression in their faces.

On the plus side, for those that played The Longest Journey the references back to April Ryan I've seen so far are a very nice touch and I do feel compelled to continue so I can find out what happened to her, but then I get to an annoying puzzle and switch off.

[mrbobbins]

recent examples have been real disappointments for me (I'm looking at your Broken Sword 3!)

Push box, Push box, Push box, Push box, die in cutscene because you pressed the wrong button a millisecond late, Push box, Push box, Push box, die in cutscene because you pressed the right button a millisecond late, Push box, a dragon? WTF?!?

[spoodie]

[..]



Push box, Push box, Push box, Push box, die in cutscene because you pressed the wrong button a millisecond late, Push box, Push box, Push box, die in cutscene because you pressed the right button a millisecond late, Push box, a dragon? WTF?!?

I was so crap at that game that it completed one of the so-called quicktime sections for me, after failing so many times, then I gave up before it got the chance at the next difficult one. Broken Sword 4, meh.

[Killavodka]

my opinion of this game after playing for 2 hours, the longest most boring journey of my life... no content, spending half an hour looking for where to go next... crap combat system. failure.