Dunegeon Seige 2 Demo out!

[Margalis]

For subscribers only at Fileplanet. OMG OMG OMG!

Actually, I'm not sure if I'm being sarcastic or not, because I never played the first one. So interpret this post as strictly informative!

[Signe]

oops.  Sorry.

[schild]

Mergerededed.

[Signe]

If you don't stop stalking me, schild, I'm calling the FBI.

[Nija]

1.7 gig demo. I'll pull away from Forza for a few hours to give it some time tonight. Hopefully it's got more to it than the first one did.


IE: I don't want to be able to shift right click on another guy and go AFK for an hour, to come back to 10 levels gained. Being able to play the entire game from the minimap was somewhat neat, in a 'why am i even bothering' type of way.

[Pococurante]

DS had a lot of undelivered promise - I'd love to see a real game using that product.  I'm particularly interested if DS can truly host persistent worlds.  Bioware still holds a Place of Cheese for not doing that from the start.

[Yoru]

Hmm. DS1 was a pretty Diablo-clone from what I recall, with two immediate points of annoyance coming to mind:

* This is my road. There are no others like it, and this one is mine. My road is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I master my life. My road, without me, is useless. Without my road, I am useless. I will stay straight on my road. I will not leave my road. My road will take me all the way from my humble n00b abode down into the pits of hell to slay the demon beast boss thing.  (With apologies to the USMC.)

 Seriously, DS1 was the most blatant and literal manifestation of a game "being on rails" I've ever seen.

* Couldn't save multiplayer games, which occurred in a somewhat less-directed space, so you either had to leave the server running continuously or just be satisfied with never being able to do the whole quest. I didn't explore multiplayer too much, so I might be wrong on that last point.

[Murgos]

If it had actually been a little More of a Diablo clone it would have been a much better game.

Someone DL this thing and let me know if they figured out how to put the fun in.

[Pococurante]

Seriously, DS1 was the most blatant and literal manifestation of a game "being on rails" I've ever seen

Yeah the mod shipped with it was beyond boring.  I never got past my teens before I quit never to load back up.  What I was originally intrigued by was the modding tools.  But NWN came out shortly after and DS1 modding I quit and never to try again.

I always figured they threw the mod in there thinking people would create the kind of rich library we see for NWN.

[Yegolev]

I left the multiplayer map in DS running until I was forced to stop it, otherwise I would have never gotten anywhere.  The single-player map had about as many branches as R-Type.  The mod tools were pretty good, too bad I'm a slackass.

[Yoru]

Yeah the mod shipped with it was beyond boring.  I never got past my teens before I quit never to load back up.  What I was originally intrigued by was the modding tools.  But NWN came out shortly after and DS1 modding I quit and never to try again.

I always figured they threw the mod in there thinking people would create the kind of rich library we see for NWN.

Well, the stock module in NWN wasn't all that much more compelling to me. Instead of 'run in a straight line', it was 'go in a straight line N/E/S/W collecting the quest stuff and then come back here so we can go to the next area and repeat this'. Looking at the way the release dates were juxtaposed and the main modules rushed, I'd suppose the two companies were competing to dominate the RPG mod community.

[Llava]

This last November, Chris Taylor came to my school to give a few talks and meet/greet the students.  Once most of the people were gone and it was down to about a dozen of us, he agreed to show us a really early build of DS2.  It still looked pretty Diablo-clone-ish to me, though I only watched instead of playing.  It seemed "okay."  He did say that he'd send a free copy to those of us who sent him an email on the day of release and mentioned the school's name and all that.  I plan to hold him to that.

Chris himself is a really nice guy with a really twisted sense of humor.  He told us a story about one night when he went for a walk and found himself in a porn store some time later, staring at a giant black butt plug.  He bought it and kept it on his desk in his office, just sitting there in plain view, to see who would notice it or say anything.  Of course, if anyone did ask what it was, he was completely straightforward about saying, "Oh, it's a butt plug."

He also shared a number of... frightening stories regarding the time he spent working with and living with Steve Snow, formerly of Artifact Entertainment (Horizons... a game which Snow relentlessly bashes despite his having worked on it) and now a producer for NCSoft and working on Auto Assault.  These two are either very secure in their sexuality or very gay.  Either way, they're funny, likable people.  Mr. Snow was also present, and he instructed a few students to ask Chris about butt plugs... to which Chris responded, "Yeah, I have mine in."

I sort of rambled there...

Anyways, I do have confidence in the leadership of this product.  It's not made by some jackass who's more concerned about profit than the game.  So if the game isn't all that great when it comes out, at least it won't be for lack of trying.

Also, Snow did seem really, really genuinely psyched about Auto Assault.  As an avid DAoC player himself, he knows that there needs to be a balance between significant PvP and the investment it takes to get to it, both long term (levelling, item farming, etc) and short term (finding a group, stirring up some action).  He definitely expressed a desire to speed up that process and get to the fun part, while still having that part feel significant.  But that's a tangent for another thread, I guess.

[Nekon]

Not really impressed with what i've seen so far. Ofcourse, it only took about 5 minutes for me to get bored and stop playing. Maybe i'll fuck around with it more tomorrow.

[Kageru]

DS modules were pretty boring and repetitive, and the AI was simplistic. I had hopes for it in multiplayer but the game mechanics are also dodgy. Experience is allocated on the basis of damage done and melee ramp up massively faster than casters, which means they effectively start "starving" them for advancement. Add in that melee generates strength, which determines character health and damage. Whereas intelligence generates mana, which only barely keeps pace with the increasing cost of the spells (as you skill up), in addition to making it hard to improve strength.

I'd still like a good co-op RPG for LAN gaming, diablo is a little old now and Neverwinter nights is too complex for many people.

[Krakrok]

The DS1 mod tools sucked compared to the NWN stuff as far as I tried to use them. As in I could actually make stuff with NWN and the DS1 mod tools were so complex as to be unusable.

DS1 took 25 hours to beat and I can't say that I would go back and play it again but it was "fun" in a mindless kill shit Diablo kind of way.

[schild]

I can't bring myself to play this demo. Anyone like it?

[Margalis]

It's funny with the mod stuff - a lot of games want to be a platform for mods, but what they fail to realize is you only really need one in each genre, if even that.

For example the game Impossible Creatures was going to be a platform for awesome RTS mods. Only the game sucked so nobody bothered with the mod, and the RTS mod scene (or any mod scene other than FPS) is pretty small to begin with.

It's a big gamble to try to be the platform for Diablo-style mods.

[Ironwood]

I can't bring myself to play this demo. Anyone like it?

Me neither.  Are there guns ?  That's one thing I remember for the first one.  Gatling guns.  Which pumped your skills up in seconds.

Gah.  DS1 was horrible.

[Nija]

I'm yet another on the 'I can't stand to play this'. I sat through 5 minutes or so of stupid, pointless dialogue then I wanted to kill myself. I fought like 5 or 6 monsters then stopped. It feels old. Out of date. Gameplay is uninspired. I couldn't figure out how to hotkey switch from melee to ranged to magic 1 to magic 2.

Meh, back to Forza.