Too Human Meets Mediocre Reviews

Earlier this week, the long anticipated action-adventure game, Too Human, was finally released for the Xbox 360. After being in various stages of development for about a decade, the game made its US debut to overall lackluster marks. Gamespot weighed in with a 5.5/10, while IGN gave it a slightly more favorable 7.8. Developer Denis Dyack from Silicon Knights defended the game, saying players didn't yet "get it," and that it was "so innovative that we have put some people off." The game's reception in Japan has been similar.

Comments

Some dev's are clueless...

[blahplusplus]

Just because you have the skills to develop a game, does not mean you know how to develop a gaming experience.

There are developers that know how to develop entertaining gaming experience, and their are dev's that just know how to make games without a decent ability to judge whether or not what they are developing is exciting, interesting and entertaining and doesn't suck.

This is a big problem in the industry as far as I'm concerned, there is just too many clueless people (pub's and developers) about how to build entertainment. I think the biggest problem is still the technology. There is so much time and money consuming technical engineering that it overtakes the money and time needed to develop the entertainment aspect. Too much on art and engines, not enough on developing interesting things and connecting them with skill.

Striking a balance is hard, I agree, but that's the business you're really in: Entertainment. Game developers have to be good at knowing entertainment as well as engineering. It's hard, no doubt... and sometimes you just want to keep trying just doing your own thing (which is also valid) but if you want to do your own thing, you got to go back to small time games and understand what aspects of both the art, and the interaction of the objects, makes the game. Some indie game developers know this, they know what is wrong with the industry.

Re:Some dev's are clueless...

[BoberFett]

Between World of Warcraft and the Diablo series, Blizzard has proven that there are tens of millions of gamers who game SOLELY for the objective of collecting incrementally improving loot.

If Too Human fails, it means it's just a bad game.

Innovative?

[RogueyWon]

On the basis of 3 hours or so play, it's a pretty but generally uninspired 3d Diablo clone, at heart. Sure, it mixes Norse mythology with sci-fi, but that's hardly new. Just ask John Romero - I seem to remember him at least partly doing that in Daikatana (although if, like most people, you only played the demo, you won't have seen those bits). It's also really easy, the enemies seem to auto-scale (a la Oblivion), which is a feature that should be consigned to the dustbin of history, and the camera is annoying. Personally, I'd go for a 6 on 10. Maybe a 7 on the basis of the graphics.

Is this just another case of Derek Smart thinking his IQ is at least twice what it really is?

Re:Innovative?

[Feanturi]

What I don't like about the auto-scaling in Oblivion is that the game tends to remain at the same relative difficulty at all times. For an open-ended game where you can access just about anywhere in the world from the beginning of the game, this is no fun. There should be all sorts of places that will get you destroyed until you've been around the block a few times, then you can come back to those areas later and *this time* clear them. That's an accomplishment for you as a player, winning against something that previously kicked your ass. With auto-scaling, this doesn't really happen, you just pick somewhere to go, clear it, go somewhere else, clear that, etc. Don't get me wrong, I loved Oblivion, but various bits of it needed work, and the level scaling thing was one of them.

Re:Innovative?

[vadim_t]

Autoscaling has MANY issues.

Badly tuned autoscaling can result in the game progressing very strangely. You start good and kill enemies with a moderate challenge at the start. But the game believes that is too easy and ramps up the difficulty until you die a couple times, at which point it sets difficulty back to easy. You get a very strange cycle where difficulty progressively rises then abruply falls.

In games like Oblivion it manifests in a different way: It's hard to judge the player's power. For instance in Morrowind (Oblivion's predecessor) you can make items that will continously heal yourself and by performing certain tricks make yourself absurdly powerful at low levels, sometimes without trying very hard. Or, you can follow a very suboptimal progression if what interests you is say, commerce and roleplay. As a result, you get a game that's either absurdly easy or absurdly hard.

Another problem is that you get worlds where EVERYTHING gets harder. At level 1, a rat did moderate amount of damage. At level 20, it now also does moderate damage to a knight in shiny armor, and a keen vorpal longsword of burnination +5. The lowly thugs you had issues with at level 3 now level 15, wear shiny armor and have magical swords, and inexplicably demand your lunch money. It doesn't make any sense for a warrior in the top 1% of the world to hang around a crossroads and mug people. They could go hire themselves for a much better price.

Even the scaling is done well, the result is still strange. The cave where low life robbers are hiding is still challenging at level 15. The citadel is possible to storm at level 5. If it wasn't for the requirement of having the right items you could probably go fight the big bad at level 3, as autoscaling would ensure he'd be possible for you to defeat.

IMO, games like Oblivion should be planned differently. Instead of autoscaling there should be a progressive increase in difficulty as you get away from civilization. The rats in an inn's cellar should be doable at level 1. The bandits on the crossroads should be moderately challenging at level 5. The hideout in the woods far from the road should be pretty hard at level 10. And if you decide to storm a castle, you'd better be armed to the teeth.

It should be perfectly possible to make a game where you can explore even at low levels. Cities should be generally safe. Roads less so. The further you get from civilized places, the less safe it should be. It doesn't have to be frustrating, if you find you're barely surviving you should be able to return to safer places.

Re:Bad grammar

[wigle]

The title follows the conventions of use in English. It won't confuse any native speaker.

Just as films can get "good reviews" and "bad reviews", a video game can get "mediocre reviews".

Don't get it.

[Merls the Sneaky]

If game players "just don't get it" then you have made a bad game.

Re:Don't get it.

[Das Modell]

Well, not necessarily. If you released Grim Fandango or Fallout today, I bet there'd be a lot of Halo kiddies who wouldn't "get it."

Re:Don't get it.

[Das Modell]

Contrary to what it's become popular to spout, gamers today aren't a bunch of fuckin' morons.

Very seldom is there an actual, valid, reason to back these sentiments up.

Clearly you have never visited forums populated by gamers, such as Steampowered. The average gamer is so stupid that no amount of science and philosophy can explain how they're able to even turn on a computer.

Nor, for that matter, is Halo a bad game.

No, but it's got a really shitty fanbase.

Re:Don't get it.

[Das Modell]

Halo has, far and away, the best story to grace an FPS.

BioShock
Deus Ex
Half-Life
Half-Life 2
System Shock
System Shock 2
Thief
Thief II

Half-Life 2 and BioShock are the only ones that were released after Halo.

No other game, for that matter, has characters so endearing that I actually gave a damn about their fates by the end of the journey.

Whatever credibility you might have had just vanished. Poof. Gone.

We may see better stories in FPS games in the future, but Halo's legacy will always be that it was the first FPS to have a great tale to tell.

The only thing I remember about Halo's story is that someone's going to activate Halo and it's going to kill everyone, and then Master Chief stops it.

Re:Not at all surprising

[Generic Guy]

I heard so much buzz about this game in the months/years leading up to its publication. Can someone more knowledgeable about some of the history help me understand this?

I think most of the "buzz" surrounding Too Human was mostly about how long the game has been in development and Silicon Knights' very public fallout with Epic. After spending a lot of money on Epic's Unreal Engine, SK then claim it was delivered unfinished and un-usable, and that promised enhancements were ignored while Epic used the time and money to finish their own competing game. Ultimately, Silicon Knights sued Epic and then say they rewrote the game and authored their own complete game engine. The whole lawsuit thing is a bit of a spectacle, especially since no other dev houses seem to have anything bad to say about Epic's Unreal Engine.

I'd say this is less hype about Too Human itself and more about watching this train wreck unfold.

Re:Bad grammar

[Anonymous Coward]

Meet is slightly problematic, though.

Meet is used all the time in English! Superbowl teams meet victory! I go to the grocery to meet food! Transplant patient meets new kidney!

It's a perfectly cromulent word in this situation.

Re:A decade?

[LilBlackDemon]

It's changed significantly since it was announced. Also, it's been on (in order), the PS1, GameCube, and now X360. It also started out as futuristic Sci-Fi, and now it's Gothic Norse.