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Bethesda Unveils New Co-op Dungeon Crawler
Bethesda Softworks took advantage of the recent Game Developers Conference to take the wraps off a new game called Hunted: The Demon's Forge that they're partnering with development studio inXile to create. It's planned for the PC, Xbox 360, and PS3, though no release window has been set. It's a third-person action game with a swords & sorcery setting, and it features two heroes as they fight their way through monster-filled dungeons. The game is designed such that two users can play together online (no split-screen), each controlling one of the heroes. ShackNews summed it up thus: "From what I saw, Hunted rolled up ideas from a number of different games to create its modern reinterpretation of the dungeon crawl. There was the raw action appeal of wading through waves of goblins, spiders, and related denizens. The skill system and weapon upgrades bring in the character development side from a role playing game. And the co-op design with its warrior and archer dynamic introduces the reward of playing together like an MMO."
Always welcome in by book!
Why do neckbeards like dungeon crawlers?
So, kinda like Borderlands except not as multiplayer? I'm excited anyway.
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Those shelves won't stack themselves.
I read some of the previews of this game and I am cautiously optimistic but a couple of worries:
1. "the raw action appeal of wading through waves of goblins, spiders, and related denizens" sounds an awful lot like Dynasty Warriors/Musou series and while I understand some people are into that, and that's totally fine, I find the games terribly boring. I could be reading too much into the phrasing here, but it's hard to pinpoint what this game is trying to do exactly.
2. To me, the current gold standard for a dungeon crawl is Demon's Souls. How are they going to top DS's brutality and innovate features?
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
The game is designed such that two users can play together online (no split-screen), each controlling one of the heroes.
Wonderful! I like nothing better than to play RPGs that are going to stop working in 5 years!
The problem with all these online console games is servers are going to be turned off far sooner than with PC equivalents (chances are, servers for WoW are going to be up in 2020 and beyond) making the game almost unplayable. Even with PC games, you can host your own server, you can't do that really with console games.
I don't mind paying a -bit- of money for games that are going to go away in 5 years, for example I play The Orange Box on the 360 because I only paid ~$7 used but I'm sure not gonna pay $60 for online-focused games.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Like Gauntlet, only with RPG stats and more power-ups?
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
The game is designed such that two users can play together online (no split-screen)
Well why the fuck not? Online is great and all but I become increasingly annoyed by the fact that I can play with my buddy who is 300+ miles away but the instant he comes over to visit we can't play without doing some wacky setup with extra TV's and consoles. Seriously is it that hard? I've dealt with splitscreen multiplayer since the NES so why is it so hard to find now?
The skill system and weapon upgrades bring in the character development side from a role playing game. And the co-op design with its warrior and archer dynamic introduces the reward of playing together like an MMO.
It is another Diablo clone. Oh, and having two people play together makes it like a massively multiplayer online game? Right.
I don't see a single thing that wasn't in Diablo over a decade ago, let alone something innovative.
I want a new elder scrolls dash nabbit!
Too bad they've decided to do away with split screen. I count myself one of the lucky geeks with a wife who loves video games and one of our favorite types has been the split-screen dungeon crawl like Baldur's Gate. We won't be buying another TV and another PS3 to play games on, though, so I guess this is a game we won't be buying.
Dear Game Developers: Please bring back split-screen play as a standard. While Borderlands is great, we won't be playing it forever.
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My wife and I play on the couch; video games, too.
Bethesda, the poster child for shit game developers, top a masterpiece like Demon's Souls?
Heh.
Bethesda will put out another piece of crap Bethesda game:
* Horribly unoptimized graphics. They've giving up trying to write their own graphics engines and instead are relying on Gamebryo.
* Alpha-level buggy code - with a huge number of bugs that have existed in their shit code base for years and many product regurgitations
* The same tired old braindead gameplay they've been shitting out over the past decade
multiplayer MUD
Hopefully I can use my NIC Card to play some Local LAN network games as well!
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
2. To me, the current gold standard for a dungeon crawl is Demon's Souls.
I'd say that the current gold standard for a dungeon crawl is Diablo II. Nothing else released in the past 10 years has even come close.
do you really play after 5 years?
What an amazingly new and ass-kicking concept! Oh wait, it's been done before. I'm only familiar with the PC version as well.
I think I'll stick with Darkstone; chances are it'll run fine and won't makes my graphics card sound like a jet engine while playing.
And besides/more importantly, given Bethesda's "we don't give a fuck about fixing bugs in our games" stance (I'm referring to Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth), I'm not sure I WANT to play anything they release.
Their games have gone downhill since Morrowind, IMHO. Oblivion was pretty, but it was no Morrowind. My main gripe with both Morrowind and Oblivion and to some extent Fallout 3 has been that Bethesda is very unimaginative when it comes to combat. The melee moves are very limited and the special effects for magic/spells is just supremely unimpressive. They should take note from Final Fantasy's style when it comes to the spell effects and from Demon's Souls style when it comes to melee and character movement.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
And all you'll need to do to play with your flatmate in the next room is connect to our proprietary authentication servers in Asscrapistan. Network outages my occur but are part of normal operational parameters.
Bethesda lost me as a customer after completely screwing over me and everyone else who bought Star Trek Legacy for the PC. If they treat this as well as they treat other third party titles, you'll be in for a great time of necessary patches that never come.
Oblivion > Morrowind.
And Morrowind was certainly no Daggerfall.
Daggerfall > all.
Hopefully this time they won't get lazy and just port the XBOX interface to PC like they did with Oblivion ..
If you want a solid single player dungeon crawler look no further than Torchlight. It is made by the same crew that made Diablo 1 and Diablo 2 (they were immediately fired from Blizzard after making D2). They even got Matt Uelmen to do it's music. Their next project is an MMO but details are lacking as usual.
I fully support these guys. They do roguelikes VERY well as we've seen in the past with D1 & D2, and now they have total creative control over their game. Torchlight is a good bit "happier" than either of the Diablo's but it's story line has nothing to do with the Three Brothers walking the Earth. My only complaint about the the game is that it looks cartoony but that's an artifact of using advanced engines and needing the game to play on every PC out there. It even plays on a netbook.
I just hope the Torchlight MMO doesn't tank like Hellgate London did (wow that was a boat of fail..). Supposedly it will be free-to-play and will survive on microtransactions. I would gladly buy a potion of experience booster, but I wouldn't pay for anything else.
As long as it's not like Hellgate London... ...please God.... anything but something like that again.
I really wish press-releases would stop using "PC" when they really mean "Windows-only".
Finally!
Cooperative multiplayer has been ignored for too long by the games industry. There's one reason I played Borderlands at all, and that's cooperative multiplayer done well. I'm so glad Bethesda is finally going that direction. I've always wanted cooperative Oblivion. Well, one can hope... maybe Eldar Scrolls V... please?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
...was a game almost impossible to complete without a hint book.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/demons-forge
Why does absolutely everything these days match the pattern blablabla-online. A cooperative game just begs to be played with a family member or room mate sitting next to you. This means it needs LAN support above all. Sure online functionality is nice, but I don't want to be dependant on matchmaking just to play a game over my local network. I like to bring my games with me on vacation so I have something fun to do wherever I am, this includes areas without internet access.
I'm willing to bet that this game will sadly do what all other recent games have done recently, namely forced matchmaking, making offline multiplayer impossible.
So that's whats been slowing down the release date of Elderscrolls V. Thanks alot Bethesda, don't forget what your best selling product has been all these years.
I hope they have learned how to do this properly since they made Battlespire. One "interesting" feature happened when you traded between players as the results were rather random, a good pair of boots could turn into a sword.
Carbon based humanoid in training.
A coop PC game pretty much has to have splitscreen unless users connect via LAN or internet. Its rare to find a PC game that allows for 2 players on 1 computer these days.
While Diablo 2 has a lot of its spiritual roots in the rogue-likes, it's quite different in some ways as well.
For example, a lot of the time-based spells or abilities simply can't be modeled by a rogue-like which necessarily is turn based. For example, I've never played a rogue-like where dodging enemy attacks is a significant part, whereas I recall that was rather important in Diablo. Even if dodging were a part of a rogue-like, it'd be pretty awkward in a turn-based game. Diablo's real-time nature introduces an action element that is wholly different from rogue-likes, though whether that's a good or bad thing is a matter of personal taste.
Also, a lot of rogue-likes (like the Anonymous Coward alluded to) equate depth with memorization grinding of experimentation (or more realistically reading the source). Results are often unforeseeable prior to occurring, which I always found a bit frustrating (of course kicking sinks is a great way to find rings!).
The modern MMOs like Anarchy Online have most of the things I've wanted from dungeon crawlers. Here's what I want in a dungeon crawler: Class, equipment and skill asymmetry & synergism, complex crafting, interesting trade-able loot with enough space to store everything I loot (WoW is all nodrop nowadays from what I hear), and enough variety in the fighting to require use of different skill sets.
I refuse to pay blizzard any more money after D2 because they deleted my set of 10 D2 accounts.... 3 times.
ps. Intrusive "we own your machine" DRM games need not apply.