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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."
So, kinda like Borderlands except not as multiplayer? I'm excited anyway.
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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.
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?
A Neckbeard
Is this a rhetorical question?
How will Bethesda top Demon's Souls?
Easy. Like other recent Bethesda RPG projects, there will probably be a mod kit. Want the game to behave more like Demon's Souls and less like a traditional modern western RPG? You can make a mod for that.
Extensibility very nearly always beats what you can come up with in-house.
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.
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.
Hopefully this time they won't get lazy and just port the XBOX interface to PC like they did with Oblivion ..
Infinite fireball was the best trick ever (though it didn't work in every patch . . . I forget which patch broke it and if it worked in the final official patch).
Anyway, neat trick:
Go to the spellmaker thingy and create a targeted AoE spell that has the Calm effect. Make the duration however long you want since it doesn't matter (I don't remember of Calm effects had a duration anyway).
Go to whatever dungeon and use it on enemies, repeatedly, while playing a character with the magic absorption in darkness advantage (which operates at 100% success rate when you're exposed to your own ranged AoE spells). You never run out of mana unless you really screw up, and after being tossed around by AoE Calm (yes, enemies hit by non-damaging AoE still get thrown around by the "blast") enough times, they will inexplicably die from . . . overexposure I guess. Feed someone enough magical valium and I guess it's fatal.
It's an excruciatingly slow way to kill enemies, but it does work.
Split screen mode seems kind of lame, just how many way split do you demand it support? How many controllers does your average console support?
Haven't tried this in Morrowind, but I recall doing a more powerful version of this in Daggerfall. Spell absorption and a firewall that does health transfer (forget the exact name) .. keep shooting at your feet whenever you have enemies nearby and you'll:
1. Never run out of mana because you'll just re-absorb it.
2. Heal up!
I stopped using it because you could kill any melee opponent, even ancient vampires. The firewall blast would push enemies back and stop them from performing combat moves against you while giving them damage.
A smaller version was great for training magic skills as well. Map the spell to a key and place your character next to a wall. Put a brick on the key and come back after a few hours to 100 skill.
The Elder Scrolls franchise used to be soooo good it wasn't funny, nobody had that sort of sandbox in a fantasy realm. Elite had it in a space format, but in an RPG? Only Bethesda ..
Shame they seem to have sold out to the console market .. console users aren't exactly the demographic that likes proper RPGs.
How about 4? I know modern game systems can support more then 4 controllers, but 4 has always been pretty much the standard. Back in the day we had no problems playing a game on standard def tv split into 4. With modern HD sets you are getting about the same resolution per quadrant as we were used to getting in 1 player mode.
Cool art gallery, if you're into that sort of thing.
Somewhere between 2 and 4 would suit me just fine. I remember the good old days playing 4 way split screen Goldeneye on the N64 with low resolution TVs and it worked well enough for a good time to be had by all.
You never played splitscreen on - say - the NES? Ik worked quite well, even on the small tvs people had back then. Given the average gamer now probably has a 40" full HD tv, splitting that in four shouldn't be a problem at all. Now get of my lawn.
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
Tried it, had I read this post 5 hours into playing it I would have agreed with you. Come hour 6, I lost all interest as it didn't get more interesting as I went along. The whole point of Torchlight was to introduce the back story for the MMO, which is strange because that's the key component that Torchlight lacked. Some lady keeps showing up at checkpoints at regular intervals telling you to go deeper, you go deeper. The quests and maps don't vary enough.
It had great music, good graphics, acceptable gameplay (although higher level spells were lacking) and no story.
split-screen is horrible stupid lame crap.
How about: if you can't design your game to work on one screen, don't bother releasing co-op mode.
Yes, split-screen is a quick hacky work-around for FPS, but for a 3rd-person game, just move the camera around or have the player who has dropped their controller to go get more cheetos drop off the screen until they come back.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
that is exactly how i felt. The game started strong, but it never changed. The side quests consisted of "kill this guy on level 12" kill him, hand it in, "kill this guy on level 15". the other side quest was "get some item on level 12" get it, hand it in, "get some item on level 15". I know basically all RPG quests are like that, but they try to mask it with story or something. The side quests in torchlight were literally like what I described.
Who says we don't? And what is a "proper RPG" anyway. We don't really know, because nobody ports the games you might consider "proper RPG's" for us nowadays. And even if they do, they're Japan only like that PSone port of Ultima Underworld.
There are a few console games here and there that feel a bit more PC RPG inspired.
Agreed. Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout...Bethesda has created some amazing and beautiful worlds with brilliant writing. They pushed past the boundaries of what had been done before. Heck, I still play Morrowind.
For a two player game, two player split screen sounds appropriate.
I'd love to play this game with my boyfriend, but alas, we have only one TV, one xbox, and - if we purchase it - only one disc.
So, unless the single player is singularly compelling, I can write this game off my list already.
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.
wow... you _liked_ the writing for Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout (3)? I found the writing mediocre and the quests linear. I really despise quests that always have the same ending no matter who you are and how you play it. I think the games look good, but I have a hard time playing them through ONCE, much less more than once (in fact, I failed to finish Morrowind or Fallout 3) - contrast that to Fallout 1 and 2, which I probably played through 10 times each.
My biggest problem with Bethesda games are the rigid quests. Even when they give the semblance of being flexible, they always have the same ending. For instance, in Morrowind (or was it Oblivion... I forget) there are some female bandits that always prey on men. If you are male, you get preyed upon, fight them and kill them. If you are female you get a choice to join them, then the guard entraps you and YOUR ONLY CHOICE is to fight them and kill them.
Essentially, there is little or no variance based on class, sex, intelligence, etc to the outcome of any quest, just in how you get there. In contrast, in Fallout 2 if you were an idiot, you spoke like an idiot (and it was hilarious) - your dialogs and outcomes varied. Male and Female characters had different options in some conversations - it was worth replaying the game as both where in Bethesda games it makes no difference. The cut-and-dry morality bugs me, too - blow up the nuke or not? Obviously blowing up the nuke is the bad option and not blowing it up is the good option. To be neutral, you have to do equal numbers of good and evil actions. In Fallout 2, by contrast, you could get yourself into a shotgun wedding and the only way to get rid of the useless person was divorce, murder (or death in combat), or selling them to slavers. Obviously there are better and worse options, but really, which one is good? They all seem bad to me, but some are obviously more bad. Other times there are only essentially good choices, but some of them have long term consequences - for instance, to free someone from slavers, do you kill the slavers, buy the slaves, or sneak in and set them free? In Fallout 3 you did have a similar choice, but it was very rigidly structured - always 2 choices, and always the same outcome.
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.
So...now we're criticizing companies for NOT churning out sequels?
The console has traditionally not been well supplied with proper RPGs, tending more towards action oriented games (eg. shooters). This means that RPG enthusiasts have tended to be PC users because all the good RPG games (eg. Baldur's gate series) have been released on them. In turn that leads developers to not target the XBOX audience for such games, which then drives RPG lovers to PC .. it basically becomes a self-replicating phenomenon. Which came first? It's a chicken and egg issue, but suffice to say that at present consoles are not what you get for a RPG experience.
It's interesting to speculate what might have happened if RPGs had made it big on consoles first rather than after PCs. Would the controls (or lack of them to more clear) have hindered such development? IMHO it would've, can you imagine playing BG on an XBOX controller? The main reason for targetting consoles with RPGs seems to be monetary rather than due to any technical advantages the consoles might offer, maybe when they begin attaching keyboards and mice to consoles there'll be proper RPGs made for them. But then isn't that just a computer? ;)
Considering I own the the PS2 Linux kit and have a Yellow Dog Linux install on my PS3....the answer is yes. Funny thing is, back in the 8-bit days there used to be more PC ports. For example, I've got a copy of the NES versions of Bards Tale, and MIght and Magic: Secret of the Inner Sanctum. With tweaked UI the former lack of keyboard and mouse was not as much as a limitation as you might think. (The PS2 and PS3 have USB ports for a reason)