Slashdot Mirror
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."
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)
More like Gauntlet.
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.
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.
-----
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.
Diablo II, Morrowind, Final Fantasy VI, Half Life 2... I could keep going, but I think you get the idea.
Maybe I'm just sentimental, but I like to break out my old favorites every few years.
Deux Ex, Starcraft, System Shock 2, Half-Life 1...
[Text goes here]
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.
Homeworld, TotalA, Carmegedon 2, Counter Strike... etc
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 ..
This is actually why Blizzard held off introducing teleport-to-dungeon and teleport-to-battleground systems for so long. If you remove the need to travel through the actual world, then the world becomes (as you put it) just one huge glorified lobby for a 5-player co-op game.
The reason they found it necessary is that they've designed WoW more and more around mind-numbing repetitive grinding of intolerably easy dungeons. They need to stop pushing the "kill this same guy once a day for the next week and we'll give you a piece of gear" design and go back to "work a little bit on this long difficult quest chain."
Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.
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.
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.