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Messages - Johnwwells

#1
One of the perks of the first-person perspective is that there's no need to develop a "narrator voice." Traditional Sierra narrators tend to be a little wry, gently poking fun at the player, cracking jokes, and so on. But this leads to a problem:

1) If the narrator voice didn't have those touches of color, it would sound too flat...

2) ...but if it did, Mage's Initiation would feel too much like a QfG retread, and not like its own game.

First-person narration in a game Kickstartered by Sierra fans is a risky move, but I like that kind of risk. It shows that the authors are willing to write to their own strengths.

Quote.  That might also keep the player's immersion up, since a narrator narrating in second person constantly associates what you see with what the character sees, making you (the player) feel more personally part of the character.  Kind of like how Link from the Legend of Zelda games never talks or expresses much thought, allowing the player to project his own persona onto him.  D'arc should still talk and express his ideas, but I think a second-person narrator narrating what D'arc is seeing would serve to better make the player feel like he is D'arc, rather than a puppet-master controlling D'arc.

I find it a little less immersive to be playing a mute cipher, unless that mute cipher gives me a LOT of opportunities to project my personality and the game really responds to my choices. The hero of Persona 4 is kind of mute, but still seems to have quirky tendencies (eating grass from a refrigerator, joining a cross-dressing beauty pageant), so it works. Likewise, the QfG hero has some personality that sneaks through (the goofy victory poses, etc), but also can be made to act in ways that establish character even further - being polite, robbing people, helping people in optional quests, and so on.

But when I finally played a Zelda game fairly recently, I just saw Link as a kind of doll, not someone I cared about, not even as a "someone" at all. The same goes for Gordon Freeman of Half-Life. It's just not my style; I don't want to project myself onto a boring person; I want to project myself onto an interesting person!

For a game where you're following a novice becoming a mage, giving the main character a personality to care about, so I can feel for their struggle, is worth a lot to me. I'm willing to empathize with this snarky lead.
#2
Mage's Initiation Forum / Re: Thoughts on the demo
March 22, 2013, 08:11:14 PM
I couldn't get it to work at full resolution on my laptop (a lenovo with a weird monitor dimension), but it was still gorgeous. The experience of the designers definitely shows in the UI options (I used the traditional right-click-to-cycle-icons rather than the verb coin).

The door dials are a wonderfully atmospheric system; all doors the same, all misleading to the outsider.

I'm not a huge fan of the use of classical elements in game magic, if only because it's been done so many times, but at least they're being executed with style. I'm still worried about how the dev team will distinguish their use in puzzles in interesting ways; maybe there will also be more abstract spells that use the elemental disciplines in a less literal way?

The combat was fun up to a point. The fire mine spell could stand to have a way of setting a delay so that enemies would only trigger the mine if they walked over it. That would add to the tactical coolness.

I think the main problem with combat in the demo is the sense of "running around in circles and shooting repetitively" I get from it. To be fair, this also comes up in action RPGs like Diablo, but the confined movement space combined with the relatively few short-range options in the demo makes it worse. That said, the ring of fire spell is great, and I'm going to bet that there'll be more close-range stuff in the full game.

I'm looking forward to this!