Too Human - New thread is up

CarbonFire

KiTA wrote: »

So...

A voice of sanity over on NeoGAF was pointing out that Too Human's review scores were about the same as some other, well, other games that are now considered hits or at least sleeper hits. The only one I seem to remember mentioned was Shenmune though, and GameRankings doesn't seem to back that up.

The comments in this thread certainly don't back up a 70% rating, anyway, although the whole "falling through the world" bug has me rather worried...

That's a co-op bug, that anecdotally seems to be linked to the amount of lag you experience in-game. I've done co-op 3-4 times now, and the only times I've experienced any real clipping/hitbox issues were when one of the party members had a 0 out of 4 ping.

Its not a bug free game to be sure, but the fun that can be had far outweighs the occasional issue. Just stick to co-op with people near you and you should be golden. Or worst case you may have to restart the game once in a great while.

Definitely a sleeper hit, and worth picking up for those that like action RPGs or loot hunts.

KiTA

So, what happened?

Combination of hype overload, Derrick and NeoGAF fighting, and NeoGAF being a really big collection of gamers all in one forum? (With Gabe's Law in full swing?)

Or are we at the point that a nice 3D Action-Roguelike isn't feasible anymore?

Nonetheless, all your guys talk has got this on my list, going to get it tonight on the way home.

!!!

Hey, if you're still around Mr. Dyack -- Speaking of Roguelikes, for DLC, mebbie you could do a bigass randomized challenge dungeon that changes every time you enter it. Think Nethack, Azure Dreams, Chocobo's Dungeon, etc etc.

I think Blue Dragon did something similar for their first big DLC push?

kildy

What happened was that people didn't review the game, they reviewed Dyack with a 10 year development time, and decided that Too Human isn't good for 10 years of work.

Essentially the drama around the game influenced the reception of the game. If you didn't follow anything and just picked it up and played it, you may like it, you may not. If you've lived this shit for 10 years now, chances are you may have built something in your head that isn't what ended up. But the general idea is that they stopped short of just reviewing the game in the box, and pretty much went for universal panning, no matter what the game's actual flaws.

Preacher

kildy wrote: »

What happened was that people didn't review the game, they reviewed Dyack with a 10 year development time, and decided that Too Human isn't good for 10 years of work.

Essentially the drama around the game influenced the reception of the game. If you didn't follow anything and just picked it up and played it, you may like it, you may not. If you've lived this shit for 10 years now, chances are you may have built something in your head that isn't what ended up. But the general idea is that they stopped short of just reviewing the game in the box, and pretty much went for universal panning, no matter what the game's actual flaws.

Wisdom gentleman.

KiTA

So in other words, if this goes trilogy, and they are actually forced to review 2, we're going to hear a lot of "Well, #1 sucked but what happened, #2 is great?"

Or if they release a big patch, even if all it does it change the font color on the main menu, ditto then?

CarbonFire

Also TH gets railed in the reviews for having less than stellar story telling. There is some truth to that, as they don't ease you into the story, they dump you in and hope you keep swimming. Well that, and the animations (especially facial) in most of the cutscenes are pretty sub-par for a game in this generation.

But honestly for a game like this, the story really does take a back seat to the gameplay and character progression. Heck, I'd play this game even if it had NO story, because I think the environments are interesting enough on their own and the gameplay/loot is great.

I do hope we see some DLC, or possibly a random dungeon generator later on. That would push the replay value of this game through the roof.

kildy

I don't know about great. The game deserves a mid 8 score, really. It has horrible flaws the reviewers could have hit better, but the core gameplay is addicting and fun. I don't expect reviewers to ever come around on it, especially since theyr'e in agreement for the most part and it would look odd for them go to "whoops, I was totally wrong" for minor changes. If Too Human 2 fixes things like the slow menus and rather annoying cyberspace (the world tree is Annoying. Really Really Annoying. The other parts are a neat way to visualize the system. Just less walking.) and doesn't take Blizzard scale timeframes to do so, it should be much better received.

But don't expect reviewers to up and go "haha, we were all wrong, this is a lot of fun" in public. In private, sure.

kildy

Play multi. The story is pretty horribad beyond fan service to norse mythos. And god, some of the animations. Please, Dyack. I like you. I think you made a good game. Using the ingame engine for cutscenes should be reserved for when your ingame engine can render them without looking stupid <3 That thor scene at the end of the world tree? The hammer throw? YE GODS man.

aBlank

gah, I thought orange runes were the best and here I am finding red runes +2 to human alignment's faster rate of fire skill.

I also have 3 epic charms I'm working on. Getting 80 200-hit combos can fuck off. 1K ruiners and finding 15 secret areas is much easier.

Preacher

I didn't have a problem with the story, though I compare this game to PSO which basically had 0 story. So there is that.

Preacher

aBlank wrote: »

gah, I thought orange runes were the best and here I am finding red runes +2 to human alignment's faster rate of fire skill.

I also have 3 epic charms I'm working on. Getting 80 200-hit combos can fuck off. 1K ruiners and finding 15 secret areas is much easier.

There are red runes? Holy fuck I new red charms but didn't know runes. And one of my red charms wants 4k 40 hit combos (thats for an instant death black hole proc) the other one was a lot more reasonable, 4k goblins. Good thing I love killing goblins.

Monger

Preacher wrote: »

kildy wrote: »

What happened was that people didn't review the game, they reviewed Dyack with a 10 year development time, and decided that Too Human isn't good for 10 years of work.

Essentially the drama around the game influenced the reception of the game. If you didn't follow anything and just picked it up and played it, you may like it, you may not. If you've lived this shit for 10 years now, chances are you may have built something in your head that isn't what ended up. But the general idea is that they stopped short of just reviewing the game in the box, and pretty much went for universal panning, no matter what the game's actual flaws.

Wisdom gentleman.

That's not the end of the story, though. Honestly, after the review nonsense, I think a lot of people picked up the game to find it not as horrific as they were told, but overestimated how much praise it deserves due to some "fuck the reviews" mindset. I think a lot of people are selectively ignoring that the game has a lot (a lot) of relatively fundamental flaws in its design. I'd consider it an important release as far as conceptual game design is concerned and it's great fun a lot of the time, so I wouldn't call it a bad game at all. I'm pretty hesitant to call it a great game, though. Mostly it's a lot of awesome ideas that are subtly broken. I'm kind of tempted to refer to it as this generation's Trespasser, but that's definitely more harsh than is fair.

I finally got my copy in and played till the end of Hall of Heroes. Contrary to popular belief, the story seems to be really good, but Jesus does it expect a lot of the player. I mean, the opening scene with Hod sets up the entire world, but only if you're intimately familiar with both the mythology and SK's spin on it. And if ever a game was in dire need of mocap, this is it.

kildy

In an honest, perfect game review world, it might be a 7. We sadly don't live in that, and this game is scoring near Lair. So it's likely an 8 to 8.5 in game-terms, which don't go below 6.

The engine has cracks (some clipping, the RNG is busted eight ways to sunday, occasional glitches, animations could be a bit better), but the reviews are essentially panning it as the worst game to come out in years.

I think the story is okay, the acting and such are murder. And it zooms in on faces a lot. The engine does a horrible job with faces. Stop pointing it out. Even moreso, stop magically taking off my helmet every time Baldur wants to make an offhand remark to a wolf trooper.

The core gameplay is there, however. It's fun at it's most basic level. It's the stuff duct taped to the side of the hacking and slashing that needs work.

KiTA

Metacritic and Gamerankings both have it at a 6.9 -- that's as close as you can get to a 7 without being a 7...

Some of that (the helmet, the RNG, perhaps even the clipping and animations) sounds like stuff that would be easily patchable.

The_Scarab

Earth Defense Force is also on 69. So that proves how useless metacritic is at determining the quality of a game.

CarbonFire

Honestly, I'd say IGN's score of 7.8 is probably the closest to right on the money.

chasm

Yeah, and despite a few stupid comments (no penalty for dying olol), their video review was pretty fair.

tbloxham

I do hope we get some DLC soon, I'd love an extra world, or some more side quests. More damage from guns at normal skill levels would be good too.

I'd also like easy mode scaling like I suggested earlier please That would make everyone happy.

Psychotic One

An endless arena would be fun too. See how far you can get with an endless supply of goons coming would be fun. My defender would be holding his ground while Eye of the Tiger plays somewhere in the background.

Preacher

Psychotic One wrote: »

An endless arena would be fun too. See how far you can get with an endless supply of goons coming would be fun. My defender would be holding his ground while Eye of the Tiger plays somewhere in the background.

Eye of the tiger or Holding out for a hero.

tbloxham

I agree that the endless arena would be fun.

Health drops would no longer increase as health fell.
Fight until dead against steadily more difficult enemies (ie wave 1 is level 1 and so on)
The further you get, the bigger the reward you get at the end.

darleysam

Preacher wrote: »

Psychotic One wrote: »

An endless arena would be fun too. See how far you can get with an endless supply of goons coming would be fun. My defender would be holding his ground while Eye of the Tiger plays somewhere in the background.

Eye of the tiger or Holding out for a hero.

I can only hear my band's cover of this when anyone mentions it now, but yes, either would be awesome.

CarbonFire

Psychotic One wrote: »

An endless arena would be fun too. See how far you can get with an endless supply of goons coming would be fun. My defender would be holding his ground while Eye of the Tiger plays somewhere in the background.

Yeah that would be awesome.

Structure it like a series of doors (similar to the early section in the first level, without the cyberspace nonsense) where each one carries a chance to hold a horde of enemies (common), a boss fight (somewhat rare), or a loot room (rare). Once you open one of the doors, the others become deactivated, and you get a new (higher difficulty) set of doors if you can survive the room.

tbloxham

CarbonFire wrote: »

Psychotic One wrote: »

An endless arena would be fun too. See how far you can get with an endless supply of goons coming would be fun. My defender would be holding his ground while Eye of the Tiger plays somewhere in the background.

Yeah that would be awesome.

Structure it like a series of doors (similar to the early section in the first level, without the cyberspace nonsense) where each one carries a chance to hold a horde of enemies (common), a boss fight (somewhat rare), or a loot room (rare). Once you open one of the doors, the others become deactivated, and you get a new (higher difficulty) set of doors if you can survive the room.

Oooh, that is a cool idea. I hope the game is expandable enough to support additions like that.

VaLiantine

I always thought the cyberspace mechanic was going to be like a spectral change gameplay similar to the Soul Reaver series.

Psychotic One

It would be great DL content especially if they add a coop option to it to put your teamwork to the test.

I would predict a Taunt Defender / Plasma Commando would own the arena if it ever happened.

Aoi

KiTA wrote: »

Hey, if you're still around Mr. Dyack -- Speaking of Roguelikes, for DLC, mebbie you could do a bigass randomized challenge dungeon that changes every time you enter it. Think Nethack, Azure Dreams, Chocobo's Dungeon, etc etc.

I think Blue Dragon did something similar for their first big DLC push?

Yeah, it was called Shuffle Dungeon, and from what I've heard, it was a bit of a bitch.

VaLiantine

Got my Level 3 Epic Charm.

The requirements you ask? Kill 12,000 enemies in the air. To boot, I just got my 20,000 kill achievement. Oh its going to be a nice long session with this game for the week.

The_Scarab

Randomized geometry is always worse than hand placed stuff.

See: Hellgate London.

Namrok

The_Scarab wrote: »

Randomized geometry is always worse than hand placed stuff.

See: Hellgate London.

Hellgate had a lot more problems than just that.

CarbonFire

The_Scarab wrote: »

Randomized geometry is always worse than hand placed stuff.

See: Hellgate London.

Yeah, I don't think the randomized geometry would be good. But since each challenge room can be filled with any number or type of enemies, you just have a series of those, and make the type/quantity/level of enemies the differentiating factor.

And they could possibly do a slight randomization of the levels, but keep it relatively simple by making interchangeable tile areas and laying them out in like a 3X3 or 4X4 configuration. Plenty of possible configurations there, and it would be relatively easy to write rules to ensure there's always a path to the exit.

█ █ █ █

█ █ █ █

█ █ █ █

Where each tile can contain a regular ground tile, a bridge, a raised tile / stairs, a tower / pit / inaccessible area, or possibly a small loot tower.

The_Scarab

If we are thinking up modes why not the Horde mode from Gears of War 2?

One room, respawning health crates. Wave after wave of enemies, varying density and type.

I mean the game is ostensibly one big grind why not make it an arena challenge type thing for co-op.

Have leaderboards for time surviving, most enemies killed, waves survived or something.

After each 10 waves spawn a chest in the middle with scaled loot.

It would require little time to develop I would imagine, heck just cut and paste a large circular room already in the game or use several challenge rooms.

The mechanic is in the game already, counting enemies killed in the rooms to get the different tier of loot rewards.

Seems like a meta challenge outside of the main plot and narrative would be great.

The_Scarab

Also:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZeyVC74lZQ


I need this game now. Commando looks so fun.

darleysam

That's basically what I was thinking when I played the demo. I'd just want a fighting room, where there's constant waves of enemies to smash. Having it structured like you guys are suggesting would be so much better, though.

Waka Laka

New Thread is going up, leave this one to the Valkyries.