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Dark Messiah of Might and Magic.
Tcheldor
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I was browsing the Steam store for some good deals (and there are some really nice ones), and I noticed this game was there for $17. I figured I'd grab it, and after playing the multiplayer for a little while, I can't figure out why this game wasn't more popular.
Things seems pretty balanced, and the leveling system is something I'm a huge fan of. I haven't touched the single player yet, but I was wondering if anyone else here has played this game in the past.
Things seems pretty balanced, and the leveling system is something I'm a huge fan of. I haven't touched the single player yet, but I was wondering if anyone else here has played this game in the past.
League of Legends: Sorakanmyworld
FFXIV: Tchel Fay
Nintendo ID: Tortalius
Steam: Tortalius
Stream: twitch.tv/tortalius
FFXIV: Tchel Fay
Nintendo ID: Tortalius
Steam: Tortalius
Stream: twitch.tv/tortalius
Tcheldor on
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Best game released last year, hands down. The sheer variety of ways to kill your foes is astounding. Great graphics and locations, fun melee weapons. Stealth, rope arrows, traps.
Never touched the multi player. It seemed pretty crappy, especially when compared to the single player.
They fixed that with a patch within like a week.
I bought it a month or two after release and patched it up fully after installing, the patches didn't fix the problems with the game. It still had huge memory leaks and other problems.
People don't like fun games. The concept of a first person action game where you have fun things to do, rather than mindlessly running around shooting with generic guns was too much for most people to handle.
Or the "Sir Kicksalot in the land of spiked walls" argument. That never made sense to me, since in order for that to be true you basically have to go into the game with the intent to cheese your way through it.
PSN ID : Xander51 Steam ID : Xander51
I'm kind of worried about the supposed locked classes though. Playing as a thief is the most fun, but mainly because you can start putting all your points into melee attack power in the fighter tree once you have stealth.
True, a totally valid concern. I played the demo and the inability to put points into anything was a little weird. Still, it seemed pretty fun in spite of being stuck with a linear progression, and it'll be neat to revisit the game and get some achievement points out of it.
PSN ID : Xander51 Steam ID : Xander51
I wouldn't go out of my way to buy it but if you get it for free or nearly free it's worth playing. (I got mine bundled with my video card as part of some sort of in-store deal or grave insult, I'm not sure which)
You have really poor taste. But then again, so does 1up, so you've got company at least.
You sort of philistines are the reason that FPS games are still stuck in the 90s.
The sheer amount of variety in the game play and levels made me very happy but the bugs and glitches really did it for me. I couldn't beat the game because it kept breaking on both of my computers.
The game reminded me a lot of Rune, which was one of my favorite multiplayer games ever.
Sometimes a computer just refuses to run a game. I never got to play System Shock 2 because of that.
Save early, save often, and don't cheese yourself out of an awesome game experience. It's solid gold.
Or say, Fallout 2. You might have heard of it.
People only talk about bugs when it suits their argument. A game with worse performance issues off the top of my head: STALKER. Which is also totally awesome.
I'm not done sucking Dark Messiah's cock, and could go on for some time.
I just have high standards and if I'm paying full price for a game I expect it to be excellent.
I've found a great deal of bugs in the game, a huge number of exploits, the game art looks dated, and the audio (namely the VO) isn't at a high quality either.
If you think this is an excellent game you should play other recent games and see where the bar is currently at.
The bar you are referring to for you "polished" games simply means more money thrown at them. I can't say I didn't enjoy the hell out of Halo 3's two player campaign, but the gameplay is the same stuff we've seen since Quake first gave us 3d shooters. Is it fun? Sure, you stick with what works.
Dark Messiah's combat is a breath of fresh air, loads of fun attacks, directional melee combat, great use of physics.
Halo 3, incidentally does not really look much better than Dark Messiah, as DM runs off the 2004 source engine, Halo 3 is basically the upgraded Halo 2 engine.
I played Dark Messiah through about 6 times, I played Bioshock through once. Great storytelling and atmosphere never trumps great gameplay. Variation is replayability.
I'm willing to take some bugs and "exploits"? (Halo 3's legendary mode is trivialized by merely engaging all enemies at extreme range and Bioshock...well, you can't even lose) whatever that means, in exchange for the most visceral melee combat I've ever seen in a video game.
The sound I found to be great, aside from the voice acting. But honestly....Halo 3, Gears of War, great voice acting? One of those doesn't belong.
The bar for FPS games is set sickeningly low.
I enjoy and own every shooter I just listed, by the way, and prefer DM to all of them.
It might not be a perfect game, but it was one of my favorite games of last year.
It's not the best written thing in the world or the most polished game to come out but the melee is so much fun I found it impossible to hate and it's the first time I've ever enjoyed first person melee combat since it's usually so poorly done.
But its combat is really great and while not the most complex thing ever, is incredibly visceral. The camera is part of what makes it.
I don't see the camera mentioned much except when it makes people nauseous, but you actually can see your body and the camera is actually inside your own head so as you fight, it will tilt, it will get knocked around, and it will be there following along for every movement you make. It makes the experience something more than your average action RPG of its sort.
Also, you feel like an incredible badass when things go so right and you're slicing through enemies and kicking them into oblivion only to find yourself standing over a pile of bodies mere seconds later.
The overall feel of everything is very primitive too. Feels very much like Hexen II, which was released in, what? 1996?
But I didn't care. I fell in love with this game when I fought my first goblin. I chopped off his head. It rolled across the ground, trough a campfire, and started burning. That's right. Taking his head wasn't enough. I had to set it on fire too.
Are you playing on a standard TV? I had the same problem with HL2 on 360. Unless you are playing it on an HDTV, it looks like pure ass. I assume this may be the problem because its the same engine, largely unmodified.
If you are running it on HDTV, that means a shitty port, which means I'll be a sad panda.
multiplayer was abysmal the last time I tried it.......
Plus im pretty sure it's a diffrent game entirely, like, diffrent maps in the single player?
Why would they do that?
I would buy this, just because it's unique, although I wouldn't pay more than $20 for it.
Most games look great on my standard TV, too, but HL2 looks like shit, and its a good looking game on the PC. Hence my comment.
Lots of money doesn't exactly equal a polished game. You just need to know your budget, and plan the project so that it has a ton of flexibility, and by you I mean the producer/guy who's running the project. There are plenty of smaller games that were more polished, puzzle quest for one. although it's not exactly an apples to apples comparison.
This game makes me strongly suspicious that the guys working ran into one or more issues that they didn't have the flexibility to handle then they ran out of time and money and shipped the game at the highest quality they could manage with what they had.
And that actually ties in to the bugs and exploits, I'm sure the developers wanted the game to be bug free but they fixed what they figured people would see most often or what they felt wouldn't ruin people's experience, I just wish they had more time because the game was very buggy for me. (had to restart it every 20 min because it would play havoc with my high end video card for some reason, wouldn't install properly off of steam since I had installed off of physical media previously and then uninstalled, jumping off a rope and into a wall can send you through the wall, and things like that)
also what I meant about exploit are things you can do to cause the game to tilt drastically towards your favor. For instance the shooting from long distances in halo, or attacking twice and jumping in combat in Jade Empire, or shooting just out of an enemies line of sight in Mass Effect, etc. All games have these but the ones in this game were very easy to spot and just as easy to execute. The review from 1up touches on how simply kicking things makes it very easy to win battles.
the sound effects were ok, but in my mind VO should always be as good as that in Mass Effect(for most voices) or Portal. And lips should sync up with VO, that's a big pet peve, most people probably dont' even notice it but it bugs me when someone's mouth moves like they're being controlled by the world's worst ventriloquist.
The bar for FPS games is not low at all, the problem is that FPS games don't compare directly to Dark Messiah. Dark Messiah is a First Person Action RPG, you should compare it to games like Oblivion rather than to Halo since the main game play elements between shooters and action rpgs are probably going to be a fair bit different, for the most part.
This leads me into my last point that I probably should have mentioned earlier. By definition FPS games aren't FPS games unless they have both a First Person perspective and Shooting. Complaining that all FPS games have shooting is a bit odd.(you mentioned that a bit ago, just forgot to say anything previously)
A valid point. Gears of War, which I mentioned, isn't really an FPS game, yes.
Dark Messiah is definitely in the FPS camp, even if its more of an action game at heart. Its more like Halflife than it is like Oblivion. Its actually nothing like OBlivion, other than that they both have swords and orcs, and are in first person. Its in the 1s person perspective and it has a bit of shooting, even if thats overshadowed by the awesome melee.
A suppose a comparisson would be this: one my favourite FPS games ever is 1994's Hexen. If Dark Messiah used the same click ---> swing axe as Hexen, it'd seem really backwards and old fashioned. Point and click gunning is still going fine. I can't think of an improvement off the top of my head, but I'm not a game developer. I doubt it would be impossible to make gunning in FPS games as engaging as slicing is in DM.
I should note that I also don't fault reviewers who gave it average 70ish ratings. So it didn't quite "click" with them. Fair enough. 1up's review (which I read) was insulting and the entire freedom of the gameplay went right over their heads.
I've been playing hideously buggy games since I first got Wake of the Ravager, though. After that and Fallout 2, nothing really bothers me. Save and load fixes everything I've ever encountered. The game did run like shit before I recached it (or whatever you call that) in Steam and patched it, but it runs fine now. DM doesn't even reach STALKER levels.
The way I see it: 1up used the whole of the percentage scale rather than just the 60-90 range most places use.
to me something around 40 is a little below average and I should only play it if I'm interested in the genre, and something around 70+ is something I should at least check out regardless of how I feel about the genre the game is in.
now the actual review I disagree with slightly, what he hated was the part I liked the most. It's very exploity but I went around kicking everybody onto a spike or into a fire....or tried to behead them....and kick them into a fire.
So basically I'd give it a 40-50% myself, but I had fun and I actually completed the game (I almost never finish games).
I wish you could have lit the beds of spikes on fire. that woulda been cool.
Also to touch on what Pancake said, I forgot about the camera thing but that was quite good. It's not something you see executed well every day. I forgot there were people who got motion sick in games though it must be hard for them to play many first person games.
And regarding the bugs. I'm in a situation that's relatively unique to people who have held the same occupation as I have. I can't not see bugs, they're everywhere. I even try to break games out of habit. I don't do it on purpose but I'll catch myself wandering around a level in TF2 looking for holes in the level geometry I can walk/see/shoot through or running through a level backwards to watch things visibly stream in, or so on. I see cut-off shadows everywhere, I see levels of details change in the distance, I see people look like they're sliding when they walk because their animations are too fast. There isn't a game that's released that's bug free but I see them and they all bother me, and the more bugs a game has the more it gets to me.
As far as I'm concerned the reviews which lingered over the whole kicking-into-convenient-spiky-walls-or-bottomless-pits thing rather missed the point. That's by no means the only way to approach a situation and very few games and can boast the sheer variety of methods available to dispatch your enemies- hell, the game would still have visceral combat coming out of its damn ears even if you removed the kick function entirely. Frankly it reminds me of the Hitman reviews which focused on how a suitably skilled player could shoot their way through practically any level in favour of stealth.
I felt the game was too short and that the potential for unique weapons and enemies was criminally underused, but the melee combat was some of the most enjoyable I've ever seen in a FPS (uh... first-person slasher?) or pretty much any game ever, come to think of it.
Most fun moment-
Mind-controlling one of a whole group of 5 or 6 big orcs (that would have kicked my ass handily if I directly engaged them. Well this group starts fighting, words are exchanged, swords start flying out and before you know it they had gotten so wild that they knocked a damn wall over on themselves and all died. While I was standing out of sight in bewilderment.
I also really liked the fighting system with the kicking and everything.
Also it was really obvious to me that two different development teams made the single and multi sections. The multi section ran like absolute ass so I didn't even bother with it. Single ran great on high settings.
I really like steam integration...
But it does do first person melee combat extremely well. It's tons of fun, and completely unparalleled in that specific area. I never encountered any bugs when I played through it the first time, though, I don't know why so many people have trouble with it.
Also, Disruptor, have you checked out Project Offset? It looks to be similar (perhaps not always first person, but still) and while I doubt it's anywhere near a release I'm still impressed with what the dev team has shown so far.
I don't think that will work, but I know for a fact that you can just enter your CD-Key in Steam and it will recognize it and automatically download the whole game + patches.
It's combat was brilliant and the battles were freeform and beautiful. Because it was so open, people have different experiences and approach each situation differently. As a result, a lot of people dislike it because they spoilt it for themselves.
It's not possible to review the combat of an open game like that. You need to play this for yourself, because person A is going to have a different experience to person B.
All I will say is that if you like your combat handspooned with limited options, don't play it.
Oh and the story was cliche and passable yada yada but I didn't care, I was having too much fun. Story is overrated for a game like this, it's not the point. It worked long enough to get you from one goblin to the next.
Here's how freeform the game is. This is a big fucking spoiler concerning the end boss so if you think you want to play the game as a thief, don't click.