Clive Barker's Jericho Demo

[jdude]

Has anyone tried the demo yet? It came out recently and it's very short but it really showcases the strong points of the game I think. The way it's set up really gets you into the game, I love how the player gets to see what he/she is doing in the fps mode through the game and the fights you can get into are truly some of the freakiest things I've seen in a video game in a really long time. The game looks like it has great potential and I cannot wait to buy it! Thoughts?

 

edit: oops I thought I was posting this in off-topic, can someone please move this thread

[Vadrosaul]

Tried it. Not bad, but the demo is only 5 minutes. 1GB for 5 fucking minutes?!?! How the fuck do they expect to make a sale to fringe interest with 5 minutes of a couple of corridors and the same enemy 10 times?

 

Couple things I noticed:

 

- The music is too over-the-top halloween horror carnivàle style. It doesn't evoke feelings of dread or fearful trepidation for what comes next, it evokes feelings that you're in a game with a stock videogame soundtrack.

 

- The Jericho squad members banter too much to each other. Cut the chatter, Red 2! This is suppose to be a frightening gruesome atmosphere, but the excessive blathering needs to be toned down in favor of volume for ambience.

 

The player character not having a corporeal form is something fresh, but unless the story gives him quality character moments, he's going to be easily overshadowed by the personalities of the team members. There is an opportunity there for the man to convey his despair over being on death row, his "soul" fated for oblivion.

[STiFU]

Haven't played the demo yet 'cause I got to learn a lot at the moment. But next week, I will surely give it a try. From the moment, that I saw the first trailer, I was looking forward to this game. I hope it will meet my expectations. After all I love horrorgames and I hate those, that don't really scare you. (e.g. Fear, Doom 3 etc)

[oDDity]

I really hate it when they tack people's names onto the start of game titles.

As if Tom Clancy, Peter Jackson or Clive Barker had anything to do with these games.

I bet the fact that the player has no physical form is going to give them ever more reason to include tedious cinematics every 5 seconds.

You may as well just watch the movie (when they make it)

[squill]

If you like painkiller style of games you'll probably like this demo. With style i mean graphics/feeling. Although the demo takes place a few chapters into the game it doesn't show anything new besides switching between characters and shooting everything rushing towards you..

 

Personally i don't like the blooming/hdr effects, they are bit over the top. It also feels very consolish with the common in-game cinematics where you don't have any control and only have to press the arrow keys at the right time. But it looks decent en runs smooth so if you like painkiller and gore you can give it a try.

[jdude]

I really hate it when they tack people's names onto the start of game titles.

As if Tom Clancy, Peter Jackson or Clive Barker had anything to do with these games.

I bet the fact that the player has no physical form is going to give them ever more reason to include tedious cinematics every 5 seconds.

You may as well just watch the movie (when they make it)

 

Actually Clive Barker was supposedly very involved in the production and design of this game, from what I've read about it anyways.

 

I actually like it sometimes when games use a lot of non-player-controlled parts in them to move the story line along, that is of course if the story is good. For example Final Fantasy 7 had a huge amount of these types of parts and I still thought it was very fun.

[sparhawk]

Is this only the demo or is the game also already out?

[oDDity]

I just find a lot of cut scenes/cinematics to be a lazy way to make a game.

If you can't conjure up the story and atmosphere from within the game it's self, from the player's perspective, then you're no good at game design.

Most people would agree that the Cradle is very atmospheric and tells a good story - yet it never has to resort to cutscenes.

That's how a game should be made. I don't like a lot of modern games, which are basically just movie/game hybrids, where the 'game' part consists of killing stuff between movie sequences.

[Nyarlathotep]

I have to admit, I'm kind of schizophrenic when it comes to dialogue in games. I can fully appreciate locking in the player during dialogue--if the player is given dialogue options. Outside of RPGs, though, dialogue is almost always glorified cutscene (think HL2). At least dialogue trees give you SOME choice (even if in most cases it's only the illusion of choice).

 

Most of the time, though, it's far better to show the player something rather than tell them, and then, it's preferable to let the player do it rather than show it (or if it's literally impossible for the player to do, let the player discover it on his own).

[jdude]

That's what I thought was so great about halflife 1, you had the ability to do anything during the cut-scenes including killing the guy who was talking, I don't know why they took that out of halflife 2, which made it just really REALLY annoying to get to a part where some guy talks for 10 mins about something you don't care about and there's nothing you can do.

 

To Oddity I think this demo is sort of half cinematic and half game play because you have to be involved in some aspect of the control of some of the cinematics such as pressing up down left right ect ect or activate the area where the cinematic takes place, ie: climbing a wall, so it isn't that bad.

[sparhawk]

When is the game finally released?

[Vadrosaul]

When is the game finally released?

The official release date is 23rd October for US and 26th October for everywhere else.

[sparhawk]

Ah! Thanks! Going to give it a look. I hate demos.

[STiFU]

Tomb Raider Legend and Anniversary both featured action cutscenes where you have to press certain buttons and I must admit that I really liked it. It made the actioncutscenes more interesting to the player and it was always like the reward for finishing a level. =)

 

And Oddity, you kinda seem to denounce cutscenes in games at all. I think it always has to be a good mixture. Thief for instance always had too few cutscenes in my oppinion. And if they are done well, I don't even mind if there is a small cutscene every five minutes, like in "The Suffering" (part 1). They really pushed the creapy atmosphere along. BTW, great game...

[oDDity]

Thief didn't have any cutscenes, just the intro and briefing. That's all it takes. No need to take control away from the player halfway through a game. Interactivity is the keyword with games.

IT doesn't 'have to be a mixture'. If Thief can create the gameplay context it did, and become the favourite game of most people around here, with no cutscenes, then so can any other game, end of argument.

[sparhawk]

Personally I don't like these in-game cutscenes. If they are real cutscenes, as like movies, so that you immediately know it's supposed to be watched, that's ok. In D3 the cutscenes were ok, because they were short and to the point. On the other hand, cutscenes like in HL2 I mostly felt boring. There were quite a lot of them, and the game mechanics was still enabled, so you could run around and do some small stuff, while it was running. The worst cutscene, in my opinion, is the intro in Calendra's Legacy, where you meet with that Lady in the beginning. It takes bloody long, and the voice acting is so bad that you can barely understand here. And you are all the time confined to this narrow space where you can't move at all, and now way to cut it short. The levels afterwards are really cool, but the intro is awfull. There is another one, which I considered equally bad, where you had to meet a vampire lord, or something similar, in a garden or at a bridge. The whole first map of that FM was a cutscene, forgot the name though.

[squill]

Tombraider (Legend and Anniversary) has a third person view, somehow because your already looking at your character from a distance makes the interactive cinematics more natural flow over then when your playing in first person. Just like in Resident Evil 4, where it feels more natural and part of the game (although playing with a gamepad). In First Person view it really draws me more out of the action(out of control) then when such a cinematic happens in third person.

 

i like the way half-life 2 deals with the story and keeping the player in control during dialog. But i also would like to be able to smack Dr. kleiner from time to time with a crowbar

[jdude]

On the topic of annoying cut-scenes I think most cut-scenes in games are boring now. Halo3 had some small ones and I just sat there hitting the button over and over trying to skip them, their so boring. The worst I've ever seen however were in Call of Duty 3. You cannot skip them, their pointless and they are SO boring!

[STiFU]

Company of heroes has got amazing ingame cutscenes considering we are talking about a strategy game. Absolutely worth checking out. (I don't like strategy either, but I wanted to see it) And if you tell me now that ingame cutscenes in strategy games are also wrong without checking them out, I will be really sad... No seriously, they really make the game more interesting and since strategy games are boring , it's really nice to have the funfactor kept up by cutscenes that manage to bring the atmosphere of the 2nd worldwar along.

[Crispy]

strategy games are boring

You obviously haven't played my strategy game.

[oDDity]

Company of heroes has got amazing ingame cutscenes considering we are talking about a strategy game. Absolutely worth checking out. (I don't like strategy either, but I wanted to see it) And if you tell me now that ingame cutscenes in strategy games are also wrong without checking them out, I will be really sad... No seriously, they really make the game more interesting and since strategy games are boring , it's really nice to have the funfactor kept up by cutscenes that manage to bring the atmosphere of the 2nd worldwar along.

 

Don't be ridiculous. We have been so swamped with WWII movies, TV shows and games, that everyone who doesn't live in a cave already knows what the atmosphere was like. Another cutscene in another game isn't going to help.

[greebo]

No seriously, they really make the game more interesting and since strategy games are boring , it's really nice to have the funfactor kept up by cutscenes that manage to bring the atmosphere of the 2nd worldwar along.

What really leaves me puzzled is that so many people tend to drool over the reality factor of yet-another-WWII FPS game. When there's one thing I really don't need it's the atmosphere of the second World War.

[oDDity]

HeH, exactly. I've never understood this obsession with war and bloodshed in games either. WWII was horrible for anyone who was there, and verging on a living nightmare for a lot of people.

Why would you want to pretend to be there for 'fun'?

[demagogue]

I think there's more than a little nostalgia for a war with clear good guys and bad guys these days, so you can feel upstanding in doing the good work in kicking ass. Many of the wars since then have blurred the line of who was really the good guys on the moral high ground. So when people get an adolescent craving to shed blood, they'll feel better doing it in a WWII context than anything else. That's my theory.

[ZylonBane]

Outside of RPGs, though, dialogue is almost always glorified cutscene (think HL2).

You might want to reconsider what "glorified" means.