Broken Age - Double Fine's Kickstarter Adventure Game

[DeepOcean]

Well, this whole KS thing teached me something: when someone is pointing elsewhere saying "That guy is the evil one." always keep watching if your wallet it's still on your pocket. I could forgive anything if, at least, the puzzles were clever and provoked some tought but, based on impressions, it's barely more interactive than TellTale stuff . So, I have to add Tim on the list of the old developers suffering from Alzheimer with Ken Levine and Warren Spector because they really forgotten how to make good games(or more likely got really too confortable with huge amounts of money).

It doesn't matter if Tim made an Iphone casual game for kids, I have STASIS, Heroine Quest, Quest for Infamy and Mages Initiation to play. Who knows? Maybe the Sierra old people, knowing that they don't have a legion of casual fans to appeal to or hype to hide behind, they might even deliver something (not hoping much), maybe the mental disease didn't consumed their brains yet (or they can't count on their production values to fool people).Well, It was kinda expected that the game would be "Good for what it is." at best being carried away by graphics and story alone but it's kinda frustrating you seeing Call of Duties, Gears of War and GTAs clones being spit out every year while if you are a true adventure game fan you have to beg for someone competent to do something about it and it's depressing to see old designers turning their back on you for this supposed huge audience of retards with Iphones.

Man, I just wanted to chill out, play this thing for the pretty graphics and kinda okayish story but when you have Monkey Island 2, Gabriel Knight and Kings Quest VI burned on your memory, it's kinda get hard to be tolerant with it.

 

[bertram_tung]

For the record, DoTT was designed to look like a Chuck Jones cartoon, according to those who worked on it.

I think it was more inspired by Chuck Jones. To me it looked like a much more twisted version. That said, quite a few Chuck Jones cartoons could certainly be described as twisted, but I wouldn't say it was the norm.

 

[Stabwound]

Why does everyone outside of this forum seem to love the game? People whose only adventure games are the shit Telltale games?

 

[J_C]

I only played a little yesterday, but

About 50 minutes of the boy and some 90 minutes of the girl and I'm done:

What a load of bullshit. 90 minutes for the girl? You skipped all the dialogue and rushed through the game? I just helped Gus when I stopped, and that alone was at least 60 minues, and I doubt that there is only 30 minutes after it. Sorry, i don't believe this. Oh... Your steam profile says that you spent 3.6 hours playing Brokan Age, and I don't think you replayed it several times or left it in the menu for hours. Everybody says that it is 3-4 hours long. And if the second one will be this long as well, you already have 6-8 hours, which is the average length of evety adventure game ever.

As for the puzzles, yeah they seem weak so far, I feared that this will be case, but it is on par with most adventure games of today. Liking the atmoshpere, got used to the art style and liking the story.

Why does everyone outside of this forum seem to love the game? People whose only adventure games are the shit Telltale games?

Because it is a nice little game, which has only one weakness, the easy puzzles, but everything else is good.

 

[Haba]

I can hear you crying as you write those words, Matt.

It is what it is - the biggest Kickstarter scam to date.

 

[groke]

I can hear you crying as you write those words, Matt.

It is what it is - the biggest Kickstarter scam to date.

From some primordial valley, a dark shambling mass rears towards the sky and calls it's most-foul name.
"OUUUUYAAAA"

 

[meanwhileInPoland]

140 minutes or 3.6 hours(216 minutes) big fucking difference

 

[J_C]

140 minutes or 3.6 hours(216 minutes) big fucking difference

It is, you math genius.

I can hear you crying as you write those words, Matt.

It is what it is - the biggest Kickstarter scam to date.

I think they delivered EVERYTHING they promised. If you don't like the game, fine. But don't act like a retard and say that it is a scam, when it is not.

 

[ZagorTeNej]

Hopefully Tim's daughter likes the game.

 

[Frusciante]

Quote from that community manager guy about the 2nd half:

''The second “half” isn’t actually half the game (I know that isn’t obvious). The first part will be the majority of the story—probably closer to what acts I and II would be in a typical story. Also, the second part will benefit from all the engine/process/etc. work that already got solved to make the first part of the game, and that part of the game will have already begun development before anything is released, so it won’t need nearly as much time to finish up as the first part will have.''

So thats a bit dissapointing....

 

[Pyke]

I think that most of the money went into the engine development, and the initial art direction. The problem with spending (that much) money there is that you don't really 'see' the direct outcome, because preproduction is supposed to be completely invisible.

I think the custom engine was created with the idea of planning many more Adventure Games - but I honestly think that if they had gone with something like UNITY they would have gotten the same results in a 10th of the time (and budget).

That said, the amount of animation in Broken Age is insane. You can see just how much work went into each and every cut scene - but I think that there are just too many of them! There is clearly a ton of reliance on the cut scenes to tell the story.
Animation is VERY expensive, and seeing how reliant they are on it to tell the story I can see how their budget exploded as much as it did. I think that they could have easily told the same story with less animation and more 'game'.

Its still a beautiful game, and the artists at DF should be proud of what they have done. If you took out the walking around parts, you could easily turn this into a film...and when you look at it like that, $5000 000 (or whatever the current spend is..I stopped following the nitty gritty a while ago!) to make what is essentially an animated Lord Of The Rings Trilogy is NOTHING.

Games have that advantage over films...every time you have a piece of dialogue it doesn't have to be a carefully animated, synced, and choreographed sequence. There is an expectation in a game that you DON'T do that - that you stay IN the game world. Its almost like Broken Age forgot about this, and they were worried about people not having a 'cinematic' experience.

 

[J_C]

Quote from that community manager guy about the 2nd half:

''The second “half” isn’t actually half the game (I know that isn’t obvious). The first part will be the majority of the story—probably closer to what acts I and II would be in a typical story. Also, the second part will benefit from all the engine/process/etc. work that already got solved to make the first part of the game, and that part of the game will have already begun development before anything is released, so it won’t need nearly as much time to finish up as the first part will have.''

So thats a bit dissapointing....

That is dissapointing indeed. We'll see how long it actually is, I've seen tha community manager in the videos, and he is not a guy who knows everything about the game. The reason I don't believe him is that the boy's part supposed to be as important as the girl's, and we didn't see his story at all. So the 2nd part should be about him.

 

[Frusciante]

It is an old post though, was posted on 07-03-2013. So things might have changed...

 

[felipepepe]

What a load of bullshit. 90 minutes for the girl? You skipped all the dialogue and rushed through the game? I just helped Gus when I stopped, and that alone was at least 60 minues, and I doubt that there is only 30 minutes after it. Sorry, i don't believe this. Oh... Your steam profile says that you spent 3.6 hours playing Brokan Age, and I don't think you replayed it several times or left it in the menu for hours.

Some people play faster, and don't get stuck on retarded "Save Gus" puzzles.... Also, at the start of the boy story, I went straight for the train mission and "broke" it on the first try. That's why I actually did replay the first part, because I wanted to see how they were.

But the funny things is that you don't have to believe me. Just keep playing. You just saved Gus? In ~5 minutes you're out of the Cloud area, and in ~25 you've beated the game.

As for the puzzles, yeah they seem weak so far, I feared that this will be case, but it is on par with most adventure games of today. Liking the atmoshpere, got used to the art style and liking the story.

Yeah right. The first puzzle of Deponia is more complex than anything in this entire game.

Because it is a nice little game, which has only one weakness, the easy puzzles, but everything else is good.

"I am smug of a adventure game with bad puzzles."

Despair is strong here.

 

[J_C]

But the funny things is that you don't have to believe me. Just keep playing. You just saved Gus? In ~5 minutes you're out of the Cloud area, and in ~25 you've beated the game.

We'll see in a few hours, when I finish work.

"I am smug of a adventure game with bad puzzles."

I am not an elitist of adventure games, and I very much enjoy games like the The Walking Dead or Fables, so some easier puzzles don't break a game for me. Sorry if it does for you.

 

[Grunker]

What a crock of shit this turned out to be. Glad I didn't back it.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

To be honest I haven't played a single point and click adventure game with intelligent, logic puzzles.
They get absolutely annihilated by puzzle games like Braid, Antichamber, The Swapper....

So I'd rather have easy but logical and coherent puzzles rather than the contrived shit I've had to play through to enjoy the awesome writting and scenery these games often have.

Antichamber mostly had pretty shitty puzzles bro, it really relied on the "lateral thinking will blow your mind bro" angle, which most of the time involved stuff being unintuitive for the sake of being unintuitive. The actual puzzles involving the block guns were both easy and tedious to execute.

Primordia definitely has better puzzles than Antichamber.

You are right about The Swapper, although that game is so technical that it's hard to compare to typical adventure games.

 

[Ravel myluv]

To be honest I haven't played a single point and click adventure game with intelligent, logic puzzles.
They get absolutely annihilated by puzzle games like Braid, Antichamber, The Swapper....

So I'd rather have easy but logical and coherent puzzles rather than the contrived shit I've had to play through to enjoy the awesome writting and scenery these games often have.

Antichamber mostly had pretty shitty puzzles bro, it really relied on the "lateral thinking will blow your mind bro" angle, which most of the time involved stuff being unintuitive for the sake of being unintuitive. The actual puzzles involving the block guns were both easy and tedious to execute.

Primordia definitely has better puzzles than Antichamber.

You are right about The Swapper, although that game is so technical that it's hard to compare to typical adventure games.

Don't really agree on Antichamber. They might not be the best puzzles, but they're very intricate to the mood of strangeness the game provides.
Plus it lets you progress on a lot of different fronts at once, which is a very good thing in a puzzle game IMO.

I know it's a bit unfair to compair pure puzzle games to adventure games, but that's to enhance the fact that puzzles are almost systematically the worst part of the adventure games.

These games are dying to tell a story, to make you meet excentric people, discover strange locations, but the stupid puzzles are there to remind you the designers needed some kind of challenge, however contrived, to entertain the player. Most of the puzzles are resolved with just checking your inventory at the right place, clicking everywhere until something happens. Terrbile design IMO.

That Broken Age has simple, braindead puzzles is a step in the right direction for me. I would love more challenging puzzles, but not if they make no sense at all.

I think a common mistake on these boards is to want challenge for challenge. Challenge should be appropriate to what the game wants to feel like, not be the hardest possible by default.
Super Meat Boy is very hard, but it's ok because the reload times are non existent, and you get some kind of extatic behavior dying and dying until you finally get it. It's an appropriately difficult challenge for the game experience.
But would the COD games be better if they were more challenging? No they wouldn't, because their whole point is to deliver a cinematic, you're-a-badass experience.

So in adventure games I enjoy story and mood, so why do I have to play these artificially difficult puzzles? You want to make hard puzzles? Fine, just make them good and fitting to the game world, not something I feel the heavy hand of the designer on.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

To be honest I haven't played a single point and click adventure game with intelligent, logic puzzles.
They get absolutely annihilated by puzzle games like Braid, Antichamber, The Swapper....

So I'd rather have easy but logical and coherent puzzles rather than the contrived shit I've had to play through to enjoy the awesome writting and scenery these games often have.

Antichamber mostly had pretty shitty puzzles bro, it really relied on the "lateral thinking will blow your mind bro" angle, which most of the time involved stuff being unintuitive for the sake of being unintuitive. The actual puzzles involving the block guns were both easy and tedious to execute.

Primordia definitely has better puzzles than Antichamber.

You are right about The Swapper, although that game is so technical that it's hard to compare to typical adventure games.

Don't really agree on Antichamber. They might not be the best puzzles, but they're very intricate to the mood of strangeness the game provides.
Plus it lets you progress on a lot of different fronts at once, which is a very good thing in a puzzle game IMO.

I know it's a bit unfair to compair pure puzzle games to adventure games, but that's to enhance the fact that puzzles are almost systematically the worst part of the adventure games.

These games are dying to tell a story, to make you meet excentric people, discover strange locations, but the stupid puzzles are there to remind you the designers needed some kind of challenge, however contrived, to entertain the player. Most of the puzzles are resolved with just checking your inventory at the right place, clicking everywhere until something happens. Terrbile design IMO.

That Broken Age has simple, braindead puzzles is a step in the right direction for me. I would love more challenging puzzles, but not if they make no sense at all.

I think a common mistake on these boards is to want challenge for challenge. Challenge should be appropriate to what the game wants to feel like, not be the hardest possible by default.
Super Meat Boy is very hard, but it's ok because the reload times are non existent, and you get some kind of extatic behavior dying and dying until you finally get it. It's an appropriately difficult challenge for the game experience.
But would the COD games be better if they were more challenging? No they wouldn't, because their whole point is to deliver a cinematic, you're-a-badass experience.

So in adventure games I enjoy story and mood, so why do I have to play these artificially difficult puzzles? You want to make hard puzzles? Fine, just make them good and fitting to the game world, not something I feel the heavy hand of the designer on.

The point, in general, isn't really about challenge so much as about interactivity, engagement, and complexity. Crusader Kings 2 isn't a very difficult game, even if you intentionally start in some backwards hellhole about to be visited by the Muslim rapetrain. But there's a depth, breadth, and complexity to its systems that justify its existence in an interactive medium. It has real "gameplay". Again, the reason CoD sucks isn't because it's easy, but because it's limited, shallow, and repetitive.

So, if we're talking about a game where your only real mode of interaction is clicking on objects, and using inventory items on them, then this interaction should have some depth to it, which puzzles attempt to provide. If you just give up and say "I can't come up with appropriate puzzles, so let's just make them really easy", then what business does your game have being a game, rather than an animated movie? It's the same problem as with The Walking Dead, once you realize there are few consequences to your choices.

 

[Ravel myluv]

To be honest I haven't played a single point and click adventure game with intelligent, logic puzzles.
They get absolutely annihilated by puzzle games like Braid, Antichamber, The Swapper....

So I'd rather have easy but logical and coherent puzzles rather than the contrived shit I've had to play through to enjoy the awesome writting and scenery these games often have.

Antichamber mostly had pretty shitty puzzles bro, it really relied on the "lateral thinking will blow your mind bro" angle, which most of the time involved stuff being unintuitive for the sake of being unintuitive. The actual puzzles involving the block guns were both easy and tedious to execute.

Primordia definitely has better puzzles than Antichamber.

You are right about The Swapper, although that game is so technical that it's hard to compare to typical adventure games.

Don't really agree on Antichamber. They might not be the best puzzles, but they're very intricate to the mood of strangeness the game provides.
Plus it lets you progress on a lot of different fronts at once, which is a very good thing in a puzzle game IMO.

I know it's a bit unfair to compair pure puzzle games to adventure games, but that's to enhance the fact that puzzles are almost systematically the worst part of the adventure games.

These games are dying to tell a story, to make you meet excentric people, discover strange locations, but the stupid puzzles are there to remind you the designers needed some kind of challenge, however contrived, to entertain the player. Most of the puzzles are resolved with just checking your inventory at the right place, clicking everywhere until something happens. Terrbile design IMO.

That Broken Age has simple, braindead puzzles is a step in the right direction for me. I would love more challenging puzzles, but not if they make no sense at all.

I think a common mistake on these boards is to want challenge for challenge. Challenge should be appropriate to what the game wants to feel like, not be the hardest possible by default.
Super Meat Boy is very hard, but it's ok because the reload times are non existent, and you get some kind of extatic behavior dying and dying until you finally get it. It's an appropriately difficult challenge for the game experience.
But would the COD games be better if they were more challenging? No they wouldn't, because their whole point is to deliver a cinematic, you're-a-badass experience.

So in adventure games I enjoy story and mood, so why do I have to play these artificially difficult puzzles? You want to make hard puzzles? Fine, just make them good and fitting to the game world, not something I feel the heavy hand of the designer on.

The point, in general, isn't really about challenge so much as about interactivity, engagement, and complexity. Crusader Kings 2 isn't a very difficult game, even if you intentionally start in some backwards hellhole about to be visited by the Muslim rapetrain. But there's a depth, breadth, and complexity to its systems that justify its existence in an interactive medium. It has real "gameplay". Again, the reason CoD sucks isn't because it's easy, but because it's limited, shallow, and repetitive.

So, if we're talking about a game where your only real mode of interaction is clicking on objects, and using inventory items on them, then this interaction should have some depth to it, which puzzles attempt to provide. If you just give up and say "I can't come up with appropriate puzzles, so let's just make them really easy", then what business does your game have being a game, rather than an animated movie? It's the same problem as with The Walking Dead, once you realize there are few consequences to your choices.

I agree that the game should definitely have some interactivity, and more than agree on TWD being an animated story with few, if any, real choices.

But you're treating as a given that clicking on objects and using inventory is the only way to go for adventure games.
I' think the whole "point and click" part of the adventure games is the real problem: it doesn't allow for very interesting puzzles.

That's why I'm very happy with a game that keeps the point n clicking to the most basic.
But the game could certainly profit from better buzzles: it just needs to be in another subgenre of the adventure games.

One game I'm very excited about is The Witness, in which creator Jonathan Blow plans to make resolving the puzzles actually making you learn about the world and the significance of your actions.
That's the kind of interactivity that tends to make games a work of art. And that's something p&c could never do because the interactivity is there to keep the player from breezing through the game, it is not thought as something that imbricates with other game elements (story, graphics....) in a harmonious way.

 

[felipepepe]

People don't seem to remember that old Lucasarts games had 12 verbs for you to play with, and puzzles required using them in creative ways, like opening a looking glass in your inventory or simply picking up the weight you're tied to (I love that one).

More even, they added a lot of content, funny lines that you would get by trying various verbs on stuff. On Broken Age you can't even look at stuff... there's only one button, and if you click on anything, you'll use/talk/pick up automatically.

 

[Ravel myluv]

Haven't played Broken Age yet. If there indeed is so very little interactivity that you can't even look at stuff, then it's a shame, because that's a big part of the fun for me in p&c games.

 

[Roguey]

Anyone complaining about length has on a thick pair of nostalgia goggles.
http://www.howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=10162
http://www.howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=2285
http://www.howlongtobeat.com/game.php?id=3748

It's still pointless hipster nonsense of course.

 

[felipepepe]

Except that those games you could actually get stuck in a puzzle, and spend days thinking about it... who knows how many of those people just alt-tabbed for a guide on the internet?

 

[J_C]

Except that those games you could actually get stuck in a puzzle, and spend days thinking about it... who knows how many of those people just alt-tabbed for a guide on the internet?

Do you honestly think that puzzles that take days of trial and error to figure out are good design? Which causes you to be stuck in the game? And before you ask, NO, I don't think that easy puzzles are any better, but nonsensical puzzles that makes you look for a guide after 3 days of thinking are equally shit.