Decline Dreamfall Chapters - Console Immersion Action Decline Kickstarter [Spoilers]

[bylam]

Tornquist stopped giving a fuck and the developers are more concerned with injecting their agenda than writing a coherent plot.

I love the implication that there is some separation between him and the developers... Same people. Who do you think is writing the game?

 

[Gambler]

I've always been a sucker for TLJ. I even liked Dreamfall, even though objectively it was a pretty badly designed game. I love the duality of that world, and especially the overall flavor of Stark. (Which they change to look like Blade Runner in the last game.)

With Chapters... It has marvelous visual design, pretty good voice acting and awesome music. This doesn't make logical sense, but I feel that it is a good game being dragged down by its writing. The reason it doesn't make sense is because in an adventure game writing is the core. If the core is rotten... I'm not sure my perception of other elements matters much overall.

Also, they should have made the game linear. Non-linearity adds nothing here. You don't really control your character or the events. And it's not used as a way to explore some narrative aspects in ways not possible otherwise. "Choices" in Chapters are just a silly thing that sucks up resources and makes somewhat incoherent writing even even more confusing. Source of many bugs as well.

...

Does anyone among Red Thread developers fully realize the irony of that Steam thread? Ian is one of the main two characters of Dreamfall games (April doesn't really count) . People have observed him for an entire game and then 3/5th of another game. And yet it still took a forum post to disambiguate his sexual orientation for most of the players. This is a writer's failure of truly epic proportions.

Even worse, instead of engaging in a real discussion about why they designed him in a particular way devs post things like "Nope — go back and listen again : )" and "Get used to it". Classy.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

remember lady alvane, the old lady that tells the longest journey story?

Once it was specullated that she was old april ryan that married kian alvane and inherited his family name...

Guess what? Lady Alvane is kian alvane... which is a gay character that went through surgery and now is a trans woman... thus becoming lady kian alvane.

 

[Dreaad]

 

[hello friend]

The surgery make him white too?

 

[Jaesun]

Perhaps he was 100% white?

 

[Darth Slaughter]

The surgery make him white too?

ever heard of michael jackson?

 

[Septaryeth]

I've always been a sucker for TLJ. I even liked Dreamfall, even though objectively it was a pretty badly designed game. I love the duality of that world, and especially the overall flavor of Stark. (Which they change to look like Blade Runner in the last game.)

With Chapters... It has marvelous visual design, pretty good voice acting and awesome music. This doesn't make logical sense, but I feel that it is a good game being dragged down by its writing. The reason it doesn't make sense is because in an adventure game writing is the core. If the core is rotten... I'm not sure my perception of other elements matters much overall.

Also, they should have made the game linear. Non-linearity adds nothing here. You don't really control your character or the events. And it's not used as a way to explore some narrative aspects in ways not possible otherwise. "Choices" in Chapters are just a silly thing that sucks up resources and makes somewhat incoherent writing even even more confusing. Source of many bugs as well.

I think the good visual is also one of the reasons why the whole thing is boring as hell.
As silly and linear as Dreamfall goes, it at least allows Zoe and Kian to travel to places and progress their adventures.
This time they clearly don't have enough to design new areas and have to force the players to stay in the same fucking cities 3/5 into the game.
It wouldn't be so bad if the city itself is at least interesting or provide more challenging puzzles than finding "different routes to the same area" over and over again.

However, even then I would consider it a failure in the story department.
The major attraction of Dreamful Chapter's story is that it relies on the momentum built from the previous game.
FFS the game has a "Previously On..." at the intro, yet the story changed its focus to exploring two cities (twice!), and the character themselves are being almost irrelevant to the plot, losing any sense of urgency.
Chapter 2 and 3 could have been trimmed down into one as some parts are completely redundant. The characters had their personality flashed out in the previous game, I honestly don't know why it's necessary to drag it any longer by telling us things like Zoe fight her boyfriend on what to have for dinner, or that she wants to have an affair with her psychiatrist. You don't have many chapters to start with, so use the events to develop them, not random trivia!

It's really frustrating seeing the story continuously trying to convince us OH NO SOMETHING HORRIBLE IS GOING TO HAPPEN (and had been doing so since the second half of the previous game), while the main characters are still stuck in their own cesspool of trivial whining and self-doubt. Was the "Undreaming" mentioned at all in the three chapters?

I ranted about Kian, now let's talk about Zoe.
Zoe is a terrible protagonist. She wasn't all that interesting in Dreamfall but now she's hitting the new low. Her talk-to-thyself drama is tolerable in the first chapter, but became unforgivable in the second and third. Why have that whole conversation in the first chapter if she's never going to remember it and will go through the same process again in the next two chapters anyway? Oh wait, now it comes with a "cute" psychiatrist, a cock-blocked boyfriend and vote-for-socialist campaign...

It's painfully obvious they are just dragging it because they poured too much into the two cities don't have enough to set up the next stage of the story.
Another example how catering for AAA graphics whores will doom your story.

 

[Redlands]

remember lady alvane, the old lady that tells the longest journey story?

Once it was specullated that she was old april ryan that married kian alvane and inherited his family name...

Guess what? Lady Alvane is kian alvane... which is a gay character that went through surgery and now is a trans woman... thus becoming lady kian alvane.

That... didn't really happen, did it? Did it?

Because if so... that's the strangest thing I've heard of this weekend, and I ended up watching a lot of weird TV.

 

[Darth Slaughter]

That... didn't really happen, did it? Did it?

Because if so... that's the strangest thing I've heard of this weekend, and I ended up watching a lot of weird TV.

Spoiler

 

[Gambler]

I think the good visual is also one of the reasons why the whole thing is boring as hell.
As silly and linear as Dreamfall goes, it at least allows Zoe and Kian to travel to places and progress their adventures.
This time they clearly don't have enough to design new areas and have to force the players to stay in the same fucking cities 3/5 into the game.
It wouldn't be so bad if the city itself is at least interesting or provide more challenging puzzles than finding "different routes to the same area" over and over again.

Thing is, great visual design for outdoor areas is one of the few clearly positive aspects of the game. (Music wold be the second.) I don't think it is fair to blame it for other issues of the game.

As far as new areas, I actually very much like characters staying in the same location. I find it very refreshing, compared to the typical design where you "deplete" a particular area and move to the next one, rinse and repeat. Real people usually live in the same place, work in the same place and visit their favorite spots over and over again. It's normal. Nothing wrong with replicating that in game. It's pretty much the best way to build a sense of "rooted" character who has real everyday lives. It also allows you to create a more fleshed-out location that feels real, three-dimensional and alive.

So yeah, I'm one of those horrible people who actually like walking around Propast, clicking on stuff and listening to Zoe's comments. It's an enjoyable experience. Problem is, it's the only experience. The last thing you said in the quote is real, and it's the root problem. Designers failed to capitalize on what they built. The city is little more than a moving background decoration. It's not interactive. Its size and Zoe's familiarity with the surroundings aren't used in (boring) puzzles or story, at all. You just run through the streets from point A to point B. And unlike in, say, Patholohic, this running around does not entail anything. There is no discovery or subspace exploration. You might as well have fast travel, as far as core gameplay is concerned.

The major attraction of Dreamful Chapter's story is that it relies on the momentum built from the previous game. FFS the game has a "Previously On..." at the intro, yet the story changed its focus to exploring two cities (twice!), and the character themselves are being almost irrelevant to the plot, losing any sense of urgency. Chapter 2 and 3 could have been trimmed down into one as some parts are completely redundant.

True.

I think they did it because they didn't expect people to have played the last two games. Also, despite it being years ago, TLJ is relatively fresh in my memory. But I don't remember jack shit from Dreamfall. Heh, in a way I can relate to Zoe's amnesia.

They devs supposed to keep the momentum from previous games, but failed to do so.

The characters had their personality flashed out in the previous game, I honestly don't know why it's necessary to drag it any longer by telling us things like Zoe fight her boyfriend on what to have for dinner, or that she wants to have an affair with her psychiatrist. You don't have many chapters to start with, so use the events to develop them, not random trivia!

Kian didn't really have any personality in Dreamfall, though. He was boring and I remember wishing they would just compress his part of the game to save resources. In Chapters they're building him from scratch. Zoe was a whiny bitch. She actually admits as much in this game. So she changed, and they're building her mostly from scratch too. All of this begs the same question: what's the point of this being a sequel with the same main characters?

The boyfriend parts were cringe-worthy. Another character with personality deprivation disorder. Who works in an office that's a single giant room with no furniture. He has nothing interesting to say about anything, doesn't serve to advance the story and does nothing for exploration of Zoe's character (which was probably the intent). And our first "quest" is bringing him a sandwich. Really? This is the kind of stuff that simply shouldn't be in a game.

 

[Whisky]

The boyfriend parts were cringe-worthy. Another character with personality deprivation disorder. Who works in an office that's a single giant room with no furniture. He has nothing interesting to say about anything, doesn't serve to advance the story and does nothing for exploration of Zoe's character (which was probably the intent). And our first "quest" is bringing him a sandwich. Really? This is the kind of stuff that simply shouldn't be in a game.

Reza deserves to be cucked for a thousand years for the bitchfest he does if you dare to bring him REAL MEAT for lunch.

 

[GlutenBurger]

I've just finished playing through the first three books, and it's such an underwhelming game. This far in they could have at least advanced the story more than a few millimetres from where it was at the end of the Dreamfall. Or maybe given the player some puzzles that require more than a few seconds thought once you've found the interactive points. It's like sifting through endless filler.

I doubt I have anything to say that hasn't already been said on previous pages in this thread, but it's funny how the series has touched on the major waypoints in the genre's decline. From traditional point and click, to 3D adventure with action and stealth sequences, to episodic Telltale wannabe. Almost poetic.

 

[abnaxus]

http://redthreadgames.com/forum/top...y-5-book-four-delays-—-an-update-from-ragnar/



lel Unity

 

[toro]

http://redthreadgames.com/forum/topic/2344-kickstarter-update-87-unity-5-book-four-delays-—-an-update-from-ragnar/



lel Unity

Crazy, exploding scenery!

 

[Azrael the cat]

I think the good visual is also one of the reasons why the whole thing is boring as hell.
As silly and linear as Dreamfall goes, it at least allows Zoe and Kian to travel to places and progress their adventures.
This time they clearly don't have enough to design new areas and have to force the players to stay in the same fucking cities 3/5 into the game.
It wouldn't be so bad if the city itself is at least interesting or provide more challenging puzzles than finding "different routes to the same area" over and over again.

However, even then I would consider it a failure in the story department.
The major attraction of Dreamful Chapter's story is that it relies on the momentum built from the previous game.
FFS the game has a "Previously On..." at the intro, yet the story changed its focus to exploring two cities (twice!), and the character themselves are being almost irrelevant to the plot, losing any sense of urgency.
Chapter 2 and 3 could have been trimmed down into one as some parts are completely redundant. The characters had their personality flashed out in the previous game, I honestly don't know why it's necessary to drag it any longer by telling us things like Zoe fight her boyfriend on what to have for dinner, or that she wants to have an affair with her psychiatrist. You don't have many chapters to start with, so use the events to develop them, not random trivia!

It's really frustrating seeing the story continuously trying to convince us OH NO SOMETHING HORRIBLE IS GOING TO HAPPEN (and had been doing so since the second half of the previous game), while the main characters are still stuck in their own cesspool of trivial whining and self-doubt. Was the "Undreaming" mentioned at all in the three chapters?

I ranted about Kian, now let's talk about Zoe.
Zoe is a terrible protagonist. She wasn't all that interesting in Dreamfall but now she's hitting the new low. Her talk-to-thyself drama is tolerable in the first chapter, but became unforgivable in the second and third. Why have that whole conversation in the first chapter if she's never going to remember it and will go through the same process again in the next two chapters anyway? Oh wait, now it comes with a "cute" psychiatrist, a cock-blocked boyfriend and vote-for-socialist campaign...

It's painfully obvious they are just dragging it because they poured too much into the two cities don't have enough to set up the next stage of the story.
Another example how catering for AAA graphics whores will doom your story.

Not to mention, the most interesting thing Dreamfall did was to end with

Spoiler

Zoe trapped in the prison dimension, watching the events unfold

, stating in her voiceover that Dreamfall was 'her story', and this is where she ends up. They already have the 'chosen one' hero in April, it was kind of neat to have the middle chapter be about someone who doesn't make it through and defeat the big bad. Just a story of someone who manages to discover a few things, and build a path for April and Kivan to follow, perhaps enabling them to defeat the big bad. Having Zoe get free and continue on is far less interesting than if they'd had the player (as April) discovering clues and warnings left by Zoe, or puzzles where the solution ends up being something that Zoe set up in Dreamfall.

 

[Venser]

http://redthreadgames.com/forum/topic/2344-kickstarter-update-87-unity-5-book-four-delays-—-an-update-from-ragnar/



lel Unity

I guess I'll play this after they release all chapters and fix most bugs.

 

[abnaxus]

Good news: we’re getting very close to having a beta-testable version of Dreamfall Chapters: The Fabled Unity 5.2 Version. For reasons of transparency, we’re going to share a list of the highest priority bugs the team's currently working on.

Warning: this is a straight copy/paste from our internal task list, and a lot of these bugs will appear completely cryptic to most of you. We won’t spend time explaining the details; we just wanted to give you a quick peek into what we’re currently working on.

(And if you just want to scroll right to the end to get a wrap-up, feel free to do so!)

We’re using the terms P1/P2/BLOCKER, and this is what they mean:

BLOCKERs must be fixed before we can go into a public beta. We’re taking care of these first.
P1 (priority 1) bugs must be fixed before we can release the Unity 5 version (3.2.0).
P2 bugs will be fixed in patch 3.2.1, which should be out about a week later.
P3 bugs will be fixed in time for v4.0 (Book Four).

• Bloom is way too aggressive & needs to be tweaked (BLOCKER)
• 64-bit build for Windows (BLOCKER) (Note: this should benefit the vast majority of our players who use a 64-bit version of Windows)
• Martin fixes all of Martin’s sequences (BLOCKER) (Note: only Martin knows what this means)
• Combining inventory items bug (BLOCKER)
• Missing inventory items: items vanish when acquired a second time (BLOCKER)
• Random crashes on scene load – memory related? (P1) (Note: in general, performance and memory usage should improve with the new version; however, we are experiencing some mysterious crashes that we have to investigate further)
• Poor performance in certain scenes. Get FPS (frames-per-second) data from every scene & fix as necessary (P1)
• Light maps – first iteration finished for all scenes, keep improving when/where we find bugs (P1) (Note: this has been one of the biggest hurdles for us, and it's taken a long time to fix the light maps in every single location in the game)
• Disappearing backdrops in Europolis (only?) — test, find & fix (P1)
• Faulty, buggy collision – should be fixed. EVERYONE needs to test (P1) (Note: collision’s handled differently now, and these changes broke…everything. The beta will probably still have some issues with collision, and we’re hoping our beta testers can help us weed out any remaining issues)
• Character shaders need to be updated to work with Unity 5 deferred lighting (P1) (Note: another huge change, which requires us to go over every single character model in the game)
• Multiple cut-scene issues: audio/loading lag and collision issues (placement of character/camera) (P1) (Note: …yeah. Cinematics are very broken right now. We're working on it)
• Character lighting is broken. Test and make lists. Fixing ongoing (P1)
• Exploding scenery — should be fixed. Test! (P1) (Note: Kotaku's favourite bug!)
• Flat/missing/broken lighting in many locations. Testing/fixing ongoing (P1)
• Occlusion testing – do we have proper occlusion now? (P2) (Note: this is more of a memo to remind testers to look for occlusion bugs; e.g. scenery that pops in/out & poor performance/frame rate)
• Lens flares in Europolis are no longer working (P2) (Note: some of you will probably be happy to not have lens flares anymore — but they are coming back!)
• Broken visual effects. Which effects? Need a list! (P2) (Note: effects and shaders have to be rewritten and replaced to work with Unity 5, and we're compiling a list of the ones we've missed)
• Mac...everything. Mac version is broken due to Unity 5 bugs (P3) (Note: we will have the Mac/Linux versions ready for Book Four, but the Steam beta will be Windows only)

These bugs illustrate just how much stuff broke in the transition from Unity 4.6 to 5.2 — and it doesn’t include all the bugs we’ve already fixed during the past ten weeks.

If all goes well, there should be a public beta later this week (fingers crossed, as usual! We’ll send out another update when that happens). After that, we’ll continue to fix blockers and priority 1 bugs until we feel confident enough to release a general patch.

And then we’ll get back to finishing Book Four: Revelations.

 

[Infinitron]

The Unity 5 update is out, but apparently it wasn't easy: https://medium.com/@ragso/dreamfall...-rocky-road-to-unity-5-48e1f22ea62#.4namdlups

Dreamfall Chapters, Extreme Makeover Edition, or: The Rocky Road to Unity 5

For the past four months, Red Thread Games has been working on two concurrent and intimately connected projects. The first is Revelations, the penultimate episode of the Dreamfall Chapters serial adventure. The second is a complete revamp — an extreme makeover — of the previous three episodes.

Yesterday afternoon, the Dreamfall Chapters Unity 5 engine reboot wasreleased on Steam as a free game update.

This launch caps four months of shifting schedules and development delays, a barrage of bugs and a protracted and painful beta phase, a $100,000 investment, and a cautionary tale of the potential pitfalls of episodic game development.

This is the story of how a seemingly simple engine upgrade threatened to derail a studio’s entire future.

Dreamfall Chapters is the episodic sequel to The Longest Journey (1999) and Dreamfall (2006). It’s Red Thread’s first game: we acquired the Dreamfall license from Funcom in 2012, and founded our Oslo-based studio in order to make a sequel. After raising over $1,5 million on Kickstarter, development began in spring 2013. And in October 2014, we released the first of five episodes: Reborn.

For the most part, I believe it was a solid start to the series. The plot took some time to get going, but those who persevered seemed to enjoy the mix of cyberpunk and high fantasy, the original characters and complex dialogue trees, the choice-and-consequence mechanics, along with the — for an indie adventure title, at least — ambitious and beautiful locations.

When it came to performance, however, the game stumbled. It was — this is an understatement — not fantastic. Even with above-recommended hardware specs, many players suffered suboptimal frame-rates and memory-related freezes.

Over the next seven weeks, we pushed out several patches that improved things, but we eventually hit the wall. Unless we went back to split our larger scenes into smaller chunks, reduced visual quality or population density — none of which were ideal — we were done. The performance was not going to improve further.

We needed a miracle.

The reason the port took as long as it did, and why we didn’t anticipate the delays, was a combination of several factors.

There were major changes in the tools — both first-party and third-party — between Unity 4 and 5. Some of the third-party tools hadn’t even been updated, and there was nothing to do but wait and pray for this to happen.

There was an enormous amount of work involved in re-lighting, from the ground up, dozens of enormous locations — more work that we’d initially imagined, more work than anyone could possibly imagine. This was partly due to lacking, and overly optimistic, estimates on our part, and partly due to countless bugs in the new lighting system. In addition, with every lighting fix in the biggest scenes, we had to go through an eight-to-twelve hour baking process before we could see the final results. Rinse and repeat, over and over.

We had to rewrite all shaders and scripts to work with the new engine. And we had to deal with a large number of often crippling bugs, some of which persist to this day, requiring desperate workarounds.

Upgrading from one patch or point release to another would fix one serious issue — say, memory leaks — while introducing a completely different issue — such as broken real-time lights. Every new version of the engine would see improvements in one area, and break the game in two, three, ten other areas.

On some days, it was hard to get out of bed and find the will to keep moving forward.

But we did. We did.

The fact that we did is a testament to the team’s commitment, professionalism and loyalty — and to the simple fact that we had no choice. There was no way back. We couldn’t revert the changes. Book Four was almost finished, and it’d been built from the ground up with Unity 5. Starting over was not an option.

We’d come too far. We had to persevere.

 

[abnaxus]

Better wait a year or so before playing.

 

[abnaxus]

omg finally something might actually happen

 

[Lucky]

Fourth book is out and the whole thing is on sale on GOG: http://af.gog.com/game/dreamfall_chapters_season_pass?as=1649904300

Is anyone playing it? How's the quality?

 

[Crooked Bee]

So I just booted this up and realized I had completely forgotten what happened in the previous episodes. Ah, the wonders of episodic gaming.

 

[Malpercio]

There is just no way the ending won't be a rushed clusterfuck at this point.

 

[Deleted member 7219]

It was a mistake to release it in episodic format because the story really doesn't make sense that way. There's such a long gap between 'books', it is hard to remember what happened previously or what you are meant to be doing. I think I would look on the game more favorably if it had been released as one cohesive whole, like Dreamfall.

I'm playing Book Four at the moment. So far, there have been a lot of TLJ references. The book started with, "Hey, all those choices you made before are about to have a really big impact!" but I haven't seen anything yet.

One weird thing is how massively gay the game is getting. I mean, they revealed Kian was gay in the last book, and now another prominent character has come out as gay, and I'm confused. Why the fuck is this so important in a fantasy video game? I would understand if this was one of those gay-focused things, but Dreamfall/TLJ was never really about sexuality and I don't get why they are making such a big fucking deal.

It isn't really characters making such a huge deal about being gay that I find weird. Zoe was talking a lot about all the sex she was having with Reza almost as soon as met her, so I guess it is just sexuality in general which is laid on thick. It's weird.