Prosper Realms of Arkania: Shovelware Edition

[Darth Roxor]

es majestic

 

[Bruma Hobo]

Is it still shit?

 

[Don Peste]

Is the game + final patch available in Sweden already?

 

[NotAGolfer]

Sure it is, just look inside that Steaming pile of horseshit just over there.

 

[Duraframe300]

Finally able to realize its full potential Realms of Arkania will surely appear in the Codex next Top 50 list.

 

[ColCol]

Here, get it in a bundle for 3.49.

http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/fusion-bundle/

 

[thesheeep]

Here, get it in a bundle for 3.49.

http://www.bundlestars.com/all-bundles/fusion-bundle/

Why not...

 

[Bubbles]

It's easily worth ten times that price.

 

[Don Peste]

IT'S AN AWFUL GAME, CLOSE AND NUKE THIS THREAD.

 

[Shagnak]

Fuck, if only I'd waited.

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

They claim it has 'gone gold' which as far as I know is supposed to mean it is now a finished release and ready for the public eye.
I'll let you be the judge of that.

Here's my personal suffering documented.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EqaCMUS0X8

Character creation:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9h_YNb-oKHg

Not sure if this is up to standards now. Even if this had been the state of the initial release 3 months ago, I wouldn't exactly have gotten moist over that.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

I'm fairly certain the character models are still ugly as a warthog's ass.

 

[thesheeep]

Oh my... I've played it, for two hours, I think. Then uninstalled.

The graphics are better than what you've seen from the first versions. But boy, is this still one of the worst games I've ever played.

Here are the negative points from only the first two hours of playing:

• Character creation screen/temple: The character creation itself works. At least that. But the management is ridiculous. The characters are displayed with far too big portraits, sorted by alphabet, so maybe 10-15 fit on the screen at the same time. Of course, nobody uses default characters, so the 25 or more that are already there force you to either delete them first or scroll through them all the time after you created a new character.
• You cannot choose who is "talking" when buying/selling wares. Maybe the best one is chosen automatically, maybe not. There is no indication. This may also have been the case in the originals, I can't remember, but in a game from 2013, I do expect slightly more.
• The inventory of merchants is vastly different from the normal inventory. The normal inventory is your standard grid inventory, which is fine. Now, the merchant inventory is like the Fallout 1 inventory, just rotated by 90° and with two rows instead of one. Yeah, why use the already existing inventory for trading if you can come up with a different, broken one?...
• The narrator is bad. Not incredibly bad like in some other games, but bad.
• I hate rolling characters. It's just rolling and rolling and rolling again until you end up with a build that is basically overpowered. Yeah, it was the same in the originals, I just mention it for completion.
  
• You cannot alt-tab. I mean, you can, but it will not let you get back into the game. Also, you won't gain anythign from it, as the game window happily keeps staying on top of the desktop, so you can neither get back into the game nor do whatever you wanted to when you alt-tabbed. It takes some effort to screw this up with an engine that his this as a default feature. This is what cost me 1 of my 2 hours, as this is what happened after character creation.
• The bloom! OMG! Why do developrs keep on thinking that this looks good? The horror!
• The depth of field blur. Yes, this can add to the atmosphere, but if everything like 3 meters away (in a shop/tavern) looks like I am close to unconsciousness, it went a bit too far. Funny enough, the extreme blurring hides the character models.
  
• The shadows on buildings are constantly flickering. At least those shadows, that shouldn't even be there as the sunlight comes from another direction. Go figure.

Seriously, all of this after 2 hours. I couldn't even motivate myself to keep on playing to see the combat. I bet that would really increase the length of this list...

On the other hand, buying the bundle gave me Thunder Wolves, which is a pretty fun and super cheesy arcade game. Hell, yeah!

 

[InspectorRumpole]

Right, guess it's time to abandon ship and click "Unwatch Thread".

 

[Don Peste]

SURELY IT CAN'T BE THAT BAD!

 

[V_K]

You cannot choose who is "talking" when buying/selling wares. Maybe the best one is chosen automatically, maybe not. There is no indication. This may also have been the case in the originals, I can't remember, but in a game from 2013, I do expect slightly more.

This may be a case of being "true to original": in the non-HD Blade of Destiny, IIRC, only the first (leftmost) character was used for any skillchecks, so you had to constantly rotate your roster.

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

Yep, that's still the case for everything. So put your rogue in front in the dungeon, your huntsman in the wilderness and your jew- uhh.. dwarf.. when going shopping in town.

 

[thesheeep]

So they made some things worse, but at least kept the bad stuff.

 

[Dorateen]

and your jew- uhh.. dwarf.. when going shopping in town.

Hey! I remember boosting up the haggle skill on our party's Magician.

 

[getter77]

One can only hope the daily beatings, er, patching resumes beyond Gold towards some sort of Platinum edition---still seems a long road ahead in this Sisyphean, or at least Tantalus-approved, jaunt of Aventuria.

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

It's like the swamp castle in Monty Python's Holy Grail, no matter how often you rebuild it on this kind of foundation, it isn't gonna look pretty.

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

Crashes are still sooomewhat frequent at least for me, but usually happen around when I start playing and not much after, saving often is a good idea at any rate..
There's a few glaring bugs here and there, not all of them helpful. Combat is cumbersome but no longer seems to lock up, except in one case with a special boss fight, where the result was even repeatable each time. Unfortunately I don't know if I am good enough to actually try and complete the game so I could come back and relate wether technicalities allow this or not.
The good thing one has to say is that they don't pull any punches in attempting to stay faithful to the difficulty curve that the '92 game had.

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

Ouuh never knew about this, first couple of levels is indeed pretty tough, however.

 

[NotAGolfer]

Not really, no. Preparation (like for wandering the wilderness) is everything in these games, especially the first one is quite easy if you're well prepared and leveled your party intelligently (learning the ropes is kinda tough though... but these games are quite forgiving).
And all of them are easy if you always carry enough of the cheapest poison you can buy with you (in german it's called Krötenschemelgift).
You don't need to care about maximizing experience that way oasis mentioned btw, at the end of the third game it will come down to maybe 1 level difference ... you won't even notice.

I'll avoid this "remake" and the sequels they threatened to release at all cost, the art is much uglier than in the originals and I don't trust these hacks to do anything else than ruining everything about it.

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

I haven't figured out how to come by or make any poison in the HD remake yet.. how should it normally work?