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KickStarter Swordhaven: Iron Conspiracy - BG1-inspired low fantasy RPG From the ATOM TEAM - Early Access on December 12th

InD_ImaginE

Arcane
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Joined
Aug 23, 2015
Messages
5,958
Pathfinder: Wrath
That's the kind of trailer, even when labeled Alpha, that affects a game negatively more than anything. If not for knowing that this is coming from ATOM dev I would instantly put the game on ignore category.

Very bad frame rate, awkward music, and literally nothing happens except walking in the first 20 - 30 seconds but instead of a beautiful pre-rendered environment like in PoE games whose look is actually an attraction, it's just average-looking assets in average looking environment.

Then what, 10 seconds of 2 guys standing over a "secret" pit with the camera rotating around them.

Then 10 seconds of hitting rat and dogs in a VERY SLOW combat with only auto attacks.
 

Feyd Rautha

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Nestled atop the cliffs
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
Companies shouldn't be transparent about the game's development process is my main takeaway from that reasoning.

Personally I prefer a look at the alpha or even pre-alpha. And I know it will all come together very nicely in the end.
 

Lord_Potato

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
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Messages
10,913
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Free City of Warsaw
Companies shouldn't be transparent about the game's development process is my main takeaway from that reasoning.

Personally I prefer a look at the alpha or even pre-alpha. And I know it will all come together very nicely in the end.
As the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck famously said: "Video games are like sausages. It's best not to see them being made".

After witnessing this trailer I must admit, truer words have never been spoken.
 
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ds

Cipher
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2,545
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here
Bunch of consoomers in here. Gameplay shown isn't much and what is shown is very simplistic, yeah, and that is feedback that I hope the ATOM Team will take to heart. But proudly proclaiming that you'd be ignoring the game based on what isn't shown in an alpha trailer or because it isn't polished enough yet is pretty fucking retarded. And you wonder why bigger developers focus and shiny presentation over substance…

The graphics are absolutely fine - nothing spectacular but they do the job of visualizing a world with enough detail to allow for interesting scenarios. Games don't need to be photorealistic to be fun. If anything, I'd be worried if how much breadth of content they can achieve in a reasonable time frame with this amount of detail if they had to make all the assets from scratch. As for frame-rate, it's a Unity game what do you expect. Video also seems to be encoded at 25 FPS (unless that's just Google being a twat) which is not going to help here.
 

Taka-Haradin puolipeikko

Filthy Kalinite
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20,656
Codex 2016 - The Age of Grimoire Make the Codex Great Again! Grab the Codex by the pussy Bubbles In Memoria
Problem with the trailer is that it makes Swordhaven look like generic fantasy without any hook.
There's no premise of the game shown, no concept art, no nothing beyond generic "medieval" assets and hard to read font.

Compare that to early trailers for ATOM, which managed to give identity for the game, despite not being that much more technically complex.
 

Beans00

Erudite
Shitposter
Joined
Aug 27, 2008
Messages
1,720
The trailer doesn't look great, but it's alpha and game trailers are never really indicative of how good a game will be.

Insomnia the ark had the absolute best gameplay trailer/kickstarter pledge I have ever seen. The game turned out to be absolutely terrible lol.
 

Tyranicon

A Memory of Eternity
Developer
Joined
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Messages
7,801
I would probably rename the trailer to Alpha Sneak Peek or something. There's not enough interesting things to call it a full trailer and we're probably too far out from launch to even need one yet.

Words matter. Calling it a trailer makes people think that's the best you have to offer. This video only confirms things (medieval RPG, in the forest, loot, turn-based combat, etc) but it doesn't have any kind of hook.
 
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Contagium

Savant
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Joined
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513
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The spinning...MAKE IT STOP.

I'm looking forward to killing rats and basic RPG shit honestly, I'm so sick of games now trying to outdo each other with piling on ultra high fantasy scenarios (I'm looking at you BG3)
 

Tyranicon

A Memory of Eternity
Developer
Joined
Oct 7, 2019
Messages
7,801
You can clearly tell the dev takes codex advice to heart since there's 200% more camera spinning. :-D

Also the voice over doesn't really match up with the action and it's distracting.
 

Abu Antar

Turn-based Poster
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Joined
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Messages
14,194
Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is. Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Much better trailer than the alpha one. A lot more is happening here. Some posters thought that I wanted AAA when I criticized the previous trailer, but this actually has things going on.

Edit: True about the voice acting, and camera spinning.
 

Atomboy

Atom Team
Developer
Joined
Oct 1, 2016
Messages
734
With the gaping trailer-shaped wound in my soul aching a bit less, I'm back! Thanks for all the feedback, we tried to do better with the second one. You know how these things go. You're tired, your eyes hurt, you like spinning the camera too much, you film it, you publish it online maybe... There's always a good side to those things, for example those pesky skeptics who thought I lied when I said we don't really know how to market our stuff got pwnd big time!

Atomboy What's with the striped signpost at 0:20? Looks anachronistic.
We get that a lot, but one of us did a research and it turned out they painted those like this since the Renaissance, and we're sort of there chronologically.


Common the game looks fantastic, I've had it with your negativity.
I'm looking forward to the game, played both Atoms and enjoyed them a lot. But it is true that the trailer looked kind of meh.
Thanks! It really did!
That's the kind of trailer, even when labeled Alpha, that affects a game negatively more than anything. If not for knowing that this is coming from ATOM dev I would instantly put the game on ignore category.

Very bad frame rate, awkward music, and literally nothing happens except walking in the first 20 - 30 seconds but instead of a beautiful pre-rendered environment like in PoE games whose look is actually an attraction, it's just average-looking assets in average looking environment.

Then what, 10 seconds of 2 guys standing over a "secret" pit with the camera rotating around them.

Then 10 seconds of hitting rat and dogs in a VERY SLOW combat with only auto attacks.
We pretty much did poorly with this one, BUT! The pit is kind of hard to spot without appropriate stats! And the combat speed goes up to 300%. The guy filming had his on the slowest setting. Also it looks to me as if the framerate is the recording's fault. My copy is running at all kinda of top FPS. Gotcha covered!
You can clearly tell the dev takes codex advice to heart since there's 200% more camera spinning. :-D

Also the voice over doesn't really match up with the action and it's distracting.
This time it's only PLOT-RELATED camera spinning! This one actually happens in the game if you do a certain thing to a witch.
We went through every new line in this thread since day one and the codex really did push us to improve this thing. Though in hindsight maybe I should've written the narration before finalizing the footage. You live and you learn!

I would probably rename the trailer to Alpha Sneak Peek or something. There's not enough interesting things to call it a full trailer and we're probably too far out from launch to even need one yet.

Words matter. Calling it a trailer makes people think that's the best you have to offer. This video only confirms things (medieval RPG, in the forest, loot, turn-based combat, etc) but it doesn't have any kind of hook.
I think we'll do one better and make it invisible now that the updated one is out!
Swordhaven really reminds me of Hard To Be A God. In more ways then one. Overall my intuition feels good about this one...
Can you tell me why though? Very curious...

Problem with the trailer is that it makes Swordhaven look like generic fantasy without any hook.
There's no premise of the game shown, no concept art, no nothing beyond generic "medieval" assets and hard to read font.

Compare that to early trailers for ATOM, which managed to give identity for the game, despite not being that much more technically complex.

Thing is, most of us find Atom's trailers really cringy. Maybe they're okay from the outside looking in, but for us... a different story. So this one was like a conscious attempt to step back somewhat from the format of those. Hopefully we got a bit of both worlds with the new narrative one.
needs more camera spinning
this trailer is far better
Thanks!



lmao at 20sec
That's a plot-related spin!

Swordhaven really reminds me of Hard To Be A God. In more ways then one. Overall my intuition feels good about this one...
Such a weird movie. I recommend not eating anything before or during if you are going to watch it.
Movie? It's a book.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God
It's a whole bunch of very intriguing things!
That jump at 0:44. That is going to be my go-to skill.
Every weapon style has a jump or two. But this one has the additional benefit of you standing up straight after the jump, hanging out there for a few mincroseconds and then just stabbing the guy out of the blue.
They'll be really cool if we get kickstarter backed animationists tho promise!
WIP! WIP!


----------------------------------

Now I'll take my leave again, those four days really shouldn't go to waste. Squadala, I am off! See you in the Kickstarter timeline!
 

Litmanen

Educated
Joined
Feb 27, 2024
Messages
551
With the gaping trailer-shaped wound in my soul aching a bit less, I'm back! Thanks for all the feedback, we tried to do better with the second one. You know how these things go. You're tired, your eyes hurt, you like spinning the camera too much, you film it, you publish it online maybe... There's always a good side to those things, for example those pesky skeptics who thought I lied when I said we don't really know how to market our stuff got pwnd big time!

Atomboy What's with the striped signpost at 0:20? Looks anachronistic.
We get that a lot, but one of us did a research and it turned out they painted those like this since the Renaissance, and we're sort of there chronologically.


Common the game looks fantastic, I've had it with your negativity.
I'm looking forward to the game, played both Atoms and enjoyed them a lot. But it is true that the trailer looked kind of meh.
Thanks! It really did!
That's the kind of trailer, even when labeled Alpha, that affects a game negatively more than anything. If not for knowing that this is coming from ATOM dev I would instantly put the game on ignore category.

Very bad frame rate, awkward music, and literally nothing happens except walking in the first 20 - 30 seconds but instead of a beautiful pre-rendered environment like in PoE games whose look is actually an attraction, it's just average-looking assets in average looking environment.

Then what, 10 seconds of 2 guys standing over a "secret" pit with the camera rotating around them.

Then 10 seconds of hitting rat and dogs in a VERY SLOW combat with only auto attacks.
We pretty much did poorly with this one, BUT! The pit is kind of hard to spot without appropriate stats! And the combat speed goes up to 300%. The guy filming had his on the slowest setting. Also it looks to me as if the framerate is the recording's fault. My copy is running at all kinda of top FPS. Gotcha covered!
You can clearly tell the dev takes codex advice to heart since there's 200% more camera spinning. :-D

Also the voice over doesn't really match up with the action and it's distracting.
This time it's only PLOT-RELATED camera spinning! This one actually happens in the game if you do a certain thing to a witch.
We went through every new line in this thread since day one and the codex really did push us to improve this thing. Though in hindsight maybe I should've written the narration before finalizing the footage. You live and you learn!

I would probably rename the trailer to Alpha Sneak Peek or something. There's not enough interesting things to call it a full trailer and we're probably too far out from launch to even need one yet.

Words matter. Calling it a trailer makes people think that's the best you have to offer. This video only confirms things (medieval RPG, in the forest, loot, turn-based combat, etc) but it doesn't have any kind of hook.
I think we'll do one better and make it invisible now that the updated one is out!
Swordhaven really reminds me of Hard To Be A God. In more ways then one. Overall my intuition feels good about this one...
Can you tell me why though? Very curious...

Problem with the trailer is that it makes Swordhaven look like generic fantasy without any hook.
There's no premise of the game shown, no concept art, no nothing beyond generic "medieval" assets and hard to read font.

Compare that to early trailers for ATOM, which managed to give identity for the game, despite not being that much more technically complex.

Thing is, most of us find Atom's trailers really cringy. Maybe they're okay from the outside looking in, but for us... a different story. So this one was like a conscious attempt to step back somewhat from the format of those. Hopefully we got a bit of both worlds with the new narrative one.
needs more camera spinning
this trailer is far better
Thanks!



lmao at 20sec
That's a plot-related spin!

Swordhaven really reminds me of Hard To Be A God. In more ways then one. Overall my intuition feels good about this one...
Such a weird movie. I recommend not eating anything before or during if you are going to watch it.
Movie? It's a book.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_to_Be_a_God
It's a whole bunch of very intriguing things!
That jump at 0:44. That is going to be my go-to skill.
Every weapon style has a jump or two. But this one has the additional benefit of you standing up straight after the jump, hanging out there for a few mincroseconds and then just stabbing the guy out of the blue.
They'll be really cool if we get kickstarter backed animationists tho promise!
WIP! WIP!


----------------------------------

Now I'll take my leave again, those four days really shouldn't go to waste. Squadala, I am off! See you in the Kickstarter timeline!

I'm another one who loved A.T.O.M. and is has chosen to play Trudograd in order to have a satisfying experience after a series of big delusions.

The previous trailer was particularly anonymous, lacking character, which is something we're accustomed to seeing in your games.

This trailer offers much more, thankfully.

However, it still reveals little about the game world, in my opinion, but there have been definite strides forward in terms of marketing, yes :)
 

Feyd Rautha

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Apr 17, 2009
Messages
2,071
Location
Nestled atop the cliffs
Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath
Many players from the Codex, NMA and similar communities felt that the ATOM games were far too easy, even when you selected the difficulty setting titled "Hard".

What will you do to make Swordcoast feel challenging for experienced players?

e: And not just combat difficulty, I mean balance of economy as well in order to give the player a challenging experience.
 
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