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Vendetta: Curse of Raven's Cry - open world pirate action-RPG from Two Worlds developer

Explorerbc

Arcane
Joined
Nov 22, 2012
Messages
1,170
Wow, you guys are actually arguing on Gothic vs Raven's Cry combat. :hmmm:

Yeah, the gothic controls are awkward and initially you get your ass kicked even by the shitiest enemies. But then you stop playing like a retard and realise you have to put some effort into timing your moves. Mastering this shit and destroying those that made your life miserable before is one of the most rewarding experiences I had in rpgs.

Raven's Cry looks like a low-budget clickfest with floaty enemies.
 

Mustawd

Guest
The sabers look like Masamune length.
Which Masamune blade? There are severals, because masamune is a swordsmith.
But the length is due to the fact that they used the long polish hussar saber, which was very long, because it was made to be used from horseback. (around 1m long, rarely 1.2m ) The later models were shorter. That is a flaw of all the makers of such games, because pirates used the cutlass. The spanish used the spada da lato (side-sword), english used more the broadsword and backsword type of blades. And the Rapier was more / only a duelling (civilian) weapon.


Think he mean this Masamune.
 

vonAchdorf

Arcane
Joined
Sep 20, 2014
Messages
13,465
The sabers look like Masamune length.
Which Masamune blade? There are severals, because masamune is a swordsmith.
But the length is due to the fact that they used the long polish hussar saber, which was very long, because it was made to be used from horseback. (around 1m long, rarely 1.2m ) The later models were shorter. That is a flaw of all the makers of such games, because pirates used the cutlass. The spanish used the spada da lato (side-sword), english used more the broadsword and backsword type of blades. And the Rapier was more / only a duelling (civilian) weapon.

It was meant as a joking reference to the blade Sepiroth uses in FFVII because judging from the video, their weapons looked really long.

Yes, a cutlass would have been better, it was developed for the use on ships.
 

Darkzone

Arcane
Joined
Sep 4, 2013
Messages
2,323
Odachi or nodachi is the correct terminology for this kinds of swords like the Masamune blade from FFVII (Sephiroth's sword).
Developers rarely dive deep into the research on certain topics like swords and their use, therefore i have such high hopes for Kingdom Come: Deliverance. Pirates should use pirate weapons, like the cutlass, matchlock / flintlock pistols, musket, granade, ax and blunderbuss.
 

Astral Rag

Arcane
Joined
Feb 1, 2012
Messages
7,771
Wot I Think: The First Few Hours Of Raven’s Cry
By John Walker on February 3rd, 2015 at 5:00 pm.


Well Raven’s Cry is quite the thing. It’s not too often that you get a game released in a state like this these days, without having “Early Access” excuses stamped all over it. This pirate-themed third-person RPG is quite astonishingly terrible. Here’s wot I thought of the first few hours.

Welcome to the confusing not-yet-invented American accent of St. Lucian resident Mr Handsome Hairychest Pirate – your pin-wheeling Mr Magoo of a playable character – in this historical farce of clumsy controls and barely coherent menus that rather hilariously prices itself at £40.

Taking most of its inspiration from 1998’s action games, Raven’s Cry also borrows a good few ideas from Sid Meier’s Pirates, including reputation meters, smuggling, and ship battles. Sadly, to the best of my knowledge, there’s no ballroom dancing. It is, however, in glorious gloomy third-person 3D, complete with broken sword fighting, broken ship boarding, broken conversations, broken interfaces, and broken spirits.

Things open, after some meandering cutscenes I only vaguely remember, with a ship battle. No explanation, just dumped right in a sequence in which you must sail between some rocks, and then fire canons at another ship. It’s clumsy, barely involving, and tiresome. Once completed, there are more cutscenes about something probably, and then you’re in a pub where you’re not quite taught how to fight, then a town where you’re being shot at by about thirty enemies. You’re armed with a sword, and a ye-olde-pistol, and a hook instead of a left hand. Sneak up unnoticed and you can take enemies out with your hook, but get spotted and it’s time to wave your sword about!

Wave wave wave! Oh gosh, it’s so, so bad. The animations are dreadful, spasmodic blips as enemies change attacks, with blocks generally achieved by fluke rather than skill. Things are so choppy that it’s hard to tell if you’re actually hitting or being hit, until one or the other of you falls over dead. Which is the Bolshoi Ballet compared to the pistol. Yes, a ten second reload time is a thing of the history, and the rifle-wielding locals are similarly inhibited. But there’s dozens of them, and one of you, so the odds aren’t really with you. Especially since the damned thing rarely works. It’s complete arbitrary whether a point blank headshot will take someone out, or just have no reaction whatsoever, as they stand there and stare blankly at you.

Get through that tedium and you arrive in your native St. Lucia, and immediately are treated with this bit of local theatre:



Absolutely everything is a mess. Characters sometimes forget to open their mouths when they talk, the animations are universally dreadful (I have become prone to snickering as I watch Cap’n Handsome stride his manly strut), and the voice actors – who vary from okay to terrible – are forced to say the most unremarkably banal nothingness.

But the interface. Oh my, what a treat there is here. Everything is awful, laid out as if in Word Art, presented without flourish nor thought. The map, for instance, doesn’t tell you which island you’re currently on. And when you zoom out to the full Caribbean, the individual islands are a different shape than their zoomed in equivalents, so no hope of figuring it out that way.

And the shops! I can’t get over the shop interface. I cannot understand how a sentient human was involved with this layout:
rav2.jpg

There are such poor design decisions. When you fight someone, their health bar appears in a straight red line at the top of the screen, but the straight red line at the bottom of the screen isn’t your health, no no, yours is curved over the teeny map bottom left. But then, goodness me, if there’s one aspect we can all celebrate, it’s the XP notifications.

Look, it may seem like I’m being overly picky at this point, but when a game’s this dreary and poorly put together, you’ve got to find your fun somewhere. Rather than popping up with “100 XP” or howsoever you might expect it, you get a short story:

“100 experience points received”

It’s only disappointing they don’t write out “100” properly.

I should add, I’m fighting my way through this interface using the 360 pad, because the game’s not giving me any choice. Have a pad plugged in and it’ll insist on it, and I’m not crawling around the back of my PC for this nonsense’s sake. It’s better suited to the analogue stick for general play, but obviously its refusal to let me use my mouse is agonising in the batshit menus. And as if that weren’t annoying enough, my attempt to reassign 360 buttons to things slightly less idiotic than the defaults resulted in discovering this momentous control options screen:



That’s right. There isn’t one. Just a blank space where it’s supposed to be. £40.

Ooh, what else. There’s some sort of bonkers fish-eye on the camera view, which means that NPCs getting near the edges can start to distort in very peculiar ways. This chap has a very disturbing left arm, for instance:
[img]http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/images/15/feb/rav1.jpg
Copious amounts of recorded dialogue is missing, including for the main character. And they know it too, the game switching a character to subtitles mid-monologue. And oh god, OH GOD, what’s wrong with their necks?!



Fluffed lines are left in, with characters starting a sentence, messing it up, then restarting. There are major characters for whom no dialogue has been recorded at all, leading to mad conversations with one person chatting away, the other person fluent only in subtitle, which is a peculiar experience. And a slightly more galling one when it’s not the occasional mistake, but something they clearly knew they weren’t even close to finishing, but thought, hell, let’s sell this to the suckers anyway.

Oh, listing everything wrong with this is my new hobby. When it changes time of day, it doesn’t gradually adjust the light levels – it just becomes daytime like God flipped a switch. Out of boredom, at one point, I tried to see if I could murder NPCs in a town. I could. The game didn’t care, no one reacted. But best of all, I heard the murmuring of a small crowd a few times, killed one guy, and it stopped. Noisy guy!

One scripted fight autosaved as the chap chopped me with his sword, and it only took one more blow from him to kill me. So eventually, after multiple tries, I just ran off. Came back a minute later and he’d forgotten he was meant to be fighting me, and stood patiently still while I hacked him to death. Oh, and the exposition! It’s a joy. Conversations in which characters introduce major plot points by saying things like, “But you know that my father was killed when I was a boy and had that same shape carved into him!”

Icons on the minimap don’t match those on the main map. Characters piss mid-conversation. The jump barely functions. There’s just nothing redeemable here. Frankly, it’s damned rude to release a game in this state.

So, Raven’s Cry is available for £40 on Steam! What a treat.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02/03/ravens-cry-review/
 
Last edited:

Darth Roxor

Royal Dongsmith
Staff Member
Joined
May 29, 2008
Messages
1,878,406
Location
Djibouti
Icons on the minimap don’t match those on the main map. Characters piss mid-conversation. The jump barely functions. There’s just nothing redeemable here.

does not compute
 

pippin

Guest
My favorite bit was the muted guy. How on earth can you fuck up something so basic? :lol:
 

Angthoron

Arcane
Joined
Jul 13, 2007
Messages
13,056
My favorite bit was the muted guy. How on earth can you fuck up something so basic? :lol:
Apparently they tied wrong soundbites to wrong triggers. Prolly rushed to hell by the publisher, it's a very basic but very tedious and time-consuming task.

That, or someone wiped his ass on the sound asset list.
 

Tigranes

Arcane
Joined
Jan 8, 2009
Messages
10,350
The German dude was right, this is a game worth buying. BRB getting wallet
 

Bruticis

Guest
1GB patch just finished downloading on Steam. They removed Steam DRM to fix stability (totally not a desperate and blind wtf else can we do to fix this shit move). I'm half tempted to try it again to see how they "improved animations".
CHANGE LOG:

GAME STABILITY
- Steam DRM encryption removed (improves overall stability and performance)
- Random EXE crashes fixed
- fixed bug causing hero to freeze in the air
- fixed bugs with flying NPCs / enemies
- Level fixes in Santo Domingo, Bridgetown, Port Royal, Saint George, Santa Muerte, San Juan

BALANCING:
- ship mast HP increased
- adjusted price of some goods
- some balancing adjustments in skills

GUI:
- tool tips added to Quest Log
- Tutorial messages added to Quest Log
- various corrections in quest log

GRAPHICS/LEVELS:
- Various animations improved
- Improved character models
- Port Royal Ship markers Positions fixed
- camera positions in various dialogues fixed
- fixed bug with officer's models on the ship (but the hooker stays ;))
- St. Domingo: ladders added
- Santa Muerte: corrected stairs

SOUND:
- missing German VOs added
- missing English VOs added
- some distance volume corrections

SETTINGS:
- HD video clips - default set to OFF (please note, switch ON if system speed allows)

STEAM DELUXE AND PREORDER:
- Unlocked Deluxe Edition items
- Preorder Items will unlock Feb.8th 2014
 
Joined
Jan 4, 2014
Messages
795
"third-person, role-playingaction-adventure"

Lost all interest right there.

If you don't have the guts to call your RPG an RPG, then don't make one.
At the risk of getting every gun on the codex aimed at me, I'll come out ans say action-adventure games have ample amounts of RPG-ish aspects which unfortunately get trampled underneath hte massive weight of the "expectations" which have grown in like really bad nose hair. Expecting RPGs to be exactly XYZ is so 15th century.

BUT does that mean anything goes? Never. Just kep an open mind about the genres.
 

balmorar

Arcane
Queued Possibly Retarded The Real Fanboy Edgy
Joined
Jan 24, 2014
Messages
866
Location
Hawaii
No patch can fix this shit game.
 

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