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Preview Frayed Knights 2 Flythrough Video

Infinitron

I post news
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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
Tags: Frayed Knights 2; Jay Barnson; Rampant Games

Jay Barnson's Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath, the sequel to his 2011 comedic blobber, Frayed Knights: The Skull of S'makh-Daon, has been in development since 2012. Today, in a post on his blog, Jay finally unveiled its first gameplay video. Well, sort of. It's actually a "flythrough video" that he used to attract attention towards the game during a recent conference. Here's the video, along with some notes from Jay about the game's demo build and its success (or lack thereof) with the younger crowd that attended the conference:



First of all, we used the level from the Comic Con demo, mainly because it is at the highest level of completion and was designed to be a tiny mini-adventure that could be completed in about five to ten minutes. However, the game (and the level itself) has changed a lot since then. We used the new, full UI this time around, although I disabled lock-picking to avoid complicating the game too much. Actually, what I did was add a new ‘impossible’ lock flag which pops up a message in the case of full-on plot-protected doors. I hope to use them extremely sparingly if at all outside of the demo.

One of the new additions (taken from a lesson learned at Comic Con) was an “attract mode” added to the game. It was inspired somewhat by the menu screen in the original Unreal. It actually worked quite well. Maybe too well… I had a constant stream of players and no chance to take a break the entire night. I’ve included a video of a full ‘cycle’ of the fly-through. It looks better at 60 fps with no compression / streaming artifacts at full resolution, but it should give you the idea.

The players were (mostly) teenagers. About half of the players really didn’t “get it.” They had trouble with the controls, with a first-person perspective, with the style, or the amount of text. About half or one third of the remaining players REALLY seemed to get it. They were laughing at the text, asking great questions, digging into the spell-system, really trying to master the combat options, and so forth.

I don’t know if that was a good or even representative ratio. I told my wife, “I’d rather make a game that a few people really love than a lot of people think is just ‘okay.’ ” He answered that she wanted me to make games everybody loves, which… well, okay. Yeah, that’d be awesome, but how do you do that?

We didn't report about that Comic Con demo last year. You can actually catch a few glimpses of in-engine footage in this short interview with Jay that took place there. The game's first official screenshot was also revealed last year:


There's still no release date for Frayed Knights 2, but it looks like things are starting to warm up. Time to start paying more attention.
 

Metro

Arcane
Beg Auditor
Joined
Aug 27, 2009
Messages
27,792
Uninstalled the first one after an hour or so. Shallow and the punky/derpy character interaction didn't help things, either.
 

Morkar Left

Guest
Really liked the first one. A bit clunky but with well working game mechanics and the not-serious world makes it a good distraction between all the grim-dark bloodsplattering rpgs. I'm still looking forward to the sequel.
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
Yes, the drama stars where pretty cool. Would like to see a similar mechanic in other rpgs.

I do hope he manages a more consistent quality of his 3d models and character graphics this time around. Some of them really could get pretty bad in the first game, which made them stand out in comparison.
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
Yeah, still haven't played that - anyway I think it should be used more.
 

Sizzle

Arcane
Joined
Feb 17, 2012
Messages
2,471
Didn't they say that there was going to be a similar system in Bard's Tale IV, for the monk class?
 

Gord

Arcane
Joined
Feb 16, 2011
Messages
7,049
Hm, dunno, but making it restricted to classes would kinda defy the idea behind it - (in FK) you accumulated drama points for certain actions, which could be used to get different benefits. The points would get lost when you reloaded, however.
This gave you an incentive to keep on playing when something went wrong, instead of save-scumming your way through the game.
 
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Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth

Sizzle

Arcane
Joined
Feb 17, 2012
Messages
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Oh, right. I thought they said both rest spamming and save scumming for the monk class. Yeah, that's certainly not the same thing.
 

Darth Roxor

Royal Dongsmith
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Well it's a meta mechanic for boosting your shit.

Except in Arcanum it's severely brought down by savescumming + limited as hell as a resource, while in FK it's a save scumming countermeasure (quite possibly the best and least intrusive one I've ever seen in a game, too) that's also meant to be used semi-often.
 

Rpguy

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Apr 9, 2013
Messages
1,168
Pathfinder: Wrath
Except in Arcanum it's severely brought down by savescumming + limited as hell as a resource, while in FK it's a save scumming countermeasure (quite possibly the best and least intrusive one I've ever seen in a game, too) that's also meant to be used semi-often.

It made me play much bigger sessions than I planned for ( and finish the game in less days ) because I just wouldnt stop in order not to lose the stars :P
 

vealck

Novice
Joined
Apr 3, 2014
Messages
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All this time I honestly thought the first one was still in early access.
 

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