Chadeo said:
I LOVED how the main guy (overlord? I forget his title) did a little custom dialog that depended on your best stats. It was a very cool touch, and the reasoning he gave about why each of the three's abilities would prove useful was almost exactly what I would have said. That was impressive.
He's the Watcher.
I'll admit, that's what hooked me right there. The fact the Watcher
knew what assets my party had in it. That means the dialogue scripting is capable of being dynamic based on the attributes and skills of the player characters. That's one thing I look for in a good CRPG.
Ok, so now I get to start playing the actual game. Again, the look and feel of the game totally blew away my expectations. The fact that this game was made by a small indy group is just unbelievable, and has set a very good target to judge others work by. The 3-d engine seemed to work just fine (other than the one crash, more on that below) and while the environment was not picture perfect, it also did not in any way take anything away from the game.
Frankly, I look to independent developers for the future of CRPGs. Commercial developers and publishers these days seem to churn out nothing more than combat fests. Even quests that really don't have to have combat have combat tossed in just for that hack and slash fun.
NWN was really, really bad about that. There's a quest where you have to prove yourself worthy to judge two people, so how do you prove yourself? Combat? Why? Hell if I know, it seemed pretty trite to me. You even have to fight your way to and from these people to interview them. Way to take a good idea and blow it with meaningless combat, BioWare.
That's why I really, really dig Prelude to Darkness. Most of the quests aren't combat fests, but some are just for good measure.
I found the compos/map combo to work very well once I figured it out (again the fact that the help system came up the first time I opened the map was perfect). I quickly found my way to the contact.
Yeah, whomever came up with that system did a damned fine job. I use it all the time.
Dialog was fine, though I did not notice any difference between any of my characters. The one with the 20 int had the same options as the 20 char, and the 11 int 11 char guy. I assume that not all dialog will be like that, but for now I have not noticed any large difference due to stats.
Some situations don't have a speech skill effect, that's true. CP does a good job of listenning to suggestions though.
On the way to the hut I got into my first battle. My fighter got really beat up, probably because I hit him twice with my mage guy. It can be a bit difficult to click on the bad guy and pick your attack when you have him surrounded, but I can live with that to keep the interface uncluttered.
My party is basically:
Farmer with Gift of Goddess skill
Merchant with Literacy and Lore
Guardian with Medical
Then I train them with random encounters by resting.
My Farmer uses a spear mostly because of it's speed and range, but also provides healing in combat.
My Merchant is the leader, and does all the talking and bartering.
My Guardian is my tank. He also provides good healing at the end of a combat round.
I don't thief around, at least not in this game. I don't deal in Flame magic because there were some bugs in that area in 1.0 that have been fixed. However, as you can read in the article about Flame magic on our site, it's a pretty good little area to know. :D
So after the hut, I was a bit lost on what to do next. I went back into the town and talked with everyone I could find, and figured the quest out, but I just think that at the very beginning of the game there might need to be a bit more hand holding.
I agree with this. There's a quest in Kellen involving a missing child that could use some hint dropping. I know the child is missing, but nothing beyond that. I talked to everyone in town, but no one knows anything about it or even talks about it. So, basically, I just didn't bother with this quest and moved on.
If there were a few things to hint at what made the child disappear, or where he might be, I would have tried it. However, I figured I'd save the world instead, and went to another town.
Something like being taken back to town with the body, have the towns people all come out, act all shocked, mutter a bit about how do they know you did not do it, you respond with how you will find the killer...or whatever. It was not until I spoke with some key NPC's did I even find out that someone else knew about the death. It was a bit odd. Like I said though I figured it out, and perhaps there are more solutions so the hand holding I mentioned would only limit your options.
I actually tripped over this quest. I had no idea the witness knew about it until I solved the quest dealing with that person in question.
I got some experience so I could raise some of my skills. A few had already been raised through use, and I really like the system so far. I have a slight nit pick with the method for spending exp though. Do you really need to ask me if I want to spend my exp each and every time? Even just placing 6 or so exp got annoying due to this. Perhaps if you let me add points, and subtract points that I added until I closed the screen.
I
strongly agree here. This would be exceptionally nice rather than how it is now. It'd be much better to do the add/subtract thing and then have a requestor asking if it was okay to lock the changes in stone.
That was all the time I had so far, but I am really looking forward to exploring it more. Tonight I am going to register and bug all my friends to go download it.
Bug them all to visit our site, too. :D
Even at this stage Prelude feels like it has more style to it than a bioware game, and even if it does not live up to the initial impressions I feel it is more than worth registering to support the continued development. I still can not believe that a small indy group did this.
More style, and better designed to boot.
