Game News 7 Mages, turn-based dungeon crawler where you play a party of mages, released on Steam Early Access

[mindx2]

Quick suggestion is get rid of the annoying "New round" and "Fight is over" pop-ups!!! They're irritating to say the least!

 

[Infinitron]

Between Eisenwald and this, I'm beginning to suspect that European indie developers are getting taken advantage of by unqualified translators.

 

[Bubbles]

The whole intro is pretty clunky too. It can't be changed now, of course, but it's worth mentioning how unnaturally this reads:

When the legendary Rovenland opened to the world after almost one thousand years, hundreds of magical prospectors were getting off the boat.

Later they were called the rogue mages.

As I know, it was garbage from all around the world, just seeking the magical artefacts that had made the island so famous.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Between Eisenwald and this, I'm beginning to suspect that European indie developers are getting taken advantage of by unqualified translators.

Because they are. Everyone who finished high school and knows how to inglese on a communicative level thinks himself a translator nowadays, and many of them flock into pseudo-freelancing and offer shitty quality and/or unqualified services for shitty money, spoiling the market for people (LIKE THE ROXORS OF THIS WORLD) who actually know their shit.

And don't even get me started on Fan Translations (tm) that are done by a bunch of tards on a forum for free.

 

[Johny_G]

I should've been more careful about the wording I guess ).

 

[ArchAngel]

The whole intro is pretty clunky too. It can't be changed now, of course, but it's worth mentioning how unnaturally this reads:

When the legendary Rovenland opened to the world after almost one thousand years, hundreds of magical prospectors were getting off the boat.

Later they were called the rogue mages.

As I know, it was garbage from all around the world, just seeking the magical artefacts that had made the island so famous.

Yea that reads terrible.

 

[Riskbreaker]

Them Nintendo of America translators found themselves a new employment, they did.

 

[V_K]

One other thing that disturbs me about the game is the lack of pants. Like, there's no equipment slot for that, and the character models in split party mode look extremely weird walking around in their underware. Johny_G, am I missing something or is it some sort of design decision? :D

 

[Excidium II]

Them Nintendo of America translators found themselves a new employment, they did.

 

[Johny_G]

One other thing that disturbs me about the game is the lack of pants. Like, there's no equipment slot for that, and the character models in split party mode look extremely weird walking around in their underware. Johny_G, am I missing something or is it some sort of design decision? :D

I'm just a programmer, not a designer of the game, and I have actually implemented pants in early builds of the game (OK, this is definitely the single weirdest thing I have ever posted on the Internet). But design-wise, every armor in the game is a full-body armor, so there is no slot anymore .

 

[V_K]

One more weird dialog screen. The lower circled bit, as it turned out, was supposed to mean casting a fireball. What's the upper circled bit supposed to mean is beyond me, unless it's a LOL in Cyrillic font. Guys, you really need to do a new translation and sue that fraud's ass.

 

[Aenra]

V_K It's not weird man. It's exactly what you'd expect form a fucking retard who grew up spinally attached to Reddit. It's perfectly normal, welcome to 2016. I cannot begin to describe to you how FUN 2026 will be..!
(keyboards? What are those? o.o lol, they still type^^ !?? <3 lolz :#)

 

[Dorateen]

I'd rather play a party of 7 dwarves.

Turn-based dungeon crawler? Excellent! Recruiting a party of exclusive to one class... eh. It's like the developers never played pen and paper or a computer role-playing game, and missed the point spectacularly. Hope they learn from this project, and we get a better party-based adventure next time.

 

[Helly]

Between Eisenwald and this, I'm beginning to suspect that European indie developers are getting taken advantage of by unqualified translators.

Because they are. Everyone who finished high school and knows how to inglese on a communicative level thinks himself a translator nowadays, and many of them flock into pseudo-freelancing and offer shitty quality and/or unqualified services for shitty money, spoiling the market for people (LIKE THE ROXORS OF THIS WORLD) who actually know their shit.

And don't even get me started on Fan Translations (tm) that are done by a bunch of tards on a forum for free.

 

[V_K]

Turn-based dungeon crawler? Excellent! Recruiting a party of exclusive to one class... eh.

They're all mages in name only. In practice it's a classless system but there are weapon abilities (warrior), elemental spells (mage) and songs (bard) that mechanically play very differently from each other. Also you can (actually have to) further specialize within those broad categories or mix abilities from two or more.

 

[Johny_G]

One more weird dialog screen. The lower circled bit, as it turned out, was supposed to mean casting a fireball. What's the upper circled bit supposed to mean is beyond me, unless it's a LOL in Cyrillic font. Guys, you really need to do a new translation and sue that fraud's ass.

These "emoticons" are actually intentional and present in the original texts as well. To be honest, I never understood half of them, but it's a design decision and the translator is not responsible for that. I think it's supposed to magnify the chat-like feel of the dialogues, and in general I think the idea of the messenger-like storytelling is pretty neat and suits the game's mobile-first strategy pretty well. But I was never fan of the emoticons and don't really know what the upper one means. Maybe Jindrich will give you the answer when he reads this thread.

I'd rather play a party of 7 dwarves.

Turn-based dungeon crawler? Excellent! Recruiting a party of exclusive to one class... eh. It's like the developers never played pen and paper or a computer role-playing game, and missed the point spectacularly. Hope they learn from this project, and we get a better party-based adventure next time.

The general idea is, that even weapons and musical instruments are handled by magic. That's why we call all of the heroes mages. When actually playing, if you don't specialize your party to have some dedicated warriors, some mages and some musicians, your chances to get through the game are pretty low .

 

[Helly]

One more weird dialog screen. The lower circled bit, as it turned out, was supposed to mean casting a fireball. What's the upper circled bit supposed to mean is beyond me, unless it's a LOL in Cyrillic font. Guys, you really need to do a new translation and sue that fraud's ass.

These "emoticons" are actually intentional and present in the original texts as well. To be honest, I never understood half of them, but it's a design decision and the translator is not responsible for that. I think it's supposed to magnify the chat-like feel of the dialogues, and in general I think the idea of the messenger-like storytelling is pretty neat and suits the game's mobile-first strategy pretty well. But I was never fan of the emoticons and don't really know what the upper one means. Maybe Jindrich will give you the answer when he reads this thread.

Yeah, I'm really not sure your target audience wants chat-like dialogues in their TB blobber... Unless you go for the silly/funny parody kind of rpg of course.

 

[Johny_G]

Yeah, I'm really not sure your target audience wants chat-like dialogues in their TB blobber... Unless you go for the silly/funny parody kind of rpg of course.

Personally, I enjoy the cheesy humor of the game quite a lot . But I can understand that it might annoy other players. The czech reviewers were not fans of it either.

 

[Xenich]

So that is all you spend money on? Just added content? No potions, items, added space, etc...?

Exactly. If you buy the full game, no IAPs will be available anymore. No consumables, nor other crap. Just pay 7 bucks and it's all yours . Or, of course, you can choose to buy the levels one by one, but these are permanent purchases as well.

If that is the case, then that solves that issue, The only other complaint I have outside of that is the fact that it was designed for mobile and a straight port.

The straight port only applies to the Early Access version. The game will be eventually adjusted for computer needs (better graphics, dynamic lighting, remappable controls, keyboard shortcuts, etc.). We just heard the community reluctant to play full-pledged RPG on mobile and made the exact same version available for PC and Mac until the real PC version is finished.

Hmm, worth at least a deeper look then. I can't tell you how tired I am of the mobile gimmick games and Steam is a horrible promoter of that garbage.

 

[InspectorRumpole]

Reeks of mobile, no thanks.

 

[Johny_G]

Hmm, worth at least a deeper look then. I can't tell you how tired I am of the mobile gimmick games and Steam is a horrible promoter of that garbage.

I totally agree. The state of the mobile market is terrible, and we're sick of it as well. That's why we have ditched the microtransactions, analytics, social features, ads, life timers and whatever studios put their money into these days, and just focused on the full-fledged gameplay with no handholding and put a good old 90's shareware business model on top of it ). Now we hope it's good enough and only time will tell whether we got it right or fucked up hard. I still refuse to believe that the current freemium BS really is what people want, because all the successful studios keep telling us ever since the announcement.

Also, I don't enjoy seeing unaltered mobile ports on PC and consoles neither, because it only magnifies the lack of quality of said games. And even though I think a bit higher about the quality of 7 Mages, we originally planned to release the PC version when it's done (with all the adjustments), but things have changed after the announcement. Even people excited about the game (those have only existed in Czech Republic, since Napoleon Games' original turn-based dungeon crawler Gates of Skeldal is still very popular in here) were reluctant to even try to play anything on mobile. So I proposed this Early Access thing, and we eventually became confident enough to release it. But it is important to state that we are not yet done with the PC version. It was never supposed to be a straight port and still isn't. It's just early access in its original meaning .

 

[V_K]

There is one upside to it being a mobile port: loading times are extremely short.

 

[Mustawd]

The whole intro is pretty clunky too. It can't be changed now, of course, but it's worth mentioning how unnaturally this reads:

When the legendary Rovenland opened to the world after almost one thousand years, hundreds of magical prospectors were getting off the boat.

Later they were called the rogue mages.

As I know, it was garbage from all around the world, just seeking the magical artefacts that had made the island so famous.

This is Black Geyser levels of stupid.

 

[Mustawd]

These "emoticons" are actually intentional and present in the original texts as well. To be honest, I never understood half of them, but it's a design decision and the translator is not responsible for that. I think it's supposed to magnify the chat-like feel of the dialogues, and in general I think the idea of the messenger-like storytelling is pretty neat and suits the game's mobile-first strategy pretty well. But I was never fan of the emoticons and don't really know what the upper one means

 

[V_K]

Oh, come on, people. It's not like you play blobbers for their writing.