Development Info Lionheart demo released

[triCritical]

But i couldnt find how to assign hotkeys to spells. Oh, and scrolling sucked, its slow and with one menu open took me 5 sec to find myself. Its irritating if youre getting attacked and cant find a target cause of the slow scrolling.

Now you know why they added a pause.

Really interesting character creation and horrible, horrible real time combat are my biggest impressions after 20 minutes with it.

I just fought a hand full of characters and would have to agree. RIght off the bat, its obvious that combat falls to the lowest common denominator. For once I would like to see a RPG get combat right. Then again I am a combat purist.

 

[Walks with the Snails]

Yeah, I have spent some more time with it, and I agree the combat is very crappy. Ranged is even more useless than in NWN if that's possible. Enemies would literally be on top of me half a second after I spotted them. I guess it might work if you summon stuff to melee for you but that's about it. I also wound up dying a whole lot, and I made a pure melee / spell buff dude. Combat seemed to be more a matter of luck than anything.

Oh well, at least I'll be $50 richer.

 

[Voss]

Markman. You have to drag the spell icons from the skill menu to the 7 space quickbar. You can drag inventory items the same way.

Ah. Analysis time. Made it to Barcelona. My finger hurts.
Spells added little- mostly because I was in hand to hand too quickly with a lot of the enemies to both with the spells. Though slow and feral lash helped quite a bit against those damn black wolves and ogres.

Lets see. Feedback would be nice. It'd be nice to know how much damage I could do, and what my general chance to hit was- how much do the stances modify hit ability?
Criticals seem to be double damage and knocked down. And why am I failing to hit black wolves? Are they harder to see?

Don't care much for the layout of the skills- a list would be more effiicient than the giant icons.

The Bestial spirits voice acting bothers the hell out of me...much too cultured and not even vaguely bestial. (is it the narrator from BG?)

and the demonic spirit sounds like a weakling rather than something sinister.

Like the way the spell delay is worked... but honestly the real time combat drags it down so much that it is a major issue. The pause is actually more annoying than anything else since you can't actually do anything. And click, click click. Yesh.

quirky thing. the elemental spirit is connected with divine magic, and not the elemental based thought spells. Right.

The moron indicators, as expected, had no useful purpose.

I haven't played with the elemental spirit yet, but the initial dialogue with the bestial and demonic spirits were essentially the same... with a few lines different.

Russian monsters (the vodyanoi) and mongol goblins in Spain is also odd at the other end of the continent is also odd..

Some way to highlight things behind bushes/walls would be nice.

Professor, spare parts? It seems like the beginning of the game... which has been described as being a wilderness area outside of Barcelona...so hows it different? And a fair bit of it has been in screenshots.

Overall, not particularly impressed. A cross between BG and Diablo covers it fairly well.
The dialogue needs some polish. A few errors in spelling and grammar caught my eye.
Good dialogue and story could save it, maybe. But I'd want a spare finger after the current one falls off.

I think I'll poke at it some more to see if I can come to a final decision, but I'm thinking this one is a 'wait till its $19.99' at best.

 

[Moriveth]

Hmm... I liked the dialogue, graphics, and gameplay. Voice acting and music were definitely over par.

Combat, though... ehh... It's not nearly a good system, but I can stand it. I just hope the real game isn't as combat-heavy as this.

 

[Voss]

And wow does a sylvant spellcaster get stomped.
Same fatal flaw as NWN when it comes to ranged combat and spells. Enemies are in your face far too fast, and the HP and AC seems required. And theres no time for thought and tactics. Coming out of the pause is annoying, there seems to be several seconds delay before you can do anything- like target the enemy. Not good.

And yes, the elemental spirit *had* to be the prissy woman.

This would have had potential if it was turned based and had more of a dialogue/ interaction focus.

I'm done, I'll pass.
Ironically, had there not been a demo, I likely would have stayed unsure enough that I would have picked up it to give it a try. But the demo has convinced me.

 

[Psilon]

I've got to second the bitching about the combat. Forget Diablo II, this was giving me Arcanum flashbacks. Ranged combat is practically useless because everyone runs like a cheetah on PCP. Criticals are hard to detect... unless you get Knocked Down and blown twenty feet away.

And the "moron indicators" are aptly named. Clicking a "bye" option with Sir Esteban then made him say a farewell message. With another dialog choice. I could choose "CONTINUE" with a "bye" icon, which then ended conversation (finally). This is one thing BioWare got right with the IE and Aurora engines; end nodes should not say "CONTINUE." It makes the player think something else is coming in the dialogue, when in fact it's laziness on the part of the programmers. Two extra words are unlikely to break the translation budget.

Next, I need to second the scrolling complaint. It's too slow to accelerate. Most competent mouse users aren't going to need such a safety zone. And why does the release version's README go into the demo? Give us a manual, even if it's only a short PDF or HTML file. It doesn't have to be the full retail manual in Word form like Arcanum did, but even with the immersion-breaking Spirit Tutorial I had to figure most things out by trial and error.

Character creation isn't bad, though I disagree with making the trait selection after confirming initial stats. Unless a player already knows what's available, he's probably going to play with traits and stats simultaneously, and in the case of traits like Gifted it's almost definite.

For Reflexive's sake I hope the demo is based off a fairly early fork in the code, before much of the play balancing happened. Without any documentation other than interface popups, it really takes a Fallout fan to figure out what's going on with traits, perks, and the like. Unfortunately, combat is nothing like Fallout's in either paradigm or quality, and its emphasis in the demo has really turned me off.

Verdict? Unless someone other than a Developer Defender posts a good review here and you guys agree with it, I'm not buying until it hits the $20 bargain bin. Sorry, Cabal, but the supposedly-representative demo just lost a sale. Admittedly, I wasn't drooling over it to begin with, but I went in with an open mind and out with a closed checkbook.

 

[chrisbeddoes]

Wow .
The character creation is cool.

But the real time combat sucks so bad .

Sorry . This one is for the bargain bin.

Why why could it nit have TURN BASED play ?

WHY ?

WHY ?

 

[xenocide]

Well, played with the demo for a while and I agree that the combat leaves a lot to be desired. On the character creation, on my second time through I found you can switch back and forth between the first and second screens to see the affects of perks, also, dont forget about the tabs on the right, they show things as well. It would definitly have been better to have all the creation on one screen.

Why is everthing so big? The icons and menu items are way too large. And the interface is WAY too bug IMO. I liked playing much better with the interface minimised (F2) but then you loose the info box.

I did see a post on the interplay forums by one of the developers. Here it is:

"Our demo is out? Holy cow! Why do I hear all of the exciting news from the boards?

A couple notes about the demo:

1. For all of you playing as mages, are you aware that you can pick up those little blue balls (tee hee, I said "blue balls") to get mana. depending on your PER, you can see them from further away. AFAIK, having "search" on won't affect the range at which you can detect them.

And, yes, the spells at the beginning are pretty weak, but as your skill improves so does the damage you do, so the starter spells should remain useful for most of the game.

2. The demo is very combat-heavy. Unfortunately, due to scheduling issues the demo was the last thing we worked on, and we did it by taking some maps out of the game, changing them, repopulating them, and hooking them up with one another in ways that many of them don't in the actual game. There wasn't really a chunk of the game that was ready "as is" to turn into a demo - the download would have been huge (a lot of hte work we did on the demo was figuring out which files we could cut to get it down to a "managable" 140 megs or so).

Since we were pressed for time we weren't able to write custom dialogue, let alone get it VO'd. In fact, some of the VO dialogue in the demo was spliced together out of context. Combat, however, is very easy to implement - it's quick to set up and requires relatively little QA support.

There are parts of the game that are as combat-heavy as the demo, and there are parts that aren't. The demo is a good representation of the former, but the latter is really only represented (feebly) by the merchant in the crossroads, who will respond to you differently depending on your character.

So, the demo is good for giving you a general feel of what the game looks like and how combat plays. It has some "low-level" monsters (and unfortunately includes our least-favorite - can you guess which?) and largely unscripted fights. It isn't, because of size and time issues, a complete look at the game."

As you can see, the demo was done last, so the game will play like the demo. However, the non-combat options were non-exestint.

Although the combat was not the greatest, and the menus looked bad imo, I still had fun with it. I will prob. pick it up.

 

[axel]

<joeb> but lionheart is the maker of arcanum and fallout
<axelgreese> haha
<joeb> i tought
<axelgreese> tim cain and the boys at troika made arcanum
<axelgreese> and were the original guys behind fallout back at interplay
<joeb> so they had nothing to do with lionheart?
<axelgreese> no
<joeb> oh
<joeb> so u not going to get lionheart
<axelgreese> never wanted to in the first place
<axelgreese> but I was bored so I checked the demo out

I weep

Can you get to Barcelona in the demo? At the crossroads the sign says go east but the only road that seems to work is south :S

 

[Sabotai]

I have a nagging suspicion that this demo is doing Reflexive more harm than good, well, actually it's blatantly obvious. The combat part is the single most problematic part in Lionheart IMO. So, since the demo is very combat heavy it leaves you with a bad impression and a shitty aftertaste.

For Reflexive's sake, I really hope combat plays differently in the actual game, but I'm very sceptical. Look at the size of the "Attack" pointer, it's some kind of huge grappling hook designed to counter the problem of miss-clicking an enemy when an enemy is running towards you. I don't think augmenting the mouse pointer is a sage way to handle RT combat problems. The combat is similar to NWN without the pretty spell effects, which means no tactics, just click and wait. I really, really wanted to like Lionheart, but after playing this demo, my stance has shifted from "sure buy" to "bargain bin".

 

[Franz_Schubert]

Well, FUCK.

Don't bother getting the demo if you only have 128 MB RAM... things went so slowly I couldn't get out of the jail before the assassin killed me. However, I did manage to get some observations of the game before I quit:

Artwork looks intricate and nice.
Voice acting is colorful and good.
The real-time combat is horrible.
There are some interface issues which need ironing out.
The character creation process is complex and intriguing.

That's about it... I don't want to judge the game too thoroughly before I even get out of prison, but if I can somehow get over the combat and it turns out that the game is not too combat intensive, then I will probably get this game, once I get a new computer.

What they should have done, since they are insistant about the real-time combat, is copied Diablo 2's combat precisely. D2 made a very good representation of real-time combat: it was easy, streamlined, and the interface didn't get in the way at all since you could assign skills to hotkeys.

Anyway, unlike most of the posters in this thread, I haven't given out hope completely... Then again, that might be because I wasn't able to experience the demo

 

[Voss]

Yeah, about the floating balls of light.
I need a Mario to fetch the coins for me.

Sorry- that kind of game implementation doesn't work to well in a RPG.
Mana wasn't much of a problem on a dedicated spellcaster though.

I found the spells to be relatively worthless- I got the electric and cold spells up to ~70 points and had access to the first 3 spells in each branch. I found the low level spell to much more effective, since the higher level (non-area spell) does only 2x the damage but at 4x the cost. With the delay, close combat is just far more efficient.

Btw, how many people finished the demo with a feralkin combat monster?

{edit: added}
An upside to the combat: once you click on someone you keep attacking. I suppose thats something.

 

[Psilon]

And another thing, based on the news updates. Normally, making a demo exclusive to FilePlanet is what we call stupid. Unless it's the bloody Half-Life 2 demo or some video clip of the mythical StarCraft 2, most people are not going to bother waiting in line for 40+ minutes just to connect to a slow download server. Given the quality of the demo, however, this may be a good thing.

Somehow I'm not surprised at those internal communications problems at Interplay. The ratio of suits-with-heads-up-asses to everyone else seems to be approaching 50:1 right now.

 

[HanoverF]

Tried making a smooth taliking caster and got my butt kicked, well not so much kicked as stomped into the ground, dug up, set on fire, and then pissed on.

Then went with unarmed sneaker and made it to the end.

Combat wasn't that bad, which isn't saying much for RTw/P, but deffinetly seemed to be glaring design/balance issues. Found some boots of speed on the last map, and either casters/ranged pcs need to start with these or monsters need to move more like the hornets and less like Jesse Owens, even the Ogres ran like the wind.

The quests you could finish were ass, but there was one (I guess left in by accident) that started out more interesting then the "kill all the bees, goblins, theifs" ones. And there weren't moron indicators for it.

Bad demo tho, All the combat and next to no npc interaction gives the felling of playing a poor Diablo clone

 

[Voss]

Weird that flying creatures are the slowest enemies, huh?

And regarding yet another update...those suits are really far up there, aren't they?

 

[Vault Dweller]

My 2 cents:

Character creation is good because it's SPECIAL, but somehow they managed to overcomplicate it. Attributes and traits should be on one screen. For all the efforts Reflexive put into making the game more accessible for not so bright people, playing Fallout that had one screen btw is a prerequisite to navigating character creation screens.

Interface is huge for no good reason, and very unfriendly. Once again, Fallout had a great inteface, where skills were accessed through the shortkeys or the skilldex. I make reference to Fallout due to similarity in systems used.

Quests. It's unfair to judge a demo which does not represent a part of an actual game, but being asked to kill the bees, the goblins, and the thieves doesn't make a good first impression. An introduction to a cliche "help the dead guy" quest did not help much.

Being persuasive. I put a couple of points into diplomacy and tried to talk the thieves out of their thieving ways, and succeeded. Now, may be I am being too harsh now, but when I tricked Lucan in Arcanum , it was handled with more then 2 lines of dialogue, and thus it felt like an accomplishment considering there were different options toward the same goal. Here it was:
- Are you a bandit? I am a bandit too.
- Cool.
Sounds very convincing.

Combat. It's very arcadish in style. Since you control one character there is hardly a need for a pause, so it's point and click gameplay that seems much simplier then IE combat which does not speak well for itself. Playing Lionheart reminded me what a great job D2 did making realtime combat fun. It's ok overall, but it's not fun.

What's left? The graphics ok, looks like IE games. The magic system is ok, I kinda like that you assign points to the skill "branch" and thus improve all spells in a branch making even early spells useful later on. Of course, it's hard to tell without playing more, but I hope that there is something good in the game.

I have a question. I think that somebody mentioned that there was a way to deal with goblins other then killing them. Can somebody comment on that?

Edit: I also find 2 more annoying things: first, when I got a bear-follower, I had no way (or at least I didn't find a way) to tell its current health level. Edit: Nevermind, there is a status button for that.

Second, when you increase skills there is no "minus" button, so if you click by mistake or just wanted to see what options higher skills/spells open up, you have to reload to undo your changes.

I looked at the interface again. What a piece of work. Do we really need to have a button for pause when we have this huge space bar so conviniently located? It seems to me that the interface was designed around dialogue screen which is silly as a separate window that comes up during a conversation would have made more sense, especially in a combat heavy game.

Another question? What's up with pickpocketing, i.e. where is it? Or why pickpocket when you can kill'em?

 

[Walks with the Snails]

I was also kind of wondering about that, if they cut out skills for the demo. I know at first thought character creation was neat, then about 2 minutes in I saw there were 4 combat skills, 4 thieving skills, and 12 magic skills. I dunno, it just kind of left a bad taste in my mouth seeing how limited my real options were. You only need one weapon skill and many magic schools are redundant, so it's mostly just a matter of flavor what you tag and advance in. I didn't get the idea characters would be that meaningfully different, most will probably end up decent in one weapon class and 2-3 spell schools, with a smattering of utilitarian skills.

 

[Volourn]

I'd actually comment on the demo if it would actually download properly... I've tried three times, and it has failed each time.

Though; by the sounds of it; it isn't that good.

 

[Markman]

I'd actually comment on the demo if it would actually download properly... I've tried three times, and it has failed each time.

Though; by the sounds of it; it isn't that good.

Use download managers, Getright or Flashget.
Get em at www.download.com

 

[Montez]

I've got to second the bitching about the combat. Forget Diablo II, this was giving me Arcanum flashbacks. Ranged combat is practically useless because everyone runs like a cheetah on PCP.

Oh boy, yes. Tried it again for a second impression, and it just makes me feel like I forgot to run moslo before I played. Every goblin and wolf is tweaking out, meanwhile my guy just stands there calmly throwing uppercuts.

 

[Markman]

I played through the demo again. Well, more I play it, more I like it.
Now when I know where to put spells its much easier to do combat w/out pausing every 5 sec. Infact, pause is really not needed.

So as far action and combat goes, its really not enough action packed, its just basic point'n'click stuff-kill 3 monsters-continue. Its good, but it could've been better.
When you think about it, games like Revenant were a godsend.

But one thing that really bugs me is that damn slooow scrolling.
Atleast put that thing in options.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

It turns out CD Projekt *did* have a written permission from Interplay to release the demo, but there was an internal discommunication between the ones at IPLY who gave the demo to CDP and the ones who gave it exclusively to GameSpy. You can now download it from CD Projekt again, anyway.

That's pretty damned funny. Then again, I think it's rather stupid to give a demo exclusively to GameSpy in the first place, which amounts to nothing more than forcing someone to pay for your advertising. Then again, if it's a stupid idea, you can count on Interplay to run with it.

As for the Lionheart demo itself, I've given up on it. I'm tired of downloading it over and over again and getting corrupted ZIP files or I/O errors in my setup file. After six tries from various locations, I think that's enough of a chance.

 

[Constipated Craprunner]

My Sylvant Char/Int Spellcaster is almost to Barcelona. I think I am on the path, but am I right that I cannot go down it?
Anyway, I am overall a bit impressed. I think that some parts leave a bit to be desired (mana is to hard to find in some parts, but is not now for whatever reason), get rid of those annoying diolouge indicators for the love of FO, and some of the Spanish accents are not very convincing. Although I liked the music alot, and the other sound effects are brilliant. I like the skill setup, though it feels like it makes alot more sense to just pore all your skills into one area of magic then move up at the same speed in your magic skillz, which is unfortunate.

 

[Volourn]

Well.. Between some of the demo reviews, the fact that LH is ana ctuall full fledge Rt game as opposed to at least pause and play, and since the demo is completely impossible to download; I'll be waiting until either it gets raving reviews on the role-playing side; or it's price gets lowered before buying it.

(run on sentences are NOT fun. )

 

[Dragon]

You are all wrong, this game will rock, I loved this demo !!!

No, just kidding...

I want Turn Based Combat !!!

I don't understand, hasn't this game been playtested ? Imagine the people who posted had actually been the playtesters. The game would have been a lot different. And I don't even speak about some major changes, but even some small silly things (what's this lame scrolling ? And can't I change the defaukt keys ? never heard about a descent GUI ?).