Some early
impressions in glorious language of mighty potatoes, declared as based on author's gameplay of beta build. Summary of the most important points for non-Polish Codexers:
- General summary of reviewer is "I doubt MMX is a glorious return of the series", last sentence form the review "I could not belive that it may be something worse than MMIX, now I'm afraid that such nightmare may come."
- MMIX is most similar to Xeen-era dungeon crawler
- Movement is very limited, you can move only on designed paths. Even if you are in large cave, you cannot move towards the walls, you just move on the "rails" through the middle of the cave. There is no 2D net to move, just predefined path.
- Comaparision to Legend of Grimrock: LoG does everything 1000x better and even looks better (logrus: I cannot imagine that combat is worse than in LoG, TB >>>>> waltz simulator)
- Author did not not encounter any logical puzzles (logrus: maybe his gameplay was too short to encounter one, AFAIR puzzles have been already announced?)
- Author notices that game designers announced that MMX should have some decent story beyond simple dungeon crawler, but he founds the dialogs to be very shallow (compares them to Kings of Bounty as having similar level of
complexity simplicity)
- Character development is gimped, you decide only about the skills development, the rest is advanced automatically, this auto advancement is based on race and class (logrus:
)
- Fighting is in turns, whole turn for the party (one action for each member), then the same for the mobs
- Author is not impressed with the graphics, but says the graphics is "not ugly, but rather simple", it has the HoM&M "fabulous" feel
- It's not the final build, game designers collect the remarks, lot of them after PAX and plan to make some changes in the next builds (author hopes that next builds will be vastly improved)
From another person from ubisoft forum
http://forums.ubi.com/showthread.ph...e-surfaced?s=fab38103a88a03db2abd3de20ad12ef7
http://www.gram.pl/artykul/2013/04/1...grali-my.shtml
http://www.gry-online.pl/S022.asp?ID=8914
"Here's a short summary:
- there's no freedom of exploration, the demo was extremely linear, pushing you down a single path
- all the areas were very, very small, leaving no room to maneuver even
- the game shamelessly creates an illusion of free movement within a given space, the grid your movement is restricted to doesn't match the layout of a level, meaning: there's an abundance of invisible walls;
outdoor areas or larger dungeon rooms make it look like you should be able to walk up to walls or foliage (or enter a small cave) without any problems, but the aformentioned invisible walls prevent you from doing that - according to these previews, it makes no sense. As a result, because of these restrictions, all the environments feel like movie sets instead of areas you can actually explore.
- no puzzles in the demo
- there's "hardly any roleplaying": you cannot engage in conversations with NPCs, merely read/hear a few words they have to say
- character development is extremely limited, the only thing you can manually alter when levelling up are the skills, everything else is done automatically based on your class
- the graphics, while "charming", aren't as good as in Legend of Grimrock
- they didn't like the fact you cannot freely choose a class for each race
- too easy & short, leaves a mediocre impression overall (they claim Legend of Grimrock did everything better)
Well, according to the recent Q&As and interviews, some of these flaws are a result of the demo being... well, a demo for the press, an unfinished build or conscious design decisions... but still, certain things like the grid layout being pretty limited and resulting with invisible walls ("I should be able to walk up to this wall or enter this cave, but I can't, because the grid feels so arbitrary") sounds very worrying."
Most of the complaints sounds stupid.
