Decline New King's Quest game - MASSIVE DECLINE Everything is shit

[Blackthorne]

Yeah. Really, if you turn off your brain, you might be able to sit in front of the monitor for the couple hours it takes to play it. I'd say that's true.



Bt

 

[Darth Slaughter]

Yeah. Really, if you turn off your brain, you might be able to sit in front of the monitor for the couple hours it takes to play it. I'd say that's true.



Bt

I prefer to turn off my monitor...

 

[Great Deceiver]

I expected nothing but the worst for this, but even so, it's a rare thing when something so completely insults your intelligence that you actually feel appalled - the first "puzzle" of the game involves fixing a broken winch wheel mechanism: however, apparently the cog can't turn because the wheel is missing a... sixth handle. I mean it's dumb on such a fundamental level, you can instantly picture the hipsters who made this fucking tripe drooling over each other for figuring out how to cleverly deal with the "old fashioned deaths" in the old games.

In short, 10/10 Doritos etc.

 

[Lambonius]

polygon gives 6.5. since i refuse to read polygon, i'm not sure if it's because it's too hard for them.

Actually, they lamented the lack of fast travel. I think they were hoping for Skyrim.

It seriously is the stupidest review of this game that I've read so far. I'm by no means a fan of the direction this game has taken, but the specific reasons the Polygon reviewers cite for disliking it are moronic. They wanted to be able to push a button and watch the story play out, and are lamenting all the ways this game isn't as straightforward as Telltale.

 

[Archibald]

You know things have gotten retarded when you have to defend a game, that you don't particularly like, from professional game journalists.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Well, this looks like ass, I am very surprised about this.

Good thing I never gave a shit about King's Quest

 

[Lambonius]

You know things have gotten retarded when you have to defend a game, that you don't particularly like, from professional game journalists.

Hey, hey, hey...let's not throw the word "professional" around willy-nilly now.

 

[Astral Rag]

 

[Blackthorne]

This is what games were like before your parents were born? Well, sure, if I was in bed, under the covers and reading a copy of "Inside UFO 54-40" while watching "Pinwheel" on Nickelodeon simultaneously. Maybe.


Bt

 

[Jackalope]

IGN makes me sad for the f-tards that call themselves journalists...

 

[Boleskine]

That person is correct, if you assume he's talking about Dragon's Lair.

 

[MRY]

That's an interesting brainteaser: are there kids today playing COD whose parents were born after Dragon's Lair's release? Dragon's Lair was released in 1983, so if the parent were born in 1984, had kids at 20, those kids would be 11. . . I suppose it's possible. Who knew that having kids young yielded offspring of such good taste?

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I don't think this game is dumb, and I don't think it's insulting to my intelligence...but I find it very odd that a revived franchise isn't targeted at the generation that made the franchise so revered in the first place.

This game is clearly aimed at children first and foremost, with QTEs, pointless platforming (Press button to climb up one-step platforms), simple and straightforward paths, etc. I'm gonna go as far as to claim that the developers/publishers are insulting the KQ fanbase by insinuating that they have the maturity of children, which isn't gonna work when you're releasing episodic content.

Also, Chrisopher LLoyd's voice acting quickly becomes annoying for some odd reason.

This is like if Disney had made a Watership Down film. But then again, considering that there was a Watership Down animated series made in the late 80s, which quickly deviated as far as away from Richard Adams's work as humanly possible, appropriation of this kind shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

 

[Duraframe300]

I don't think this game is dumb, and I don't think it's insulting to my intelligence...but I find it very odd that a revived franchise isn't targeted at the generation that made the franchise so revered in the first place.

This game is clearly aimed at children first and foremost, with QTEs, pointless platforming (Press button to climb up one-step platforms), simple and straightforward paths, etc. I'm gonna go as far as to claim that the developers/publishers are insulting the KQ fanbase by insinuating that they have the maturity of children, which isn't gonna work when you're releasing episodic content.

Also, Chrisopher LLoyd's voice acting quickly becomes annoying for some odd reason.

This is like if Disney had made a Watership Down film. But then again, considering that there was a Watership Down animated series made in the late 80s, which quickly deviated as far as away from Richard Adams's work as humanly possible, appropriation of this kind shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone.

There's going to be a CGI Watership Down movie.

Random info

 

[Boleskine]

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/art...ndles-Original-s-Adventure-Roots-in-a-New-Way

The definition of "adventure game" has changed since the days of the original King's Quest. What used to be a genre about banging your head against puzzles and dying repeatedly, has evolved into something more cinematic after the rise to popularity of Telltale projects such as The Walking Dead. It would have been easy for The Odd Gentlemen to make their revival, King's Quest: A Knight to Remember, into a Telltale clone with a focus on dialogue choice and we would have liked it. Instead, they decided to go one step further and attempt to make it feel like an older Sierra game, while still adhering to the modern adventure game formula. For better and worse, this gives King's Quest: A Knight to Remember a unique identity in a genre whose games tend to feel like carbon copies of one another.

......

King's Quest sets itself apart from other modern adventure games by including these gameplay elements in different ratios to what you might expect. While most of a Telltale-style adventure game is spent conversing, you spend most of King's Quest adventuring. There's always a new puzzle to solve or place to go, and it makes the game feel very active and interactive.

It doesn't feel like you are just watching a movie and making a choice every so often. In fact, you frequently get to make choices outside of dialogue. Many puzzles have multiple solutions, and how you solve them is as important as what you say afterward. Heck, there are even quicktime events that you can complete different ways!

What a fucking sad state of affairs that a "modern adventure game" being more interactive than a Telltale game is cause for celebration, and that multiple ways to complete a QTE somehow enriches the game's level of challenge or overall experience.

 

[Lambonius]

What a fucking sad state of affairs that a "modern adventure game" being more interactive than a Telltale game is cause for celebration, and that multiple ways to complete a QTE somehow enriches the game's level of challenge or overall experience.

From the same review:

"One final inspiration taken from older King's Quest titles is the sheer length of the adventure. For an episodic game, King's Quest is long. Expect to play for about six hours before you hit the end, at least two play sessions. Compare this to the two hour run time episodes in games like The Walking Dead or Life Is Strange have. It's almost too much!. Even though you spend a lot of time solving puzzles, this is still a cinematic game, and I couldn't imagine sitting through a six-hour movie, especially one where so much time is spent traveling."

GAME IS TOO LONG. HAS TOO MUCH INTERACTIVITY. ME WANT WATCH MOVIE.

FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK JESUS FUCK.

 

[Crooked Bee]

Other things aside I gotta say, six hours is not bad for a single episode. I wonder if they can keep up this sort of length for the future ones.

 

[Aeschylus]

This does seem like roughly what should have been expected. It 's fairly clear in retrospect that Activision had an idea of what they wanted done with the IP even back when they initially gave it to Telltale, so a 'cinematic' QTE fest was pretty much inevitable. Oh well, there's an outside chance it could be fun to play with toddlers to prepare them for the actual KQ games a bit later.

 

[Great Deceiver]

This game is clearly aimed at children first and foremost

I think the old KQ games were also aimed at children/teenagers; I played my first KQ (3) when I was 9 years old and I loved it, even if I could not finish it back then. I don't think I am special in any way for enjoying it being as young as I was, and I have no delusions about these early Sierra adventures (especially KQ) having been anything other than directed at children/teenagers. That doesn't mean it can't work for other audiences, i.e. adults, good writing goes a long way.

I guess what I'm saying is that being "aimed at children" isn't a carte blanche to make a game a QTE-ridden, insultingly simplistic borefest. Rayman Legends is a game that's aimed at children, I never felt insulted playing it at 35 years old, in fact I enjoyed it a lot.

I'm fine with people making such a game as this; what I'm not fine with is people calling it an "adventure game" (for the same reason I don't agree with considering Telltale games adventure games) and what's worse, trying to elevate it as some kind of reinvention or overhauling of the genre as a whole. There are people who work very fucking hard to make quality adventure games on a shoestring budget and they put out stellar efforts like Heroine's Quest, Quest for Infamy, Primordia, yadda yadda - any kind of spotlight on this tripe is an insult to them, and to their audience.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I think the old KQ games were also aimed at children/teenagers; I played my first KQ (3) when I was 9 years old and I loved it, even if I could not finish it back then.

I know many people personally that can share stories similar to yours - though sadly my own experience with King's Quest started much later.

KQ had an appeal to children, yes...but can anyone claim that the children were the primary target audience? Not even Sierra On-Line themselves would make that claim, they bent themselves over backwards to make The Black Cauldron and Mixed-Up Mother Goose "kid-friendly", thereby demonstrating what their target audience was.

That is the problem with NuKQ - it's not just aimed at children, but dumb ones as well. Ask a child that's just beaten NuKQ to go beat the original. Any version will do.

 

[Barbarian]

I gave up on this about 2 hours in. Just doesn't feel or play like the original series at all. I also imagine all the reviewers praising the game didn't play the originals.

 

[Great Deceiver]

This is the sort of shit that I mean about the manboons writing about the game (from the Lolygon review):

"Even the UI is a smart evolution from the noun-verb text input and icon-driven interfaces of previous games."

A one-button, non-interface is, to these people, an evolution over interfaces that allowed for wildly creative ways of interacting with the environment (especially in the parser games, even with the Sierra parser being very weak compared to more accomplished text adventures), each verb yielding a different flavour response, helping to build the gameworld and increase player investment, even when it didn't advance their objective directly? How is that not considered gameplay? Evolution of gameplay is the lack of choice represented by pressing A when you're shown when to press A on the screen?

"has wonderfully odd character design and a lovely storybook aesthetic, finally delivering on the visuals that King's Quest box art has been promising since the early '80s"

The lavishly produced, beautifully drawn and expensive as fuck pixel art of the SCI games is somehow inadequate compared to low-poly character models with smeary textures because reasons. These statements are so clueless and it's fucking depressing that a lot of people will take them at face value.

 

[Crooked Bee]

John Walker's extremely negative review: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/07/30/kings-quest-chapter-1-review/

Oh wow.

I really had no idea what to expect of the return of King’s Quest [official site]. The original series were mostly terrible, twee and poorly constructed adventure games, but it had its moments, and certainly found its place in nostalgia. The news of its return after a few abortive efforts seemed like it could bode well, especially with The Odd Gentlemen (PB Winterbottom) behind the wheel. Trailers were confusing, not making it clear if it was an adventure game, platformer, third-person somethinger. But I waited to see. Here’s wot I think:

And wow.

I am struggling to remember a game with a worse first hour.

With no introduction, no explanation, not even a title screen, you’re playing some guy in a stupid hat, standing on a pathway sealed by thorns in every direction but one (how did he get there?). Immediately it becomes apparent the game was built for a controller (and far more likely, a touch screen), the WASD movement confused with pressing Space to interact, Tab for your inventory, and the mouse not involved at all. The only thing you can do at this point is approach a well, and wind down the rope using a handle. By pressing Space/A. Then climb down the rope. By pressing Space/A. Then at the bottom, the prompt to press A appears again, and apparently it’s to look at some gold on the ground beneath you. Walk to a mattress against the wall and press A when prompted, and whoever you are moves it aside. Christopher Lloyd mumbles a couple of sentences about how he remembers that he was looking for something, as if he’d lost his keys while in the recording booth, and then you have to pick between two identical wooden wheels to open a door. By pressing A. Pick the “wrong” one and you instantly die.

Through the door and you have to run down a grey cave corridor while Lloyd tells an unseen little girl about how he ran down a corridor, and then your movement is slowed down as you walk across a precarious rope bridge. A rope bridge you can’t fall off.

And you realise you’re its puppet. A wheel needs another spoke, so you press A when the prompt appears by the only thing in the room with which you may interact, which causes a dragon’s attention to be aroused. Lloyd narrates that he hid, so I stood still, and the game killed me. And started me the other side of the boring cave, forced to listen to all the unskippable dialogue all the way through again. And god forbid in your hammering of buttons in an attempt to make dialogue stop you catch the moment it finishes and you have hear it AGAIN.

You’re not able to tell which nearby thing on screen is this location’s interactive object, so an attempt to look at the cart of hay you’re facing most likely results in opening the door behind you. (In a laborious cutscene.)

There was a reason why incorrect solutions to puzzles became met with jokes, rather than random and unfair death. In 1992. 23 years ago. That reason was because it’s hideously boring to play. What could possibly have possessed anyone involved in this cheap-n-tacky peculiarity to think that this was the nostalgic kick everyone was after once more? King’s Quest has a surprise way of killing you every other minute.

There was a reason why adventure games stopped trying to have action sequences. In 1995. Because they were utterly incongruous to the tone of the genre, put off people who were playing for narrative, and were invariably extremely poorly made. King’s Quest has you hammering at quick-time-event keys from the start, firing arrows at ropes on the fly, and kills you if you don’t react within the first second of its latest interrupting cutscene ending. And then makes you watch the cutscene again.

What we have, for the first hour, and then permeating throughout, is the worst platform game ever made, trying to exist inside a deeply clumsy and inferior copy of Telltale’s already ungainly adventure engine. It’s embarrassingly obvious how desperately the game wants to both look and behave like Telltale’s recent successes, right down to the rotoscoped look of the art, and the tedious over-reliance on QTEs instead of wit.

However, it’s also trying to be a quaint fairy-tale-ish world of magic and knights, cheerful rather than angst-ridden, and in the most peculiar way, traditional in the most untraditional framework.

The story desperately owes everything to The Princess Bride, from the conceit of the tale being told by an elderly man to a grandchild, to the types of characters you meet, that a series of duels is central to the plot, the rather desperate crowbarring in of the name Buttercup, and incredibly, casting Wallace Shawn – then having a duel of wits in which dosed drinks are used. But it’s never so overt as a tribute – it always just feels like lazy copying.

After the first unbearably dreadful hour of insta-death and nothing to do but press A, we leap to the present day with an elderly King Graham (Lloyd) telling stories to his granddaughter, clearly while on his last legs. There’s some extraordinarily throwaway attempt at suggesting a storyline in that time, before things leap back to a new tale of Graham as a teenager, reaching the kingdom of Daventry for the first time. He wants to become a knight, and enters a contest against clearly superior contestants, and so begins a series of extremely familiar puzzle chains to outwit/cheat your way through each round.

Though it doesn’t do this without returning to the abject misery of its mangled, deformed platforming horror at certain points, actually re-using the same dreary locations as the first section of the game, making you try to force its frankly broken controls so you can jump up and grab at seven million ledges and ropes without its killing you and making you start over. (Don’t get over-excited – there’s no “jump” – you’re just pressing A, of course, but only when you’re pointing the analogue stick at the right fraction of a degree.)

By the second half, things find there way to a much more traditional adventure, although with both arms and a leg tied behind its back. Because you’re directly controlling Graham in third-person, and because the engine is a disaster, this is – incredibly – a further backward step from the single-cursor curse that has fallen so much of modern adventuring. At least with a cursor you get half a fraction of a choice of what to do. Here it doesn’t even manage Grim Fandango’s head-tilt – it’s a case of running around sprawling locations for the one thing that will cause the crude, placeholder-looking prompt to press A to pop up. Then perhaps open your inventory and use an item from therein.

There are some nice characters, and some excellent voice actors. I was particularly excited to hear Loretta Devine appearing in a game, and Tom Kenny (Spongebob, Mr Show) is particularly excellent as The Merchant Of Miracles. Christopher Lloyd is, well, Christopher Lloyd, and there are appearances from the likes of Kevin Michael Richardson (Groot) and other familiar voice actors. And while Josh Keaton’s young Graham is undeniably generic, he does a splendid job of the game’s main highlight – manic episodes of crazed excitement, while bouncing around the screen.

Characters like the bridge trolls and wannabe knight Acorn are extremely likeable, and occasionally pop out some funny lines. And as furious as I was with just how bad so much of this is, Graham’s moments of cartoon frantic excitement cracked a smile. There’s something in here, buried so, so deep beneath the crud. (The game is just DELIGHTED with itself for its puns, constantly congratulating itself for them, despite their being mostly weak and easy.)

It doesn’t help when it attempts to be arch. When finding a tool box containing an axe, Lloyd eventually finishes saying, “Before you ask me about that hatchet, no, I did not go around using it on everything.” No, indeed he didn’t. Because there were literally two useable things in the locations surrounding him. And no choice about what to do with either. And this is the case throughout. There’s no sense of choice, apart from a couple of overtly over-flagged moments of making decisions about whether you’ll be kind, smart or violent.

But most wrong is the pace. It’s all so agonisingly slow. Movement, because you’re trotting about with direct control, means you have to repeatedly traipse back and forth across its very many verysimilar locations, trying to remember which patch of forest it was that had the pathway you couldn’t cross before. Accidentally looking at the same object twice feels like a punch in the gut as you’re forced to sit through the same unfunny sequence a second time, and even more infuriating is when it’s wholly the game’s fault. During a dreary puzzle sequence at the very end, the granddaughter asks Lloyd’s Graham,

“You didn’t try to beat him straight?”

“No,” I replied, because I wasn’t beating him straight.

“Yes, of course I tried to beat him straight,” replies Lloyd, causing the lengthy, slow and deeply dull sequence to abort and force me to start over. ARGH.

In the last of its four hours, it does start to feel like an adventure game, and less like a third-person action game that was in a terrible car crash, but by then the damage for me was long done. Good performances, some very nice animation (albeit embarrassingly similar to Telltale’s look), and a couple of passable puzzles, just aren’t enough to compete with some astonishingly dreadful design decisions, the monstrously slow pace, agonising traipsing, unskippable repeated dialogue and laborious cutscenes, violently pisspoor platforming and action sequences, complete lack of introduction or explanation of who anyone is for people new to the long-dead series, ghastly controls, cheap and tacky on-screen prompts, obviously designed for tablet interaction, and god-awful instant deaths.

I'm glad the review is negative, but it's also so... dumb at the same time. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[Trash]

the original series were mostly terrible, twee and poorly constructed adventure games

Stopped reading right there.

 

[Blackthorne]

I'm fine with people making such a game as this; what I'm not fine with is people calling it an "adventure game" (for the same reason I don't agree with considering Telltale games adventure games) and what's worse, trying to elevate it as some kind of reinvention or overhauling of the genre as a whole. There are people who work very fucking hard to make quality adventure games on a shoestring budget and they put out stellar efforts like Heroine's Quest, Quest for Infamy, Primordia, yadda yadda - any kind of spotlight on this tripe is an insult to them, and to their audience.

Thanks, that's how I often feel when I hear that same kind of hype. That kind of hyperbole feels like a parade of self-congratulatory shitballs, and - well - it sucks. Lucky for us, we do have good fans - smaller fanbase, but far better fans: I know people really like our games when they say they like them. They're not just following the latest hype. There's consolation in that.


Bt