Yooka-Laylee: Rare-viving the animal duo platformer that we've all yearned for.

[BigJKO]

I just hope they have a Ukulele in the soundtrack. Then I'm fine with everything else.

[Merus]

My mistake, it looks like Yooka-Laylee's absurd funding goal is because they're investing their own money. I was thinking of the Igavania and thought Yooka-Laylee was in the same boat.

[dartmonkey]

Yooka and Laylee have slowly grown on me since the first reveal. I think the game should have enough charm to carry it, though it'll be interesting I see what fans do when Rare announce BK3y.

It's interesting that I don't see much middle-ground opinion for Banjo. I LOVE the original. It felt like the absolute perfect concoction of colour, humour, animation and music. Magic. I can never understand people who say it's a bad Mario clone. At the very least it's a bloody incredible Mario clone! But each to their own.

I feel like the original's perfect mix usually gets lumped in with the bloated Tooie and the obese, laborious DK64. The original BK is a game I can 100% blast through in 5ish hours. I'd say a first timer could complete it in around 10. And you don't need 90% of the notes to progress. I'd estimate it's closer to 60-70%.

I also disagree that Nuts & Bolts was a tragic misstep. It has some big faults, the largest being it doesn't give you enough to do with your creations beside racing and fetching stuff, but it's a beautifully realised world and the building mechanics, animation and music are all wonderful. It just wasn't a traditional platformer. They didn't handle people's expectations well, and the game itself is hugely underrated as a result, but it really is something. Yooka-Laylee world looks to be cut very much from the same fabric as Nuts &Bolts so people should be satisfied with it.

But some people are never satisfied, so who knows. I like it!

[Merus]

And you don't need 90% of the notes to progress. I'd estimate it's closer to 60-70%.

 

There are 900 notes, 100 in each world. The last Note Door requires 882 Notes, although that doubles your life. The last door you have to go through is 810 notes, which means you have to have an average of 90 notes per world.

[Twig]

Nuts & Bolts was really fantastic, and it's pretty much the only game I regret not finishing before I sold my otherwise worthless 360. ):

 

I'd love for the BK remasters to be put on PC but we all know that'll never happen. ):

[dartmonkey]

True. You're right, to complete the game it's 90%. And I guess there are some pretty stringent Note doors once you get to Rusty Bucket Bay and Click Clock Wood. I guess I never really considered 90% to be unreasonable. It's only those last two worlds where they're more difficult to find. It's more of a challenge to collect them all without dying and losing the lot. But I liked the strategy that introduced - get the difficult ones first.

[Thrik]

In some ways, you can think of Banjo-Kazooie as the precursor to Ass Creed and its more or less pointless collection. I never found the collection in BK unsavoury because it was always so exciting and awesome uncovering a whole new section of Grunty's Lair and the world that laid within. There's nothing wrong with collection being the primary mechanic rather than survival, so long as plenty of other stuff fun exists to keep it interesting. BK basically combined the two to great effect.

Excellent shout about Banjo-Tooie and Donkey Kong 64 not really getting the formula right, though. 

[Merus]

There's nothing wrong with collection being the primary mechanic rather than survival

 

You know, I'd argue this point (and have!) - collection is an excellent way to spice up linear tracks, but if one of the chief pleasures of your game is exploration, collection has the unfortunate habit of cheapening the exploration. An interesting corridor with a mediocre reward in a game with collectibles is less entertaining than that same corridor in a different game where collectibles aren't used to guide the player. It's an intrinsic/extrinsic reward problem.

[Zeusthecat]

You know, I'd argue this point (and have!) - collection is an excellent way to spice up linear tracks, but if one of the chief pleasures of your game is exploration, collection has the unfortunate habit of cheapening the exploration. An interesting corridor with a mediocre reward in a game with collectibles is less entertaining than that same corridor in a different game where collectibles aren't used to guide the player. It's an intrinsic/extrinsic reward problem.

 

Well that's just like your opinion man.

 

I disagree. I think having collectibles is a great way to encourage a player to explore a space where they might otherwise see no point in doing so. One of my favorite parts of GTA games is going through and getting 100% of collectibles. So many cool areas and things that I never would have come across if it weren't for some kind of collectible to lead me there. If you're talking solely about a corridor in a non-open world game then sure. Collectibles don't really add much in most cases. But for open world games I think they are better for having them.

[Architecture]

The DKC games remain my favourite of all of Rare's output, but Banjo had a much different art direction and this is more in keeping with that. If it's just the vibrancy of the colours that turns you off, maybe you could lower the saturation on your screen — although from what I've seen of the very early in-game shots the vibrancy isn't so pronounced. Purple and Green are pretty much universally considered good complementary colours and are used together all the time, so I don't believe there to be anything wrong with the choice of colours.

Purple, tan & red are not complimentary. The issue isn't the use of vibrant colors, it's the flat look of the characters and the actual colors themselves. And my monitors are calibrated with the help of a professional colorimeter, so I've no plans to adjust 'em for this game.

 

Either way, I hope it's great. I miss traditional platformers and I really loved the DKC series, so if they can replicate that magic I'll be overjoyed. Cautious optimism is the stance I'm going to take for now.

[Merus]

Well that's just like your opinion man.

 

I disagree. I think having collectibles is a great way to encourage a player to explore a space where they might otherwise see no point in doing so. One of my favorite parts of GTA games is going through and getting 100% of collectibles. So many cool areas and things that I never would have come across if it weren't for some kind of collectible to lead me there. If you're talking solely about a corridor in a non-open world game then sure. Collectibles don't really add much in most cases. But for open world games I think they are better for having them.

 

In GTA, there's usually far fewer collectibles than there are interesting places to hide them, which changes the experience a bit. If your expectation is that you can't count on there being anything down here, but there might be, you're hitting a sweet spot when it comes to collectibles where the extrinsic motivation can't overwhelm the intrinsic motivation because the rewards are too infrequent.

 

(Of course, GTA has the problem where as you pick up collectibles, the last collectibles become exponentially harder to find, as you're essentially scouring the entire city for a handful of items.)

[Twig]

The more people complain about collectibles in the awesome Banjo-Kazooie, the more excited I get for Yooka-Laylee.

 

it's gun b gud

[Merus]

yeah you say that but you've found, like, two collectibles in our Numenera game

[syntheticgerbil]

I really don't know where I stand on collectables. Generally I love it if it stays to a manageable amount like Yoshi's Island or the cages in Rayman 1. I am not into collectables being littered around all over the place ala most Rare games and Jak and Daxter. It can get really overwhelming and even though it does encourage exploration, it starts to make the landscape look ugly and littered.

 

I usually hold Rayman 2 up as the sweet spot, but sometimes I wonder if the amount of lums in that game is too much. Generally you get secret areas you have to find that contain small jackpots and then otherwise they float around paths you have to go. Sometimes the ones on the paths can become a pain in the ass though, but I think this balance usually works well as they serve for both exploring and then for helping you on more tense sequences. I sort of liked how Beyond Good and Evil continued this design philosophy with the pearls where you are trying to find the secret parts of the dungeons for small caches but then completing smaller tasks for the rest. I don't really consider Rayman Origins/Legends to be collectable games (outside of the cages) since it's more of a scoring function.

 

What I think is hilarious is that Conker's Bad Fur Day is one of the most anti collectable platformers I've ever played besides the old school ones. I wonder if anyone was annoyed at Rare that those guys didn't stick in a ton of crap to grab. I think there there was maybe one possible chunk of cash you could miss but otherwise gathering them was part of the linear game path.

[Twig]

yeah you say that but you've found, like, two collectibles in our Numenera game

Hey I have the location of a poison cache that I could go back to any time and collect a billion poisons!

[Ben X]

my monitors are calibrated with the help of a professional colorimeter

 

As a result of PaganMingate, no doubt.

[Dr Wookie]

Like a lot of games with very strong identities, this series isn't for everyone, as the thread so far has definitely shown! I used to really like BK when it came out, and am interested to see where they go with this.

I got the impression that the small original goal was to help port the game to many different platforms, as they already had the money to develop for the lead platform. I have no problem at all with this approach.

I like the art style, and really love the massively nostalgic BK-ass sample music. I'm not going to kickstart it, since it's comfortably met it's goal, but will definitely follow along with interest.

[Brett E]

Purple, tan & red are not complimentary. The issue isn't the use of vibrant colors, it's the flat look of the characters and the actual colors themselves. And my monitors are calibrated with the help of a professional colorimeter, so I've no plans to adjust 'em for this game.

 

Either way, I hope it's great. I miss traditional platformers and I really loved the DKC series, so if they can replicate that magic I'll be overjoyed. Cautious optimism is the stance I'm going to take for now.

 

I dug out my colour wheel for last night then I remembered this post so I thought I'd check. It turns out green, yellow, red and violet works as a tetrad relationship. Violet is not purple though, (that's red-violet on my wheel) so yeah you're right the colours aren't 100% complimentary but the most prominent colours of yellow-green and red-violet are directly complimentary.

 

Colour theory is an interesting subject that I haven't spent enough time reading up on.