Dantes Inferno trailer

[miffy495]

You read the rest of that sentence, right?

I'm sure none of you read the book and thought "you know what? that would make a badass game".

Seems to me to be assuming that we have read it but that the game concept never crossed our minds.

Nachimir, I'm very aware that comics are pretty awesome these days, and honestly have been for a while. I'm a fan. I was merely thinking that a cheap and trashy comic book tie-in would be perfectly in theme with what they're doing.

I love the idea of a circles of gaming hell game. Would play that in a second.

EDIT: I sound sort of pissed off in this post. I'm really not. My bluntness is due to the fact that I haven't slept for about 30 hours at this point. Go school! Sorry if I come off as a dick today...

[Noyb]

Ye Gods, that trailer is awful. I am 75% certain that the plot will more closely follow the myth of Orpheus than anything resembling the actual book.

The EG preview did mention quick time events (a'la God of War).

Press X to not faint.

Ahahah I'd love a game that had a different game design horror for each circle of hell. When I say love, I obviously mean, hate.

5th circle: terrible voice acting.

Maybe we should make it, collaboratively. Like the podcast guys pointed out, Dante's Inferno is public domain, right?

:tup:

[Nachimir]

Ahahah I'd love a game that had a different game design horror for each circle of hell. When I say love, I obviously mean, hate.

5th circle: terrible voice acting.

Maybe we should make it, collaboratively. Like the podcast guys pointed out, Dante's Inferno is public domain, right?

This is a brilliant idea :tup:

[Noyb]

http://blog.wired.com/games/2009/02/san-francisco-.html

Wired had a hands-on preview of the game, revealing the plot and some mechanics.

The plot is basically the myth of Orpheus. With a scythe instead of a lyre.

EA's take still features Dante as the protagonist, but the poet-philosopher is now a hulking veteran of the Crusades. He returns home from war to find Beatrice, the subject of his love and admiration, murdered. When her soul is "kidnapped" by Lucifer himself, Dante dives down to the very depths of Hell, armed with Death's scythe, to win her back.

Best yet is that the first enemies you encounter in purgatory are

hordes of unbaptized demonic attack-babies (with blades for arms)

[DanJW]

AHAHAHAHAHAHA

Seriously, the game design is so transparent in this thing. They basically sat down and looked at every character or situation mentioned in the saga, and said "how can we make a monster out of that? What special moves can it have?"

Besides, the limbo of the unbaptised is no longer church doctrine. I love how the modern churches can change their own canon and not even bat an eyelid. And people still deny that religious texts are influenced by the hand of man.

You know the other stupid thing about this game? Dante's Inferno has had such an influence on the western idea of hell that practically all pop culture depictions of it are already call-backs. So a game based on it will come across as being completely unoriginal since a hundred other games have borrowed from it already; from Doom to Neverwinter Nights, from Monkey Island to Warcraft 3.

[elmuerte]

Ugh... what a cookie cutter story. The last game I played with that story was Rise of the Argonauts.

[elmuerte]

Ok, so: Gamer's Inferno

In Gamer's Inferno you play a gamer called Dante. Who ... <insert some (stupid) reason here why he has to travel through the 9 layers of gamer hell>.

We need to figure out a mapping from a bad game design element to a circle.

Some game design elements I can think of that should be feature are:

- quick time events

- "bullet time"

- yearly sequels

- stories without closure (i.e. "to be continued" if we ever going to make a sequel)

- horse armor like add-ons?

- ...

[Noyb]

Ok, so: Gamer's Inferno

In Gamer's Inferno you play a gamer called Dante. Who ... <insert some (stupid) reason here why he has to travel through the 9 layers of gamer hell>.

We need to figure out a mapping from a bad game design element to a circle.

Some game design elements I can think of that should be feature are:

- quick time events

- "bullet time"

- yearly sequels

- stories without closure (i.e. "to be continued" if we ever going to make a sequel)

- horse armor like add-ons?

- ...

Dante Allard, head of multi-billion dollar Video game company Electric Poetry, is well known for his cruelty. Rushing unfinished games to market, pushing programmers past their limits during crunch time, stifling any creative ideas that could possible emerge under his reign. Driving home wasted from a night of debauchery while his employees work the night shift on Generic Clone 6, he crashes his expensive Ferrari, bought from the ill-earned profits of Generic Clone 5. But the story doesn't end there. Because Lucifer himself has played Dante's games. And Lucifer is not pleased.

More possible circles:

• Camera angles - the camera is always pointing the wrong way. character is never fully on screen at any one time.
  
• Localization - "translation" of dialogue is so poor, you have no idea what to do
  
• Unskippable cutscenes - 30 solid minutes of unskippable, non-interactive dialogue. Perhaps to be combined with bad writing and quick time events.
  
• Sound design - music is a 10 second piece, looped ad infinitum. vocals and sound effects are necessary to progress, much softer than the music. No subtitles.
  
• Fetch quests/padding
  
• Invisible walls
  
• Unneeded grittiness
  
• Xtreme sidekick
  
• Illogical puzzles
  
• Condescending tutorial
  

[Nachimir]

http://www.eegra.com/pages/show/title/24_02_2009_Survival_Horror_Hamlet_and_Other_Classics/

I heard all of these spoken in the voice of Remo:

Shakespeare's Hamlet adapted into a survival horror puzzle game. Something is indeed rotten in Denmark, the ghost of Hamlet's father has returned from the afterlife with a terrifying vengeance. Find all the skulls that can finally put the specter to rest forever. This summer will you be, or not be? It's Resident Evil meets House of the Dead, IN DENMARK.

***

Blake's The Tyger adapted into a fighting game. Do you have what it takes to beat the flaming feline in hand to hand combat? Execute combos with poetic accuracy and conquer the forest of the night. It's Street Fighter meets Bloody Roar, IN THE FOREST.

***

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 adapted into a first person shooter. Read and play along with the story of Montag as he roots out the evils of literature and unlocks 48 amazing weapons and abilities for setting fire to books and people. Revel in the incredible writing delivered as 10 chapters of embellished text set against the backdrop of a painterly dystopia. But watch out for the twist ending where Montag discovers that it is not books that are evil, but the people who burn them – and you for playing a game about burning books. If only you could go back and warn yourself what you were getting into. It's Bioshock meets Braid, IN A DREAM OF WHAT MIGHT BE IF WE ACHIEVED WHAT WE SHOULD NOT DREAM!

[OssK]

Well, it's not the first time really that someone made a game using some world mythology, the Odyssey was made game a thousand times and nobody gave a shit (out of these thousand games I guess approximately 100% of the raped the book and none were about poetry) so yeah, I guess you can make a game out of the Divine Comedy using it mainly as a backdrop for your game, it's what you'd call an adaptation.

You take a profound piece of litterature and you choose to make a dumb game out of it... Why not. I'd say it's a mort valid thing to do than trying to replicate the exact content to another media like it's been done back and forth with films and games and comics... Sin City the movie is just the same thing as the paper version... Only this time, IT MOVES! And so it's more spectacular I'd say, but less profound than on the original media. Same thing goes for the Tomb Raider movies, because it exists and was designed as a video game, it's really tough to make a good movie with it. I'd guess I could explode everyone's brain on this forum with that simple sentence:

Imagine Braid... the movie...

[DanJW]

No one is arguing against using previous fiction as inspiration - as you point out almost every game borrows from something else.

The stupid thing is that they are touting it not as "inspired by" or "influenced by" but as the thing itself. Putting the actual title on it and accounting for all the names of people implies that they think they have a faithful adaptation going on here. If they had simply called it 'Inferno' and let people work out the connections for themselves, I would have very little problem with it (other the fact that it is yet another big dumb macho action game when so many of us are crying out for something else in addition to those).

[OssK]

Well, if you're a game publisher, I'm a game designer myself so instead of crying we should get to work ^.^

Back to Dante's Inferno, the funny thing is, I would so definitely buy a game that has the name "The divine Comedy" because it just rapes me how beautiful that title is, but "Dante's Inferno" in the book is nothing, it's not his hell it's just hell.

So I guess you are completely right about this being a stupid thing to do... Actually I was thinking about that the other day: do you (or anyone reading) have in mind a very good adaptation from a media to another? Like I don't know, a book you liked but found the movie way more awesome or anything like that ?

[brkl]

There's Blade Runner, A Clockwork Orange, hrrm, some others too. The key is to take what the original is trying to convey and use the methods of your chosen new medium to convey that. Sin City is one of the worst examples of an adaptation I can think of, though it's pretty well liked for some absurd reason.

[OssK]

though it's pretty well liked for some absurd reason.

Wouldn't you think it's mainly liked by people with no precedented knowledge of the comic? Like V for Vendetta, 300 and not just right now but next week it'll probably be the same, Watchmen ?

[brkl]

I really can't understand that. Sin City sucks as a movie. If you hadn't read the comics, you should hate it more.

[OssK]

Don't get the wrong impression, I've been reading comics for years and definitely read them loooong before seeing the movies, but I guess it's like Harry Potter, people who have not read it first can't really understand what's in it besides the monsters and the story.

For V for example, the story is so much deeper and darker, but also so much more complicated in the graphic novel, so I guess I can understand the appeal for a less powerful and simpler version of that masterpiece. Sin City was just capy pasted pictures with actors in them, and as it visually had not been seen before, having these crazy all black and white silhouettes was enough to give people a taste of the novel. And the novel being so powerful, tasting even a lower version of it is enough for people to like it... Am I making any sense ?

[OssK]

Besides, the limbo of the unbaptised is no longer church doctrine. I love how the modern churches can change their own canon and not even bat an eyelid. And people still deny that religious texts are influenced by the hand of man.

Nowadays it's easier for the church to change the bible than for Grant Morisson to change an event in the 3rd reallity of the 11th time continuum of earth 52 in the second multiverse to your ass's right chick's left... Funky world you live in... But don't worry, disco's not dead, disco is life.

[SignorSuperdouche]

I watched both Sin City and 300 without reading the comics and I thought they were both sweet. They're shallow but they're also visually interesting and gratuitously cool. What's not to like?

[fineline]

I see this game being more intresting as a turn-based RPG. Dante as the sword weilding muscle man, Virgil as the chanting spell caster/summoner/necromancer, Beatrice as the party's spiritual healer.

After each ring of hell you make it through, Virgil will be able to summon the damned from the previous ring. Though, summoning infants from the first ring seems a bit taboo . . .

Thoughts?

[OssK]

They are awful shit compared to the comics that's not likable

[DanJW]

I liked the Sin City and V for Vendetta movies. I was able to take them on their own terms (and I think the Sin City movie was a pretty close to the spirit of the comics anyway). But this kind of thing is incredibly hard to be objective about. If you don't think the film does the book justice, then it's not easy to consider if it is a good film when it stands alone.

The From Hell movie was utterly miserable though.

Soon we will know how the Watchmen movie has turned out. Will Wheaton in his role as celebrity geek spokesman gave a very encouraging review of it.

Fineline, an RPG would definitely have more scope for dialogue in it. Dialogue in like what dat the source material has.

But then, the game is already borrowing more from Diablo than from The Divine Comedy, making it an RPG would only make the fact more obvious.

Edited February 27, 2009 by DanJW

[OssK]

the spirit of the comics anyway

I'm sorry, since the catastrophe these two words can not be placed in the same sentence anymore, it has become a taboo.

As for the RPG of the divine comedy, having Leneth's voice ringing in my head shouting "Divine assault" it has to sound like a good idea... But yeah, though your design ideas wouldn't give me a hadron as much as particle physics can, I must say it does seem like a better genre to convey the book into interaction... I guess my favourite pick would probably be an enigma game, slow and sad, in a hell frozen in time by the presence of Virgil with crazy depictions of tortures and pain caught in the suspended moment.

You would arpent hell and resolve enigmas such as opening very complex gates or freeing people from their eternal torment to get their help and so on... I'd play that game

Partly because traveling through Bosch's hell or even a crazier hell than that, reinventing hell as being the most horrible place in existence instead of playing though that generic hangar or science facility as in every other game would in itself be a great thing, but you'd have to make it exciting I guess, so If you go to far from Virgil you're not safe anymore, this being part of solving puzzles with probably crazy physic interactions like you can burn yourself in fire to be reduced to smoke and ashes to be at to places at the same time and recite the bible to open a hole in a flesh wall...

[Roderick]

I actually kinda... liked the Dante's Inferno game trailer. I particularly liked way they visualised the various circles of hell and gave them each their specific appeal. The snapping teeth, the misty grabbing misty things... visually very striking. And if it's a half-decent action game it might still be worth a look because of the art.

It's a bit pitiable the developers are tauting the literary roots of the project so much, but that's hardly something that should influence your experience with the game. Is there already some gameplay footage available? I'm curious how they'll implement the visual style in actual gameplay. I hope the [again, visual] originality of the trailer returns there.

[brkl]

Giant Bomb has a video interview up. It's a bit painful. They're going to improve the original, boring story. But they're 'telling his story, his fantasy'.

Here's what the first commenter thought about it:

All I have to say is, YES! Please spend your time to make sure this is not like "Clive Barker's Jericho." If this turns out like I hope it will be the greatest game of it's kind. And... Since everyone does it... I got the first comment!

[OssK]

On one hand, it looks like a goodable game, yes you could make something cool out of it, on the other hand it is still true that it seems like a bunch of goofers are going to rape an epic story and make it a dumb beat em all... We'll see I guess...