Kolzig

Eric Chahi's Project Dust

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still requires being online at every start
It’s pretty likely that it will require a connection for a first-time authentication, but whether it’s going to demand the internet be there to launch each time is what we want to know.

Maybe, maybe not.

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I played the Xbox demo for From Dust tonight. There is nothing here that I like.

It doesn't play like a God Game, but so what? I don't mind that it doesn't play like the game we had in our head from watching the trailers.

But unfortunately, it doesn't play like much of a game at all. I should have guessed that—coming from the Out of This World guy—that there would only be one way to get past every obstacle.

There are also more cutscenes than Metal Gear Solid. A tsunami appears in a cutscene. You gain control back for two seconds, then another cutscene occurs when the tsunami almost hits your village. Ridiculous.

In between the cutscenes you get to sweep dirt from a pile on one side of the screen to a predetermined spot on the other. It's the best vacuum cleaner-based game since Luigi's Mansion!

Nothing interesting happens when you try to drown animals or your villagers. Plus the camera angles are terrible. Everything is too far away in normal view and zooming in on villagers doesn't help you tell where they are. Completely zoomed out is OK, but you'll be picking up the wrong element all the time.

To contradict my previous comment, I don't see a mouse making any difference in gameplay. (Unless you get more control over the camera.)

There might be enough here for some people, and it's pretty, but it's a game that imposes itself on me too much and ask for too little player input. I'm not interested in that.

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I don't think it's really fair to condemn the game as lacking scope and freedom based on a couple introductory tutorial stages. I mean, has anybody played the full thing? Do the later scenarios open up at all? I know, at the very least, the scope of the powers available to you broadens pretty dramatically as you continue playing. It certainly doesn't seem to top out at being a "vacuum cleaner" sim.

Also, yes, i completely agree that all the comparisons to Black & White and Populous have been pretty misleading. The game that, in my mind at least, this seemed to be the most similar to was Darwinia. Guiding NPC's from place to place so they can autonomously complete predefined tasks, while you are off engineering the environment to be safe for them.

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There are also more cutscenes than Metal Gear Solid. A tsunami appears in a cutscene. You gain control back for two seconds, then another cutscene occurs when the tsunami almost hits your village. Ridiculous.

This comment is ridiculous. The only cutscenes are between levels (which is basically just a loading screen). Maybe in the demo/first time a tsunami comes it takes control of the camera to point it out (I don't remember), but never after that. You have full control over the camera, you can zoom out and look at it, or zoom in to see it from the villager's perspective.

Plus the camera angles are terrible. Everything is too far away in normal view and zooming in on villagers doesn't help you tell where they are. Completely zoomed out is OK, but you'll be picking up the wrong element all the time.

I rarely had a problem picking up the wrong element, and I beat the whole game and almost all of the challenges. I use the zoomed out view almost always.

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I mean, has anybody played the full thing? Do the later scenarios open up at all? I know, at the very least, the scope of the powers available to you broadens pretty dramatically as you continue playing. It certainly doesn't seem to top out at being a "vacuum cleaner" sim.

Yes, I have. You gain a bunch of other powers, and there are also fire trees/water trees you can move around. You can move your villages to better locations if you want, so that adds some more strategy too. I wouldn't say the game changes dramatically, but I love it and never got bored. The later levels keep changing; there's one where the ground keeps shifting up and down (causing water to flow back and forth), and one in a volcano where it erupts and then rains, back and forth.

If you're looking for a village building sim, then you'll be disappointed. It's very much a protect-the-villages-and-get-them-to-the-exit game.

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So i went ahead and played through this and... Egghhh.

I don't know to articulate how i feel about it. I don't think it's bad, it's very interesting. I feel it was worth the 15 bucks, if nothing else.

It feels like something with big ideas constrained by... i don't know? Deadlines? A meager development budget? This technology and these ideas deserve something more, and i don't mean that they should have just made populous, i don't think that is necessarily the "something more" this needed.

Also totally infuriated by the AI pathfinding, your little dudes are idiots. They're constantly getting hung up on terrain for no reason, or taking the long way around something.

There's some really incredible stuff in the later scenarios, but the game sort of lost me when it started introducing elemental plants and getting away from the terrain deformation mechanics a bit.

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I just finished the rest of the challenges. They were all fairly short, and only a few of them are difficult (frustrating?). Some of the ideas in the challenges are really great, and it makes me wish the main game incorporated some of them (can't really be specific without spoiling them). Still, I loved the game, and hope they make a sequel or some great DLC.

The thing that bugs me the most is how urgent the whole game is. You barely have any time to breathe in some levels because a tsunami is coming, or fire is about to burn everything down. The challenges are basically puzzles, but they always take multiple tries because you need to start building immediately, before you even know what to do. For instance, I wish you could trigger the tsunami, so it was more about figuring it out, completing the steps at your own pace, and then sending the tsunami when you're ready (more likely they would increase the timer to, say, 10 minutes, and then give you a "fast forward" button).

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still requires being online at every start

Well, if you buy it from Steam for example, you always have to be online anyway, right?

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Well, if you buy it from Steam for example, you always have to be online anyway, right?

Yeah, I was about to say the same thing... Don't hear people complaining about that very often :erm:

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You shouldn't need to unless it's changed. I've never really used the mode but when I once had a dead connection but fancied some Half-Life 2 it simply prompted me to go into Offline Mode when I started Steam and it found no connection.

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Steam's offline mode only works if you've played the game via steam recently. Although for steamcloud games there is often not much use in playing offline as progress might not be loaded, and very likely not even saved.

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So I guess this came out yesterday, I had forgotten.

I know what I am in for, I know what to expect, I know that I'll only play it for like 30 minutes and go "wished it was populous +" or something... can anyone talk me out of buying it knowing full well its not the game I want?

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No high resolutions, no AA, shitty Ubisoft DRM.

The first thing to notice is that the game is capped at 30fps. With PCs offering four times that, being locked off at a crappy console limit is good evidence of how little effort has gone into the PC version. Worse is the lack of options. Yes, it can be run in a window (for some reason not at the largest resolutions though), but beyond that you’re on your own. Anti-aliasing? No chance. The game is made of staircases on a machine that could be making it look beautiful. So what were they doing during the eleventh hour delay?

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/08/18/from-dust-does-need-online-badly-ported/

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Sounds like the PC version is an absolute bag of shit. How disappointing. :fart:

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It's not absolute shit, but it is a sucky port. I don't like the controls or the camera behaviour.

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Agreed, it is a slightly dodgy port, and it is weird how the game will allow you to move with the mouse or the keyboard, but not both at the same time. Essentially, rather than the keyboard moving the camera and the mouse moving the breath, both of them move the breath. This makes things harder than they need to be, but you still end up with better control than on the 360 (particularly since you can zoom to any level smoothly) so I still recommend the PC version if you want to play it.

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It's such a shame that Ubisoft have all these great properties like BG&E, Settlers, Myst and Imagine: Babyz. They should sell them all off and then just go find a corner and die. Whenever I play a Ubisoft game, you can see how they've taken what the developers have made and then their fucking lawyers and marketing execs have just circled around it and caked it in this horrible, fetid layer of Ubisoft's proprietary half-assed PC-gaming-killing goo before shipping it off.

Who requires me to log in with a username and password each time I start a game, and then forget it every time even though I check the "remember me" checkbox?

Ubisoft!

Who insists on using my country rather than language setting to determine their game's language, forcing me to set my Xbox to the US when I want to play?

Ubisoft!

Who has to have their own, worthless achievements system that can't be disabled and is just shit?

Ubisoft!

Who had the most awful, non-funny douchebag host for their E3 session?

Ubisoft!

Who secretly hates PC gaming and has been poisoning its dinner with ever-so-slightly increasing doses like that mother in The Sixth Sense?

Ubisoft!

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