Dark Messiah of Might and Magic Impressions
So this just unlocked today on steam and I've spent the last few hours playing it. So far the game is fantastic, for those who aren't familiar it's a first person action game set in a fantasy setting with some RPG like elements to it (equipment, skill points and the like). The game lets you choose from 3 different archetypes to develop your character (fighter, mage, and thief) without actually having any hard classes, instead there is a big skill tree and you develop your character as you see fit. So you can mix and match skills from multiple trees, focus on just one, whatever you like.
Character points are earned by completing objectives; there is no experience for fighting which allows stealthy thieves the ability to earn just as much xp as someone who kills everything in sight. As long as the objectives are done, you get the points; how you do it is irrelevant. From my experience so far, each area tends to have multiple paths allowing for a variety of tactics and approaches, similar to Deus Ex though smaller in scope then that.
Combat is all done from the first person perspective and includes melee combat, archery, spell slinging and any combination of those three. In melee combat you perform moves through combinations of directional movement and mouse clicks. You can do quick attacks by clicking the mouse or do stronger power attacks by holding it down. You earn some new moves by increasing your melee skill, for example you can get a very effective leaping power attack that often kills enemies in one shot. As for magic you have the standard elemental attacks with fire, ice, lightning and some utility spells, my character isn't a mage so I don't have much to tell on this front. For a stealthy character archery and backstabbing are the order of business and both are quite effective with the backstab having a particularly brutal animation. The environments themselves are also weapons; you will find areas with spikes, fire pits, collapsible shelves and even some booby traps which a clever adventurer can use to their advantage. It is often times much quicker to kick an orc off an edge or into a fire then trying to survive a protracted duel with him and adds some nice spice and variety to the combat.
Enemies have so far been quite enjoyable to battle, with some decent AI as well. Like Half-Life the enemies bark out orders to each other giving you a hint as to what they are attempting, and unlike many melee based games the enemies don't line up to attack you one at a time but will instead attempt to surround and overwhelm you. Wounded enemies try to retreat for reinforcements, archers will hang in the back taking potshots at you, but will pull a weapon if you get too close and often times they will try to kick you into the same environmental hazards that you can use. Although I'm not too far into the game the enemy variety has been good, melee characters with shields, archers, mages and even some non humanoid flying squid things. All in all, good stuff so far.
The level design seems to vary from stage to stage, the game is divided into chapters that take anywhere from 15 mins to an hour to clear. It seems to alternate between the fairly open ended Deus Ex style missions and Half Life style linear "roller coaster" levels full of crazy scripted sequences and lots of exciting moments. This helps to keep the game feeling fresh so far and both types of level have been of a very high quality.
Graphically it is gorgeous, the textures are phenomenal, the environments expansive and believable and the models make good use of the source engine facial animation system to provide believable lip syncing and facial expressions. The sound is also quite good, it seems the developers have accounted for the sound an object makes striking a surface, no matter what that surface may be. From clanking chains, hollow stone, soft rope, wood, etc. you name it, they have a sound for it. The music is also quite good so far, staying quiet and moody as you explore and busting out some epic percussion heavy orchestral stuff when the fighting starts. All in all the presentation is top notch.
So what are the downsides? So far the main problems appear to be technical in nature. The steam release was missing the dialog files for everyone but the main character after the tutorial, so whenever someone spoke, nothing but ear piercing static came through. Thankfully there is a fix for this issue, by running a validation on the game files, but this kind of thing shouldn't be happening these days, especially from a publisher as large as Ubisoft. There have also been a fair amount of reports of crashes and lockups (of which I've experienced a couple) as well as a bug in the first or second mission that keeps you from progressing (which I didn't experience thankfully). One would assume that these issues will be ironed out in patches, but the game does have a fair amount of problems for a release title.
As for the multiplayer I've played the beta a fair amount but haven't tried the full version yet, I'll save impressions on that for later. A basic description would be Day of Defeat in a fantasy setting, where you also earn experience to level your character, and that carries forward from map to map. It seemed promising in the beta so my hopes are high.
So that's my long winded, comma abusing impressions. Shoot any questions you got my way and I'll do my best to answer them.
My days of not taking you seriously have certainly come to a middle.
Nicholas Cage is my hero
My Gamercard
I am one of those people experiencing issues. The first level (i.e. the level after the tutorial level) is a pausefest. It was so bad that I quit after about 5 minutes in the level and it took a long time for my system to recover. Seems like a memory leak.
Xbox Live: shonuff27
Waiting for a review with some length of game posted. Otherwise I'll pick it up as soon as it goes on sale somewhere.
Somewhere on a deep ocean vent no man has ever seen, God smites a small colony of tube worms because you masturbate.-JoeBedurndurn, on sin
Sounds great. Wish I could play it.
I've waited four hours for the game to decrypt and do its final unlock downloads at ~60k/sec. I had to restart Steam twice. It's finally done, but now the "preparing to launch" window freezes. I'm trying to verify now.
Even if I do get it running, it sounds like I might be better off waiting until some patches are out, at least considering all the complaints at the Steam and Ubi forums.
XboxLive: Fly GWJ | PSN: The _Fly
A game designer wrote:
*sigh*
I really hate Ubi Soft. In fact I think at one point I said I wouldn't buy anything else from them because of their invasive DRM/securerom/etc antics. I guess I just have the audacity to think a game company doesn't have the right to sniff around my computer or block my accessing something I purchased because they don't care for the tools I have"… I didn't buy anything from them for a long time, at least as the game release cycle goes. But they know I'm a weak knee ninny and if they hold out something shiny and new with enough quality I'll forget about past bluster and buy it.
That is what I did, I bought it. The whole game. On a disk. I put the disk in my computer and installed it. It broke a couple times because apparently it didn't like something in my steam install... ok, not sure why it even needed steam at that point but I fixed that by installing steam again. I installed the game again. It seemed to work. Yes! Good!
Now Steam is making an exact copy of the game or both games I guess (given how they break it apart) I just installed on my hard drive... I know hard drive space has gotten cheaper but COME ON. Anyway if that was my only problem I would probable just suck it up, maybe scratch my head of how wasteful they are of everyone's resources, including their own.
The game crashes for me. It crashes a lot. Like every couple of minutes, and that is only if it successfully manages to start. Half the time it hangs trying to do the disk check or something. I think I can thank secure rom for that, and probable this or that antivirus/spyware program dueling it out with secure rom or whatever is on there that makes it load so poorly. Some sort of race condition I would imagine. Certainly something I would expect to be caught in QA but ah well.
Should I really need to make my computer less safe to play a game I bought, and so that the publish can feel more safe, with my money, already in their wallet..torrent spy suggests not. In fact at this point, sense it's mainly the single player game I wanted I wonder why I gave them money first. Dam that honest streak in me, that always screws me in the end.
Well ok another crash. some sort of memory followed by a new direct error but so far the ubi soft forums are just chalked full of people much louder and angrier then myself with similar issues. Honestly I almost can't get worked up, it's just so ridiculous, it's a broken release yet no retailer will let you return software these days, why? There afraid will steal from them? Hurm seems like we are the one's being robbed to me. That just can't be legal can it"… to ludicrous to even contemplate.
My memory is fine according to mem86, I trust that a lot more the Ubi for some reason (that is the popular answer in the faq that is non game specific). My system is reasonable well speced and performs other gaming duties well... I ran a full disk check and defrag, more time out of my day to no effect. Why do you have to try to be so special Ubi, the glitter rubs off you know...
Course this is all only with the retail installed game, heaven forbid that should work out of the box. Maybe I'll be able to play the second copy steam is so helpfully getting for me. That of course started shortly after I skipped out of work (you don't read this forum boss, move along) to get the game this morning and it is now all of 40% done at 7pm pst. I guess I should have just bought it from steam, hey I could even have preloaded it, maybe that is the secret sauce... seems there is no apparent point to buying the disk that I can see (maybe if you are netless, but then it doesn't seem to run anyway so....well anyway seems like a dumb system).
I really liked the demo. The demo ran flawlessly on this exact same system. No changes at all hardware wise since the demo came out. The demo made me think this would be an A+ title... I'm not so sure now, though I guess with patching it could be.. but what little I have managed to play seems run much worse then the demo did. Like maybe half performance. Odd, ok if I can just stay in long enough maybe I'll tweak things.
Amazing what a good demo can do for anticipation. Much like a good movie trailer it can set the stage for so much hope"… course much like a typical movie trailer that hope lifts us up just enough to smash us down hard on are empty wallet and sore asses as we rlease hollywood sucker punched us again with a crapy release. Course you are absolutly guaranteed with a game demo that the same content is going to be in the final game, why waste all that content when they can just feed it back to you again and give you less bang for your buck. Half the time the trailer scenes don't end up in the film at all (is that false advertising?), so I guess the whole movie analogy dosn't work that well.
Here is my question to Ubi soft and the development house. What the hell happened? Where did wheels come off? You probable should look into that. But then you should probable do a lot of things like ditch invasive programs that hurt your customers more then they help you... but I doubt will ever see eye to eye. After all I'm only a customer and you already have my money and I don't have a way to get it back (is that legal?).
*sigh*
Some days. Some days I just HATE being a PC gamer. This type of thing just gets so ridiculous, and all so somebody can save a few bucks at their customers expense. Ship early and ignore a few QA red reports and get a big bounes check, a fine industrie.
-Griffon
"White is the new black"
Pre-load, enter code, play or pray it doesn't crash. No need for discs.
XBox Live|Tshirts|My Music|GameFly|xfire
Griffon, you're thinking of Starforce, not Securom. Ubi hasn't been using Starforce since last spring. If the program authenticates through Steam, there shouldn't be any sort of invasive DRM running. Well, other than Steam itself, that is.
It sounds as though you might have a bad install or you somehow fubared it by reinstalling Steam.
Xbox Live: CrankyBaby
baggachipz: Who cares about Japan, let them have their silly pointless dog games and countless re-hashes of anime-based dragon princess super lucky crapitty crap.
I finally got it running, after another hour of re-downloading data following verification. So far, it seems to play okay, with the exception of infrequent audio stuttering similar to that that plagued Half-Life 2.
XboxLive: Fly GWJ | PSN: The _Fly
A game designer wrote:
I also have the stuttering problem but aside from that, based on the first two chapters this is going to be an amazing game. It isn't taking itself too seriously and the gameplay is rock-solid.
As far as Oblivion comparisons go it's a different animal, pure scripted fps so far with a Deus Ex twist on character development and varying approaches to a situation.
Well, it finally began to run better during Chapter 2. I don't know why. It still chugs a little at certain load points but it's mostly smooth throughout. The game is fantastic! I had to force myself to stop playing (actually I was starting to get nauseous just like in the outdoor areas of HL2). I'm really digging the melee combat. I'm worried that I'm spreading my skill points around too much between all 3 skill sets but, so far it hasn't hindered me.
Xbox Live: shonuff27
Any word yet on how the long the game will take an average gamer to complete? I just picked it up today (God I hate going into GameStop now with the whole, "Umm... I don't think we get new computer games in any more.."), installed it, got Steam, patched it all, but haven't loaded it once. I plan on giving it a test run tomorrow after noon when I get home from my girlfriend's house. The whole Oblivion-look it gave me from the trailer screamed at me.
And I liked it.
"I recommend against throwing your kids when you're high, regardless of how high you are. You should, however, be very drunk." ~ The Fly
Xbox Live: Vrikk GWJ
I'd guess anywhere from 8-12 hours depending how quickly you tend to play through games, but with the different character development paths and multiple endings there is some good replay in there.
My days of not taking you seriously have certainly come to a middle.
Nicholas Cage is my hero
My Gamercard
Please tell me this isn't true. 8-12 hours of gameplay for 50 bones does not work in my wallet anymore.
Somewhere on a deep ocean vent no man has ever seen, God smites a small colony of tube worms because you masturbate.-JoeBedurndurn, on sin
I'm really looking forward to some multiplayer impressions. Specifically, how well does the combat system work when you are fighting anythong person.
Baba Ganoush1
I played the demo through about 4 times to experiment with the different character development paths, so I wouldn't get too worked up about a first runthrough taking 8-12 hours. Don't forget there's a multiplayer component too.
Xbox Live: CrankyBaby
baggachipz: Who cares about Japan, let them have their silly pointless dog games and countless re-hashes of anime-based dragon princess super lucky crapitty crap.
I am really interested in hearing about a multplayer review. Did anyone release a comprehensive review of the hopefully updated MP yesterday?
I know the singleplayer is solid.
Xbox Live: Kooter06
This looks like it will be good once they patch it.
Hopefully Ubi does what Ironlore did with Titan Quest and get a good patch out in a week.
xbox live: Lester King 17
This *was* a day 1 purchase for me, but now I'm waiting for the patch.
I never minded piracy. Anyone who minds about piracy is full of sh*t. Anyone who pirates your game wasn't going to buy it anyway! -Warren Spector
I bought this today. I got the LE for 5 dollars more at bestbuy than the regular version.
I cant figure out the install and its giving me a headache. (In the below, SP = Single Player, MP = Multiplayer)
I installed SP (only?) off the dvd. I then authenticated against Steam. I deselected the SinglePlayer Steam install and installed the STEAM MP component only.
But.. I see the STEAM SP install looks to be only 4(?!) gigs if I download it, whereas my DVD install I think is 7gig. I dont think I need the STEAM SP as I can run the DVD SP just fine. Unless the STEAM SP content represents updates to the DVD SP Install. Most internet reports say it is just a seperate STEAM SP install of Dark Messiah. ARGH.
The LE extras... I dont see anything to click to install them. If I run the version installed off the DVD I guess I have them. What happens if I D/L and install the Steam SP version..... I guess they will be missing.
This is soooo confusing. Have I confused you... if so I'm sorry, I've never seen an install process so convoluted that it left so many questions. And no, even the official forums dont seem to clarify any of these questions.
Xbox Live: Irongut | Playstation ID: Irongut_GWJ
I'd like to revise that figure. I was going off the fact that it took me roughly 3 hours to hit what is in terms of level count, the half way point. The thing being that the stage I was on when I made that comment ended up taking as long as the entire game up to that point had and the subsequent chapters have been quite lenghty as well. Something more along the lines of 15 - 20 hours seems more likely now.
My days of not taking you seriously have certainly come to a middle.
Nicholas Cage is my hero
My Gamercard
For folks running the retail version. If you experience unplayable choppiness upon loading a save, I found a great fix someone had posted to the Ubisoft boards. Seems to have cleared up the issue for me entirely (i'm only in Chapter 1/2)
More fixes are kindly summarized here: http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/808101043/m/8701050694
I am not getting much game time in, but I like the feel of combat so far. I can see this being replayable even for a play-and-forget style player like me, seems there are lots of nooks and crannies to check out and class/skill options. I'm still too early in to give better impresssions though.
Xbox Live: Irongut | Playstation ID: Irongut_GWJ
That sounds better. As soon as this goes down in price anywhere (as in a sale, as I'm sure CC will have it on sale in the next week or so), I'll pick it up. Looking for impressions on the multiplayer also, as none of the reviews I've read mention it.
Somewhere on a deep ocean vent no man has ever seen, God smites a small colony of tube worms because you masturbate.-JoeBedurndurn, on sin
I ran the demo amazingly smooth when it first released. Well, I downloaded the same demo and played it again on my rebuilt PC and it is a choppy mess. Same video and sound drivers too.
Xbox Live: Kooter06
Just a quick question: I purchased this retailed and boxed, but since it still plays through Steam will the client automatically download any patches that are released?
"I recommend against throwing your kids when you're high, regardless of how high you are. You should, however, be very drunk." ~ The Fly
Xbox Live: Vrikk GWJ
Vrikk: If it is in your steam list it will automagically patch.
BUY MY STUFF!
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Xfire/Xbox Live: StylezXP
Like the comment above, retail dvd install is a seperate install than steam.
I really like the fighting system they implemented. It takes the visceral feel Oblivion half implemented and brings it to another level. You can slash away, swords sparking off each other as they parry and strike, kick your opponent in the gut to knock them back, disorient them with a strike, power up a swing and literally disembowel them. If you knock them down you can deliver a brutal death blow. Its cool.
DMoMM is very heavily scripted. I'm still early on, but it seemed little things are happening all around me that I didnt take time to stop and absorb. I dont want to give anything away, but they did a good job of letting you roleplay the experience, meaning, if its a fight, it feels like you are in a fight, if you are stalking someone, you really get that vibe. There are some glitches, but the mechanics so far are strong enough that a technical glitch doesnt jar me out of the experience too badly at all.
I was a fan of Arx Fatalis, so am happy see what Arkane Studios has done with this franchise. I'm only starting chapter 3, so hopefully I have a lot to enjoy yet.
Xbox Live: Irongut | Playstation ID: Irongut_GWJ
If it's in my Steam list? Ok, so it's not. How do I, er, remedy this?
"I recommend against throwing your kids when you're high, regardless of how high you are. You should, however, be very drunk." ~ The Fly
Xbox Live: Vrikk GWJ
Anyone near beaten this yet? Just wondering about game length.
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Xfire/Xbox Live: StylezXP
Thanks Irongut, the DEP fix took care of my stuttering.
I was very excited when I first played this demo a couple months back but now I have lost interest. I really love the Source engine and action RPGs, so this seems like the perfect marriage of the two, but I will pass and put money towards NWN2 for now.
However, in the future, when a price drop occurs and there are a few patches out and more multiplayer maps, I would probably be tempted.
Xbox Live: Kooter06
During the original install, if you select that you want to install multi, it will kick off a steam install later. Towards the end of the install Steam kicked off and asked about installing single/multi via Steam (if I remember correctly) This would kick off Steam and validate your cd key.
My memory fades already, it was an insane process. If you check all the boxes at the Steam prompt, I believe you end up with a retail single player install, and steam multi-and single player(2nd copy) installs. Apparently there is no way to make steam realize you already have retail single player installed.
I think what most folks were recommending was: In the beginning of the install, checkmark that you want to install both single and multi. Because by ticking multi, steam will kick off at the end. Retail installs. Then towards then end when Steam kicks off you can de-select the Steam single player(unless you want it), only cause you will end up with two installs of the single player game on your system.
Clear as mud?
Xbox Live: Irongut | Playstation ID: Irongut_GWJ
Wow Irongut... That sounds absolutely stupid.
That'd take up what? 14 gigs or so of hard drive space?
I know it's cheap now, but come on!
BUY MY STUFF!
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Xfire/Xbox Live: StylezXP