ABZÛ – Catch All

ABZÛ is coming out soon so we might as well have a catch all! I plan on getting it on PC so I can waste hours and hours taking in-game photographs with Nvidia's upcoming Ansel in-game-photography tech.

This was previously the Giant Squid Studios catch all with the following original post:

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

Matthew Nava, previously the art director for That Game Company, started a new game development studio called Giant Squid. Considering that he put together The Art of Journey book (of which I have a signed copy), I figured a catch all would be in order. I expect great things! Apparently the first game they are working on will end up being scored by Austin Wintory. I have to say, the website is about the prettiest thing I've seen in awhile. I heard about this via Joystiq.

Look at that awesome logo:

IMAGE(http://www.blogcdn.com/www.joystiq.com/media/2013/03/giant-squid.jpg)

I won't judge your excitement over a gamedev studio (you made a thread!), but I have to question the praise you give the website. It's nice and simple, but that's it. I like pretty games, hope he can make good ones, too.

I totally deserve some judging. It just appeals to my love of marine biology and minimalism. Something about the graphic design just hits that sweet spot of awesome for me. At any rate, I pretty much just expect this thread to lie dormant until there is some actual news. I just wanted something to be available for when that happens.

TuffaloBuffalo wrote:

Something about the graphic design just hits that sweet spot of awesome for me.

Must be the logo...

I don't know, it makes me kind of nervous for some reason. Wait a minute...

IMAGE(http://wallhype.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Game-of-Thrones-We-Do-Not-Sow-Greyjoy-542x305.jpg)

Greyjoy, you iron-blooded bastard!

I thought I started a thread for this way back when! Lots more footage of ABZÛ coming out and I'm guessing more info will be dumped next week at E3.

Old Teaser:


Pre-E3 2016 Demo and writeup at Polygon
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I'm really looking forward to this game because I've done a fair amount of diving and this seems to capture the feeling you get doing that as best as you can in a video game. I guess we might as well make this the ABZÛ catch-all.

New trailer! It comes out August 2nd.

Yeah, I'm all over that.

This looks gorgeous.

They do majestic environments like few other developers. That looks phenomenal.

It's out! Gonna play some tonight. Reviews are about where I expected. Seems to be very good but not great or revolutionary for most people. I'm probably going to personally love it because I love diving and listening to Austin Wintory music.

Nice. I'll get to it by the weekend.

Played it at midnight last night for around 90 mins then a couple of hours today finished it off. I enjoyed it.

If your expecting Journey underwater that's pretty much what your gonna get. A beautiful journey of a quite stunning underwater kingdom, amazing sea creatures & beautiful movement. The swimming is ultra fluid with a kind of 3 timed button press boost, camera feels great, extremely light puzzles, you have your little vocal beam that can activate stuff in the environment by tapping square.

It takes a lot of elements of both Flower & Journey but because of the underwater setting it retains a unique feel with strong environmental storytelling that ramps it up at the end much like its spiritual predecessors.

If they could work some sort of deeper puzzle or gameplay mechanics into future games they could have something truly unbelievable. Their world building, visuals & soul of their games is something special, with beautiful movement & control, if they layered stuff on top of that it would be a dream game.

Wow! Just started it up and am getting PC settings dialed in. Apparently this thing can be a system tester if you want it to. You can set it to render higher than the resolution. Seeing as I have a GTX 1080, I figured I'd set it to 200%, and I'd be good. Nope. It really fluctuates between 30 and 60 fps when you do that at 2560x1040. Even 150% wasn't pleasant. It runs great with everything at ultra and just rendering at 100%, though. I wouldn't have thought given the cell shading that it would require so much power, but apparently it does. Glad I upgraded recently.

I like that they have that option in the settings. It'll make the game fun to play 5 years from now in 4K rendered at 200% with whatever monster GPU they have then. I'm hoping they'll add in Nvidia Ansel support some time soon.

As to the game. It feels fantastic. The current modeling is perfect. How your character reacts feels almost exactly like when you are Scuba diving with a little more freedom. I just love floating in the water and seeing the current shift your body around in the water ever so slightly and also seeing the little flicks of the fins that keep you in place. I'm really impressed only playing 10 minutes.

Finished my first playthrough. I'd give it a 10/10 for anyone obsessed with scuba diving and/or marine biology and things like Blue Planet, but it's probably an 8/10 for other people looking for a normal game with "gaming" type mechanics. Lacks bosses.

The physics in this game are just mind blowing. This must have been an extremely difficult game to create. There are so many individual fishes/mammals doing all sorts of things, and each one of them feels alive. I just stopped and watched fish constantly.

Even though I'm hoping for Nvidia Ansel to show up at some point, I couldn't resist taking a bunch of screenshots as I went along.

Edit: One final thing! I didn't love the Austin Wintory score. I kinda wish he had gone a completely different direction than Journey. This score just felt very competent but inferior to Journey's soundtrack.

Playing it right now. This game is just beautiful. Light on 'game' but heavy on atmosphere. Like tuffalo I keep stopping to watch. One particular moment made me laugh with sheer happiness:

Spoiler:

Breaching the water with the pod of dolphins. So awesome!

All in all, I'm loving it so far. I suspect I'm getting close to the end, so we'll see how it holds up until then.

Rallick wrote:
Spoiler:

Breaching the water with the pod of dolphins. So awesome!

I didn't do that! I saw the achievement for it after the fact, though. I did spend several minutes

Spoiler:

seeing how high I could jump out of the water. :)

My 6 year-old nephew has been visiting over the last couple days, and he managed to finish the game! I had to help him with the mine parts which are a little tricky but mostly intense.

It's a surprisingly good game to learn how a dual analog stick controller works. It's very forgiving with the camera.

Let him use my Xbox Elite controller and tried to impress upon him how nice it is. His reaction: "Well, at least it works you know." I laughed.

He seemed to enjoy it pretty well, but he enjoys just about any video game.

Somehow I passed this game over back in the summer. Not sure why I didn't buy it when it was new? I f*cking love Flower and Journey, and I knew this was a spiritual successor to that.

Anyway, it's on sale for $6 right now, and I finally corrected my mistake and gave myself the best Christmas present ever.

Or the worst, because now I have to completely rethink my entire game of the year list.

Holy crap, man, if you are reading this, enjoyed either of the aforementioned games, and somehow haven't bought this game yet, please correct your mistake as well. For serious.

It's really great. Right now it's at #6 on my list which is pretty crazy low. 2016 was apparently a crap year for everything except video games.

zeroKFE wrote:

Holy crap, man, if you are reading this, enjoyed either of the aforementioned games, and somehow haven't bought this game yet, please correct your mistake as well. For serious.

I picked it up when it was released but only got around to playing it a couple of weeks ago. I finished in two sittings. I had a lovely time with it.

As someone who was a huge fan of journey this was a must buy. While it doesn't reach that sort of height it is a good game. Really short although I probable could do more of the extra bits. Still absolutely beautiful game with great music. I think my only complaint is that it mimics journey a little too much. Some of the best bits is when it does it's own thing.

I love, love, LOVED this game. Not much of a surprise, considering my live for Journey and Austin Wintory's music, I guess, but still. Received it as a gift for my birthday and repaid it in kind by gifting out 6 or 7 copies during the Steam sale.
It's really lovely.

I picked it up on sale a while back, but just haven't gotten to it. It's one of the next games on my playlist though. What little I've seen looks beautiful.

Fun tip for anyone looking to play this through a Steam Link: if you have it set to use surround sound, you may get a problem where the audio goes silent after a few seconds in game. The solution is to set the Link to use stereo instead.

I liked the hell out of this thing. The score is fantastic.