We finally got more gameplay in these E3 interviews.
Ok, so:
- Death animations are sometimes bad like in New n Tasty (for example: a slig getting shot and just falls to the ground instead of exploding like it used to be), and I honestly still dislike this. Were the explosions of organs realistic? No, but the falling to the ground of the enemies' bodies as if they were simple objects without any kind of weight are honestly worse.
- Possession is different now and it works as a floating orb, just like in MO but it definitively looks better. Glad to see that you have to get through open spaces (and so to even open doors or gates) to possess an enemy. Makes the game more challenging.
- Quarma seems to be more complex now: you get bad quarma even for killing sligs and other enemies, so imagine if you wanted to do a run with only good quarma; that'd make the game more difficult, but it looks like you can stunt the enemies by possessing them or by throwing a rock against them, which would let you to get past them and ransack em easily. Yet, if you meet multiple enemies on your path I guess getting past them would be more difficult. By seeing how more detailed and complex the Quarma system is now, it really feels more like a real Karma concept.
- We got what Lorne calls the 2.9D perspective, and it seems to work greatly. The camera acts in a smart way along your movement through the game, but I wonder if you can actually control it.
- We have double jump now, but that doesn't make things easier. If you have mudokons following you around they wouldn't double jump like you, so you have to search a path for them.
- We interact more with the level ambient by scavenging cabinets, trash cans etc. That's a cool feature.
- And so crafting and using weapons,"potions" etc now are an actually thing. We also have money now and I wonder what you can really do with it.
The more I look at these kind of features the more I realize that this is an Oddworld game that has expanded its own franchise formula for the series; there are still puzzles and you always have to save (or kill) your Mudokon friends, but now with more expanded ways. Tbh, this makes me more excited for the game and I feel like OWI is taking a good path for this series. I really like how the gameplay evolved, all these new things makes the whole game more interesting.
- Level design here seems to be still complex and interesting. Even if Abe can do more things, you have to be reactive and smart enough to figure out how to proceed through the level.
- We also have a bar that indicates the level of alarm of the enemies present in the level. They could sleep while we get through the level silently, or they can still be highly alarmed by our presence so much that we are forced to face them all. As a result, the choices we make during the game make a greater difference now.
- UI is okay, but it looks temporary to me? Some icons are not entirely detailed and have simple artstyles that don't match much with the game itself. Not saying that the UI is bad, but its graphical style might be a little unfitting to the game artstyle. I really wonder how it is going to look like in the final version.
- Talking about the UI, it has yet the same concept Lorne showed at EGX 2017, and with it the health bar is official now. We don't die at the first shot we get, same for our Mudokons friends. At first, this made me more perplexed, but seeing that with the new features we got we have to be more careful in the level progress, the perplexity faded away. So I guess the game is still balanced on the level of difficulty. But I'd still want an hard difficulty (where you can get oneshotted, just like in NnT) that makes the game more "classic" and even more challenging. If they include it, that makes everyone happy.
I gotta say that we got an
HUGE amount of gameplay content now, and of course we're all happy. Yet the wait was a terrible struggle: the release date of the game has been postponed three times, and we had to wait almost 4 years to get a preview of the game itself. The advertising of the game itself wasn't even that good; there have been times when we had various types of information regarding the game to then have moments of total silence by OWI. They tried to make the future release of the game more relevant with the ARG, which was a really good experience but its flame went out slowly and progressively with less involvement of the fans in it. There was also the Oddwall, but it wasn't a good move: instead of making the future release of the game more relevant with a new screenshot that had to be unlocked through votes and the need to reach a certain share of likes on Facebook, of Twitter followers and Youtube subscribers, it has made the whole social activity more unnerving and the fans more anxious and even angry.
On these aspects, OWI didn't do well. Yet the game looks totally promising now.
Soulstorm is going to change the original series for good, and I'm looking forward for it. These new features at first could've make the game easier to play, but it's actually the opposite as I said in the previous points; we must be even more cautious, reactive and clever in the actions we take. If we thought that these three fundamental characteristics were necessary to complete the first two old games, we can be sure that this time they will be even more necessary to complete a game that apparently will be even more challenging. Yet we have not yet tried it with our own hands, and I can't wait to try it. I hope the game will be released in 2020, and that it will not be postponed for the fifth time.
Keep going OWI, you're doing a great job
:
|
This is not a revolutionary game, it's an evolutionary game about revolution.
|