By John Walker on July 29th, 2008 at 11:02 am.
Legendary (which has, thank goodness, dropped its ludicrous suffix, “The Box”), has put out a release date (Oct 1st), and announced itself ready for pre-order. There’s a new trailer, with some developer comments throughout, down below.
I really want to look forward to Legendary (even more so now that it’s not called “Legendary: The Box”), but I feel somewhat hampered by having played the developer’s previous game, Turning Point: Fall Of Liberty. It wasn’t just a generic shooter – it was dreadful. But the ideas behind Legendary sound fun – Pandora’s Box is opened, and this series of vast, destructive beasts are unleashed, and reluctant antihero and art thief, Charles Deckard, finds himself having to fight it all. What to think?!
I say: forgive and assume the best. Because I would rather a world where the game with the giant golems and rabid werewolves, with griffens soaring in the sky while vast mythological beasts known down skyscrapers, be excellent.
29/07/2008 at 11:19 Roritharr says:
Have i spotted the crucification logo for all PC Games in the Trailer?
“Games for Windows”? Please, dont.
29/07/2008 at 11:29 AndrewC says:
I have never seen anything like it before. It’s going where nothing has been before. I think this FPS might be just too avant garde for a mass audience. I fear your optimism is like a butterfly in a hurricane. It makes me want to protect you.
29/07/2008 at 11:41 Bobsy says:
Nice monsters.
29/07/2008 at 11:41 Dr_Demento says:
Turning Point – or at least its demo – really was shocking. One nice idea (the CQB) crushed underneath some of the worst shooting/movement/graphics/sound design/plot I’ve ever seen.
Legendary might be good, but… you can’t finish that, can you? It would be like kicking a puppy.
29/07/2008 at 11:54 Ross B says:
Legendary: The Box, The Game, The Box.
29/07/2008 at 11:55 Phil says:
Predictions? It’ll be marginally better and certainly less broken than Turning Point – no Q and A department can survive that sort of kicking without serious changes being made, unless of course its dealing with licensed IP, and hence consists of a spotty work experience lad named ‘Tone.
29/07/2008 at 12:03 Subjective Effect says:
The trailer hype is incredibly American and it makes me cringe. I can’t get behind something with someone saying “where a human get ripped to shreds is very satisfying” on the trailer. It’s like omg guys the GORE is so HARDCAWR!!
The other thing is the gameplay must be very contrived. In most games you are tough and realistically incredibly lucky to survive (think HL2, Far Cry and how it would pan out in reality). But this? Surviving this stuff will be like the lucky evaporating bullet from Dark Side of the Sun. There must be something else to it and if there is why aren’t we seeing it?
29/07/2008 at 12:12 muscrat says:
“seeing a scene where a human gets ripped to shreds, is very satisfying”.
Huh.
29/07/2008 at 12:13 John Walker says:
The main guy is marked with some seal or other that makes him the saviour of mankind. It’s in the game description on the main site.
29/07/2008 at 12:14 dr.Boiffard says:
Turning Point was so awful because it was developed in only nine months, so I think it shouldn’t be taken as a reference. Nobody can make a good game for three different platforms in such time.
29/07/2008 at 13:18 Matt says:
YOU’RE NOT CHANGING ALL THE RULES, YOU’RE CHANGING THE STORY AND SETTING OF A STAGNANT GENRE. Jesus.
29/07/2008 at 13:33 Mike says:
The problem here is that you could extract all the set pieces from their last game and cut them into a trailer that looked as exciting. If the bits in between what we’ve seen are filled with buggy exercises in holding down the fire button, it’ll bomb all over again.
29/07/2008 at 13:36 King Awesome says:
The developers need to share their fair share of the blame for Turning Point. It wasn’t the bugs that killed it so much as the poor art, design and sound.
Having said that it was rumoured that they were busy working on this while they were supposed to be working on Turning Point. So maybe it’ll have recieved more love.
29/07/2008 at 14:33 Caiman says:
Out of all the trailers I’ve seen so far for Legendary, this one both interests and repels me the most. It finally looks like being more than just a generic shooter (ok, a generic shooter on a bigger scale perhaps) but at the same time those developer comments have the exact opposite effect to the ones they probably intended. It could end up being the gaming equivalent of Dragon Wars.
29/07/2008 at 14:34 rand526 says:
seeing a comments thread where a game trailer gets ripped to shreds, is very satisfying
29/07/2008 at 14:50 hungSolo says:
This development team has only one head of hair between them. So, while Turning Point may have sucked, they’re still one of the most aerodynamic development teams around. I call that a wash.
29/07/2008 at 14:55 Charlie says:
I thought some of the team working on this were people who worked on Allied Assault and the first Call of Duty? If that’s so it makes me a little optomistic. But Turning Point really was awful, and I really like the premise.
29/07/2008 at 14:56 mrrobsa says:
One trailer, will take hyperbolic superlatives, TO THE NEXT LEVEL!
With a trailer like that from the devs who brought us Turning Point, I am left completely cold.
29/07/2008 at 15:22 JonFitt says:
This one is a strict “I’ll believe it when I see it” after TP:FOL.
Turning Point had an interesting premise and some good trailers, but the difference between good premise, and good game is vast.
Just think: Star Wars MMO.
29/07/2008 at 15:45 Flint says:
Ooh, werewuffies.
29/07/2008 at 15:49 Shawn says:
Turning Point was an absolute disaster, especially the PC version. This is definitely a wait and see kinda deal.
29/07/2008 at 16:04 Charlie says:
I think this looks more promising than Turning Point. That always looked like it was going to be shit, even in the trailers. This looks a lot more polished to me. But you are right.
29/07/2008 at 16:26 Switchbreak says:
A lot of it looks bad, but the one thing I think they got right that no other game has been able to do is capturing the scale of a good disaster movie. Even GTA didn’t have enough cars and people to make it feel like actual city traffic, whereas this has streets that are full of them from end to end, like it should.
29/07/2008 at 16:27 A-Scale says:
Most people thought Pandora’s Box was a myth, like the Boogie Man, Yetis, and Ann Coulter, but little did Save Urman know that the most devilish, most despicable evil to come out of Pandora’s Box………. WAS NAZIS! SWEET JESUS GET DOWN FROM THE SKYSCRAPER OH MY GOD WE’RE ALL DEAD OH GOD ISOLATIONISM
29/07/2008 at 18:38 zaibouglish says:
What A-Scale said.
29/07/2008 at 19:20 Steelfist says:
I find it hilarious that they say its going to ‘change the rules’ and then the shotgun seen in the main character’s hands has the exact same model as in CoD4.
29/07/2008 at 19:21 todd10k says:
Ohh snap i aint laughed so hard for so long. Some of the comments i’ve seen in this thread are quite possibly the funniest ever made in the history of the internet.
“This development team has only one head of hair between them. So, while Turning Point may have sucked, they’re still one of the most aerodynamic development teams around. ”
Quite possibly the best comment ever.
29/07/2008 at 22:33 Vexor says:
I’d be more impressed if I watched it with the mute on. The commentary really detracts from this trailer. It looked decent enough for the trailer to just speak for itself. What could be interesting fights and okay graphics are only a small portion of the formula for a decent game. I’m remaining cautious on this one.
29/07/2008 at 22:43 Colinmarc says:
Haha I loled at this comment thread. What a terrible teaser!
30/07/2008 at 00:24 malkav11 says:
Honestly I think the best disaster action ever has come in the forms of the PS2 games Disaster Report and Raw Danger (terrible US titles. They’re called, I dunno, Zettai Toshi-somethingorother in Japan, I think. And I totally space on the European release name(s).). Massive-scale earthquake and flooding stuff with associated secondary disasters.
But if this were to pull that sort of thing off with supernatural elements and modern graphics, I’d be sold.
30/07/2008 at 05:57 GeorgeR says:
It looks interesting, cool premise. But I do not like nude werewolves. I dunno, as a kid I grew up with furry werewolves, the nudish ones always freak me out.
30/07/2008 at 05:59 Bhlaab says:
It’s hard to forgive and assume the best when Legendary seems to be cut from the same loaf of bread as Turning Point… that is, a high-concept FPS with low-concept gameplay
30/07/2008 at 09:02 Malagate says:
Steelfist said:”I find it hilarious that they say its going to ‘change the rules’ and then the shotgun seen in the main character’s hands has the exact same model as in CoD4.”
Could it be that Legend will “change the rules” like Limbo of the Lost did, and we can have another wonderful meta-game of guessing where such models and textures have come from? Still looks too good for that, needs to be 30% more naff looking.
31/07/2008 at 22:59 hydra9 says:
I found the hyperbole in that vid hilarious as well. Plus, I played a bit of Turning Point and it did seem verrry poor.
But I’m still ready to believe this game *might* be good.
For those who are interested, I just found another video, which shows extra footage and features more dev talk. I have to say, it does look pretty cool when a giant bird picks someone up in his beak, then throws him away like an unwanted chew-toy:
Escapist vid
08/08/2008 at 18:43 Kunikos says:
Legendary: Box, featuring Keiron’s mom.
29/05/2009 at 01:28 hydra9 says:
Note: This game really, really sucked.