I don’t expect Dreamfall to be as complicated as e.g. Riven. Sure I appreciate the mental challenge of a game like that but about 90% of the people I know who played Riven never finished it because it’s so incredibly difficult. That’s not a good situation if you have a story to tell.

The problem is that not only were the puzzles simple, you were outright told what to do most of the time. Breaking into Eingana is the worst example here: there is no puzzle element here, it’s just following to the letter what Damien told you to do. Without Damien’s instructions this sequence would’ve been a fine puzzle, now it’s just tedious going through the motions. Of course it’s more realistic from a story point of view that Damien had a detailed plan since he had been planning for a while, but the way to deal with that is to have something go wrong, to have something change so Zoe has to deviate from the plan and she (the player) has to find some other way to accomplish the goal. Having the player just follow instructions is not fun. That’s another thing I love about Myst, particularly Riven: Atrus tells you to go to Riven, find and free Catherine, then find a way to signal him. How to do that is left completely up to the player and you never get told what to do. What you should do, and even what goals to accomplish in some cases, is discovered through exploration and interaction with the environment. That’s good adventure game mechanics in my view (of course a game like Dreamfall should add character interaction to that list, something which the Myst games don’t really use; and again I stress that Dreamfall didn’t need to be as difficult as Riven, and is in fact better off not being so, but it can still learn some lessons from it).

The other major issue is the stealth bits. Once more I bring up Myst. I love those games because you can endlessly explore. Riven particularly you can reach almost every location without solving any puzzles. Making you have to sneak around enemies doesn’t work for me because of that because it obstructs exploration. The worst example of this is the underground city. The symbol puzzle to open the gate is very simple, and the only reason it takes any time to figure it out is because you can’t just walk around and try things because you have to avoid the guards. That doesn’t encourage me to want to solve the puzzle at all. I actually got so frustrated with the stupid sneaking that I abandoned the game for a few months at this point. Afterwards I just looked the solution to the puzzle up online just so I could get past it with the minimum amount of sneaking involved. It also just feels like the whole stealth element was thrown in there because the designers acknowledged the puzzle was too simple on its own.

This is not to say I don’t like Dreamfall. I love it to death. I love the characters and I love the story, and don’t mind the ending at all (like Ragnar I prefer stories that leave unanswered questions at the end). But as an adventure game it’s a letdown.

Dreamfall Chapters doesn’t need to have more complicated puzzles per se. It just needs them to be a little less linear, it needs to let the players figure them out instead of telling them what to do, and it needs to avoid the annoying stealth sequences. If it can do that, and have the story be even half as good as Dreamfall, it’ll be a fantastic game.

Oh, and I recommend they copy the controls from something other than Tomb Raider next time. :P Try sticking to FPS conventions, they work better, even in third person perspective. :)

Also I don’t know if anyone else wondered what was in the package that Zoe was supposed to deliver to Helena Chang at the Chicadri (sp?) building.
So I played TLJ a second time after beating Dreamfall and I discovered that the guy that April went to get the fake ID from(his name is eluding me)had cameras in the garage from chicadri industries. I don’t think that it is important for the storyline. I just think that it foreshadows. But if I was to guess I would say that the package that Zoe was to pick up was the recording of April’s movements in the garage.
but those are just my views.

Have to say, when I read your insistence that the old woman has to be April, I was a little surprised. At the end of the first game I thought it was. At the end of the second game I wondered if it might be Zoë. After all, Crow does join up with her. All we really know is that she is referred to as Lady Alvane (and I can’t be the only person who correlated this to Kian’s name). In other words, someone who may have married Kian or else somehow inherited the name.

*shrug* Lots of mystery here. Can’t wait to find out what happens.

TLJ was great – bar some puzzles that didn’t make much sense, but they were mostly clustered towards the start, and some interface issues. It’s format worked well for me because I could work and play at the same time, or at least alternate. It’s quite a nice way of playing the game actually, because you can just listen to the quality writing and acting without having to look at the screen and the dated graphics. Anyone else who’s wondering if it’s worth picking up, do.

But transitioning straight from that to Dreamfall is incredibly abrupt, and Dreamfall has far more ‘game’ flaws than TLJ, mostly centered around the action adventure elements, such as the usual dodgy camera and awkward movements. I don’t want to say ‘dumbed down for consoles’ but the interface is certainly built to work with a control pad, and doesn’t do anything for PC users. You can only hope that when Ragnar says Chapters will be better, he means ‘will have a better control interface’ in that.

I’m amazed that the game includes the ‘mulled wine puzzle’, it’s a parody of a fetch quest, and completely futile from a story POV. Okay, it introduces the magical ghetto idea, but really, that’s something that I’d have been happy to have had resolved with a single cut-scene. So far, my main issues are with things like that – if the mobile phone is also your credit card/multittol, you shouldn’t need to manually select it to interact with objects that only it works with. Strangely, I feel there is a redundant amount of control in certain instances where MORE automation would have done the game favours.

It’s too early to compare stories, but so far, Dreamfall’s got a lot of ground to cover to catch up with TLJ. Maybe I’m jaded, but certainly some of Zoe’s early ‘I’m so apathetic’ conversations? I skipped them as soon as I read the subtitle. So the quality of the script isn’t as affecting for me as it was for John. But he is a woman.

From what I’ve seen so far, The Longest Journey is far superior to Dreamfall, and I hope Chapters, which I’ll be quite interested in now, shares more in spirit with the first game rather than the second.

First of all, I don’t really like adventure games, insane puzzles you pretty much had to be inside the head of the developer to figure out takes away the fun for me :)
However I appreciate games trying to tell a story, work with a theme etc.
Thus I didnt really know what to expect from these games.

As expected I did get annoyed by some of the puzzles and running around collecting weird stuff in TLJ, and on many occasions I just went directly to a walkthrough, to move forward in the story.
Thats a failure of a game ofc, if people to wish to skip parts of it, but at the same time I cant blame the game only, its not really the designers fault that I hate puzzles.

Thus unto Dreamfall, it had removed pretty much all the puzzles, maybe even going a bit too far. It made it more enjoyable to go through in some ways ( didnt have to abuse a walkthorugh :D … not much anyway), but as others have stated, it also made it less of a game. And sadly, the running around from A to B often felt like useless timesinks between the storytelling. Combined with that terrible combatsystem, which at least wasn’t used a whole lot.

Anyway, despite both games shortcomings as actual games, I really enjoyed them. Sure, they are very different from typical other games out there today (with the adventure genre being a bit dead), but isn’t the diversity one of the things that makes games so interesting?
Its a diversity which is much more difficult to find on movies and books.

If/when they get Chapters out, I kinda hope they find a middle way, have most of the focus on the gameplay, keep a few puzzles, but mainly for the main story (a very simple example is the ring from Aprils father in TLJ, it was hardly a puzzle, easy to figure out, but it worked fine for showing something between April and her father at the and of the story, beside introducing him as character through the ring early on).
Keep the fluffy A from B, hiding etc. stuff down to a minimum. I liked how they did that in a game like Beyond Good & Evil. They mixed lots of different game elements, sneaking, racing, fighting, small puzzles etc, but tried to make sure you never grew too tired of any of it by changing it all the time. Thus you had lots of gameplay, but it consisted of very small game mechanics.
Each game mechanism should pretty much be designed for its storytelling purpose. If X mechanism works great for one part of the story, it doesn’t mean it had to be reused 10 other times throughout the story, where it doesn’t belong.

Its of course more work to develop lots of different small game mechanisms instead of, lets say one combat system or one stealth system reused over and over, but on the other hand, small mechanisms only used a few times, dont have to be as awesome either, since you hardly get the time to grow tired of them.

I’m in stage 3 and I like it, but I prefer to call myself “a realist” rather than “disillusioned.”

But yeah. A pleasantly open interview, which is always good.