By John Walker on August 11th, 2009 at 9:29 am.
The completely brilliant/insane idea behind Darkest Of Days is getting to time travel through various famous conflicts from the past, and mow everyone down with a machine gun. You see, the problem with guns in the Olden Days is they were rubbish. Only capable of firing one shot at a time, or very poor at targeting at a long range, they were such a faff and fiddle that by the time you’d managed to poke the pokey thing down the barrel there was a reasonable chance you’d be entirely dead. What they should have done, and what Darkest Of Days finally puts right, is arrange for time travellers from the future to bring them semi-automatic instruments of enormous death. It’s both tasteful, and delicious.
Set to be released on September 8th, it’s coming from 8Monkey Labs, whose only previous game is something called AquaSpank. The publisher, Phantom EFX, is equally obscure, usually focusing on slot machine and casino games for the PC and mobiles. It also features jaunts in the Battle of Little Bighorn, as well as a romp in a volcano-encumbered Pompeii. I think it looks awesome. And there should be a demo along later today.
In the first video you can compare the difference between battling in the American Civil War with a one-shot musket, and a machine gun.
In this second one enquiring minds can learn the distinction between fighting in the Second World War with a Bolt-Action rifle, and something called a Combat Shotgun.
This looks pretty fun. The guns seem pleasingly meaty.
Tangent – their tech is pretty nice. They released some of their authoring tools earlier this year for people to play around with and it’s got some really nice features.
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Eh, forget the clever and get to shooting people. Why not, i’d be interested if you start with an era appropriate gun, and if you die you can either retry or cop out and use a modern gun. If you die with a modern gun you can try with some futuristic laser cannon.
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That looks terrible. If it’s so tasteful and adult, why aren’t there more breasts? In metal wetsuits?
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Polycounters FTW this game is gonna rock!
“Numerical adjustment” hur hur.
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That. Looks. Bonkers.
I feel as if the violence being dealt out so casually is perhaps a little underwhelming, a little lacking in impact, compared to, say, Brothers in Arms II or even Call of Duty 5. Not that I’m able to tell from a couple of bite-sized trailers. Who knows? I await a demo.
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@Schmung – yes releasing the Marmoset toolbag for the public was very, very awesome. It’s a great way to realtime render and present one’s 3d models very easily, without all the fuss of trying to find a viewport shader and then setting it up and then not being able to use AA and shit.
For that reason alone, I’ll be buying this game, the dudes are awesome.
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Looks rad.
BTW – you might want to consider bringing on the guy that wrote this even if he is an American’t:
http://pc.ign.com/articles/876/876701p1.html
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Good job of the PR guys/devs on making the gameplay footage look like it was played on a gamepad even though it’s a PC game :(
Looks great though !
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Agincourt through a Modern Warfare-style gunship cam? Big stompy robots at Troy?
That last weapon looked utterly ridiculous.
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tapanister : yeah, it’s really nice. Took some faffing for me to get it working properly as it was doing some funky smoothing with my obj files initially, but for presenting your work it’s absolutely top notch.
Hopefully their kindness is rewarded and I guess a fair few people from Polycount/GA etc will buy anyway simply because of the toolbag.
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I’m ashamed to admit that the only thing I can think of when watching that is the opening sequence of Timecop. Except that I’m not ashamed, obviously.
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That looks pretty good, in a rather daffy way. Certainly worth a look for giggles.
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Also preview here: http://elder-geek.com/2009/08/preview-darkest-of-days/
Likely a first day buy for me – and that’s rare for me with FPS games. Epic.
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I really want to know what the FMG is.
Looks kind of challenging with modern weapons, or maybe the guy playing was just really bad.
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GapGen – “Agincourt through a Modern Warfare-style gunship cam? Big stompy robots at Troy?”
One can only hope. :)
Hell, forget the gunship cam – put me in a a Huey UH-1 with a minigun at Agincourt.
Now if we can only get a game that pits pirates vs. vikings my life will be complete.
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There’s another great trailer on the front page of their website!
“The ‘Broomhandle’ c96
- Reliable semi-automatic pistol
- Rate of fire ideal for use in trench warfare
- Looks badass
- Is badass”
Do want.
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Then it pretty much is.
http://www.pvkii.com/
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I’ve totally always wanted a game like this, “Imagine if you could go back in time and win an otherwise impossible war…”
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Nope not mental enough
needs more chain gun.
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It looks pleasingly bonkers but I must admit, I thought the battles in those videos looking pretty terrible.
Will wait and hope I am proven wrong, because I like things with a dash of the absurd.
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As said, needs a massive backpack belt fed minigun :D The broom handle should fire quicker than that – its lethal. Try DoDS to see what it can do.
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Oh my. Thanks pierec!
The sense of humor in this along with the manic absurdity is great. That it is cloaked in a quasi-serious storyline only makes it more amusing. Go check out the trailer on the game’s site and on the devs’s site.
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I always wished someone would make a game about time-travelling to the past and mowing down soldiers with guns.
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If only Timeshift had been that diverse with regards to periods of time, oh well, this looks good.
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Woo Polycounters :D
Looking forward to this game, if only for the toolset. And getting to fire EQ’s guns.
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If only the weapons in Call of Juarez had been a little like this. The terrible revolvers and rifles may have been realistic, but they weren’t very fun either.
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Also, that it looks as if it’s going to have a good sense of humour around it;
http://www.gametrailers.com/video/exclusive-firearms-darkest-of/53409
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Being able to gun down confederates with an assault rifle as they run away appeals to me on every level.
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“You can use the CO7 shotgun for… everything. It’s a shotgun.”
:D
One thing that would be interesting is something like this where you’re very vulnerable, but have massive firepower. So the Romans might have rubbish ranged abilities, but if they catch up with you then they’re going to murder you.
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Man, the guns really don’t do enough damage.
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I was a bit underwhelmed, and I went in with high expectations. Despite the wonderful setting it just looked like it played out like another mediocre run-of-the-mill shooter. Of course it’s only about 5 minutes worth of footage and I could be wrong. The game clearly has a sense of humor in it, and hopefully they’ll play the comedy angle right as to charm to pants off of you all the way through as opposed to instilling the sense of disappointment Junior High Schoolers felt all over the world after playing State of Emergency for more than ten minutes.
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I’m feeling some strong Timesplitters vibes from the weight of the guns presented – I wholeheartedly agree with this thing.
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“Time travellers take back modern weapons to ensure the ‘correct’ side wins histortical wars” is a really great idea, with a lot of room for a good sense of humour and fun gameplay.
Those trailers however, showed major AI issues (shooting the entire confederate army in the back?) and a real, sort of, unresponsiveness to the weapons; say what you like about CoD4, but at no point did i really feel particularly Detached from the guns/killing in there; whereas this looks more like “you click the mouse button and people are dead”, which is a shame.
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Always dreamed of how it would be to enter a roman battlefield with a modern machine gun. And this game promises just that!
I do wonder if it’s not being a little bit too ambitious. WW2, civil war, romans, medieval times,…
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If I’m getting the right impression from the videos, I’m quite surprised no one’s tried to steal the Gears of War active-reloading system thingie before.
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@faelnor: Refer to the “Saving content. Please don’t turn off your console” text in the second video.
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Ah that would explain a lot thanks. Somehow, I couldn’t get the second video to play.
So it’s coming out on Xbox 360 as well, eh ? Expectations lowered.
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Maybe I’m being a little overly sensitive, but I don’t remember a lot of other games where you machine gun retreating soldiers in the back. War’s hell and all, that just seemed a little tasteless. I don’t know exactly why, it just sort of rubbed me the wrong way.
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Yeah, it’s clearly lacking in quality next to something like the Call of Duty games, but man, the concept is sound. I definitely think the further back into history you go, the more fun the game will be. Introducing Romans to GUNS will be superb. I just hope the NPCs will react in some way to all these technology.
There’s a couple of trailers on the site which grabbed my interest. I like this mechanic of keeping certain people alive, and I’m interested as to how the time traveller stuff will play out in terms of story.
What this game does do is remind me of the sadly delayed Alliance: Silent War. That looked really very good. Superb graphics (well, back in 2006!), a huge selection of weapons, and in intriguing storyline. Oh well!
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@The Hammer: I was trying to think of the name of the game this reminded me of, and Alliance: Silent War was it. Both have the using different weapons in different environments throughout history thing going for them, I’m surprised more games haven’t used the concept.
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I was hoping for more screaming of the WTF?-kind, from the time-natives. Otherwise, looks like good fun.
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@Sam C. Gun description: High speed violation of the geneva convention :)
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Looks like a lot of “disengage brain” fun. And the Antietam battle looked very much like COD, which is not a bad thing. I think this might even be a purchase.
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The enemy don’t seem to be scared enough by the appearance of a soldier with a spectacularly OP weapon… part of the fun should surely be the waves of panic as you stride among the enemy with a terrifying device spitting death at a never-before-seen rate. And in the game, obviously.
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Sam C – I thought the same.
The AI looks terrible. In the 1st video they just stood still or ran away slowly whilst you mowed them down. I reckon that could get old really fast. Shame.
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It certainly sounds like fun, but I’ll be trying the demo first once it’s available.
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Alliance: Secret War! Thank you, I was wracking my brain trying to remember that name.
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Or rather Alliance: Silent War.
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Err…. I could only see this as being interesting if the AI was absolutely fantastic. I at least like the enemies in my FPS games to have a hope of fighting back, instead of being the closest thing to unarmed there is. It’s not going to be satisfying to eliminate vast swathes of enemies if they could never actually fight back, eh?
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In my opinion, while the game looks like fun, the AI looks pants. They just stood there, shooting. Worse, they didn’t respond with any kind of “Holy shit, what the HELL is that guy USING?!”
But still. The weapons video is awesome.
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Yey, I’ve been waiting for more information on this for ages.
Is this the one with the multiplayer where you can pit Navy Seals against a German Rifle brigade and the game will try to balance the match.
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I think it’s easy to do this sort of asymmetry wrong – the machinegunning retreating soldiers in the back being one example where I agree it could be a little tasteless, and I’m not sure how well some of the differences between technology would work.
The concept of intervening with history is an interesting one (possibly as an analogy for modern-day interventionism). It will be interesting to see what they do with the story. There’s a lot of scope for discussion there, assuming they don’t go all-out mindless comedy.
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This looks terrible. The AI looks daft.
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reminds me of this – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Day_of_Creation
Goog memories indeed, but I refuse to set my hopes up high for that one, not before I see a proper RPS Verdict.
That rocket launcher was ridiculous btw.
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It’s like someone reached into my mind and took one of the best ideas I ever had and made it real!
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Holy crap, that’s insane! The engine is looking a little dated, but otherwise it looks like a jolly good time!
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Poly counters all up in this thread, yo!
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lopl that looks… interesting…
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awesome, but i worry about the AI …
anyone play the battelgrounds hl2 mod where its mutiplayer musket fighting?
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I hope they manage to recreate a real feeling of all of the time periods. Otherwise it’ll just be:
Level 1 sword baddies.
Level 2 musket baddies. etc.
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Lack_26, no, that one’s Alliance: Silent War – which is by now probably permanently cancelled. Website: http://www.alliancethegame.com/thewar.php
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@Shadow Aspect,
Ah, shame. That one looked to be a fair way into development. Ah well, this still looks fun in a silly kind of way.
Now just to wait until CoD [Number]: Bloody Big Battles where they take battles from history and throw them together without a care for plot (which CoD has always sucked at, despite what my friends claim).
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@rabbitsoup: Yeah, Battlegrounds had alot of promise. Too bad it never went anywhere. There are still lots of issues with it…
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Those of us who were raised by video games have long day-dreamed of this during history lessons and documentaries. Its about time they bring it to the mouse!
Regarding video game violence i would say treating all creatures and people around you as pinatas which may drop goodies if you smash them hard enough… may not be the healthiest of behaviors for some people over the long term.
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Downloading the demo now. I’m interested to see how it plays out.
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Brilliant. I will be keeping a very close eye on this one. The idea of shooting Roman Legion soldiers very closely mimics a daydream I once had, and makes me happy.
Also, the cocking of the bolt action rifle and lever action rifle is hugely laughable. I take it these guys have never shot a weapon in their life.
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PS: F&#$ Fileplanet.
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Surprised that this hasn’t been mentioned yet, but if you like this kind of stuff, check out the book Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove. Time travelers bring AK-47s back to the American Civil War in an attempt to change history and make the Confederacy win. Not the greatest writing ever, but a bunch of loony scenes of assault rifle vs. muzzle-loading rifle.
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So you play a soldier who uses advanced weaponry to inflict completely disproportinate damage on other soldiers using obsolete technology? I thought that game about Fallujah was cancelled.
This is a really cool idea though.
Seriously though, don’t drop your gun against the Romans, or else you’ll be facing off against a legion of Romans using an improved version of that gun in about two months.
Why hasn’t this started a “100 Navy Seals” vs “Entire Roman Army” style flamewar yet?
I can’t see the videos at work, but I immediately think of Serious Sam…
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How about Civilisation twinned with, say, something like ArmA? In Civ fighting spearmen with aircraft carriers does happen, and so this kind of conflict, along with whatever social consequences for the vastly asymmetric warfare that would entail, would be a natural extension of that game. After all, European colonialism and imperialism was in some ways like this, with modern gunpowder weapons against pre-metalworking societies in some cases.
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Also, Clovus: I think there’s a difference between reverse engineering a wooden ship and developing machine tools to sufficient precision to build modern rifles, plus having an understanding of chemistry enough to build the ammunition.
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@Gap Gen: Maybe a slight difference. But singlehandedly trying to take over Rome with modern weapons (not the point of the game I’m sure) would be a very Hannibal-esque voyage. You mow down an entire legion only to have another one pop up the next day. And then another. And then another. Seriously, WTF?
And then the running and chasing…
I’m guessing this game is not a logical extension of anything but some random bit of awesomeness that popped into someones head (stoned or not). But getting to fight the battles in Civ would be cool…
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Just finished the demo it was pretty fun. Some funny dialog. grenades threw weird, (like from the chest rather then the arm) Cannon was also a pain, give me iron sites or at least a stupid cross hair. Do not give me the worst of both worlds. Minor complaints though.
The intro was pretty cool. I was worried that the “chasers” you use to save important people would be a pain and it would turn into babysitting and quicksaves and quickloading. It didn’t, and it was actually kinda a cool twist. The quick reloading thing i thought was gonna be a huge pain actually turned out to be kinda cool.
That said so many of these games the bullets are instant. no matter the distance. I’ll take fallout 3 speed bullets any day of the week. Last point.. they better have a sweet tree-mowing mini-gun!
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I will only be pleased with this game if i can run around with 2 berghmann WWI machine guns screaming insane words with maniacal laughter on a roman battlefield.
Oh well, looks interesting by the trailers.
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Clovus: I’d guess you’d have to do it using special ops forces to take out key figures, rather than just attempting to kill every person with a sword. It’d be a bit like Blackhawk Down, against a bigger force with more organisation but no guns or RPGs. Hell, if you didn’t care about casualties you could just carpetbomb the city.
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Well, I just tried the brand new demo. It’s the choppiest, most sluggish thing I think I’ve ever run on this computer.
I couldn’t even play through it. I had about 1 fps at one point. My computer is not shit. I run things like Fallout 3 on the highest settings, smooth as you like. The programming behind this demo, however, clearly *is* shit.
What a shame.
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More fun would be a Roman Centurion who time-travels into modern warfare and has to try to fight machine gun types with his spear ^_^
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Actually, I think I had a dream once where I was a Roman soldier fighting a modern army. I think we were bombed, and the last thing I remember of the dream was crawling under a bush, trying to avoid the explosions.
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It has always been one of my fantasies to go back in time with a machine gun and mow down people using swords and shields, seriously! This is awesome.
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In the photo above it shows a roman solider stopping rounds from a machine gun with a tower shield, if the game ends up keeping that factor I’ll be right angry :P There is NO WAY a wooden tower shield could stop a freaking .50 round, at least that looks like it is suposed to be a .50 cal machine gun I could be wrong. Either way even a pistol would go through one of those things at that range.
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Society for Destructive Anachronism.
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It wasn’t too bad. The AI was a bit ropey, and the logic of the plot somewhat daft, but the atmosphere was good, and the shooting was fun. Overall I enjoyed the demo.
How many other chances are you going to get to play through historical battles in an fps? I’ll probably play this for the novelty.
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Timeplitters looked more interesting.
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Cap Gen: they did with their bare hands what we still can’t do today.
Ahem, e.g. Greek Fire – no one knows how to make that anymore, but the old blokes did. Ditto pyramids etc.
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Cap Gen: I’d imagine the Roman (and especially Byzantine) era “special forces” types and close security would be very high standard. What with the general levels of murder and unpleasantness doing the rounds. Obv, there’d be a technical disavantage. But that runs out once your modern tech breaks. Unless you’ve brought Thomas Edison along with you.
Yeah, a crack SASS squad dropped in, say Londinium, wouldn’t have much hope of getting Ceasar’s head onna stick…
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Just played the demo: good start, but I wanted to be a Sioux (at one point I shouted “that dude just got an arrow in the brain!” and scared the shit out of my missus) then faded in the tutorial section. The Civil War mission was fun and although I didn’t like having control taken off me I understand why they’ve done it. I especially liked the part near then end when you find a mass grave of mixed troops and your movement speed is halved as you wade knee deep in blood and bits. Nice touch.
I look forward to this.
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“Either way even a pistol would go through one of those things at that range.”
I wouldn’t count on that – most pistols have remarkably poor penetration power. A solid inch of iron-reinforced wood would at the very least slow a low power pistol round to the point where it’s useless, if not outright stop it.
On the game front, after playing the demo (and having it run smooth as hell – I had far more performance optimization issues with Fallout 3, poster above) this thing actually suprised me. In the positive sense. There’s a certain B-movie vibe to the story that’s endearing, while it’s pretty and polished enough to be fun.
Plus, I just imagine the character going “come with me if you want to live.” whenever he grabs one of the time-important people.
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“they did with their bare hands what we still can’t do today.”
You mean, build an industrial-age civilisation capable of precision machining in the space of a few years? Arguably, the Romans did have the knowledge available to make steam engines, but they didn’t have the metallurgy skills or the incentive (since slave power seemed to do the trick).
Also, not knowing what Greek fire was exactly isn’t the same as not being able to make it now. We have plenty of ways to burn people alive very effectively on the battlefield (napalm, WP, flamethrowers, you name it).
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I liked the gameplay, but i didnt think the way the ai didnt react to you and the feeling you dont have much effect a bit silly, i might buy, probably wont sadly..
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Gap Gen: more of an excuse to mis-quote Neil Young. The romans were no dummies, the tech behind damascene blades, for example, is not to be sniffed at. And they were, above all else, pragmatic. It might have taken them 2 years to suss the reverse engineering, but they’d have done it…
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“I liked the gameplay, but i didnt think the way the ai didnt react to you and the feeling you dont have much effect a bit silly, i might buy, probably wont sadly..”
The way the AI reacts seems to be rather specific actually – it prioritises other NPC’s above the player. You can test that with the demo by running ahead and facing the long line of musket wielding white-uniforms (sorry, I’m not American so I don’t know the specifics of that local tussle) on your own.
If you’re at that point on your own, you get shot to bits. If you march there with NPC support, the friendly soldiers fall around you while you’re unharmed. I suppose that mechanic makes it look like the AI ignores you or doesn’t react to you, but there does seem to be a point behind it.
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Funky Badger: Two years to advance from an iron age civilisation to a military-industrial complex, complete with all the scientific advances and infrastructural changes that this entails? This is something that took society hundreds of years. The Romans were smart, but they weren’t many hundreds times smarter than we are.
To put it another way – we know in reasonable detail how a black hole is made, but we can’t build one ourselves yet, and we certainly aren’t two years away from making one (or at least one that doesn’t vanish instantly). Finding something isn’t the same as being able to build it, and I’d wager that a trireme is a bit simpler to copy in a pre-Industrial Revolution society than an M4 carbine, say. I’d be willing to buy that with a lot of luck, they could build a bombard with a bit of ingenuity.
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Fun fact. The demo is the first app to bluescreen Windows 7 for me.
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I tried out the demo as well, and it’s a fair amount of fun. The taking away of control has already been mentioned, and I can’t really think of a great reason to do so, it seemed a little silly. The one quibble is how no one seems to care that you’re spraying away with an automatic rifle from the future, or throwing handfuls of glowing metal balls. Just shouts of “What is that thing?” would be kind of nice.
Some poor bastard Union soldier is going to be telling his grandchildren about The Man With the Hand-Maxim rifle that can throw magical balls of green light, and no one will believe him.
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Clearly the AI ignores you since the brain filters out what it doesn’t want to see (Discworld reference there), so they clear just cant see the 6 foot futuristic mass slaughter machine. There it makes perfect sense. (Not that this game needs to).
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Reminds me of Battlegrounds.
For King and Country!
So much fun, its was basically shoot once and then try and bayonet people, as reloading was rubbish/not worth it.
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I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Margaret
http://powerleveling.info
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^^ We’ve been flogged.
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