By Kieron Gillen on January 21st, 2010 at 9:56 am.
Here’s a little quick thing for you while Quinns and I work on the penultimate (or is it?) part of Gameboys from Hell. Quinns has also done some hands-on-impressions of Love for Eurogamer. You can read them over here. It’s also worth noting that the first forty or so posts in the comment thread are a kind of performance art. Hurrah!
21/01/2010 at 10:26 LewieP says:
Title takes me back to the last night of Indietracks back in July. The DJ played You Love Us, and my friend who is a manics obsessive was so drunk he didn’t recognize it til halfway through.
Good times.
21/01/2010 at 10:51 Meat Circus says:
When I tried the Alpha, I found the game a little too inscrutable, and the flickering did my head in.
But it’s finally starting to congeal into something special, I think. Might try to convince some RPS Holdings guys that we should drop in one evening.
21/01/2010 at 11:02 vanarbulax says:
Love the comments thread, should challenge to see how many references you get.
21/01/2010 at 11:06 Jacques says:
I’m on the UK1 server quite often, in game name is Algon. Probably worth mentioning that Eskil has set up a Teamspeak server that makes communication quite a bit easier, and low end mode makes the graphics easier to comprehend.
22/01/2010 at 00:26 Miles of the Machination says:
Hey, is there some way of choosing which server you join? I seem to have ended up one a server with only one other player.
21/01/2010 at 11:22 Andy says:
So, any idea how to play this game, any links to guides, FAQ’s or anything? I’ve logged in a few times and ended up completely bewildered, I really want to give it a good shot though.
21/01/2010 at 11:27 Jon says:
I tried playing Love last night for an hour or so, and as beautiful as it is (in an abstract kind of way), I just couldn’t work out what I was meant to be doing. I know I need to find a settlement, but I have no idea how to go about doing that. Everywhere looks more or less the same.
I did find a sign saying someone had set up a settlement at some coordinates, but the game has no compass, and so I havn’t got the faintest idea how to get to said coordinates. So far I’ve spent my time either being shot by aliens, or drowning in knee deep puddles.
I’m going to give it a bit more time soon, since it does feel like the sort of game I could really get into, but the start could do with being a little gentler then dumping the player in the middle of a desolate wilderness, and telling them to find a home.
21/01/2010 at 11:37 Jacques says:
Eskil recently added a feature that automatically drops you on top of a settlement if one already exists.
The knowledge tokens (that sign you found) aren’t working quite yet, and working with the coordinates is a little confusing for newcomers.
basically, in chat, type the coordinates, press enter, and then LMB click on the icon that appears next to your message, that’ll drop a coordinate onto your toolbar that’ll point in the direction you need to go.
Might be useful also to know that the North Pole is at 64:64:N so you can get yourself a compass by typing that coordinate into the chat and following the method above.
21/01/2010 at 11:51 Quinns says:
It’s true! No promising it’ll be either populated or any good, though.
21/01/2010 at 11:28 Jim Rossignol says:
http://www.gaminglove.net/wiki/Getting_started
21/01/2010 at 11:31 Jacques says:
I apologise for some of the screwed up CSS on the wiki, I’m working on it.
21/01/2010 at 12:27 tisan says:
I ran around for a while, found a settlement, got shot at by lots of little things so I killed as many as I could see, got lost, found a glacier, found a forest, found a marsh, and then got the LOVE logo on screen?
There was this place where turrets were shooting things, so I ran away and found the old settlement again so I climbed to the top of what looks like a terracotta roof, jumped off, accidentally founded a settlement right next to the other one, ran out of my primary weapon thing, figured out how to manipulate the ground and then spent a lot of time looking through geometry and trying to get out of invisible walls.
Oddly, I still had fun.
21/01/2010 at 12:40 Collic says:
When you read comments threads like that only one thing springs to mind: I love you internet.
21/01/2010 at 13:12 EyeMessiah says:
Love is like a woman, mysterious and beautiful, enchanting and cruel!
21/01/2010 at 18:46 Scott Ossington says:
EyeMessiah dont let it get in the way, tell us how bitter you really are.
21/01/2010 at 14:20 PixelCody says:
I tried the alpha for a couple of days, which was encouraging, but Love definitely needed a little more time to develop into more of a game.
The biggest turn off for me was the constant blur and flickering, it was way too hard to recognise objects in the world (especially distant ones). The graphics certainly are beautiful but some of those filters (or whatever they are) need to be toned down or I fear I wont be able to stick around long when I give it another go.
21/01/2010 at 19:29 MadMatty says:
I can read a effin manual. Can´t you? whats wrong with people these days. If things go on, games will have front case stickers which say “This game might require of you to read the manual” or the quickstart guides (beta manual) in case of beta.
I´ve been drooling over this since i first saw it mentioned, as being one in search of new and untried things…and seeing as Heroin is 100 quid a pop and bad for your health to boot, i´ve decided to give this one a go at some near-future point in time.
Looks like the Anti-thesis of Dragon Age, which is mainly what im been looking for.
22/01/2010 at 03:24 Tom Camfield says:
@ MadMatty
Any game that wants to have some manner of mainstream success should come with a tutorial, help menu and online manual; though clearly this game’s in beta so such things might not yet be implemented. I think most of us expect to leap into any game and find our feet, and I think that’s natural and right. If Love changes the rules the developer should realise that they need to warn people, especially now they’re getting coverage on Eurogamer which will bring plenty of new meat who’ll happily squish the game on forums if they can’t fathom it.
22/01/2010 at 04:28 MWoody says:
So are you talking shit about people who have difficulty understanding a game you’ve yet to even try? Yeesh.
For the record, I read the “manual” (a 1-page readme file), a FAQ, and two wikis in their near-entirety before I could do much of anything in Love’s confusing world. Frankly, the game would be relatively simple (and possibly even fun) if the screen would stop flickering in that eye-meltingly “artistic” fashion.
22/01/2010 at 21:20 MadMatty says:
Yeah my bad- i was generally upset about some other games where people wouldnt even read thru it at it stayed with me in reading this, which is so not pro.
It took me around 6 hours to get my bearings in the game, which is as you say, a bit lacking in documentation.
Had great fun after that though.
Sooorreeeeeeeeeee
21/01/2010 at 20:18 A-Scale says:
This is one of the many games posted here lately that I can’t make heads or tails of. I have no idea what you do, what the goal is, or how you play it. The screenshots don’t help either.
22/01/2010 at 04:41 MWoody says:
Quick synopsis: the game is split into roughly-200-person servers. In the game world are items called “tokens” that allow you to put down a monolith-type structure in a human settlement (which is, in turn, formed by the first token you put down). Tokens in the world are inside AI-built bases populated with enemy spawners. Monoliths in settlements allow the player to copy a tool into a 4-slot bar that allows them to trade energy, a sort of universal currency, for things like weapon shots, bombs, mine fields, windows, turrets, teleporters, etc. Energy comes from finding energy spawners in the world and building power wires (using yet another tool) back to your base. The AI constantly hunts and assaults human bases, eventually winning and returning all tokens contained within to the ether, only to show up in new AI bases in time.
In practice, the game world ends up a horribly damaged mishmash of dead human and AI bases, making it very confusing and difficult to traverse. The graphic style looks great in screenshots, but in practice it flickers like mad and makes even simple navigation a daunting task. Human bases rarely last more than a few hours, which I think is by design – it IS fun to be the first to put down a settlement token, getting to pick where a good number of people on the server will congregate – but it also means that more complex bases are a brief rarity.
21/01/2010 at 23:42 Miles of the Machination says:
Well, I’ve just signed up, and I intend to document my journeys through this crazy land. This whole procedurally generated environment thing has got me interested, I’m curious to see how it works away from the blockiness of cities, and into the stubborn geometry of NATURE.