Articles
Ray and Jennifer’s
Excellent E3 Adventure
by
Ray Ivey & Jennifer Miller
Part One: Longest Journey Ascendant
RAY: What’s wrong,
Jen? You look a little green around the gills!
JEN: Sorry. Still trying to regain my equilibrium after the official
Dreamfall preview.
RAY: (Handing Jen a Dramamine).
I know what you mean. It’s
a bit hard not to suffer from vertigo, considering the lofty ambitions
of this game, right?
Of
course this game is FunCom’s very highly anticipated follow-up
to their The Longest Journey. While we did see some more game areas
than we have seen before, the impression is still alarmingly that
of a game that’s much, much farther away from release than
December.
Even
more distressing is the fact that we once again did not get a chance
to see the
mouse control system demonstrated. Every time
we have seen this game in action it has been with the Xbox setup,
which is all well and good, but we imagine the lion’s share
of purchasers of this game will be playing it on the PC. We keep
hearing about the natural-feeling and intuitive mouse control system,
but we want to see it.
JEN:
I’m going with Ray on this one. Where were the mouse
controls? Not every adventure gamer is going to want to steal their
cousin’s Xbox controller to play this game.
So yes, do to a snafu in setting up the demo PC, we were not given
a demonstration of the mouse controls, which when they did work at
one point, looked a little cumbersome and reminded me of my early
days learning the controls of Uru.
RAY: It was good to see our heroine Zoe running around in environments
that were new to us, solving physical puzzles that were quite reminiscent
of Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. It would have been more encouraging
if the environments had been more attractive, however.
JEN: Come on, Ray, there
is no doubt in my mind that Dreamfall looks great and sounds even
better. Ragnar has billed it as not exactly
a sequel to his hit The Longest Journey, but as a “spiritual
successor.” I became a little worried at that point, but let’s
proceed.
RAY: We did pick up a
couple of tidbits of new information. Remember Teddy, the talking
robotic teddy bear in Spielberg’s A.I.?
Well . . . there’s a similar character in Dreamfall, and FunCom
has hired Jack Angel, the same actor who voiced Teddy for Spielberg,
to do the vocal honors for the character.
JEN: Let’s not
go into the story too much (because Funcom will probably hunt me
down and kill me!) as not to spoil readers
out there, but we will return to familiar places from the original
game. We will see April, though we did not see her in our demonstration.
RAY: Yep, we keep hearing about April, but we have yet to see her
in the game.
JEN: Puzzles are pretty
well integrated, but I thought became a little cheap in places.
Such as “I can’t unlock the door
until I can see that it’s a door” kind of puzzles.
RAY: I thought one puzzle we saw was pretty solid: remember the
one that involved using the environment and inventory to create a
torch to facilitate exploration of a dark area?
JEN:
Your character has a “focus field” that can pinpoint
a number of objects in a room so you can interact with them. This
is especially useful considering the game is completely rendered
in real-time 3D. This rendering also presents problems. The collision
detection needs tweaking. There were times when I would see my character’s
hand suddenly disappear into a wall or through solid glass on a window.
And yes kids, there is combat, but easily defeatable combat. There
are jumps, but easily accomplished jumps, with targeting and everything.
Oooo . . . pretty . . . .
RAY:
Finally, it will probably come as good news to our readers that
combat using the mouse control system will be simpler and easier
than combat using the Xbox controller.
JEN:
There are also (gasp) mini games throughout the game. And while
this has worked in a
series like Nancy Drew, I’m not
sure that they work in a game such as Dreamfall. They seemed a little
too much like filler and less like purpose.
Oh and
shame on you Funcom. Didn’t you learn anything from
Syberia? Don’t ever put more than two “doors to nowhere” in
a room. It only serves to drive the gamer crazy.
RAY: The bottom line
is, we’re a little tired of hearing
the rhetoric about how ambitious this game is when we’ve seen
so little. Particularly since it’s got a release date that’s
just a few months away . . . It’s just difficult not to be
a little nervous about this one . . .
