Grimrock

Frenchie wrote:I think AH should make a questionaire of what we like to see in LoG3 and then make a vote to see which has the highest popularity. I think we already spawned enough ideas, but we have no insight to what is in the LoG3's vision or what is possible. Maybe Petri should group them in programming difficulty degrees and AH decides how many features are still open and which ones are most likely already planned.

I think AH should use their actual game designers' ideas instead, so that they actually end up with a good game.

I played the original Dungeon Master on the Atari ST and later on the Amiga. From my perspective this is a very "good" game already. By adding a dungeon editor even "great". I loved it they didn't go overboard with the difficulty level like FTL did with Chaos Strikes Back. Back in the days of the 8-bit games you were always amazed what programmers could do with only 16K. Nowadays people's expectation is much higher. Maybe I'm just too simple minded.

Over 20 years LoG will be the inspiration for a virtual reality game in a Sword Art Online environment. You will still move tile wise but you will smell the dampness and feel the wall texture. Maybe I still have my wits to be able to play those games.

I know I'm very late to the party, but still I'm gonna revive this thread.
This part of the forums deserve more attention, most especially this very thread.

At this current point in time, we're 6 months past the release of LoG2, are there some news about a possible development of LoG3? Maybe some proofs of concept or something?
Obviously not expecting a release date yet, but informations (as meager as they can be) to chew on would be fantastic.
Sorry for the impatience, but I'm totally hyped on the Grimrock universe.

It's undeniable that this (now) series of games is absolutely great, but I'm nonetheless gonna pinpoint 3 things I think are to be reviewed/improved upon for a new installment.

1) Open-world (LoG2)
I'll start with this one as I think it's very subjective, and I know a lot of you are flat out gonna disagree with my take on the subject, but IMO making LoG2 open-world was a downgrade from the original.
IMO making the game open-world made Grimrock a lot less hmm... Grim.
Being constantly trapped under a floor made the first game a very oppressing experience. And the deeper we ventured into the mountain, the more it intensified. A true claustrophobic nightmare.

No matter which part of the island I explored, I can't say I experienced that feeling again in LoG2. Seeing the sky above my head removed a lot from the immersion. It didn't matter that the Sewers or the Pyramid of Umas for instance were "closed" environments. As soon as I left these zones and reached an open area it disconnected me immediately from that oppressive feeling.

Also another problem I noticed with the new open-world direction the game turned to, is the fact that every zone felt disconnected to each other. The whole "feel free to roam the island and collect 16 power gems to open the castle" theme didn't sell it very well to me personally.
Every zone was arguably intertwined as some questlines were spread across several regions, but (once again it's my opinion) the end result is poor.
Having a full view over it now that I finished the game 100%, it felt more like a treasure hunt game with clever puzzles tossed at it rather than a spiritual successor to LoG.
I'll admit though that some questlines (Cemetary Gate) were pretty well-conceived.


2) Confusing wording on puzzles
I have in mind the Archives / Storage puzzle from LoG2 when typing this line.
Believe it or not, I actually decrypted the Archives cypher without even setting foot in the lexiconary. My complaint is in the wording of the Storage plate.
It should read In a heavy puzzle-oriented game, I think it's an issue that can't be overlooked.


3) Food system
Alright, this one is a bit tricky I'll admit.
I'm all in favor of a food system as it adds some immersive depth to the game.
Problem is, it deters the player from heavy exploration and encourages (at least in my case) a very heavy use of quicksave/load cheesing. So many times I found myself reloading a previous quicksave due to the fact that I unlocked/found nothing new and realize all my characters are starving. Problem with that is that it skews the real ingame time in the statistics menu.
Arguably noone should ever have food problems with respawning mobs, but there's a psychological factor at play : moving tiles plain and simple wastes food.
A simple idea would be to
> Drastically decrease food consumption of traveling
> Increase (adding?) food consumption while performing attacks or defending during combat

William Drake wrote:At this current point in time, we're 6 months past the release of LoG2, are there some news about a possible development of LoG3? Maybe some proofs of concept or something?
Obviously not expecting a release date yet, but informations (as meager as they can be) to chew on would be fantastic.
Sorry for the impatience, but I'm totally hyped on the Grimrock universe.

viewtopic.php?f=18&t=9818&p=94487#p94485

William Drake wrote:
1) Open-world (LoG2)
I'll start with this one as I think it's very subjective, and I know a lot of you are flat out gonna disagree with my take on the subject, but IMO making LoG2 open-world was a downgrade from the original.
IMO making the game open-world made Grimrock a lot less hmm... Grim.
Being constantly trapped under a floor made the first game a very oppressing experience. And the deeper we ventured into the mountain, the more it intensified. A true claustrophobic nightmare.

No matter which part of the island I explored, I can't say I experienced that feeling again in LoG2. Seeing the sky above my head removed a lot from the immersion. It didn't matter that the Sewers or the Pyramid of Umas for instance were "closed" environments. As soon as I left these zones and reached an open area it disconnected me immediately from that oppressive feeling.

Also another problem I noticed with the new open-world direction the game turned to, is the fact that every zone felt disconnected to each other. The whole "feel free to roam the island and collect 16 power gems to open the castle" theme didn't sell it very well to me personally.
Every zone was arguably intertwined as some questlines were spread across several regions, but (once again it's my opinion) the end result is poor.
Having a full view over it now that I finished the game 100%, it felt more like a treasure hunt game with clever puzzles tossed at it rather than a spiritual successor to LoG.
I'll admit though that some questlines (Cemetary Gate) were pretty well-conceived.

I respectfully disagree with this. Granted, you are describing an entirely personal experience so it is silly for me to disagree with how "you felt" about "your experience" with Grimrock 2. So I guess what I'm really saying is that when I played Grimrock 2 I still felt both the immersion and the oppressive feeling. And I played it very soon (a few short weeks) after beating Grimrock 1 for the very first time. I was super late to the Grimrock party, as I only heard about it via a Steam Advertisement (which popped up after I played and beat the recent Gauntlet game). Playing Grimrock 1 and 2 back-to-back was very fun for me. I could feel how the game evolved and matured. Moreover, I feel that the constant underground oppression in LoG 1 was very redundant. By the time I was a few levels away from the Cube I was pretty much "over it."

In LoG 2, I not only felt the same type of oppression and immersion, I also felt an overwhelming sense of mysticism and none of the redundancy of the first game. The mysticism in LoG 2 was so impactful that I couldn't wait to create a Myst Mod. I hope that should a Grimrock 3 project begin, that it advance us to a world where we finally get to interact with other friendly life-forms. Towns, NPC's, quests, dungeons, travel, etc.

William Drake wrote:3) Food system
Alright, this one is a bit tricky I'll admit.
I'm all in favor of a food system as it adds some immersive depth to the game.
Problem is, it deters the player from heavy exploration and encourages (at least in my case) a very heavy use of quicksave/load cheesing. So many times I found myself reloading a previous quicksave due to the fact that I unlocked/found nothing new and realize all my characters are starving. Problem with that is that it skews the real ingame time in the statistics menu.
Arguably noone should ever have food problems with respawning mobs, but there's a psychological factor at play : moving tiles plain and simple wastes food.
A simple idea would be to
> Drastically decrease food consumption of traveling
> Increase (adding?) food consumption while performing attacks or defending during combat

I agree with this 100%, and for the same reasons. Although when I brought it up, the community tried to burn me at the stake (although I admit that I might deserve it from time to time lol) :
http://grimrock.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=8506

Oh and I love your callout on the UHU NA puzzle. That was my worst puzzle and that "E" omission is part of my Fail in attempting to solve it. Although most people seem to have had an easy time deciphering it

I hope they improve the load times. I have just spent ages figuring out the "House of Braids" puzzle which meant lots of quick loading and lots of frustration. Anything but quick... Worst part is the reward is some mediocre hammer that isn't as good as my Great Axe I found ages ago!

I haven't had any issues with running out of food though. So far at least food seems plentiful. I have multiple chests and bags full of rations.

Perhaps AH team do a DLC for LOG2 before LOG3
I know there are a lot of mods for both LOG (i did 2 mods for LOG1) but new "oficial" content before LOG3... i like it.
I don't think so but...

I too would love to see a significant chunk of DLC (would happily pay £10 for a 5-8 hour quest) exploring a bit more of the world.

To be fair, even the guys at AH might not know what is coming next but my gut tells me from watching other indie companies grow that this is the period a growing company most likely tries a new IP or two before returning in a few years with the epic 3rd game in the series. Don't get me wrong, I would love for AH to keep churning out Dungeon Crawlers, but I would also be really excited to see some other work from the team. You have definitely earned my trust and respect to follow whatever you decide on next (as long as it's not a COD clone or a sports game - or both ).

Look what happened the last time we tried to make a DLC

At the moment we are polishing the iPad version which is coming out real soon and I'm also toying with my new game engine. No idea yet what it's going to be used for and I don't want to rush into a new project before I'm completely sure what it's going to be. Besides I had forgot how much fun it is to build a new tech from ground up, so I want to spend more time in preproduction this time around.

Now that's got to be living the dream - working on awesome tech without having to fear an impending deadline (at least for a while). I don't know if you're ready to share just yet, but out if interest - is the new engine likely to be "Lua Centric" again or going for something different?

It would be cool if you feel like blogging at some point if you perhaps did a post-mortem of the LOG2 engine at some point. Nice and geeky/techy would be cool :p.