King- Errrr.. I mean "The Silver Lining" Demo Review
The Silver Lining (TSL), formerly known as King's Quest 9, is one of the most anticipated Adventure games to be released this year, or at least the first part of it, Shadows. The team behind it has a lot going for them - VU gave them permission to continue production after their fans fought for the C&D order to be removed, they've been interviewed and mentioned by several online and print magazines (including MTV), and they've made it on TV. They've gotten their PR and marketing skills down pat, but in terms of game designing, they still have a long way to go, and here's why.
When I first discovered the script excerpts Caser Bittar posted to demonstrate the quality of TSL, I was both underwhelmed and apprehensive. It really wasn't comforting to read that the game boasted "1500 pages script", especially since the examples he posted weren't at all funny. So when the demo finally came out, I didn't have very high expectations about its quality, though I tried to remain somewhat hopeful. I guess it was the foreknowledge that kept this game from being a complete disappointment. If you haven't tried it out yet, here's the link. Bear in mind that this was the demo made specially for VU to try to negotiate talks with them in removing the C&D. VU probably saw potential in it, or maybe they just couldn't stand the KQIX fanatics trolling their forums and spamming their emails with "BRING BACK KQIX!!!". :P
Story Presentation
I was expecting a video clip for the introduction, but what appeared instead were a bunch of words detailing the tragic events of the Royal Twins' birthday party at the Green Isles, followed by Graham's short mission. The game starts with Graham in his royal clothes, and he has to get changed in his famous red and blue adventurer's garb and visit the Oracle to find out how to save his family (again). Since this demo was slapped together in only three weeks, the story itself in the game was very short as well as straightforward, so there's very little to comment on. You can talk to the NPCs to hear their take on the tragedy, though it doesn't add very much storywise. What's worth mentioning though is Hassan, the ferry captain. When Graham approaches him to use his ferry, Hassan objects. Not sure *why* he doesn't make use of the opportunity to simply make a quick buck from it, but he does. Graham then reveals himself to be King Alexander's father, and therefore a king, but Hassan doesn't believe him. Silly Graham, that's what you get for walking around in those peasant adventurer's clothes instead of that royal attire you wore earlier, and I'm pretty sure Hassan wouldn't have doubted your story if you didn't change your clothes. Why Graham doesn't think of changing back, I don't know either, but lucky for him, he has a coin with his face on it, and Hassan believes him right away... except he still refuses to grant Graham's request. Hassan, you're dealing with a king here, and kings are usually loaded. Instead of being difficult and reject the request because you have to feed your crew, why not offer your services for a high fee? Graham offers him a sackload of gold, and Hassan greedily accepts right away. The game ends with Graham visiting the oracle, who proves to be ultimately useless in giving out information because the great evil clouds her vision, but knows someone who might be able to offer more help (read: less cryptic). Even my Oracle in KQ3VGA gave information more freely than theirs.
Dialogue and messages weren't all that interesting, and apparently also riddled with typos and mispronunciations. The same few messages got old pretty click whenever you clicked the hand, eye or talk icon on yourself or on any area that isn't important.
Game Design
Again, not much to comment here, but there are some notable bugs and one design flaw. Hassan's conversation was not thought of carefully enough. When Graham has paid for his passage and Hassan asks if he's ready to set sail, there is no way for Graham to say "Yes" or "No" with the talk icon. Instead, Graham must click his hand on the ferry in order to leave for the oracle. Apparently most didn't have a problem with this, but for those of us who respond with our talk icons than with our hand icons, we were stuck. It was because of this that I stumbled onto a bug. Sometimes previous conversation options that shouldn't be there would appear, and Hassan would develop partial amnesia by either not recognising you or forgetting that you've already paid. For those who thought of using their hand icons, but forgeting to pick up an item along the way, the game would prevent them from leaving. That's good in a way, because at least you know that you've forgotten something, but said item is found in a place that isn't exactly on the way, so there were people who got stuck and wondered where it was.
Conversation was done using branches, a first for a KQ game. As noted earlier, there were bugs in Hassan's conversation tree (and I read that they're still trying to debug it).
Travelling between the islands was done using a large ship sprite to travel on a map. Travelling this way would be fine as long as you go to the proper destination. Try any other, and the game would crash.
At one point during the game a tree trunk would fall and block one of the paths. Problem with this move is that the trunk itself didn't appear large enough to be an insurmountable obstacle, and fans have asked why Graham simply couldn't climb over or walk around it.
Perseus brought up a good point about the 3D environment. For a 3D game, it didn't make use of its environment. There's really no gameplay reason for it to be in 3D other than to look cool in today's world, and would have worked just as well with 2D.
GUI
(Not too sure if some of the things I write here fall under GUI or under Game Design, but whatever)
The menu is pretty similar to the traditional Sierra menu. It hides itself at the top unless the cursor enters that area. The design is rather pretty, but there's still much to be desired. There were no tooltips. While most of the icons were self-explanatory (footprints = walk, bubble speech = talk, hand = use, eye = look, bag = inventory), the options button and the few blank squares next to the bag icon weren't. The options was in the centre of the menu, and its symbol could have meant anything, so having tooltips for that would have been good. I had no idea what the few blank squares were for, and they didn't seem to have any purpose. What were they even doing there?
I noted three misleading exits in total. The first was in the starting room, where you can't tell whether there's any room to the right of the screen. It turned out that there's supposed to be a wall, which I had deduced from Graham's restricted walkpath, but visually, you couldn't see any wall, so there's no way to tell at a glance whether the area can be explored or is blocked. The other two misleading exits are probably that way because they're meant to be explored in the full game.
The inventory has a finite number of small squares on the left where the items are placed, and a closeup view of the selected item on the right. I don't recall if every single object rotates, but the coin certainly did. I thought that was ironic, because Roberta Williams (the original KQ designer) felt that objects shouldn't rotate around uselessly unless there's a reason for it. It's a strange way to honour Roberta, but meh, it's their game.
For a game that's supposed to be heavily inspired by The Longest Journey, I'm surprised that they didn't think of bringing over the helpful smart cursors and exit highlights that Longest Journey had. This would have at least made it easier for the player to see which areas he/she can and can't explore, without having to click on so many doors and find out that Graham's not supposed to enter them. It also would have made it easier to find the exit hotspots, since they weren't large enough for players to click on to exit the area.
The cursor icons and the words were very small. Personally, I would have liked them to be bigger, especially the words. It wasn't always easy reading them, especially against a translucent textwindow. The yellow words against the yellow floor was the hardest to read, and the translucent textwindow provided very little contrast.
It's hard to say whether the full game would be worth playing. Critical as I am of their demo, I do understand what it's like to be rushed into producing a game in three weeks, thanks to "Hero of Infamous Kingdoms". I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for the best, nonetheless.
When I first discovered the script excerpts Caser Bittar posted to demonstrate the quality of TSL, I was both underwhelmed and apprehensive. It really wasn't comforting to read that the game boasted "1500 pages script", especially since the examples he posted weren't at all funny. So when the demo finally came out, I didn't have very high expectations about its quality, though I tried to remain somewhat hopeful. I guess it was the foreknowledge that kept this game from being a complete disappointment. If you haven't tried it out yet, here's the link. Bear in mind that this was the demo made specially for VU to try to negotiate talks with them in removing the C&D. VU probably saw potential in it, or maybe they just couldn't stand the KQIX fanatics trolling their forums and spamming their emails with "BRING BACK KQIX!!!". :P
Story Presentation
I was expecting a video clip for the introduction, but what appeared instead were a bunch of words detailing the tragic events of the Royal Twins' birthday party at the Green Isles, followed by Graham's short mission. The game starts with Graham in his royal clothes, and he has to get changed in his famous red and blue adventurer's garb and visit the Oracle to find out how to save his family (again). Since this demo was slapped together in only three weeks, the story itself in the game was very short as well as straightforward, so there's very little to comment on. You can talk to the NPCs to hear their take on the tragedy, though it doesn't add very much storywise. What's worth mentioning though is Hassan, the ferry captain. When Graham approaches him to use his ferry, Hassan objects. Not sure *why* he doesn't make use of the opportunity to simply make a quick buck from it, but he does. Graham then reveals himself to be King Alexander's father, and therefore a king, but Hassan doesn't believe him. Silly Graham, that's what you get for walking around in those peasant adventurer's clothes instead of that royal attire you wore earlier, and I'm pretty sure Hassan wouldn't have doubted your story if you didn't change your clothes. Why Graham doesn't think of changing back, I don't know either, but lucky for him, he has a coin with his face on it, and Hassan believes him right away... except he still refuses to grant Graham's request. Hassan, you're dealing with a king here, and kings are usually loaded. Instead of being difficult and reject the request because you have to feed your crew, why not offer your services for a high fee? Graham offers him a sackload of gold, and Hassan greedily accepts right away. The game ends with Graham visiting the oracle, who proves to be ultimately useless in giving out information because the great evil clouds her vision, but knows someone who might be able to offer more help (read: less cryptic). Even my Oracle in KQ3VGA gave information more freely than theirs.
Dialogue and messages weren't all that interesting, and apparently also riddled with typos and mispronunciations. The same few messages got old pretty click whenever you clicked the hand, eye or talk icon on yourself or on any area that isn't important.
Game Design
Again, not much to comment here, but there are some notable bugs and one design flaw. Hassan's conversation was not thought of carefully enough. When Graham has paid for his passage and Hassan asks if he's ready to set sail, there is no way for Graham to say "Yes" or "No" with the talk icon. Instead, Graham must click his hand on the ferry in order to leave for the oracle. Apparently most didn't have a problem with this, but for those of us who respond with our talk icons than with our hand icons, we were stuck. It was because of this that I stumbled onto a bug. Sometimes previous conversation options that shouldn't be there would appear, and Hassan would develop partial amnesia by either not recognising you or forgetting that you've already paid. For those who thought of using their hand icons, but forgeting to pick up an item along the way, the game would prevent them from leaving. That's good in a way, because at least you know that you've forgotten something, but said item is found in a place that isn't exactly on the way, so there were people who got stuck and wondered where it was.
Conversation was done using branches, a first for a KQ game. As noted earlier, there were bugs in Hassan's conversation tree (and I read that they're still trying to debug it).
Travelling between the islands was done using a large ship sprite to travel on a map. Travelling this way would be fine as long as you go to the proper destination. Try any other, and the game would crash.
At one point during the game a tree trunk would fall and block one of the paths. Problem with this move is that the trunk itself didn't appear large enough to be an insurmountable obstacle, and fans have asked why Graham simply couldn't climb over or walk around it.
Perseus brought up a good point about the 3D environment. For a 3D game, it didn't make use of its environment. There's really no gameplay reason for it to be in 3D other than to look cool in today's world, and would have worked just as well with 2D.
GUI
(Not too sure if some of the things I write here fall under GUI or under Game Design, but whatever)
The menu is pretty similar to the traditional Sierra menu. It hides itself at the top unless the cursor enters that area. The design is rather pretty, but there's still much to be desired. There were no tooltips. While most of the icons were self-explanatory (footprints = walk, bubble speech = talk, hand = use, eye = look, bag = inventory), the options button and the few blank squares next to the bag icon weren't. The options was in the centre of the menu, and its symbol could have meant anything, so having tooltips for that would have been good. I had no idea what the few blank squares were for, and they didn't seem to have any purpose. What were they even doing there?
I noted three misleading exits in total. The first was in the starting room, where you can't tell whether there's any room to the right of the screen. It turned out that there's supposed to be a wall, which I had deduced from Graham's restricted walkpath, but visually, you couldn't see any wall, so there's no way to tell at a glance whether the area can be explored or is blocked. The other two misleading exits are probably that way because they're meant to be explored in the full game.
The inventory has a finite number of small squares on the left where the items are placed, and a closeup view of the selected item on the right. I don't recall if every single object rotates, but the coin certainly did. I thought that was ironic, because Roberta Williams (the original KQ designer) felt that objects shouldn't rotate around uselessly unless there's a reason for it. It's a strange way to honour Roberta, but meh, it's their game.
For a game that's supposed to be heavily inspired by The Longest Journey, I'm surprised that they didn't think of bringing over the helpful smart cursors and exit highlights that Longest Journey had. This would have at least made it easier for the player to see which areas he/she can and can't explore, without having to click on so many doors and find out that Graham's not supposed to enter them. It also would have made it easier to find the exit hotspots, since they weren't large enough for players to click on to exit the area.
The cursor icons and the words were very small. Personally, I would have liked them to be bigger, especially the words. It wasn't always easy reading them, especially against a translucent textwindow. The yellow words against the yellow floor was the hardest to read, and the translucent textwindow provided very little contrast.
It's hard to say whether the full game would be worth playing. Critical as I am of their demo, I do understand what it's like to be rushed into producing a game in three weeks, thanks to "Hero of Infamous Kingdoms". I'm keeping my fingers crossed and hoping for the best, nonetheless.
posted by Swift at 9:15 AM
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