Part I
Part II
Part III
Part IV
The Playstation Experience - Part WTF-man-wrap-it-up-already
It was day 2. The day when people either chill out or don't show up. I was at the main door at 8:15 AM. There were 157 people. Yes. I counted. Really.
I had enough time on my hands. So I sat down to write my impressions on day 1. I had an idea for a start
"There was a line for people with wrist bands…"
The security guy ordered us to get closer to the main entrance. So I closed my laptop and stood up. That first sentence was all I managed to squeeze in. I stood around for the next hour and 45 minutes. Talked to a couple of strangers and they all had great things to say about The Order 1886.
"So... looks like a lot of the initial skepticism has now been addressed. Can't wait to play it."
"What skepticism?"
"You know, there has been very little gameplay shown, and they have all been basic tutorial sections. So people on GAF haven't really been very optimistic about it."
"GAF? What's that?"
"NeoGAF. A gaming forum. I post a lot there"
"Ohhh. So that's what Adam Boyes was joking about during the SFV announcement..."
I was shocked to realize that so many well informed gamers have no idea about GAF. Makes me wonder if we are in some kind of bubble in which we assume our opinions matter in the grand scheme of things. Well, at least Adam Boyes wrote us a poem. That's something…
As the giant doors slid open, we literally ran for the 2 booths that were seemingly impossible to conquer. Project Morpheus and The Order 1886. Project Morpheus needed you to reserve first thing in the morning. They issue a time card and let you come back at the allotted time so that you don't have to wait in a big line. The problem is, you have to wait in a big line to get the time card. But that was the only way, so I went for it. Luckily I got a slot for 1:22 PM. I had all the time in the world now. Or so I thought.
The Order 1886
The queue wasn't just long. It was longer than the previous day! It was so long that it wasn't even a line. It wound inside the booth, around the booth, and coiled like a snake all the way to the next hall! My indisputable, totally accurate estimate was close to 250 people! When I joined that line, still processing what that meant, one of the devs walked to us and said the wait time was expected to be 5 hours! They were planning to give out collectible playing cards to those in line so that anyone just looking for those can leave and those who really wanted to play the game can stay. But the estimate was still 5 hours. And I was standing there clueless if I should stay. Thought I'll stick around for 30 minutes and find out more. Fortunately, a LOT of people either chickened out, or left when they got the collectible cards. The 5 hour ETA became 3 hours and then 1.5 hours in a span of 1 hour. After that, nobody left, so my total wait time was 2.5 hours. The booth was modeled like a red brick chapel decorated with ancient lights, real steam rising up from steam pipes, a life size wax model of Galahad, life size thermite rifle and lightning gun - stuff people totally geeked out over. They must have spent quite a bit of money in building this elaborate set. I gradually progressed through the serpentine trail until I was next up for playing the game. Finally!
The different gameplay sections are very well detailed
here, so I'll stick to my
thoughts on it. Firstly, the game is a thing of beauty. After playing it, I'm certain this is what the ND devs were drooling over. The game does look better than UC4 in its current state. May be not Drake's model per se, but everything else. There is just so much post processing going on that, from a reasonable viewing distance, it is near indistinguishable from CG. Unfortunately, I couldn't appreciate it at the distance I was sitting at. I could see the pixel boundaries on the TV at that distance, so nothing was going to look really good. The game has copious amounts of film grain and at that distance, it looked pretty excessive. So I stepped away from my chair just to see how it held up from a couple of feet away. It looked exponentially better, so I didn't count that as a negative. It really is remarkable that they pulled this off. The IQ is almost flawless with nary a jaggy in sight. The 4x MSAA was working wonders and it held up at extreme close distance.
The gameplay was fun. It wasn't blowing my mind, but it was solid. The weapons packed quite a bit of punch. The cover system was pretty smart. It seemed like a hybrid between TLOU and GoW. There is a button that lets you enter soft cover mode, after which, you move in an out of cover automatically. It worked really well and felt like the character knew when I wanted to go into cover and when I just wanted to skirt around it. The health regen system is a hybrid as well. There are a certain number of hits from which you can recover by simply hiding from sight. But if you cross that threshold, you will go down on all fours. The only way then is to crawl slowly to cover and use blackwater, which works like a medkit. You can easily get killed once you have been downed, so you need to crawl to the nearest cover ASAP. There is a QTE to rapidly press X to bring him back up after healing, which also works well, because the situation is tense as it is. It really added that sense of urgency.
Black sight works like bullet time (it has a limit, but I didn't get to push it) and sort of auto locks on to enemies and you flick with the analog stick. But it still gives you freedom to do head shots by aiming post lock-on. Helps conserve bullets, I suppose. From the demo it seemed like it was limited to pistols.
Speaking of bullets, I was able to down almost all enemies with 3 shots to the body with the pistol and auto rifle or 1 headshot with either. Sniper shots were all 1 shot. So they weren't really bullet spongy. Hit reactions have been vastly improved, so enemies do react to every bullet. Their collapsing animations are very believable with appropriate reactions to where they have been shot. Hats do fly off their heads if shot at.
Run and gun is possible so you can strategically use it to rush enemies and melee attack the ones that survived. Melee is super satisfying and it seemed different every single time. There must be a heck of a lot of contextual take down animations.
Throughout these 2 major sections, I was rarely ever pulled out of action, so all those concerns about "shoot, cutscene, shoot" didn't really apply here. It followed the more standard format of a longer cut scene at the end of a skirmish.
The pots and pans section in the kitchen was mighty impressive, with the physics shining quite nicely. Utensils, food, limbs flew around amidst the chaos. Enemy AI was decent. They flanked, moved from cover to cover, lobbed grenades, retreated, charged forward etc. But I didn't come across any noteworthy nuanced behavior.
I liked the cool down section where Galahad looks out from the airship deck and then just walks around, picking up your weapons of choice and talking to Percival. Combo rifle and triple barreled shotguns were my favorite. The alt fire came in handy a couple of times.
Controls were very responsive and the frame rate was smooth. I have no idea why all their videos look so choppy, especially in the combat scenes. Looks just fine while playing it.
So I'm pretty low on complaints, except a MAJOR one. The game suffered from terrible audio sync issues for ALL conversations. The animations always played out 5 to 15 seconds before the audio cut in. This was limited to conversations/commands only in both gameplay and cut scenes. Rest of the in-game sounds were fine. They better sort that out. It completely turned me off and I stopped paying attention to the conversations altogether.
The other complaint was that no Lycans made any appearance. I understand that Ru doesn't want any spoilers, but Lycan combat seems to differentiate this game quite a bit and I'd really like my hands on one of those encounters. Or even hands off would do. And no, that rushed little snippet of melee combat didn't really give me any idea how it worked. They really need to open up a little more and sell us on those mechanics.
This demo has turned me from neutral to positive. I do believe RAD has what it takes to pull off good gameplay with a great story and setting. The visual excellence is just icing on the cake. It was 1:20 PM when I finished my session. Just in time for my Project Morpheus appointment. I got lucky again.
(To be continued.. Because it's 3:20 AM and I have this thing called work on Monday)