Reasonable said:
Yeah but I take the view there's no point using a medium unless its better - i.e. I don't want an average movie disguised as a game because it has a few contextural controls. Make a movie or write a novel.
If you're going to have combat then in a game it should be combat controls - not press Triangle quickly and watch. Or make it a true adventure and don't have combat as such - allow options to play out the scene without response time QTEs. Look at Grim Fandango as an adventure title. I always have full control and I can interact, investigate, etc. There's no reason not to use a similar approach but simply have a mature story, etc. But if QD can't work out how to allow me to dictate the combat I don't want them to offer me four QTE choices - I want them to remove any choice for that combat, play it out, and move me to the next interactive element of the story.
Sorry, but QTEs are simply a workaround for wanting a certain action that the developers don't think control offers so instead they simply ask you to hit a button - Triangle to dodge left and block with a chair, Square to dodge right and toss a knife, etc. But QTE means the outcome has already been plotted, which I'm not interested in.
I will absolutely reserve final judgement until I see the thing - and like Farenheight I'll probably even buy and play to see how good/bad the developer gets it, because I want titles like this. But in Farenheight it was obvious that they were reaching way past their abilities as a developer - both in terms of how the gameplay would work and narrative (which started very well but ended a mess).
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"Make a movie or write a novel" but you seem to like Grim Fandango and point and click adventures?
This is a genre, like point and click adventures were of their own genre. Wasn't the plot there already decided by the writers? Didn't they have to script all possible responses to the players actions? Isn't that a strictly contextual response, even though there's no real time action?
If you read the Eurogamer hands-on, they explicitely talk about the investigation mode through augmented reality that is available to the FBI agent. Is that all that different from a point and click "investigate" verb? The authors also state that they will show very different kinds of gameplay in the upcoming months.
I for one have played Infocom textual adventures, semi-graphical adventures from Magnetic Scrolls and point and click since Maniac Mansion times. They were all different, but I enjoyed the different ways they entertained and challenged me. And I will wait to judge this new genre of adventure game, prejudices are useless.