Any soulbringer impressions?
jessem
played it and what they thought, considering picking it up soon.
Knight37
>This game seems to get a lot of mixed reviews wondering if anyone here has
>played it and what they thought, considering picking it up soon.
There was a post in here several months ago from Bob Perez that gave quite
a bit of details about this game. Based on this article I intend to pick up
Soulbringer, but I haven't had a chance to tear myself away from other
games yet. It sounded to me like this game would be pretty fun as a "B"
level RPG when there's a lag in "A" titles.
Here's Bob's post (retrieved from Deja), it was quite good:
-*-*- BEGIN quoted message -*-*-
Subject: Soulbringer: Screw the critics, I like it a LOT
Date: 08/31/2000
Author: Bob Perez <b...@deletethis.bobperez.com>
I picked up this game on a lark without knowing really anything about it,
craving a new RPG. I started playing it and it enjoyed it despite a few
early flaws. Saw the potential in it and kept going. It got better and
better and better and now I am deliriously hooked on it, having caught that
"just one more quest" syndrome that keeps me up all night when I KNOW I
should be in bed. I posted a message here about a week back asking why
there wasn't much discussion of this here. I received several comments
back, two of which amounted to: "Because the game sucks".
One of those messages was from a known troll so I didn't give that one any
consideration. The other, however, came from a forum regular and cited the
following:
a) "bland uninspired graphics, and it's always night"
b) "awkward camera control"
He also described one of my favorite innovations, the Combo (basically a
macro creation system) as "a pain in the butt" that would only appeal to
fans of programmable robot games.
The comment I found the least compelling (and most surprising) was "see
recent reviews for reasons why", as though one would need to turn to a
reviewer's opinion rather than form their own.
Ok, these things are of course subjective and your mileage will vary, etc.
I don't fault others for differing opinions, they're of course entitled to
them. But when flat out dismissive comments like that are made, AND there
appear to be a few bad reviews out there, and you couple that with a lousy
promotion on the part of the publisher, that usually spells the kiss of
death for a game even if it has unusual merit in the eyes of some. That's
why I'm writing this message.
Witness what happened with ShadowWatch. The game was panned by many
critics, dismissed by several on the strategy news group, got ZERO
promotion from RSE and seemed well on its way to becoming not only a
commercial flop (probably inevitable at this point) but also never really
seriously considered by most of the very fans at which it was aimed.
Because most of them would never even try it. What happened next was that 3
or 4 regular posters started talking up the game and pointing out that it
was (gasp) fun! Enough talk happened that a few players became intrigued
and started talking it up even more. Tom Chick started an infamous thread
titled "You guys were right, this really IS a great game" (I paraphrase).
Eventually, the producer got in on the thread and started pouring out
details on the game's mechanics and design.
The result was that a game that was destined to fail without much notice
suddenly got a lot of attention and wound up attracting the attention of
the audience it was aimed at. Not the critics, not the casual gamers, but
the hardcore turn-based strategy fans who favor good gameplay over Heavy
Metal FAKK eye candy. Of course, Heavy Metal FAKK will sell a lot of copies
and ShadowWatch will not, so this message is not intended as a marketing
lesson to game publishers or a comment on game industry economics. This
message is really just about good games.
Ok, what are the things that I like most about Soulbringer?
a) The reward system - The greatest games understand that there is an
unspoken pact between the gamer and the gaming system: "I pledge to make an
effort, and you pledge to reward me promptly and regularly". Diablo is the
simplest manifestation of this. Kill a monster, take a chance at recovering
the "King's Vampiric Sword of Leech & Quickness" off his corpse.
Kill/reward, kill/reward. PS:T is a much more refined example that rewards
one with the satisfaction of a compelling unwinding story as well as an
endless stream of "experience" points that lead to further character
enhancements, etc. Soulbringer is delightful in this regard, delivering
plenty of visible experience and loot after each accomplisment (quests and
combat), and the pacing is perfect. Every time I've looked at my character
sheet to see my progress I've been surprised at how close I was to leveling
up and getting 6 more stats to distribute. Wheee.
b) The realtime combat system - This simply kicks major ASS. Imagine this.
Every move of your character is motion captured and true to life. When you
lunge, you *lunge*, an overhead smash with a hammer is just that, a stab
faithfully depicts a stab, and so on. I couldn't believe the first time I
swung at a Mercenary and he ducked his head to the side causing my sword to
slice through air: a miss! And then when he swung back at me and I actually
sucked in my gut and watched his sword tickle my buttons as it whiffed past
them, WOW! I tried an uppercut with my sword and I found his weakness and
sliced him to ribbons! This is combat, folks! Tactics that mean something
and offer incredibly lifelike visible feedback, this is what I had in mind.
No clickfest, just an honest contest that took my breath away and turned
every battle into a contest. I would watch and wonder "will my thrust find
purchase", "will I lose the war of attrition as we both seek each other's
weaknesses", and so on. This is by far the greatest part of the game for
me, I look forward to every single kill, whether it's a meaningless minion
patrolling an insignificant area or the final boss.
c) The graphics - This is a weird one. Many who pan the game pick on it
because of the graphics. There are several reasons, I think. One is the
always night thing. Um, so what? Planescape Torment may have daylight but
have you ever played in a more morose, morbid atmosphere? Probably not, but
so what? Again, these are things which will probably not help sales (look
at the box art for PS:T as an example) but they do help create the
atmosphere for the target audience, small as they may be. Another aspect of
the graphics that has been commented on is the slight pixelization. Think
Daggerfall or M&M, that software 3d rendering look. Except that
Soulbringer's is much, much nicer and dazzling if you ask me. You can
swivel around the camera with a right click (think Homeworld or Ground
Control, although only on one plane, not freely 3 dimensional alas).
Whatever pixelization is apparent (and yes it is apparent) becomes
invisible once you've become sucked up into the game. I would compare this
phenomenon to Impressionist art. Through Impressionism one gains a view of
the substance, the essence, unfettered by the requirements of photo-
realism. History reminds us of the first reactions to Van Gogh's paintings.
Although no one said "fuzzy graphics" you can bet a lot of people reduced
his work to just that. Ok, so the Impressionist analogy is overstating the
case, but the underlying point remains: the essence of the communication is
achieved admirably (as I said, I am dazzled) even if it there is some
perceptible imperfection.
d) The story - It's a deep story line with many developments. Although
there are plenty of the classic RPG simple idioms, the story is not reduced
to a "Kill Foozle and recover the Orb of Originality". There is honor in
the battle of an enslaved and outnumbered people, there is tragedy, there
is depth. I am still making my way through the story (the game is a lot
longer than I realized initially).
e) The game mechanics - I think there are many reasons that people will
have trouble getting into Soulbringer. One of them is the unfortunate
reality that the game designers created a system that is initially somewhat
tedious and slow in developing. In the first 25% of the game you will
wander around on foot and constantly be wishing you had a Town Portal
scroll as you lug your loot back to the market to sell. But at a certain
point in the game you acquire a new ability and the game just opens up
incredibly. The very tedium of the initial phase makes this particular
acquisition that much sweeter. It's a wonderful development and fits neatly
with the overall reward system, although it will only be achieved by those
few of us who are willing to put in the investment. That is really the
turning point of the game because along with this development come other
benefits and suddenly the game becomes vastly different and infinitely more
enjoyable. Add to this a generally excellent system of game feedback (you
see the actual damage and heal numbers on screen as you fight, this helps
you adjust
tactics/weapons/spells). Finally, the Combo system. This is a system that
lets you create macros that enable one-button presses to initiate a
sequence of events. I can create a Combo called "Kill Vampire" that begins
by casting Shielding on myself, then does a Stab with my Blooddrinker
sword, followed by a Slash with the sword, followed by an Upper Cut with
the sword, and then loops back up to the Slash and continues until the
Vampire is dead. Great idea! Despite the criticism I've seen of this
feature (one reviewer said "You will not use it once you're well into the
game because it just gets in the way") I have found it to be incredibly
useful. I use Combos *exclusively* for every battle I have had in the game.
So the critics are wrong again, you will use this feature just as much as
you want to. In my case, that's been the entire game so far.
f) The magic system - This one's different from any system I've ever seen.
Sure, the usual spells based on five elements (Fire, Water, Air, Earth and
Spirit) but the mechanism for learning and executing spells was unusual.
You must acquire spellbooks and then a magical Rune associated with that
spellbook in order to access the spells in that book. These are typically
found independently. Even if you manage to acquire the Book and the Rune,
however, it will only work once you've discovered the one location in the
game where these two items will come together to give you access to the
spells. And even then you only get access to the first few spells in the
book, picking up the more advanced ones as you progress. And then there's
the notion of a Seculorum, a five-spoked wheel that represents these 5
elements in balance. The wheel never shrinks or grows, but the "spokes"
change position as you cast among the elements so that if you rely too much
on Fire, all the others will diminish. You can wind up with a huge wedge
for Fire and Earth, and tiny slivers for Air, Water and Spirit if you're
not careful. The consequence of small spokes? Your elemental resistance is
directly tied to your Seculorum state. So although a big Fire wedge will
give you great resistance to Fire, you're SOL if you come up against Water
damage. So one goal may be to maintain balance in your Seculorum. Or, you
may say the Hell with it and rely exclusively on Fire or Air and take the
consequences. Your choices determine your game behaviors.
g) The challenges - The game is not easy. You will use the Save/Load
feature. But it rewards thinking. There was one encounter with a
particularly tough character that I thought I would *never* kill . My blows
would not damage him, he did incredible damage to me, and in general I
thought I was hopelessly ahead of myself and not ready for this battle. I
considered going out to level up some more and then discovered something
interesting (spoiler follows, skip paragraph if you don't want to learn the
solution). My Firebolt spells actually healed him. I saw the little green
numbers floating up that indicated this and thought "Ok, cold damage". I
realized I didn't have any Cold damage spells available. Earlier on that
level I had noticed a strange architectural issue. Green mists spraying out
of four posts that surrounded a pentragram. When I touched one of the posts
the color of the mist changed from green to blue, then to red, then back to
green. If I touched all 4 of the posts and changed them all to red mist,
walking over the pentagram caused massive Fire damage to me. Changing them
all to Blue caused massive cold damage. Bingo, change them all to Blue, go
meet my friend, run away and have him chase me and lure him into the
pentagram to fight me. By deft maneuvering I managed to get him to cross
the pentagram and watched with intense satisfaction as he died from the
massive cold damage.
In the end, few players are going to make the kind of investment this game
requires to reach satisfaction. That's a shame, because it's a wonderful
game full of depth and innovation. I cannot tear myself away from it and
had to force myself to make the time to share this information with the
rest of the newsgroup in the hopes that some of you who have read the
negative accounts will see enough possibility in the game to give it a try.
For those of you who do, I hope you wind up getting as much out of it as I
have so far. You might not, that's the nature of these subjective reviews.
I may be part of a small handful of people who wind up enjoying this title,
but if you're up for trying something different and you enjoy the pursuit
of good games, there's a lot here to like.
BP
-*-*- END Quoted Message -*-*-
Ok, that's Bob's take. There was quite a bit of discussion generated from
this post about the game, if you do a search on Deja (www.deja.com) for
"Soulbringer" you'll find quite a few hits. I'm pretty sure I've seen
Soulbringer in stores for $20 or so.
Hope this helps.
Knight37
jessem
$19.99. I will be picking it up today. Thanks again.
"Knight37" <knig...@gamespotmail.com> wrote in message
news:Xns901E68933knig...@209.155.56.81...
p_conrad
guess it's time.
PBC
m.m.m.m.m.m.m....What was my e-mail address?
DreamSearcher
looked like an EXCELLENT game, and this review makes me want to play it even
more.
k a
game takes forever to take off and sometimes the stories and quests don't
quite make sense. There is no map or compass, which makes navigation
especially annoying.
In article <92valh$8k373$1...@ID-64874.news.dfncis.de>, "jessem"
DreamSearcher
it works great.
The only thing I don't like so far is that the control is quite awkward.
"DreamSearcher" <dreams...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:qpL46.34016$F_3.1...@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
Knight37
19:51:50 GMT:
>I bought mine for $7. I just wish I could get the damn thing to work.
>It looked like an EXCELLENT game, and this review makes me want to play
>it even more.
Where, may I ask, did you happen to snag it for such a tasty price?
--
Knight37
"I've never seen so many men wasted so badly."
-- Blonde, from "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly"
DreamSearcher
That and EB are the best places I've found to buy software for pretty cheap.
Also, if you have a Best Buy around you could check there for some decent
stuff. I found the first Baldur's Gate and expansion pack for a decent
price (I say this because I haven't been able to find that game anywhere
else around here lately).
"Knight37" <knig...@gamespotmail.com> wrote in message
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