Caltrops - Cleve Blakemore's Grimoire





	[quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]I'll preface this by saying that I've been making a CRPG for the last five years in a text adventure language. I'm probably the one guy on earth for whom Grimoire is a giant technological step up. I'm going to compliment it and note some things that can be improved. The feeling that I had been trying to get back to, in creating a CRPG, is that of the first time I played the Bard's Tale. The game I am making doesn't do it: I have graphics depicting the "room" the player is in, whereas Bard's Tale and Grimoire have 3D views. And in this, after a half hour of play, Grimoire is <i>gorgeous</i>. Codex folks trashed the art from the demos, but the people doing that just don't like the art style (<i>or dislike a million other things over 23 years -- ed.</i>) It is absolutely beautiful. When you get to a wall in the first maze and try to go forward you get a little "bump" giving distinct feedback that, hey, you are at a wall. That first area looks like something out of a fever dream and looks good doing it. Cleve gives three small pieces of text to read to set the scene of "you don't know who you are or where you are." Compared to the new Torment game, which took an excruciatingly look time to present the same and had some really poor writing, Grimoire is reserved and subtle. It's not crashed on me yet, but I am also not trying to crash it, if that makes any sense. Like a lot of you, I have been around computers long enough to know what they do and don't do well. I've also been subconsciously trying to not crash an RPG for five years so that I can continue to write mine. I'm not doing anything with it that I think is out of the expected and ordinary. Games need exploratory testing, sure, and the reports indicate that the game is getting it now, but it's run fine for me. I don't like the music. Been playing it with my system volume on mute so far. And the way you add characters to a party is... well, it's unlike anything else I've ever seen. He wasn't kidding when he was talking about the game not holding your hand. But there's something about this game that, while in desperate need of a manual, isn't illogical to me so far. Every time I've wondered how to do something that a manual would explain, I've thought about it, tried to think how I would implement it and worked backwards from there. I've "thought" more in this game so far than most of the others I have played lately. I just got to the first town and maybe everything falls apart after that. I don't know. But I'm definitely intrigued. ICJ[/quote]