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No new postsBroken Age Act 2 Discussion
I replayed Grim for the first time in over a decade when the Remaster came out in January and it took me a little less than 10 hours, same as Broken Age.
You played BA for the first time in 9.5 hours and replayed Grim in 10 hours! I rest my case.
Like I said, I hadn’t played Grim in over a decade, it’s not like I remembered the solutions to any of the puzzles. I spent plenty of that 10 hours stuck.
There is discussion going on good analysis of recent BrokenAge by
Super Bunnyhop , and how it doesn’t do much for genre what PillarsofEternity or Wasteland2 did, i think most of what we Adventure gamers see as tight narrative experiences are bottleneck of genre.
More over, puzzle grinding(as he explained) is synonymous with level grinding in RPG, only that you don’t just sit and click over and over on multiple objects to sort out the way but fight enemies and hence the payoff is much greater as achievement in RPGs.
Atleast the that part is not evolved much or cleverly replaced by other stuff.
Also BrokenAge with 30% discount is on page 6 of Steam Top sellers, while PillarsOfeterntiy is still on the first page with higher price tag, a RPG , a KS which released earlier.
Edit:
You can search youtube for his video on BrokenAge, SuperBunnyhop and also newogaf thread on his Review, posting links is giving me error, asked Wilco to post them he also got errors.
Edit2:
I count 20 screens for El Marrow (in year 1), and Rubacava felt much bigger than that, so I’d tend to agree with Karlok’s estimate. Grim Fandango was huge.
Add the forest sequence and the unique screens for Rubacava in Year One, and I’m up to at least 28 different screens for Year One alone. And Year Two is a lot bigger.
Years Three and Four are indeed smaller, but especially Year Four still contains a lot of different screens. Not to mention the dozens of cutscenes that are in the game.
If Broken Age has 60 different screens, it’s small potatoes compared to Grim Fandango.
The truth can’t hurt you, it’s just like the dark: it scares you witless but in time you see things clear and stark. - Elvis Costello
Maybe this time I can be strong, but since I know who I am, I’m probably wrong. Maybe this time I can go far, but thinking about where I’ve been ain’t helping me start. - Michael Kiwanuka
I am playing act 2 now and I have to say that I enjoy the game - pretty much. It is no BoUT, IMO, but, still a fun game. The people who say that the puzzles are easy must be geniuses or something. I am having a heck of a time! But, I guess that is good as this act is taking me quite a long time to finish so I am getting my money’s worth.
if theres anything that should be learned from the last 5+ years of the indie scene.. money doesnt translate into how good a game is. In any way. Its got to feel weird for devs with kickstarters.. when youve got thousands of people with magnifying glasses saying “well this kickstarter had this much, and this one had this much, so this should be this way and that way”. Theres a reason devs dont typically announce what their budget is, and if they do its much later after the release.
Ok, going back to tackle the knot puzzle,
Even though I enjoy revisiting the old towns and characters, I’m still slightly disappointed with the lack of new locations in the 2nd part of the story after this long delay.
I’m not familiar with game development but when I look at this:
Broken Age Kickstarter - $3,336,371
Broken Sword Kickstarter - $771,560Broken Sword has a much bigger scope, and technically speaking, it performs better than Broken Age. It has more locations, more backgrounds, more characters, more dialogue, more music, more puzzles, more cutscenes…
And Broken Sword accomplished all of this with less than 1/4 of the Broken Age funds. Go figures…
I think its the more pricey location , California, More pricey voiceactors and the fact that BrokenAge graphics have decent production values, so add that too.
The writing,story of BrokenAge and puzzles were weakest link instead of VAs or graphics.
Puzzles though hard, mostly people complaining that they are 90s era AG bad puzzles not good ones.
I don’t know how much this game will help AGs, as its made by Legend, and expectations were super high, but Machinarium was better, and Kings Quest will be better too(hunch).
In between Tim had a chance and he has lost it.
Tim made this comment on Twitter about the knot puzzle:
If you mess up the knot, choose “Hang on. I’m going to get a new knot diagram…” Shay will teleport to the right place & back. No walking.
You will also miss a progress-blocking bug @HarshlyCritical found. No wonder people think that puzzle’s hard! Fix will be in next update!
So it sounds like this has been harder than it was intended to be for some players.
Ok, going back to tackle the knot puzzle,
Even though I enjoy revisiting the old towns and characters, I’m still slightly disappointed with the lack of new locations in the 2nd part of the story after this long delay.
I’m not familiar with game development but when I look at this:
Broken Age Kickstarter - $3,336,371
Broken Sword Kickstarter - $771,560Broken Sword has a much bigger scope, and technically speaking, it performs better than Broken Age. It has more locations, more backgrounds, more characters, more dialogue, more music, more puzzles, more cutscenes…
And Broken Sword accomplished all of this with less than 1/4 of the Broken Age funds. Go figures…
Revolution used more money then that. The game was well into production when they launched their kickstarter. Pretty much every other major kickstarter have used additional funds as well.
Wasteland 2
Dreamfall: Chapters
Elite: Dangerous
Divinity: Original Sin
Etc.
All of them used much more then just what Kickstarter brought in. I’m quite confident that Pillars of Eternity did the same, but Obsidian haven’t confirmed that in public.
The kickstarter money is something you to kickstart a project, what you say you need to deliver a product. It’s in no way an obligation that it’s the only money you need or will use.
If I remember it correctly, Revolution actually said before the kickstarter craze began, that the sales of their iOS titles had been that good that they could selffund their next title.
As for which game turned out the best, it’s of course about personal preferences and opinions, but IMHO Broken Age is the much more enjoyable title. Much more interesting story, more fun dialogues, a greater attention to detail in every scene, more memorable characters, and much more interesting puzzle chains. Broken Sword had it’s moments, especially in the middle part of it, but in the end it felt like it did nothing interesting with the series at all, in terms of characters, story and structure. But that’s my opinion, that no one has to agree with. 
As for the playtime, I beat Broken Sword V in about 10h, and I have yet to see anyone say that that game was too short.
Indeed, the Kickstarter loot rarely is the whole truth. Even Larry Reloaded ended up going north of 1 million and that game is short (and not nearly as good in production value, especially with animations).
I noticed that the Android version of this game only has like 100 downloads. Not ranking high on steam either. Releasing the first half early may have been a successful plan to get some funds up front, but I think it had a really negative impact on the sales overall. It’s a shame.
As for whether or not it’ll help the genre overall, I think it already has. Look how many great adventures have come from Kickstarter. None of that would have happened if not for Broken Age. This has been a great couple years for the genre and we still have some awesome stuff like Armikrog and Obduction coming up.
This puzzle where I have to get the sweeping robot to unlock the door is driving me crazy and it is not fun for me. There have been quite a few puzzles in this game that haven’t been fun, IMO. It sure is a disappointment for me. I will continue and I hope to finish, but, I doubt it is a game that I will replay. I have played BoUT about 5 times already, I enjoyed every puzzle in them, but, this is a different story.
Revolution used more money then that. The game was well into production when they launched their kickstarter. Pretty much every other major kickstarter have used additional funds as well.
Yes, but of course Broken Age also needed quite a lot of funding beyond the amount generated by the Kickstarter. Considering the - for an adventure - very generous budget Broken Age simply is underwhelming. The fact that it still might look good in comparison to other contemporary adventures that were created with significantly lower budgets does not change this.
This is not surprising, if one looks at Tim Schafers career after he left Lucas Arts. Both “Psychonauts” and “Brütal Legend” had a troubled development history, with the initial publishers bailing out. In the end, both turned out to be good games, but simply too expensive for what they were, losing their publishers a lot of money (Majesco, the publisher of Psychonauts, got out of making “large” games because of this and never quite recovered from the blow).
Unfortunately, being a good game designer does not necessarely mean that you are also a good project manager. Perhaps it would be better, if Tim would go back working for some other company and let others take care of the management stuff. But thanks to his prestige as a game designer, he has somehow muddled through with Double Fine for the last 15 years and might do it for quite a while longer.
just finished. A completely full-sized and well made game
And also a completely silly and senseless plot
but thats ok.
I dont envy the DF devs on this one. First act was puzzle-lite, everybody complains about the difficulty being too easy. Second act significantly ups their game on the puzzles, lots of people still complain that the puzzles are too hard and distracting. And same goes for whether the plot is silly or takes itself seriously… they just cant win.
But i officially liked broken age. A lot
^what was “overpromised”? I got exactly what i hoped for. A very solid schafer adventure. They were wrong about time estimates (just about everyone is). But they never promised the best adventure game of all time…. thats what people projected onto it. And i like this game better than a number of the “classics”.
hmm, I’m not aware of that… I didn’t follow the Revolution kickstarter that closely. But anyway, even though I enjoy playing Broken Age a bit more, I’m more satisfied with the result of the whole Broken Sword Kickstarter campaign. Unlike Double Fine, Revolution did not overpromise, we got exactly what we hoped for. And yes, there was a episode split and a short delay between the releases, but that was only a minor setback.
Yeah, I will have to ask the same question as Zane here, overpromised what?
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