Adventure Gamers - Forums

SoccerDude28 - 28 December 2015 05:14 PM

DaveGilbert - 28 December 2015 12:08 PM

Hi all! I rarely post here but thought I’d pop in and say that this was a delight to read. ECC is probably one our most divisive titles, but one I still have a fondness for.  Thank you all and happy holidays/new year.

-Dave

Thanks for making the game. It was really great and I loved it. Any plans for a possible sequel in the future (or maybe a game with other characters set in the same world)?

Sadly this is doubtful. The IP is owned by PlayFirst, so I can’t really touch it.

Finished the game.

What a great story that turned out to be! I love the ending. But I’m a sucker for second chances, so YMMV. Great use of the “Reversia” spell to add a twist to what we knew already.

Easy 4/5 in my book, the best game we’ve played in the casual CPTs, imo. Yes, even better than Enigmatis: Mists of Ravenwood.
Although I still maintain that despite the button-searching and quest pop-ups, it’s still closer to a regular AG than to a casual. But I’m perfectly willing to settle on the compromise “hybrid”.

Sefir - 27 December 2015 09:43 PM

What somewhat bugged me was the fact that I expected the use of the oblivion pills to make Cutter forget of his past but we didn’t need to use them anyway.

I agree. Well, it didn’t bug me, but I did consider the option…

Now that you mention him, isn’t he an animal with the traits of an man? Doesn’t he count as a Phanfasm? 

For that he needs to have a human body with an animal’s head. He’s got the body of a lion, though. Just look at his paws that are sticking out of his costume…

furgotten - 28 December 2015 11:44 AM

I liked the Cutter ending but one thing that bugs me is that there was absolutely no justification for Ozma imprisoning Petra the last time.  After all, she saved Ozma and she saved Oz.

She didn’t, imo. Petra was just visiting.

DaveGilbert - 28 December 2015 12:08 PM

Hi all! I rarely post here but thought I’d pop in and say that this was a delight to read. ECC is probably one our most divisive titles, but one I still have a fondness for.  Thank you all and happy holidays/new year.

-Dave

Thank YOU for making a great game!
Divisive? Hah! The nay-sayers wouldn’t know a great story if it hit them upside the head…
Best Wadjet Eye game I’ve played so far. Still have the Blackwell series to go, though.

TimovieMan - 28 December 2015 08:01 PM

Easy 4/5 in my book, the best game we’ve played in the casual CPTs, imo. Yes, even better than Enigmatis: Mists of Ravenwood. Although I still maintain that despite the button-searching and quest pop-ups, it’s still closer to a regular AG than to a casual. But I’m perfectly willing to settle on the compromise “hybrid”.

rtrooney - 12 November 2015 09:01 PM

I’m not sure whether I’m treading on Diego’s Hybrid turf. But here goes.

I have no problem calling this a “hybrid”, as I mentioned in the AGSOTD thread.

There are some who think this is casual. Others think of it as adventure. And there are fence-sitters as well. They’re all correct. Nobody is wrong.

I did a little spreadsheet when the game started that listed the casual game attributes and the adventure game attributes. There were about an even number of attributes on both sides of the ledger. Although there were a few that screamed “Not Casual” rather than “Definitely Adventure.” Third person perspective was one of those. There are plenty of adventures that use first-person, but very few casuals that use third.

On the other hand, the lack of individual save-game slots and the inclusion of an interactive map, (I think of the Gump stand as the equivalent of an interactive map,) scream “Not Adventure” to me. As do the quests and the buttons.

One thing that is definitely not casual is the dialog tree and the amount of dialog.

TimovieMan - 28 December 2015 08:01 PM

DaveGilbert - 28 December 2015 12:08 PM

Hi all! I rarely post here but thought I’d pop in and say that this was a delight to read. ECC is probably one our most divisive titles, but one I still have a fondness for.  Thank you all and happy holidays/new year.

-Dave

Thank YOU for making a great game!
Divisive? Hah! The nay-sayers wouldn’t know a great story if it hit them upside the head…
Best Wadjet Eye game I’ve played so far. Still have the Blackwell series to go, though.

I’m also curious why Dave thought the game was divisive. Was it an internal design thing? Or was it the Casual/Adventure thing? Or was it something else entirely?

I’m dragging a bit behind once again
I did the second to last section though and will finish the game hopefully when it’s still 2015

I also think this is really a game between a casual and a true adventure. More when I’m finished.

Finished the game and agree that it was great. I wouldn’t call it my favourite Wadjet Eye game by any means, but all the games so far I’ve scored 4-5/5 stars anyway.

The premise of the game seemed fun but I wasn’t terribly impressed with the beginning. The hard-boiledness of Petra and the humour overall seemed a bit too over-the-top, and the casual parts kind of hit me hard in the face. But as I got further the game just got better. Plot, humour and puzzles. I’ve always enjoyed the puzzles in Wadjet Eye games. Especially the spells and of course Reverse spell the most made many of the puzzles fun.

The main twists of the plot weren’t really that hard to figure out but the characters and the setting itself made the ride enjoyable. And there definitely were some nice minor twists like the whole turning into a coat rack thing.

The ending was pretty nice. [spoiler]I had already forgotten about the forgetting-pills (ha ha) though I don’t think I would’ve thought about them anyway. To me the ending is bittersweet. Cutter got his childhood with a loving sister back but to me the adult Cutter was a person too. His life might have not been that great but he ceased to exist and that means that in a way he was killed. By Petra. There’s a death and a new beginning, kinda feels like a tarot card or something. Did Petra think the spell would turn William young again? If she did, she chose to kill the Cutter and revive young Will, which is quite interesting, though probably the choice Cutter himself would have also picked.[spoiler]

Oz continued to be an unfair place to live as even a brainwashed child wasn’t pardoned after saving everyone. Lion should have been able to get Cutter out, so in my opinion there was a way to save him (and let the new William never be.)

Tinman reminded me of Joey a lot. And I guess Petra felt a tiny bit like Lauren. (Blackwell series is my favourite.)

I think the playthrough is just about over, although that is always Sefir’s call. But I hope it doesn’t close just yet.

I would love to see all the players chime in on the casual/somewhere in between/adventure question.

I also wrote a PM to Dave Gilbert asking him to clarify the “divisive” element of the game mentioned in one of his posts. I would really like to see what he meant before the thread is un-pinned.

Happy New Year everybody!

Hi all! So sorry to make that cryptic statement and then disappear.

ECC was an interesting experience. PlayFirst wanted to make a point-and-click game, and so they hired me. I had made the assumption that they wanted me to make the type of game I had always made, just with higher production values. So that’s what I did. The game was designed, written, drawn and mostly programmed/implemented when PF started testing the game and then alarm bells started to ring.

What I didn’t realize was that PF didn’t just want a point-and-click game, they wanted a point-and-click game targeted to their casual audience. So when they had playtesting sessinos, they put the game in front of casual players -  Diner Dash players. Chocolatier players. Mystery Case Files players. People who never played a p-n-c game before, and had absolutely no idea how to play one. For most of the players, it took them 10-20 minutes just to figure out how to pick up the crowbar in the first scene.

So we all went to the drawing board. It was four months until release, and there was a limit to what we could change. So we decided to bolt on a LOT of casual mechanics - the in-your-face quest markers, the extreme handholding, the big glowing outlines that tell you what to click on next. Lots of puzzles and interactions in the first third of the game were streamlined to such a degree that the game almost played itself. The hope was that by that point, the casual players would “get it” and be able to get through the rest of the game without difficulty.

In the end, we managed to walk a fine line where we failed to please just about everyone! The game was too difficult for casual gamers, yet too condescending for hardcore adventure game players. That’s what I mean by “divisive.” In hindsight, we should have just doubled down on the adventure-ness of the game instead of trying to appeal to more casual gamers. We took what was a decent-to-good adventure game, and turned it into a mediocre casual game.

In fairness, nothing like this had ever been attempted before. It was a new kind of game and while the experiment didn’t totally work, it was neat to be a part of that. Eventually, PlayFirst DID benefit from the experience, as they took what they learned on ECC and made “Avenue Flo” - an adventure game that was designed to be casual from the ground up. From what I hear, it did very well for them. As for ECC, I’m proud of what we achieved. I’ve never had that kind of budget before, and even to this day I’d never be able to make a game with that kind of production value. And while a lot of players were super turned off by the casualness, a great many managed to get past it and enjoy it. And for that I’m glad.

DaveGilbert - 02 January 2016 05:20 AM

In the end, we managed to walk a fine line where we failed to please just about everyone!

Time seems to have proven differently. ECC is a game that’s held in high regard on the site here, and going by the comments in this thread (as well as my own experience playing it), it’s easy to see all the positives and look past the rest.

And while a lot of players were super turned off by the casualness, a great many managed to get past it and enjoy it. And for that I’m glad.

Well, a lot of AGers will pick a good story over everything else, and that’s exactly where ECC really shines. Story, writing, world-building (or in this case world-expanding), graphics and voice acting are really top notch. When that’s the case, most of us don’t care that it’s easy and that there’s a lot of hand-holding…

You should be very proud of this game, imo.

^
|

What he said! 

rtrooney - 28 December 2015 09:12 PM

I’m also curious why Dave thought the game was divisive. Was it an internal design thing? Or was it the Casual/Adventure thing? Or was it something else entirely?

Well, that was either a lucky guess, or pure brilliance!

I’m going to go with the hybrid that I suggested in the AGSotD thread and the other Tim suggested here. It’s obvious from Dave’s description of events that the game started out as a classic, if somewhat easy, adventure. It was then “casualized” to the point that it was no longer an adventure. But it never made it all the way to casual. (I still lean towards casual, but I promise that I will no longer call it that.)

I think the phrase I used in the AGSotD was something like it was a game that had no place to call home.

It certainly found a home here!

This was a great playthrough.