Monday, March 16, 2009

The Chronicles of Spellborn - CB Impressions

First off, no NDA has popped up anywhere, and my account just appeared with an "active" by it at Acclaim, so I feel I can touch on some things.

First off, there is no doubt that the game looks cool, and has a unique visual quality. The wife had a blast making our first character. I always let her make the decisions when trying a new game for the Character Creator to get a feel for how she likes a game.
She enjoyed that, but after 15 minutes of play, walked away, so that was not a good sign. She likes to stick around and watch Conan for as long as I play if she is in the mood...hmmm.

The intro tutorial is neat, but hopefully skippable after doing it once. Need someone else to tell me as I only tried the game once.

Issues were:
*Not all my resolutions were selectable. Due to playing on a 1080p TV, and the fonts being so small, I usually will put the game in 1360x768 (720p for LCD TV). This was NOT available. Luckily it is an Unreal game, so I found the ini file and change my res, and it worked.
*No joystick support. Even though Unreal games do have Pad access, it would not enable. And thanks to Gameguard software for anti-hacking, Xpadder, my 360 software controller configuration tool was also blocked. No joystick control on the couch is a big strike against the game for me.
*Lag randomly happening. Now, I run Age of Conan 100+FPS with no issues, yet here I would freeze randomly while around people, or mobs, etc. Just so...random.

The combat is cool. But, the "kill 10x" or "Get me 5 of this" type quests got old. And the text was just blah when reading these quests. I got major Deja Vu.

I have not loaded up since. So, not a good sign.

But, Resident Evil 5 is wicked awesome, and getting my high level in Conan has been such an exhilarating experience, that I will not miss TCoS.

Guess I have finally found my niche, and will be sticking it out...

Cheers

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The freezes are not something I have encountered on the Frogster/Mindscape servers, so this is likely an Acclaim issue and one reason for them to have the beta.

GameGuard is a bit annoying indeed. It messes up my Chrome browser. Not a major issue since I can use one of the other installed browsers, but still..

While I think the nw tutorial is an improvement it does not really go into combat mechanics as much as it should. There are a few nice quests in the starter areas, but a number of them are certainly a bit of the slightly less inspiring kind.

But there are some quite nice pieces later.