From Fogknight22
Double Fine is one of the most influential independent gaming studios in the industry. They created memorable games like Psychonauts, Costume Quest, The Cave, and Brütal Legend. Some stepped around the perimeter of “indie”, but they all demonstrated Double Fine’s creativity. On March 12, 2012, Double Fine succeeded at one of the most successful crowdfunding endeavors to date: Double Fine Adventure, also known as Broken Age, was overwhelmingly funded on Kickstarter.
With Tim Schafer at the helm, the Double Fine Adventure Kickstarter campaign was no small deal. Gaming enthusiasts were screaming with joy since Double Fine debuted the campaign, with consumers throwing money at their computer screens. With nearly 100,000 backers, over 3.5 million USD (and a paltry $400,000 requested), the demand was clearly for more than a small-scale game. More than a “win” for Double Fine, this was a big and necessary step in gaming industry that showed independent developers a window to getting their games funded - without the need for a publisher.
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Skip two years ahead and Broken Age (Act 1) released on January 18, 2014. As promised in their Kickstarter campaign, Broken Age is essentially a modern point and click adventure game that is, well, adventurous. Beyond just pointing and clicking on areas and objects to make progress throughout the game, there are a good amount of puzzles for the adventure genre. Broken Age’s Act 1 received critical acclaim from both game journalists and the gaming community thanks to its interesting and humorous writing, good mechanics, and pleasing art style. Broken Age had so many things that many people liked from Double Fine - the game is just brilliant and a great change of pace from your regular dose of games.
The hook in Broken Age’s premise that there is more than one playable protagonist. Putting you in the shoes of Vella Tartine, the girl who doesn’t accept her sacrificial fate, or alternately, Shay Volta, the boy who is alone with a motherly artificial intelligence that puts him on “missions” that are far too childish for his tastes. Both are confronted with unexpected adventures and mysteriously intertwined fates.
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As I played in Vella’s shoes, I was apparently just a young woman sleeping under the protective shadow of a tree as my sister called out my name. I woke up and stood to approach my sister. She was excited for something, that’s for sure, alongside with other villagers and families for the “special celebration”. I went with her to our house so we could celebrate for the day. The thing is that I, Vella, didn’t want to celebrate. I didn’t accept my fate to be sacrificed for some creature - and wanted to kill it - but all but one family member laughed at my belief. After finding the required item to continue on, the feast began.
Villagers are apparently excited and eager for Mog Chothra, the giant creature that feasts on sacrificial girls, to appear in their village, including my family. I was just wearing an awkward cake-shaped dress and not even wanting to be sacrificed. I tried talking to fellow sacrifices but apparently they welcome their forced fates and they even encourage the creature to feast on them. I was trying to find items that would help me avoid being eaten upon and escape from the village. As the creature appeared, girls were giving away their useful items to me so I could escape from my demise (and the village that was about to be destroyed) when I escaped with a giant bird.
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Vella’s adventure truly began after that.
Vella’s adventure relies on the theme that she doesn’t passively accept her destiny and is willing to fight it one way or another. From the beginning of her escape she is trying to find people to support her on her quest to kill Mog Chothra. Most were laughing at her, with few to understand her. Fate was heavily used throughout Vella’s perspective of the game, and while the areas she visited were fascinating the puzzles were odd when compared to those of her playable counterpart, Shay.
As Shay, I was innocently sleeping in a bed with digitalized bed sheet covering my body. My “father” tried to wake me up so I could join missions but failed as I kept snoring. “Mother” managed to do that and force me on repetitive, childish tasks that are apparently her idea of “missions”: from saving a couple of knitted creatures from an “avalanche” of desserts by eating them, trying to save them from “hug attacks”, saving lives from an impending train wreck that just requires waking up a mountain, and getting a gift from some kind of a plant outside of the airlock.
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I had to force myself to keep on as I ate the same breakfast, nutrition pastes, and brushed my teeth everyday without having fun in the monotony of repetitive child plays. Still, I kept doing those annoying “missions” until figuring screw it, let’s do something dangerous for a change. That’s where Shay’s true adventure starts.
Shay’s adventure is full of loneliness in his air ship in space with only a mother that is an artificial intelligence - and that doesn’t really understand his desires. The introduction isn’t exactly strong since it has you doing childish and repetitive tasks that are indeed childish and repetitive for the players too. This does an excellent job of drawing the player into Shay’s boredom and experiencing it for themselves while encouraging you to do something different, or possibly dangerous. Consistent with the sterile “AI” of the ship, the puzzles were sensical and quite logical compared to Vella’s adventure.
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At certain areas both of those perspectives, most notably Shay’s, gave hints of how each of these characters’ stories were intertwined in a fantastic way. The dialogue was also humorous and interesting, and you will meet interesting characters along the way such as a talking tree cursing humans for their murderous instincts, and a lumberjack who started to feel guilty from cutting trees because of their death screams. Both Shay and Vella had interesting dialogue options while interacting with NPCs. Whether they ask for something or joke about something, the options were nice and the voice acting was engaging from both the protagonists and the supporting cast.
The music also did a good job at showing whether the scene is peaceful and calming as the protagonists are enjoying their conversation or watching something pleasant, or it is tense and dangerous as they try to escape or to fight the danger that would result to their demise if failed. They weren’t anything special and noteworthy unfortunately, but they served their purpose and they served well.
I've been reluctant to go into more detail; Broken Age is one of those games that should be experienced by you, not from reading or watching someone else who played it. I wholeheartedly recommend you playing the first act of Broken Age and then discuss and theorize with each other the events that could occur in the second act - which is hopefully coming soon.
Thank you for reading, and happy indie month ladies and gentlemen!
http://www.brokenagegame.co...
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Day 19 | Double Fine Productions
Despite No Man Sky's rocky launch, Hello Games managed to turn it into one of the best space exploration RPGs out there.
I hate the whole concept of "comeback story" because at the end of the day it doesn't remove the core issue we had in the first place, that we were lied to, it was disappointing and it launched with bare content to what was promised for years.
Any bad game can have a comeback story if it's supported enough after launch but for me if you launch in a terrible state then you had your chance. I can applaud you for what you've done after but at the end of the day there's not much of a choice since most gamers would blank your next product if you ditched your last game so fast, it's not about repairing the game but spending your time repairing gamers trust before you launch your next product otherwise it would be dead on arrival.
With these stories and the games being updated, the only way is up most of the time so of course it's going to improve the game and feel better over all, getting better and better as time passes. No Mans Sky, Sea of Thieves, Fallout 76 etc but then you have games like Anthem, Suicide Squad, Redfall and The Avengers where the devs just clearly moved on, now if they have another product people won't be as exited for it, I mean hell Guardians of the Galaxy was a great game but because of the Avengers it didn't help its sales since people were obviously still sour at that point.
I still think despite the improvements to games like No Mans Sky and Cyberpunk along with being better now overall the games are still not up there to what was promised and hyped as for years.
If we keep celebrating these “comeback stories” then unfortunately it only strongly supports the concept that these studios / publishers can continue to push half arsed broken products out for the sake of quick sales instead of waiting until they are fully finished. We need to condemn this awful behaviour or sadly we lose all voice and power as consumers.
I really enjoyed it at launch and had every trophy by August 2016.
The experience I had is no longer in the game: It was just me and my ship. It was a survival game and the feeling of loneliness in the universe was pervasive. There was no way to ruin too far from your ship and, in an emergency, you grenaded a hole in the ground to survive.
I miss that aspect, but since then, I love what they've done.
Asura Kagawa from NoobFeed writes - Vindictus: Defying Fate is the upcoming action RPG game by NEXON, and it has the potential to have a significant impact on the action role-playing genre. Expanding upon the immense universe of its 2010 predecessor Vindictus, this installment is being developed using state-of-the-art Unreal Engine 5, ensuring an immersive and graphically stunning experience.
A ton of leaked Marvel's Wolverine PS5 test gameplay have surfaced showcasing boss fights, Rage Mode, wall running, combat and more.
Scumbag journalists who post leaked gameplay for internet points are as bad as the leakers.
You can choose not to be a scumbag.
Am I crazy for being glad they showed this? Like, I’ve been wanting to see something for a long time. They actually do some journalism and we hate them for it?
Hate them for giving leakers a platform.
I want to see more too. But that's up to Insomniac.
Insomniac: “have you got a good tv, with HDR”
Player: “no”
Insomniac: “your screwed”
loving this giveaway !
because broken age as awesome .. i saw a lot of videos about it
Waiting for the act 2, it was great to help this game on Kickstarter.
Still dreaming for Psychonauts 2!
Lol, must be hard to write the article about an adventure game without revealing too much.
Awesome streams of projects coming out from Double Fine. Hope see more great games coming.
Played part 1 a couple of weeks ago. It was a lot of fun and tricky for me. I've been out of the loop with point and click adventures. The voice acting was amazing too. Can't wait for part 2. :)
Looks very nice - Broken Age