Darkwarrior_II on 21/10/2002 at 23:41

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No harm intended there, my friend. Digi hasn't previewed many games, but he has previewed them. I think he did Thief 2, didn't he?

Who knows. More importantly, who cares?

Digital Nightfall on 22/10/2002 at 00:38

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Say what? No, I didn't preview Thief 2. Arx is actually the first game I've been lucky enough to get to play early. :)

Daxim on 22/10/2002 at 03:07

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This game sucks. The interface is a catastrophe (the demo used to be REALLY AWFUL, now it is just AWFUL). Things do not highlight (like in Thief, or the brackets in Shock2 or Deus Ex) when you hover your crosshair over them. When it has finally dawned on you that you can pick up this bunch of fern, you have to keep shift pressed to pick things up (where is the intuitive right-click frob we have all become accustomed to?). Some items are not pickup-able, but only drag-able in the game world. You can't drag stacks out of the inventory. You do not get descriptions of items in the inventory when you hover the mouse cursor over them. You have a normal travel mode, a use mode, a spell mode and a fight mode and then you can use keys to overlay the inventory and book (which functions as travel log, automap, spell archive and stats screen). This is incredibly dumb as this plethora of interfaces always gets into the way of playing. Shock2, and related, Deus Ex have just a bimodal interface, one travel/action/shoot mode and one inventory mode, while using/frobbing was possible in both - and people thought THAT already was complicated. I can't imagine what they would say about Arx' highly modal interface.

You can only assign single keys in the options, not key combination like in the Dark Engine games. The speech in cutscenes often doesn't play to its end - the characters keep talking to each other with incomplete sentences. Meleeing is awfully unimaginative and you can easily beat all of the first 30 enemies or so by just backpedalling and keep hitting them. Then you encounter a giant spider which kills you in one bite. This is the worst case of imbalance I've ever seen. Enemies do not have different attack patterns like in Quake 1 - the best they came up with is that you have to crouch to hit the small spiders.

Quicksaving takes 8 seconds and thereby defeats its purpose. The radius of automapping is just 2 meters or so, so if you want to fully map a large room you have to cross it like a lawnmower crosses a football field. To cast spells you have to memorise long sequences of mouse stroke which take just too long to execute in close combat action and you can hotkey buffer only 3. When you find a precious magic scroll, you can put it in the buffer too, only to find it pushed out of the buffer from the next spell you put in. Then the scroll is gone and wasted, of course. There is no fucking music in the fucking main menu. Do you remember a game which didn't have music there?

I was so frustrated with all that I haven't touched it for over 6 weeks. I rue the 40+€ I payed for this badly designed game. HANDS OFF.

Tony on 22/10/2002 at 03:35

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I have a question. I know nothing of Arx Fatalis, so I am wondering why it has been so eagerly awaited in the first place, aside from the fact that Stephen Russell has done voicework for it. On a completely irrelevant note, I just realized something. That wasn't a question. Still, could someone answer the sentence?

Alexius on 22/10/2002 at 03:59

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The Artwork in Arx Fatalis and the idea behind it is truly amazing, but I agree with Daxim-the interface is a pain! Some enemies are hard to hit and act just strange, like they have no mind of their own. White arrows that point on ability to be able to scroll and look around in 3d, make the view somewhat annoying. Otherwise it’s an excellent game, I recommend playing the demo and decide on it for yourself.

-Alexius-
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Lead designer, Lead artist and creator of (www.hammerempire.cjb.net) The Hammerite Imperium