Exactly. Kind of like blaming Trump’s votes on an active political thread criticizing Trump.
Edit: If anyone gets drawn by the game despite it’s toxicity. All the better. Because we’re all waiting for a good review we can trust :)
I enjoyed this Steam review snippet:
The music is repetitive and lacks inspiration, a trait that is emphasized by the constant loop it plays in. While on the topic of sound, the enemies you encounter will, nine times out of ten, blast you with a barrage of identical low quality sound effects, if there are multiple enemies on the screen then all of these sounds are played at the same time, resulting in a highly deformed mess of screeching, clacking, and sometimes mumbled gibberish. To complement the auditory overload, many assets in this “game” appear to still be using placeholder names, leaving you both deaf and confused. A few cases in point: The “?WORMS?” sound like machine guns, the “?RUDE CHAPS?” scream unintelligibly, and always in tandem with their fellow brethren, and the “?UGLY DOG?” is very clearly a rat.
Now for game balance. There is literally no balance that I can discern from my time playing this 20 year conundrum. I start a party, and 5 movements in a pack of giant bats appear and slaughter 5 of my 8 party members. When I retreated, which killed another one of my characters, I heard a soundclip of Monty Python and the Holy Grail blast “RUN AWAY!” into my headphones. So much for ambiance.
many assets in this “game” appear to still be using placeholder names, leaving you both deaf and confused. A few cases in point: The “?WORMS?” sound like machine guns, the “?RUDE CHAPS?” scream unintelligibly, and always in tandem with their fellow brethren, and the “?UGLY DOG?” is very clearly a rat.
Pretty sure this meant to be part of an identification system; i.e. you don’t automatically know the names of everything. And mis-identifying a giant rat as an ‘ugly dog’ actually seems somewhat amusing…
Yeah, I saw that… what is clearly a rat shows up and then: “?Squirrel? attacks!”. Dumb.
Speaking of old-school, it’s a “hardcore” game where every encounter can wipe out your party, but you can save anywhere? That’s what the streamers I’ve seen seem to be doing anyway, saving every other step. So much for taking risks and having an adventure. Saving anywhere is like having access to a cheat console, but supposedly “legit”. It makes devs lazy too: why balance your game when it should be up to players to save-scum their way to success?
Anyway, it’s a pet peeve of mine: not everything needs to be a roguelike, but saving anywhere is dumb and many PC gamers still seem to love it. So much for the master race.
Look, an argument against save anywhere as old as Grimoire!
I know! It’s fitting!
And just as incompetently executed.
Lol, wut? Ooooooh, guess I stepped on something here… well, do go on, share with us your wisdom.
This is a hallmark of the old school, though. A pitiless indifference to the adventurer’s power curve. See: Ultima II.
edit: NVM, Woodlance anticipated me.
You guys are focusing on the wrong parts of that review. I posted mainly due to the criticism of the sound design. :-)
To be clear, some people specifically hate Cleve, while some others are critical about his game and try to otherwise ignore Cleve.
I’m in the former group, fwiw. That said, I’ve watched streams because I’m still curious. I frankly don’t get the appeal.
“It’s old school!” Okay. So what? I like nostalgia in my games as much if not more than the next guy, but being “Old school” doesn’t make something inherently good or bad. However, it does potentially set up some obstacles for the game designer to overcome; you’ll have poor graphics and sound, so descriptions and story-telling become a bit more important to work as immersion creators.
“It’s detailed!” Yeah. So was Battlecruiser. Being detailed doesn’t make something good or bad, either. Being detailed can be a tool or it can be encumbering. You want to have a UI which scales well to what the player will be engaging with.
“It’s like games X, Y, and Z!” I love those games. I don’t mind at all that someone was inspired by them and I frankly wish more people were. However, it’s important to make the game experience preferable to them. In each stream I’ve seen, I compare it to Eye of the Beholder and Lands of Lore and I still get the feeling I’d enjoy replaying them more. Then again, I realize my view on this game is tainted by my perception of the man behind it, so take that with a grain of salt.
“OMG, it’s an actual playable game just like he said it was!” I’m sorry, but not lying about your product shouldn’t be celebrated. Instead, it should be assumed.
Yeah I noticed that on the first battle I watched streaming. Guy was fighting an ?UGLY DOG? aka rat, and the same, single, low-quality growl sample was used over and over and over and over.
Well, you can always turn off your speakers…
Ah, I see the problem. Instead of thinking of Eye Of The Beholder or Lands Of Lore, maybe think of something like Sharknado. (see above-mentioned Monty Python sound clip) There are people that enjoy that stuff. I admit that I may be one of them, though I have not yet bought this game. And might never. But who knows? I’m on the fence.
Grimoire is supposed to be a spiritual successor to the late wizardry type.games…aka the DW Bradley versions. The main draw is the party compostion gameplay and the min max of character customization (CAN I SOLO FAERIE NINJA THIS GAME TO THE END ON MAX DIFFICULTY?!?). Whether grimoire succeeds as a late Wizardry type game, remains to be seen. EotB is less detailed and semi realtime, it has a different feel than the WIz 6-8 games.
There is quite a few crpg grognards that like the detail of this type of dungeon romp gameplay, notably the RPG Codex playerbase (who also love Arcanum and worship Chris Avellone).
If its true that Cleve took the remains of the cancelled Wiz game, shouldn’t it be said that this really isn’t a true solo project?
Yes, sorry for not mentioning those. I played (and replayed) and finished Wizardry I-IV and dabbled in the others through VIII, but I admit I have little interest in revisiting those titles (I also played Arcanum - I was pretty “okay” on that one, but it had its moments).
The mostly positive rating he has appears in large part due to his small army of like-minded backers. The most detailed and well written reviews are negative. Most of the positive reviews and extremely short, almost no time played, and regurgitate Cleve’s persona or his quotes. Cleve has been followed by 100k (minimum) over the years since he has been doing this self publicity shtick across not just forums (tons of forums where he got banned which made his name even more named), but way back to usenet days. With Steam’s generous refund policy I was surprised to see him not have 10k sales minimum just for the drive-by gawking effect. “Goat Simulator” made a profit after just the first 10 minutes of sales and sold hundreds of thousands in no time. I attribute its sales to the curiosity angle vs. a genuinely good game, and this was before Steam even had a refund policy. I put Cleve’s game in the curiosity pile as many want to see what it’s like to experience a game with this kind of back-story.
I don’t know if Steamspy or other programs show Steam refund numbers, but knowing Cleve’s addiction to lying, if he sells 10,000 and 98% of them are returned, you’ll never hear him admit it. Also reading complaints of him deleting lots of posts from his Steam forum. Many weren’t bad posts, just complaints of bugs and frustrations of those not being able to play.
Who cares though? There are lots of assholes on the internet. Hell there are lots of asshole game developers. So he lies a lot and might be a racist. Welcome to the internet. He released the game after 20 years and some people might actually like it. Good for him.
The theme of this thread went from “He’ll never release it, HAHA!” to “Sure, he released it, but it must suck.” A lot of you guys come across like he killed your dog or something.
these positive reviews have 4hours+ played , even the spanish one
The negative reviews are like the ones made by that guy from SA that have 30 min at best + 99% of the review is about agenda
Who do i believe hmmm?
I think its clear , game is only for people that loved the old wizardy games and want more of that , they don’t want other crpg like EO or Grimrock , just more Wizardy and i think he succeed on that.
A great negative review is the one from Nyast , blight0r review is also good.
We always tend to pile on developers who delete legitimate complaint posts from forums. I don’t see why we should not pay attention to someone doing this just because it’s Cleve and his game is 20 years old. We also talk about the impact of Steam reviews, and the manipulation of such. Both of these were done by Digital Homicide and Cleve has a history of using a heavy hand to deal with any detractors and manipulating numbers.
The quoted section was written in the larger context of the state of the game and its creator which encompasses the other issues written, and I understand your post so I’ll cut those kinds of comments. I don’t care for “mass content” for content’s sake as I would much rather have “good content” with balance the being of critical importance. What I see when I watch a stream is animation that looks worse than Wizardy 7, poor sound, sparse if any balance, inconsistent graphics, and a tough interface. On the positive lots of character options and lots of content. Comes down to what a person prefers. But I will keep your comment in mind if I post on this again.
I’ve played it for about 8 hours this weekend according to steam. I haven’t gone very far into the game as I’ve replayed the starter sections, tried new party builds, and have mostly experimented more than trying to make progress in a play through.
I’m enjoying the game, but it has some issues. They include a painful UI, many annoyances, and a bit of a rough start with respect to bugs. If you don’t like late 80’s/early 90’s style blobbers (with a sometimes worse interface), avoid it. If you do like games of that sort and are comfortable with the price, realize that you may have a rough experience if you buy now instead of waiting a bit for more patching and a manual.
To Cleve’s credit, he is constantly patching the game this weekend, but there have been issues there too like losing all of your save games such that you have to back them up before a new release is installed. Also, new releases aren’t being auto-detected (for me and others; I don’t know if it’s everyone) and you have to uninstall and re-install to update. The game is less than 100MB so it only takes a few seconds, but buyer beware. Cleve is learning how to manage updates with Steam and there are some growing pains.
The game hasn’t crashed on me, but in addition to the general issues, I have some bugs such as:
- Audio volumes are forgotten upon game launch, but they’ll show the correct setting. Workaround: bump up and down the sfx and music audio each time I launch the game.
- Resolution scaling is broken. If I enable scaling, it breaks my mouse. Workaround: I lower my screen resolution before launching. I tend to play it in windowed mode because it’s not ALT-TAB friendly in fullscreen - it always stays on top of other windows.
- The music can’t be fully disabled. I set it to volume level 0, but it’s still there at a very low volume.
- You can’t remap keys so I’m running AutoHotkey with a custom script to have it conform to my preferences. I have the script set to toggle active/inactive with a side button mouseclick. You don’t even know what the default keys are mapped to until you find a reference in forums that says ‘F1’ shows the keymap.
I really doubt that the UI will be re-worked so it’s something to get used to. How bad is it? Well, the usage is inconsistent and clunky. Here’s one example; to identify an unknown object:
- Right click on a character’s “Action” icon and select that you want to cast a spell.
- Find the Identify spell, select it, select the power level, click cast. This will put a magnifying glass icon temporarily on the main screen while the spell is active.
- While the icon is visible, scroll through the single row inventory bar to find the item.
- Left click on the item to attach it to the mouse cursor.
- Right click on the character’s “Action” icon and select “Assay”.
- If the identification is successful you can now see the stats in a tiny window of small text color coded according to some undocumented standard.
Hopefully that conveys the UI flavor - sort of like a dead skunk lollipop.
However, if you can get past that pain (or used to it), the game is fun with interesting blobber style combat. The puzzles are creative and there’s certainly a nostalgia factor. If you didn’t play this sort of game ages ago, I doubt you’d enjoy Grimoire.
If anyone is interested, I can followup this post with another detailing some of the important bits of information I’ve bookmarked from forums. It’s no substitute for a manual, but I’ve found enough to get me past the early “WTF how do I X,Y,Z?” pain.
It’s a little like getting a misbehaving puppy with intestinal problems. You might love that little dog after a while, but first he’s definitely going to crap all over your house and stink up the place.