I just wanted to post this to refute the Gamespot bullshit. Pure bullshit.
Melee combat is not meant to be a huge part of the game, that’s clear from the manual, the website, and the forums… It’s about trapping and killing enemies without them knowing you are there. It’s great to send a camera into the middle of an enemy jamboree and blow it up.
Obviously Dreamcatcher doesn’t give them enough ad revenue to prompt them to read the manual, or look at the web site, or ask anyone.
The reviewer went into the game kamikaze style and got frustrated cause he couldn’t win. The game is all about plinking off enemies from the dark and retreating, that’s why you spend all your time running away, it’s what you’re supposed to do. Voice work is great too.
I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a secret, if it is I’m sorry, but the ‘EZ Stash’ system is fantastic and I really hope it starts a trend (you can put items into a specially designated area and retrieve them at any time from other EZ Stash locations, it’s like an ATM for items).
One caveat: if you have back problems I do not reccomend this game, cause you’re gonna be spending a LOT of time leaning forward to watch for enemies.
Also the manual suck, how do you like them apples Gladman??? Not even offer me an advance copy huh?? Manual suX0rs!
Rereading that I just wanna point out that the game’s not perfect, but it’s not the trainwreck Gamespot jumps up and down on, and even the imperfections are tiny (targetting is kinda wonky) or may just be me (for example you can’t move your character from center screen, and health packs are one per use no matter how much energy you use to refill) Also the ‘plinking enemies from the dark’ doesn’t imply a horribly slow pace, you can still wade into a large group of enemies, but you’re not gonna be wanting to do that for awhile.
Also it’s clear that this product could have been managed better hahaha!!!1 Eat that Gladman!
Guest, yes you can go with melee combat, but you have to pump yourself up for it first by dumping all your points into melee and health and buying lots of packs, to use better weapons and objects ytou have to spread the points out well.
Jakub: there’s a ‘fog of war’ effect, you can see slight movement at the edge of it (unlike Diablo where it was all or nothing and uncovered areas stayed uncovered), but otherwise nothing except your radius. And there is an option in-game to adjust the brightness.
Diablo had darkness, remember? It’s why +30% light items were so cool. =][/quote]
Yeah I know, but you couldn’t see ANYTHING if it were in the dark, in Harbinger (or ‘H’ as us l33t players call it) you can see slight movement in the dark and any glowing items.
I probably shouldn’t be doing this but it’s friday so I’ll indulge myself with one polite rebuttal to these points.
I wasn’t aware of any factual inaccuracies in the article. If there are, I’ll fix them right away.
If that’s true then why are half the weapons in the game melee based? Why are half the upgrade chips for melee weapons? Why do the human and gladiator have 25% of their upgradeable traits devoted to melee? And why do you contradict yourself later in the thread and say melee is a viable strategy?
Harbinger isn’t an isometric Tenchu or Splinter Cell. And it’s impossible to play it that way even if you wanted to, because the detection radii of most enemies go far, far beyond your extremely limited sight radius. Said sight radius feels like I’m playing Diablo II with a cursed item of negative 15% to 20% light. So if your enemies sense you from farther away than you can see, how are you supposed to sneak up on anyone “without them knowing you are there?”
Yes I did use the camerakazis to blow up large clumps of enemies at times, but about four out of five times, it’s just as easy to do the run and shoot strategy. With slow movement speed and a lack of hit points, cameras get owned quite quickly, not to mention the hassles of someone sneaking up behind you and beating you up while you’re playing with your remote controlled toys. Those aspects led me to use cameras very sparingly. Time for some more of the ol’ run n shoot. About the only two useful cameras are the suicide ones and the MRTRs.
More of that counter-culture “it must be a conspiracy” talk. Well I obviously can’t prove otherwise so it MUST be true! :roll:
Nice try, but that assertion would imply that I had difficulty beating the game, which I did not. Notice I marked the game in the summary box as “Easy.” It took me about 12 to 15 hours of gameplay to beat it as the gladiator, quite a bit under the estimates of 20-25 I saw on the Harbinger site/forums (oops…I did do my homework!). I think I can count the number of times I died (before the final boss) using only my fingers. And none of those deaths happened during boss fights which were quite easy, save for the final endgame boss.
I agree with you 100% The gameplay mechanics encourage you - implore you - to go this route. I just didn’t have much fun doing it.
My question to you is, why bother doing this if you can avoid damage altogether by running away all the time? In Diablo 2 if I closed in on a ranged attacker with a melee weapon I didn’t get shot silly like I do in Harbinger. In Harbinger your ranged attack accuracy doesn’t become 100% at close range and your melee attack isn’t 100% either, BUT the accuracy of your enemies DOES become 100% or close to it at point blank. And they seem to shoot even faster at close range. So again - why get in close? Have you tried going melee in later stages of the game with dozens of cimicidae swarming you? You get owned, plain and simple.
I’m writing this reply b/c I like these forums and lurk them from time to time because of the generally high level of intelligence in the threads. I thought I’d chime in for once, now that I’m being dragged in the mud a bit. :wink: Well, to reiterate the main issues I had with it and mentioned in the review, in list form:
shallow role playing. 4 traits per character. makes levelling not fun or interesting
combat is broken, no point to melee.
more treasure chest types/models than unique enemies
no true variety in weapons, armor. humans always use some kind of rifle with or without a bayonet. how about dual pistols? submachineguns? gladiators always use a gun arm and a blade arm. he’s a robot, so why can’t I go two guns or two blades? culibines always use gauntlets and that’s it.
merchant almost never turns over his inventory. For 3/4s of the game, what he has is exactly what you sold him and that’s it. Finally near the end you get a chance to buy something cool. Why?
no multiplayer, not even randomly generated levels for extra single player fun. For a game in this genre, it’s inexcusable to not have one of these features.
Bottom line is that I was assigned this game. I played it, I beat it, I tried out all the characters. I wrote what I thought. I’m on to the next assignment. I’m not trying to put down anyone’s mother. I’m just suggesting that people’s $30 may be better spent on other products.
I had a lot more fun than you did with the game (and also forgave it some of its faults because of its price). Even so, I think you backed up your low score with strong, accurate points.
So Bob, you can actually penalize a game for what it DOESN’T have?
There were no wookies or Matrix style slow-mo, was that an extra point off there?
My point is that you were WAY too hard on this game. I tried your ‘run away, turn and shoot’ strategy, and unless you left something out it’s not gonna work out, they are just too good.
You seemed to hate that you couldn’t play the game as a non-stop gore fest with your character running into the center of battle articulating a primitive warcry as your claws ripped bloody strips of tender young flesh off of gleaming white bone. In fact that was the gist of your article: too slow, bad melee.
Take your tiiiime. You WILL be killed by being surrounded, so make sure you clean out every room behind you before taking on a new room. And cull the closer enemies out of the herd to take them out one at a time.
As for conspiracies: No review of MOO3 THREE days after release. But scathing review of Harbinger the day after it hits stores. Did you get a pre-release of Harbinger but NOT MoO3?
What is up with Captain Cookiepants assigning himself the official bodyguard of this game? In another thread the game’s designer was talking about how Cookiepants was wandering around the game’s official forum bitchslapping anyone who said anything negative about it. Now this.
Stop and say that out loud. “I shouldn’t penalize a game for lacking basic features that should be included.” Say it three times and tell me it doesn’t sound ridiculous to you. Is it so demanding of me to expect that it include multiplayer or randomly generated levels? These are features that have been in every single other game in this genre?
I guess I just click faster than you b/c I can quite easily duck and dodge out of the way of most attacks in this fashion.
No, that’s what you wanted to read. I already showed you the many reasons why I feel the way I do about this game, going so far as to simplify the analysis for you by posting my reasons in laundry list form. All the points in the list were in the review. I had more, but they are niggling points, like why does my map disappear when I save a game or come out of a conversation? Why put the quick save and quick load buttons right next to each other? Why is it that you can take the ship’s internal transport mechanism (umbilicals) right to the surface of a planet? Why is it that even though I play as one character - let’s say the human, I keep coming across health packs that only work for the other two classes? What is the point of that? I can sell it for money - except that money doesn’t really do a whole lot for you in this game, as I stated before.
You’re choosing to harp on one of the many reasons stated. To be honest with you, I don’t usually play isometric RPGs as the melee dude, so your characterization of me as a bullheaded lout who likes to smash and break things is a little off. I played D2 as the Bowazon and the Necro. NWN (ok different but mechanics of combat are similar) as a druid. I’m only pointing out that half of the game’s combat is…well, broken. If that doesn’t matter to you, then bully for you.
Why am I trying to justify myself to you, anyway? You seem quite content with erecting paper tigers and stuffing words into my mouth while simultaneously refusing to read what is on the page.
Master of the obvious. You’re still behaving as though I’m complaining b/c I thought the game was hard. Again, I died less than 10 times leading up to the final boss. Can we do away with the patronizing?
I don’t think I’m going out on a limb when I say that it takes a great deal more time to properly review a game like Moo3 than Harbinger. Shall we stay on topic or are we going to start looking for the second sniper taking pot shots at JFK? And I didn’t wipe my feet before entering the house. I apologize for that as well.
OK I’m done. I swear =) And I shoulda left with my friends tonight to go watch Adaptation instead of staying in to play BF1942.
The sad part is that this game will probably not sell well. Not because it’s a sci-fi setting, like many marketing people would like to think, but because it’s just an awful game. What’s worse is that they probably will gloss over and miss the fact that real time and ranged combat really don’t work well together. This game demonstrates the problems with real time and ranged combat better than most.
why punish any game for not including multiplayer - esp. when the developers clearly said it would not be included?
Sure, it may be a common practice but is it a good one? It’s been billed as a sinlge player game. I didn’t see anyone punishing Splinter Cell for not being multiplayer.
Let’s just look at it from a value standpoint. Today with my $30, I can get a lot more value out of buying Diablo II or Dungeon Siege (current EB prices) or finding a used copy of Nox for $5 and using my $25 in change to buy a lot of beer. Why? Because after I’m done beating the single player campaign (which, to begin with, takes a lot longer in the three games I mentioned), I can get one or two of my buddies in and go bashing monsters and finding the “triple jewelled greater staff of the necronomicon” or something online or on a LAN. Half the fun in these games is beating up things with your friends and having laughs together in a multiplayer game. You take Battle.net out of Diablo and what are you left with? Not a whole lot. And there was more depth and content in either of the Diablo campaigns than Harbinger.
Want an analogous situation? Take a look at the reception Unreal 2 is getting.
