Lair (PS3) Developer Walkthrough

There’s been a bit of a media blowout this week on Factor 5’s new game Lair (out this July). These two vids below give a great demonstration on the capabilities of the engine. Looks amazing. It’s a little washed out but it kicks the pants of all the other vids out there.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Looks great and sounds fascinating. Some things I noticed from the voiceover: the PS3 is comparatively easier to program than the PS2 even when making full use of the Cell processors. The game has seamless 32x32 km areas with textures streamed from the BluRay disk and adaptive meshes computed by the Cells to refine visual detail as objects come closer. They also fully use the motion sensors of the Sixaxis controller – you steer the dragon by moving the controller, and you slam your dragon into another dragon by jerking the controller towards the target.

Looks good, but I’m just not finding myself excited about the gameplay. Does this remind anyone else of a nicer version of Superman?

If it ends up being more like Crimson Skies that may be fun, but I’ll add that I I’m not excited about using the Sixaxis as a flying yoke

Please please please please Factor 5 dont fuck this up.

Dragons lately have gotten the shaft:
Dungeons and Dragons the Movie
Eragon
Dragon Heart (NEVER EVER EVER LET A WOMAN MAKE A DRAGON MOVIE AGAIN!!!)
that Dragon MMORPG that Codemasters blew

We need a real good Dragon experience with blood and guts!

Part of the gameplay I tried was swooping down and wreaking havoc in huge army formation. Sounds really cool but was absolutely underwhelming.
No blood, guts or chaos… just small soldiers milling about like a big fucking dragon hadn’t just decimated second battalion before their eyes…

I hope that was still betacode.

Did you play this at the recent demonstration? Yes the footage they show of the dragon walking around swiping people left something to be desired (namely the f-ing chaos that would ensue if a dragon was walking around swiping at people).

IGN has a new video demonstration with interview:

http://uk.media.ps3.ign.com/media/761/761161/vids_1.html

Well… uh… thread necro, I guess.

That’s a good old-fashioned postmortem, with mea culpas and pointed fingers galore. I read about three quarters of it, shaking my head and wondering how they could have gone wrong, with such impressive concepts turned to such a… well, Lair wasn’t bad, as I remembered it, just kind of basic, almost the sort of game that could be played on a phone. Not that ambitious at all.

Then I realized I was thinking of Hoard, the 2d dual stick game of dragons gaining treasure, stealing princesses, and fighting other dragons. I’ve never played Lair, though I think I saw a trailer for it a decade ago. That’s the postmortem for my postmortem reading experience. Lair still sounds like a cool concept, especially with VR and better hardware now and so on.

(If you happen to be interested in Hoard, there’s a lot of info in this Soren Johnson interview with the designer, Tyler Sigman–who went on to make Darkest Dungeon.)

I remember being pretty disappointed in Hoard, but it has great reviews on Steam. I also see they sell 4-packs, so maybe the MP aspect of the game really outshines the lackluster SP?

Edit - Reviews looks like everybody is loving the MP.

Personally, I loved playing it single-player on my PSP. But it’s definitely engineered to be a multiplayer game, so that makes sense.

Did you like from the beginning, or did you play the game after a lot of the extra content came out?

I can also just seeing it from different perspective being very important. I wanted it to be a different game than how it was designed.

Hm. I’m not sure what expansions were available. Not actually sure if all of them came to the PSP version!