Never played it the first go round, but very interested in jumping in when this reimagining of it comes out.
Same and same!
I hope the AI is good this time, the original had great game mechanics but a very poor AI. I don’t play MP at all.
I don’t either, normally, but the async structure makes it a pleasure here.
Oh my, the in-game Encyclopaedia is a treat after printing and binding the original game manual back in the day!
Hah. I just re-read the original manual the other day in order to refresh my memory.
Yeah, those were some really fun games.
Do we know if it has MP already?
Although I am not fond of the game’s esthetics, I was surprised how somewhat faithful the board is to the original.
Gonna grab the demo as well, hoping it’s got MP (although it won’t matter for TGB since he never accepted my Steam friend request!)
Somebody tell me if you can zoom out to see more than a few hexes at a time. That was what killed Armello for me (a board game where you can’t see the board), and the short video on the steam page doesn’t show any zoomed-out views.
Demo is single player only.
Samewise, and that’s still the case here it seems. It would be tricky to zoom out a lot, since the word is zapping around, but a full view would have been nice. In the single player map available, which is quite small it’s still worth about 6 or something max zoomed out screens.
That being said, the whole interface seems tweaked around Old World style panels with condensated info… but I take a bit of an issue that you can’t let those panels open as you wish, and that they close as soon as you click something, and that summoning the encyclopedia summons almost a screen of its own.
Much of the original game was also paying attention to what was going on in the world because of the lack of info, and I wonder if or how they translate that, and if it would be a liability one way or another.
I’ll wait and see!
This needs much better optimization. I have an all-in-one with Iris Xe integrated graphics that can handle nearly anything I would want to throw at it, but it’s struggling with this.
Oh it’s very much a beta. Even on RTX it will struggle a bit in weird places. Also have windows that don’t close and other glitches.
Don’t know if I ever saw it. Or I could have been in a weird place at the time, Either way, please send it again if you don’t mind.
Thanks. I’ll be waiting a bit longer then, it appears.
Back in the day, the Rock, Paper, Shotgun folks did a great playthrough which illustrated how much fun MP could be:
I fired up the demo last night just to show my girlfriend what the remake looks like. I’m a graphic designer with some (long) past illustration experience and she’s an illustrator so both of us had some reservations about the new art direction because the original game’s visuals were so otherworldly, weird and gorgeous to us (not to mention, I loved the prose on the cards).
But you know what? As much as we still prefer the old graphics, at least for the plains of hell cantons, places of power, playing pieces, the legions, praetors, events, relics, artifacts etc. We love what League of Geeks have done with the UI and the background graphics and icons. Everything seems so… solid and tactile, particularly the tribute pieces and the reliquary jewellery at character selection. I’ve maintained for a long time that the best thing you can do with an interface if you can’t make it outright melt away and disappear, is make it satisfying to use/see/hear. The character designs will be divisive (“too cartoony waaah!”) but I think they look good and fit with the style they’ve gone for. The more painterly card illustrations don’t do it for me compared to the original art but, again, they look really good together when spread out in front of you, like in the bazaar for example. The subtle parallax effect is quite nice too. I find myself warming to the visual style more and more which is great because it was one of my biggest concerns given the strength of the original!
Regarding the map zoom: while I wouldn’t object to being able to zoom out further (possibly even turning the map into an illustration like various other hex-based games do when you zoom out far enough), I don’t recall the original game showing you the entire map, or it being a problem either, mostly because they were never that big anyway and the wrapping edges made the space weird to properly understand anyway.
It’s so strange coming back to this after so many years, poking around the interface and slowly remembering how it all works. Still hard to believe that this game is getting such a full-blooded remake. And yeah, it definitely needs some optimising because it stresses my RTX 3080 out.
Anyway, I’m very excited to dig into this properly!
That was what sold the game to me, and how I ultimately came to meet and play with Waltorious for so long. I just missed @Kolbex somehow!
Me too - one of the things which made MP so fantastic in the original was that it lent itself so well to these fantastic AAR’s, probably because it took multiple turns for a plot to come to fruition usually, and the other archfiends had their own plots going on simultaneously, so when you could go back and see all the players’ heretofore hidden actions which either screwed up your plans, or enabled them, it was so fun. Also, that you had that anticipation for each new turn to come in and see if what you tried to make happen happened… so much more satisfying against friends than winning a shooter shootout in other MP games.
Absolutely, and I say that as someone who loves shootouts in MP shooters! :)
Oh, it was such a problem to me! If you played an expanding game, watching over your territory was a bother, and it became cruel when that lack of navigation coupled with the terribly thin borders became so discreet it would leave you not noticing a place of power being snatched by the next turn.
For all its gorgeousness, the original game’s limited interface was its worst weakness, and the main problem to me was the map.
It’s a bit sad that the new game doesn’t seem to aim at changing it, but simply covering it with other elements — elements that I think should be the main focus of the interface, instead of the near useless map, but that has been my pet peeve for many board-game-inspired computer games and is hardly peculiar to this one.
Also, that was more forgivable for a game from 15 years ago (and one that looked quite a bit older than that) from a solo developer. It is annoying in 2023 not to be able to zoom out as far as you’d like. Not game breaking for me, but certainly worth noting.
Oh I have no soft spot for the appearance or utility of the original interface! It was functional but rough (I struggled with Dominions’ more though). That’s why I wanted to praise the new interface which looks so much better and flavourful. We’ll see how it handles in a bit when I hope to do the tutorial.
I just can’t imagine many scenarios where you’re going to lose track of who can invade your territory unless you’re surrounded by excommunicated archfiends or in vendettas left, right and centre with piles of legions stomping around! I think that’s perhaps one of the reasons I loved Solium Infernum so much: between your limited orders, legion movement and the restrictions of the infernal conclave you could only focus on or do so much per turn. Now, if we’re talking legions many cantons away storming across the map thanks to some fancy artifact then… yeah, that always stung!
Good grief, this game needs optimising; even at 1440/60, my 3080 is 76 degrees C!