You can set it to display keyboard buttons in the options, my 360 controller was still plugged in when I did.
Well it wasn’t a slideshow, but I was getting some Saints Row 2-like performance on my HD4870 1GB. I had everything maxed at 1680x1050, and I was playing in a beta operating system (win 7) so that could have something to do with it.
Anyway, FPS wasn’t my primary issue. My real problem was the ten minutes of loading screens with about 1-2 minutes of weak dialogue mixed in. Once I finally hit some combat and it was kind of ridiculously out of my control I alt f4’d. It’s a pretty game but the demo did nothing for me, gameplay or RPG-wise.
I hate to join the pile but I was genuinely surprised that characters in a JRPG are still two-sentence-dispensing terminals. I jacked everything up on my HD4850 and was under 20fps. I figured it was a bad port but it could be drivers. There is certainly nothing about the graphics that looks particularly taxing.
Perhaps the battle system is interesting, but it didn’t catch me before I lost interest in the game. That’s why I originally asked if I should be excited about this game – someone needs to tell me what to look for here and what great things are happening, if any.
Jacked up everything? Are there graphics options settings that I didn’t see? I saw brightness and resolution and that’s it.
Actually, I played a bit more today and this combat system in a clear fashion and in likely a better game could be awesome. Imagine giving commands to your squad every turn like football plays executed simultaneously for each side. So you pick your maneuver(with little arrows showing where everyone will go) and so does your opponent and then watch chaos ensue. Heh.
I think someone could do some really awesome stuff with such a combat model and bump up the cinematic visuals of JRPG combat up another level or three.
There are advanced graphics options where you can bump everything up to high. It helps a bit, but it still reminds me of a psx game emulated on the PC. Not that bad of course, just the rendering style is reminiscent for some reason to me.
On an Nvidia 8800U it seems to run with zero performance problems at 1920x1200 with everything on high, sounds like they didn’t bother testing it on ATI much. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a new ATI driver that drastically improves the speed if so.
Oh found it. Bumping everything to high does make it look a bit better. I just played a few more battles.
Not that bad of course, just the rendering style is reminiscent for some reason to me.
Yeah, I was about to say, it’s no where near that bad. I think they probably still use a lot of the same shortcuts (modeling techniques) and that gives the game a very similar ephemeral quality.
On an Nvidia 8800U it seems to run with zero performance problems at 1920x1200 with everything on high, sounds like they didn’t bother testing it on ATI much. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a new ATI driver that drastically improves the speed if so.
I put everything to high and didn’t have frame rate issues (certainly not like I did with SR2), however, load times are noticeably worse on high settings for me. It’s funny because they aren’t that much longer on high, but it puts them over that edge that combined with the frequency of loads, I can see the problem other people are having.
If I do get it, I’ll probably play it on medium even though it looks worse just to cut down on loading.
I had bumped up all the graphics settings which is what caused the really poor frame rate for me at 1680x1050. Toning down the shadow settings to their default levels made it playable again at that level (which was preferable to the blurriness of scaling on my LCD).
I played quite a bit more last night. I was trying to finish the Black Soldier quest from Emma at the ruins, but I made the mistake of using the transport point to leave, thinking I could maybe upgrade my equipment and hire more party members at a city, in order to succeed in the boss fight. When I went back to the ruins the boss wasn’t there anymore. Checking the quest tracker showed it as “Suspended”. I found I had to go back to the City, go back to the bar and reinitialize the quest with Emma before I could go back to the ruins and fight the boss. I was really annoyed that in the beginning of the quest you are actually directed to a short cut to the room where the boss is by NPCs, except there’s no way to actually win that fight until you’ve spent a lot of time running through the entire location grinding your party’s abilities.
I will say this, there’s a good amount of play time in this demo when compared to the 2 GB, 15 minute demos that seem so common these days. I’m still annoyed by some last gen, engine issues with the game. It’s just silly that you have this abstract city map from which you sellect location which requires a load time to wander around in a really small map for a couple of important shops only to have to go back to the map and then load another area. There’s no reason in this generation I should not be able to walk from one end of the city to the next. Another silly thing is when you load a saved game it will take a few second to load the save, prompt you with a “loading complete” message which you must advance past with a button press before you get another loading screen where it actually loads the level. There’s no sense in not loading the level strait away from the save select screen.
I’ve grown more accustom to the combat system after a few more hours of trial and error. It turns out it is much easier to win once you figure out there’s a button you are supposed to press to initiate combat from the field screen in order to gain initiative over your enemy. Again, the demo does nothing to tell you this so it’s easy to get your ass beat because the enemies have the advantage in every encounter. I wanted to try out the weapon creation and customization stuff but I still don’t have the right components to do anything yet. The whole system with the little digging character is pretty weird. You have a limited number of digs per dungeon and the guy levels up. There are also “Loop Chance” moments where you’re supposed to press the select button rapidly for an opportunity to double your find. Again, the demo does not teach you this.
My last real annoyance is that on my PS2 controller most of the buttons map well using the Gamepad A presets, but the axis on the right stick to control the camera are the opposite of what they should be. Unfortunately the settings screen give no way to correct this.
Gamespot seems to like it. The text seems more enthusiastic about it than the score (8).
Pros:[ul]
[li] A long, epic tale in a fascinating new fantasy world[/li][li] Fun, uniquely strategic battle system[/li][li] Gorgeous musical score[/li][li] Beautiful art design.[/ul]Cons:[ul][/li][li] Some texture pop-in and screen tearing[/li][*] Battle system can be obtuse[/ul]Says it takes hours to really get used to the battle system, but it’s rewarding when you do. Also says PC version is far superior to the console.
[/li]
Well I trust gamespot about as far I can throw one their reviewers. Heh. But the 360 version seemed to get ok reviews.
The art design is beautiful? Really? Maybe in the second half of the game or something.
did anyone notice how the characters do the Robot walk during the cutscene??
I find the scores to be very negative compared to the way the demo made me feel. A lot may have to do with my computer, but at least on my fast ssd there is virtually no load-time with anything… UE3 engine is entirely smooth at max details for me, and I felt they did some great things with grinding in the game.
As silly as that would seem to say, if you are going to grind, the game encourages you to round up as many of the enemies in the area as possible. Getting tons of the enemies from any given area to all follow you and taking them all on at once, results in a much tougher battle (the difficulty is a greater than linear scaling), and the rewards are also much tougher. So if you happen to want some component from a previous area, without the boredom, you can try your hand at fighting everybody in the area at once.
This applies even in new areas, if your party is seemingly strong for the area, you can intentionally challenge 3+ groups at a time for greater risk and rewards… and if you don’t feel like fighting, you can easily evade encounters. The net result is removing the usual “stupid-random” encounter factor. The ability to turn on “turbo” causes forgone conclusions to resolve rapidly.
I guess the reason I am most sold on my pc demo of this, is that I consider myself primarily jaded with the rpg genre due to pacing issues – long pointless animations, meaningless random encounters, and heaps of load time. These particular “rpg-tax” aspects seem to be minimized in the last remnant, and it’s made me a bit of a fan. Frankly, I’m happy that cities have a abstracted map view for movement – I’d rather not walk through a huge city, and constantly feel the need to explore worthless nooks and crannies.
Damn, y’all are ruining my interest in the game. I just happened across this yesterday and thought it might be something to while away some time before Divinity 2 arrives (possibly in June). Now I’m in neutral mode again.
The enemies level with you, so although later ones have more tricks up their sleeve, there’s still challenge even when backtracking.
This is now on Steam for 10EUR (or probably 10$ for the lucky Americans) but this thread and the other one quite dampen my enthusiasm. Is it worth any time investment?
I have not finished the game yet after my harddrive with the game on it died (fuck you seagate!), but the game was good enough that i do want to go back and finish it.
Is it worth $10, yes, without a doubt.
Last remnant is a very underrated game, but it is not a perfect game. I’d put the Murbella suggested retail price at $20-30 usd. If you like rpgs, it is easily worth a shot at that price point, in my opinion. It tends to be a little on the hard side if you don’t power game a little, but the pc version fixes a lot of the issues the console version had with having to power game or castrate your character.
Personally i think it plays best with a controller which makes the push (insert button) at the right point when a prompt shows up while fighting combat system easier, but it is playable with mouse/kb too.
Another vote of confidence for Last Remnant, especially at $10. Be warned, though, that the story starts out REALLY stupidly.*
*yes, even for a JRPG
Ungh. Considering how I feel about standard JRPG writing, “stupid even for a JRPG” would probably cause me to die of aneurysm.
- Gus
Personally i think it plays best with a controller which makes the push (insert button) at the right point when a prompt shows up while fighting combat system easier, but it is playable with mouse/kb too.
That was going to be my first question. I’ve noticed that a lot of the SE games suffer from consoleitus but if it is playable and enjoyable with a mouse and keyboard then I’ll take a chance on it. It does look very nice though and I was interested in it when it came out.
So what’s so special about this to non-final fantasy rabbid fans?