Game News Empyre: Lords of the Sea Gates Released

[gaussgunner]

Another glowing review, which saves its highest praise for the game's art direction, with visuals that look "as though they were taken directly from Unity Asset Store."

...am I right?

 

[MRY]

Who knows, but I was mostly struck by the fact that Antebellum America typically refers to the southern states prior to the Civil War, not New York City in 1911. I guess it's "ante" the Great War or something?

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

I think the art actually looks quite okay. Not that it matters much, after a week from launch they don't even have enough reviews to have a score (lol), while steam spy tracks them at about 500 copies and peak numbers at the weekend had a total of 5 people playing.

It's dead Jim.

 

[Infinitron]

What did they think would happen?

The tragicomic thing is that because of its slick website and press releases, this game (unlike so many indies) actually got multiple media mentions before its release, but made absolutely no attempt to capitalize on them.

 

[MRY]

And yet they still won't answer my queries!

Maybe telling them that I like to learn about eccentric RPG development cycles was the wrong angle...

 

[Zombra]

I think the art actually looks quite okay. Not that it matters much, after a week from launch they don't even have enough reviews to have a score (lol), while steam spy tracks them at about 500 copies and peak numbers at the weekend had a total of 5 people playing. It's dead Jim.

Well ... I don't care about their sales, just whether it's worth looking at as a game I want to play. So far SIGNS POINT TO NO.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

It's really quite odd. Judging by the website and production values, it's not some one-man garage studio pushing out pixelated indie shovelware. There had to be a number of people working on this and at least the cartoonist seems somewhat high profile. Basically they seem like at least semi-professionals, but the way launch was handled reeks of incredible naivety.

 

[MRY]

As noted earlier in the thread, some of the team were experience Hungarian developers.

 

[gaussgunner]

I think the art actually looks quite okay.

Look at the level design and tell me all the repeating floor tiles and pillars don't make you want to gouge your eyes out. I guess the building exteriors look nice but not the stuff you're staring at in gameplay. The GUI is so busy and kitschy it just looks like mud.

Above all, it strikes me as too realistic, especially that RTwP combat with all the dudes in plain street clothes punching each other forever. That all sounds great to a noob game designer who hasn't played enough RPGs to know what's fun.

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

So nobody can say how this game is ? Only 8 reviews on steam. I personally love the fact that is not fantasy crap but not enough to make me want to play it.

 

[Urthor]

Honestly just judging from the trailers it looks like the art/various other aspects of the game are really good, but it's just half done and shoved out the door because someone ran out of money. And not in a Arcanumy sort of way in a just no it's totally not fun sort of way.

 

[Florian Gheorghe]

Stay the fuck away from this game! It really is an unoptimized piece of crap. If you really thought Tirment Tides of Numenera or Wasteland 2 are not optimized get a load of this.

 

[RNGsus]

Seems to me the team chose an era they knew less than nothing about and karma bit them in the ass. No misdeeds go unrewarded. The shame of it is the Gilded Age isn't all that interesting or well known - not from the way its taught in American schools at least - so like Infinitron said, that they didn't leverage early press is baffling.

Shit, the game probably suffered from the team's own disinterest in the setting, most of all.

 

[Zombra]

So the setting is the game's biggest problem? #informative

 

[RNGsus]

So the setting is the game's biggest problem? #informative

Pretty much, yeah. Unless they had capitalized on press to let people know what the hell it was they had made, buyers will judge by what they see.

 

[MRY]

This review (85/100!) nails why the Codex needs to drop everything and play the game:

As a recent convert to RPG-style games, I am still somewhat intrigued by the various innovations developers come up with to make them slightly more real-time. To be fair, it is possible that more interactive RPGs have existed all along and it has been my own ignorance of the depths of the genre that caused me to see them as nothing more than multiple choice tests and remain blissfully unaware of a form of RPG that allows for more real-time activity on the part of the player. Empyre: Lord of the Sea Gates is a case in point. ... A quick google revealed the existence of a 56-second trailer on YouTube. Said trailer demonstrated the means by which the player, having made severe tactical mistakes during their planning of their turn, can pause the motion and rectify, or at least mitigate, any regrettable decisions.

It's like the review comes from another world. I love it:

Regarding the actual style of gameplay, I would describe the fundamentals as “turn-based until it isn’t.” That sounds a little odd, or at least it felt that way to me, but it actually works quite well. The “turn-based until it isn't mode” is used in combat scenarios to allow for a more tactical approach to managing individual members of your team. This kind of turn-based mode is different from the more traditional “plan it all out, hit the ‘go’ button, then scream in anguish as your opponents moot your carefully laid plans by doing something unexpected.” In Empyre’s turn-based world, you can pause the action and change your player’s actions in response to the immediate situation, whatever it may be. That’s a pretty big deal when the AI goes in different directions than you had planned for.

Also sheltering under the “turn-based until it isn’t” umbrella are the many periods during which you aren’t in combat but have long distances to cross. With a team of up to six characters, moving each of them individually would be extraordinarily burdensome. In travel mode, the team travels as a bunch ...

Yet I can't help but love the author:

Spoiler

About Author
I've been fascinated with video games and computers for as long as I can remember. It was always a treat to get dragged to the mall with my parents because I'd get to play for a few minutes on the Atari 2600. I partially blame Asteroids, the crack cocaine of arcade games, for my low GPA in college which eventually led me to temporarily ditch academics and join the USAF to "see the world." The rest of the blame goes to my passion for all things aviation, and the opportunity to work on work on the truly awesome SR-71 Blackbird sealed the deal.

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1 that I bought in 1977 when they first came out. At that time you had to order them through a Radio Shack store - Tandy didn't think they'd sell enough to justify stocking them in the retail stores. My favorite game then was the SubLogic Flight Simulator, which was the great Grandaddy of the Microsoft flight sims.

While I was in the military, I bought a Commodore 64. From there I moved on up through the PC line, always buying just enough machine to support the latest version of the flight sims. I never really paid much attention to consoles until the Dreamcast came out. I now have an Xbox for my console games, and a 1ghz Celeron with a GeForce4 for graphics. Being married and having a very expensive toy (my airplane) means I don't get to spend a lot of money on the lastest/greatest PC and console hardware.

My interests these days are primarily auto racing and flying sims on the PC. I'm too old and slow to do well at the FPS twitchers or fighting games, but I do enjoy online Rainbow 6 or the like now and then, although I had to give up Americas Army due to my complete inability to discern friend from foe. I have the Xbox mostly to play games with my daughter and for the sports games.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Holy balls, this reviewer is awesome.

Having been gaming since I upped the RAM in my TRS-80 Model I to a massive 16k and consequently lived through decades of desperately wanting ever higher resolution, it literally offends me to see games like Minecraft revel in their return to ugly, blocky graphics

 

[MRY]

Yeah, I feel like it's all forgiven when you hit the about the author and discover he really may have just missed out on RPGs for 30 years for good reason rather than bad taste.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

Yeah, I feel like it's all forgiven when you hit the about the author and discover he really may have just missed out on RPGs for 30 years for good reason rather than bad taste.

It's amazing. It's like watching a child discovering games for the first time, except the child is probably in his 50s and writes with a verve.

I always thought it would be fun to be a king. The raw power of an army that reports directly to me, the ability to mete out summary judgments as suited my mood of the moment, and the big castle to hold massive banquets in. Then came Game of Thrones, after which I decided it might be better to just play at being an all powerful potentate. Kings, it seems, have pretty short lifespans

 

[Jrpgfan]

He knows how to write a nice introduction it seems:

It is difficult to share the news of a soon-to-be-released puzzle game with any level of detail without getting into "spoiler" territory. One must tread very carefully indeed when it comes to talking about this kind of thing. In fact, there are only a handful of other conversations that are as fraught with the risk of getting oneself into trouble. You know, conversations like that one where your significant other drops the incredibly dangerous question regarding whether or not "these pants make my rear look big." Having tripped over that very question myself a number of times prior to getting married, I was well-prepared for it when my spouse eventually asked the very same thing. My thinking is that situations like these are very similar to removing a Band-Aid: just yank it off and be done with it. It will only hurt for a minute, or so I thought. While I can recommend adopting this strategy should you ever find yourself in this situation, I would vehemently suggest not using my specific answer, which was "It's hard to say, Hon, but something is definitely doing it."

On the plus side, she never asked again.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

All Walls Must Fall is described by its developers as being a “tech-noir spy thriller.” Being a fan of both noir and spy thrillers, I was more than happy to take a look at it. Developed as the result of a very successful crowdfunding campaign, this early access game certainly lives up to that description; this access is so early that only a portion of the eventual feature set is in place

I love this guy. How does he not have any comments? He only reviews some obscure shit too, seems the staff think he's some crazy old fart and they only give him games that nobody else wants to write about.

 

[Jrpgfan]

His Trails of Cold Steel review was entertaining

Please bear with me as I begin this review with a caveat: RPG games are not my forte, which means Japanese-style RPGs are completely, well… foreign to me. In fact, I have always had a mild aversion to Manga-style things in general as, in my opinion, they often carry with them a type of sharp and brittle anger that gets under my skin. Maybe it’s the eyes. Creepy!

I went in with certain preconceived notions, chief among them being the idea that the translations from the Japanese language to English would be similar to the nearly incomprehensible and often hilarious instructions that sometimes come with foreign made products that require assembly before use.

I would describe the overall story as being very much like Harry Potter goes to Japan. I started out on a train heading to a mysterious school (Thor’s Military Academy) and possessing very little knowledge as to what to expect. I ended up being put in a special class at the school based on by tremendous innate abilities, the presence of which had been completely unknown to me. And sure enough, the class I was assigned to was an experiment in removing the social class/status distinctions between nobility and commoner that were causing so much trouble in the world, which naturally led to the type of friction extant between Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter. The parallels weren’t too close to wreck the story, though, and the natural differences of viewpoint were handled well by the writers. For the most part I found the story to be interesting and well-paced. Again, with a majority of the time spent in the game being very similar to reading a graphic novel, it is important that the story be an enjoyable component of the game. With the reading/activity ratio being so heavily biased to the reading, I soon started viewing the game as something like a Stephen King novel: enjoy the journey because the ending is probably going to pale by comparison.

 

[MRY]

Some good has come of Empyre after all!