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Interview GameBanshee Talks About Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows

Sol Invictus

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Tags: Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows; J.E. Sawyer; Midway Games

GameBanshee has <a href=http://www.gamebanshee.com/interviews/gauntletsevensorrows1.php>conducted a fairly lengthy interview with J.E. Sawyer </a>on the subject of his and John Romero's upcoming action RPG, Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows with details on the game's cooperative multiplayer features, combat mechanisms and on the game's rendering engine, among other things.
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<blockquote>The action is the heart of the gameplay. People can play it like a masher at low levels, but the fighting system is fairly involved compared to other Gauntlet titles. We have maneuvers that are typically not found in RPGs: trips, block-breaking, grabbing and throwing, counterattacking, juggling, and so on.
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To support the action and provide long-term goals for players, we have a light RPG system in the game. Players can buy new combos for their characters and find increasingly powerful equipment to augment their fighting.
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<br>
Most people play Gauntlet for the action, which is what the heart of the game has always been. For people who want a great story out of their games, we have a separate story mode. It’s for one or two players and fully fleshes out the game world and the characters living in it. The player(s) alternate between the three pairs of characters (warrior and valkyrie, wizard and elf, lancer and tragedian) as they go through the story arc. Because the story mode is separated completely from the full-action “advance” mode, the story is quite deep. In terms of scope, it’s more on par with a full RPG than an action game. </blockquote>
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Sweet! We all know how most RPGs feature copious amounts of combat even though they don't have the interface or system to support it, so it's nice to see an action RPG going the distance with combat interactivity, as opposed to having the screensaver-like gameplay of Dungeon Siege 1.
 

Sol Invictus

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This is pretty fucking rad:
GB: How many different spells and/or skills will be available in Seven Sorrows, and how will these be broken down into the six different classes? Any particular favorites you can tell us about? Additionally, what sort of team-oriented "junction" skills can we expect to see?

Josh: Initially, every character type had a huge set of spells/special abilities. However, we quickly discovered that this made our control scheme very, very complicated. Complication is kind of “anti-Gauntlet”, so we went in the opposite direction. Every character class has a unique class skill that functions much like a super attack. For the valkyrie, it is Flock, which calls down ravens on her enemies. For the warrior, it is Retribution, a defensive ability that allows players to mete out damage on attackers as they strike him. Really, the diversity between characters comes in what weapon skills/combos they learn and what equipment they find.

Currently, we have twelve Junction Skills in the game. They are very easy to execute, but demand teamwork to use well. Players who set down too many seals or seals in bad locations can make a junction pattern ineffective. The effects are all area effect and range from healing zones to circles of hail that rain down on enemies. One of the more complex patterns is a four-seal junction called Annihilate. It summons a column of floating discs that fly through enemies when they enter the circles around them.
Team oriented junctioning is pretty damn sweet. I would kill to play a turn-based game with the depth of Jagged Alliance 2, with something like that in place.

I liked this bit about terrain interaction:
Josh: There are a lot of different enemy types in the game. They range from the mundane imperial footmen to the grotesque “biped hosts” of Ghost Tree Swamp (ooOOoOoOoOoh!). Human enemies have their pros and cons. They are usually more intelligent and difficult than monstrous enemies, but they are easily grabbed and thrown – into spikes on the wall, spinning blades in a lumber mill, over convenient nearby cliffs, etc.
 

Naked_Lunch

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Damn, I thought all they were going to do was slap some new graphics on and call it a sequel, but instead they're going the whole nine yards. This might actually be even a fun and interesting game. JR is back with a vengence!
 

Killzig

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"conducted a fairly lengthy J.E. Sawyer"


What? rex?? is the asian in you making you go Engrish again???
 

PennyAnte

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I'm happy that the company doesn't appear to engaging in routine, breathless marketing hyperbole, promising the game will be all things to all people.

It seems someone might finally have done some market research here and built a game with related, but different modes that accurately cater to what different gamers prefer.
 

Ellester

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Even though I’ve played many hack n slash games, I don’t think gauntlet appeals to me. I guess if I had a group of friends to co-op with I might be interested, but as it stands I’m not interested. But I’ll listen to what people say; I might change my mind.
 

Country_Gravy

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Exitium said:
This is pretty fucking rad:

Did you just say "rad"?

That's totally tubular, dude!

This game looks gnarly, but not in a bogus way!

Surf's up!

Have you been watching Keanu Reeve movies, Ex?
 

gromit

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X-Men: Legends has given me a taste as of late for the "pseudo-RPG beat-em-up," so I will definitely need to keep an eye on this one. Maybe it was just out of Jefferson-grief before, but I've been going crazy over the lack of information on this one.

I'm -very- pleased to know that they're doing all they can to get this game out of the mucky middle-ground that often occurs when mixing RPG rules with real-time combat, giving it more involved combat that makes use of real-time's advantages. It's all in the implementation, of course, but to hear an action-RPG dev talk about this, in leiu of what cool animations play when you press punch six times, is a wicked good sign. And before anyone says anything, surfers stole "wicked" from us yankees.
 

Reklar

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Sounds mildly interesting, or at least much moreso than the previous Gauntlet games ever did. I guess I've gotten used to playing arcade games at the arcade and more involved games at home. Perhaps JE will bring a little bit of sophistication to Midway titles?

-Reklar
(a Fallout/RPG fan)
 

Volourn

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Yay. People overrating this game all because of hype by a dev who helped make one good game (IWD1), and was the elad ona crap game (IWD2) and the lead of two games that crashes and burned before they wer eevn released (though those two games had potential to be great).


"I'm happy that the company doesn't appear to engaging in routine, breathless marketing hyperbole"

Are you nuts? That's EXACTLY what they are doing. Only a moron couldn't see that.

As for this Guantlet game, I expect to be a good action game with a decent story.
 

Fez

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Remember brainless Romero is involved with this. He can turn gold to shit with a touch.
 

Volourn

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I know nothing about "Romeo" other than the potshots people take at him. He is totally irrelevant to me. Monsieur Sawyer is a somebody to me. Game over.
 

PennyAnte

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Volourn said:
Are you nuts?
Come on, Volourn. They're honest about the fact that "action is at the heart of the gameplay," instead of describing it as some kind of uber-genre-crossing wet dream. They call their own RPG system "light." That's straightforward and gimmick-free.

It's basically a combat game with combos, special moves, and so forth. But they've added a separate story-type mode for players who want it. This probably means one entire design team was free to make the action mechanics as good as they possibly could, without distractions that could have muddied the overall product given the complexities and time crunches of game development.

I like games with several modes, some designed for quick fun, others for more long-term enjoyment, like the various modes in Burnout. These devs seem to be pretty blunt about what the feature sets are and aren't. Where are the wild promises? Saying the story mode is deep? No one expects War and Peace.
 

Volourn

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You better read again. According to the piece; the combat is deep, the story is deep, the characters are deep, the spaghetti is deep, the penetration is deep... Oops, scratch the last one.. That's my fantasy....
 

PennyAnte

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Volourn said:
You better read again. According to the piece; the combat is deep, the story is deep, the characters are deep...
I think your characterization is unfair. How is this breathless:

Josh Sawyer said:
Our Monster Men are operating under the maxim that a large number of distinctly different, simple behaviors can be recombined endlessly to make every arena a new and exciting challenge.
That's just factual. Simple AI tactics, lots of combinations. That's a pretty good example of most of their responses, which are uncommonly on the level.
 

Naked_Lunch

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Fez said:
Remember brainless Romero is involved with this. He can turn gold to shit with a touch.
It's suspicious, though, how when Romero left id, suddenly the quality took a nosedive :shock:
 

gromit

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Romero's failings as a manager and a business-man, best and most honestly described in Gamespot's excellent "Final Hours of Daikatana" article (or however their naming-scheme for those go) shouldn't cast doubt upon his design skill. Daikatana would have been a kick for the genre if it had come out on time, and frankly, that's the only one of his games that's not still ridiculously playable. I didn't mind it that much myself; it felt like the first-person version of a top-down shooter at its good points, demanding accuracy and projectile-dodging.

There, now, will someone help me nail my other hand to the cross?
 

Astromarine

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that article gave me some respect for romero too. And he seemed to learn from it, and is bootstrapping himself back into the industry now, starting with mobile phone games and moving on to this Gauntlet thing. The Bitch ads are a horrible idea that he admits letting the marketing department convince him into using (remember: this was at the time of Quake smacktalking and stupid Acclaim marketing campaigns), and all his other failings are akin to the ones from Troika. He's good at what he does, but tried to manage a company and screwed up.
 

Sol Invictus

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Yeah, don't judge Romero for his only failing. His other products were top notch, bar none. Even his cellphone game was extremely fun for the gameplay that it offered.
 

Sol Invictus

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That's the only one I played. I didn't know he had anything else.
 

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