Korgoth is a rollercoaster of emotion!
But, yeah, you're never going to get an "official" Sierra game ever again that will be any good. Not from a AAA developer who is trying to hire so-called indies to give them cred. Not saying it just cause I do it, but the best adventure games are coming from smaller and indie groups. We're never gonna have another good King's Quest or Space Quest, but hopefully the indies and smaller studios can keep going, and keep doing what they do.
It's funny; some things I like about the new KQ - some of the visuals are nice, and some parts are funny, etc - but this isn't a fucking King's Quest game. I just isn't - I don't even think Chapter 2, with Edgy Soul Patch Graham can bring it into that. This French guy they hired as art director - his work is nice, sure, but still - I think the painted backgrounds of King's Quest 5 and 6 are better than the new game. This new game might have scanned art, but it's still go that cell-shaded edge that just looks crappy to me, and honestly - I don't care if the game is in psuedo-3D graphics.
The writing is....writing. That's about all I can say. Even the supposed emotional death of a character reeked of the modern tear-wrenching crap I get from any young-adult television show.
So, unless part 2 is some massive change, I can really say that this game is just going to end up known as an "okay" title, and forgotten quickly.
Bt
Not a rollercoaster so much as, a stubborn fuck. I want things how it was, you know?
I know I'm never going to get an official Sierra game again. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but Sierra - for all intents and purposes - has been dead since 1999 when they laid off their adventure game developers. Yeah, the company continued as an actual company for a few years after at Bellevue, but Sierra without adventure games wasn't Sierra. It was New Sierra. And this zombie abortion they have now is such a disgrace to what was once not only an awesome name, but a fantastic group of people. It's an insult. Even the website, it's so barebones, it's just fucking shameful. It's one thing to take the corpse of an old company, and actually do something cool with it - Atari, I feel, can be called Atari fairly at this point. But to take Sierra and turn it into an indie hipster fag label? That's just name rape. A total lack of respect or understanding for what "Sierra" was.
No, it isn't. For me, King's Quest - the core of it, what made it so appealing - was it was a kitchen sink of fairy tales, myths, folklore and legends. The story didn't really matter, it was just a means of stringing this very disparate legendary characters and creatures together in new locales. You don't get that in the new game, you get "Wedzel Wolves" and "Snarling Snarlaxes". This was a series where famous characters of myth and legend openly strode onto the screen and were even part of the game. You traded goods with Pan. You got help from the Fates. You saved Ceres from certain doom. You defeated the legendary Minotaur. You sought healing from a Sylph, you got a sword from the Lady of the Lake. Every KQ game had an obligatory witch, wizard or sorceror. Every KQ game had a traditional fantasy critter to either avoid or defeat in some way.
Where is any of that in the new game? You have visual-pun "Bridge-Trolls"...Does that even count? and "Rock Goblins". Not a single wizard, witch, ogre, or genie to be found.
Another part of KQ's charm was it's use of really exotic and differing locales. Look at KQ5. You go from beautiful Serenia to the harsh desert to the ice kingdom to the tropical island of the Harpies to the dark creepy island owned by Mordack. KQ6 you go from island to island but each island has a different feel, almost like five separate lands in one game. KQ7 you had the harsh desert, the beautiful Bountiful Wood, Ooga Booga, the Troll Realm, Etheria which was like Heaven. You had in KQ8 Daventry, then a very ancient Egypt inspired Death realm, the Swamp, the land of the Gnomes, the realm of the Sun. Each game also had a unique cast of characters, not much was recycled from game to game. In this new game, you have Chapter I in Daventry with a pretty forgettable cast...And now you have the Dragon's Well (which we've already explored) with the same old cast in Chapter II. This time with "rock Goblins". I have a feeling we're just going to keep exploring different parts of Daventry with the same side characters in every Chapter.
And of course Graham is some feminine, cuck version of Guybrush. That's character assassination right there.
And the fucking puns. The only puns in KQ were the subtitles and the death messages. There was no punny dialogue in the old games. They're taking a stupid shtick and running wild with it.
And yeah - there is no real darkness. Nothing that emotionally grabs you. Achaka's death was as you put it, modern tear jerking crap. Very very cliched.
