YDayan a écrit :
Grosse mise à jour pour ce jeu prometteur qui arrive cet automne:
- Vidéos pas mal du tout dispos sur gamespot (il faut être membre)
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/gre [...] media.html
- Preview enthousiasmante de Gamespot
http://www.gamespot.com/pc/rpg/gre [...] 71847.html
Quelques extraits de la deuxième page de cette preview, la plus intéressante:
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Even though we were able to try only a small portion of the game, we discovered at least a few instances where it was possible to approach situations in different ways; for instance, in several situations, we had the choice of either speaking with characters to get extra information to avoid combat, or simply attacking everything in sight. But this is just one of the many choices you'll have to make in the full game. Simply choosing what kind of party you want to play will decide at which starting location you'll begin your adventure. This is where party alignment comes into play: Instead of letting evil and good characters mix improbably, the game requires you to pick one of the nine conventional Dungeons & Dragons ethical alignments for your entire party; that is, chaotic, neutral, and lawful variants of good, neutral, and evil. [...] Kindly adventurers may start the game out with a good deed and set off to destroy the source of local monster attacks, while less-benevolent characters may kick off their adventure with a killing spree and jump at the chance to harness the temple's evil power for their own. Troika also promises multiple endings for the game depending on your party's alignment and how you've played through the adventure. The preview version we played seemed to include a good variety of creatures to fight, including giant frogs, which emerge from nearby boggy water with a splash. These aren't ordinary frogs--they have a nicely animated tongue attack that can incapacitate one of your characters, and they can even swallow a character whole. We also encountered a range of more-ordinary threats, like large rats and lizards, zombies, bugbears, and an unsavory group of human guards that serve the priest Lareth. These low-level opponents gave us an idea of the game's combat, but The clean interface includes a contextual menu system that puts all character actions just a click away.
Troika's next game should provide a substantial adventure, considering that the game includes 100 maps of varying size to explore and 140 characters to meet. [...] McCarthy said that completing the main quest will likely take anywhere from 30 to 60 hours, depending on how many side quests you decide to perform. A party of five characters that rush through the game may only end up at level seven or eight, but it's possible to play through the game with fewer characters to share the experience between fewer individuals. And you might really care about how strong your characters are at the end, because, if this game does well, Troika and Atari may release another adventure (possibly based on the classic Dungeons & Dragons adventure Against the Giants--another personal favorite of the developers) as a stand-alone game. And since Against the Giants is intended for characters from level 10 to 20, it makes sense to allow characters to be carried over. In the meantime, for those who might want more replay value than even the multiple story branches will provide, the game will offer the added challenge of an "iron man" mode--in this mode, if your characters die, they die permanently, and you can save your progress only when you quit the game.
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Gamespot le confirme après avoir joué à cette version quasi-définitive, le jeu est bel et bien un mix entre le background de ce module d'ad&d et les nombreuses caractéristiques qui nous ont tant fait apprécier les prods de tim cain et de ses comparses dans fallout et arcanum, c'est à dire le sentiment de liberté quasi-totale, l'intérêt des quêtes annexes, etc. En outre, les règles d&d 3.5 paraissent vraiment adaptées à un rpg pc et les combats ne manquent pas d'intérêt, de subtilité, dixit gamespot.
Plusieurs fins mais également plusieurs "débuts" (localisation géographique différente, etc), suivant ton alignement, la façon dont tu appréhendes le jeu (bad guy abyssal destructor ou gentilhomme vertueux)
L'interface ressemble un peu à celle de neverwinter nights, sorte de mix entre point&click et menu radial.
Plus de 140 personnages à rencontrer. C'est pas mal pour un soft basé sur un module TRES bourrin et née d'une intention de rationaliser les immenses aires de jeu de fallout 2 et d'arcanum (entre 250 et 300 personnages pour Arcanum)
Entre 30 et 60 heures de jeu pour la quête principale + quêtes s'y rattachant.
Au final:The Temple of Elemental Evil is a very promising role-playing game that combines traditional Dungeons & Dragons rules with Troika's free-form role-playing design. The game is nearing its beta development milestone, and all features and content are complete. The entire development team will now focus on bug fixing and polishing for the next several months, and the game itself is scheduled for release in October. - Preview là aussi très positive d'IGN, avec en toile de fond, la surprise du rédacteur face à l'accessibilité du titre et le brio avec lequel les créateurs ont su faire un soft estampillé "d&d ruled" pour une fois souple, explicite et pas du tout castrateur dans ses différents paramètres, etc.
Morceaux choisis:
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Also interesting is that depending on the alignment of your party to begin with, the story will begin in a different starting place with a different situation. For example, a chaotic good party will start with an opening scene where a caravan is under attack. Of course, being good, saving the caravan will be your path. But if you start as chaotic evil, you'll begin in a town, slaughtering and destroying things as evil characters would want to do. From there, the story will move whatever party it might be to town where the real adventure begins.
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Vraiment pas mal cette idée, ça me rappelle Seiken Densetsu 3 Bon en plus de ça, la preview indique que 300 sorts seront dispos, et le bestiaire monstrueux du soft parait vraiment impressionnant, avec plus de 90 bêtes uniques au design léché + les variantes (couleurs, feats, etc)
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Controlling all of these characters, and your game in general will be as easy as I've ever seen in an RPG, especially an AD&D game. When running through the world, your party will move as you would expect, in real-time and without any boundaries. With ease, you can stick your group into any formation based on a 5x6 grid. Once adopted the characters will automatically adopt the formation when moving. There are four slots available for these custom formations so that you can easily switch between custom set-ups without having to worry about setting them up each time. At first sight of a hostile force on the map, the game will pause and go into combat mode. Players will now have the opportunity to make their moves based off of a nice interpretation of the rules based on time.
Every action in the game is color coded to let players know what's going to happen if they make that move based on how much time that move takes. If an action is colored green you'll still be able to perform another action after that one is finished. If it's yellow that means you can do that action, but you won't be able to do another. If it shows up red, better luck next time.
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La gestion des NPC qui vous accompagne à l'air terrible. Dans la preview, ils expliquent d'ailleurs qu'ils peuvent même vendre de leur plein grès un objet que vous venez de leur donner, ou bien refuser de manière véritablement argumentée (pas comme les gueulantes ridicules du nain dans arcanum quoi) d'accomplir une tâche, etc.
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The really cool thing about the movement is that you have much more control over where exactly your characters will be walking. With the press of a button, you'll be able to see the route that the character will be taking to the destination chosen. If that route ends up taking the character into range of an enemy giving them the occasion to attack, a little icon will pop up telling you this, allowing you to change your movement orders.
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C'est cool, ça sera pas comme dans neverwinter nights où Daelan Tigre Rouge fait quasiment tout le jeu à ta place, en allant au devant des ennemis, même si tu lui a ordonné de resté près de toi Apparemment, le jeu est basé sur un code couleur très instinctif qui a vraiment séduit le testeur.
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While this interface is very streamlined for easy understanding, that doesn't mean that options aren't there for hardcore AD&D fans. A little button in the bottom right of the screen will allow players to see all of the rolls as they happen and what exactly is going on behind the combat. And from here, words that are highlighted blue, such as monster names and attacks, are actually hyperlinks that when clicked on, will bring up more detailed information about that word. The detail is certainly there for those that want it, but it won't be forced on anyone that doesn't.
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En gros, une interface ultra simplifiée et instinctive, avec un mode "advanced" en plus pour les coregamerz
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The log book, which holds these quests is also a nice piece of work. Everything you get will be organized for you here so that you never lose track of what you're doing. After playing and being frustrated by Morrowind's journal (even after the improvements) this makes me especially happy.
Inside this log will also be information about your reputation as well as why you have that reputation so you know what you've done to deserve the lynch mob that's after your party when you enter town. Both rumors that you can follow up on if you wish and statistics about each of your characters will also be in the log. Want to know things such as "Most damage done in a single attack?" That's easy enough as a full range of these awards will sit for your perusal as well.
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Le journal des quêtes à l'air très fonctionnel
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There are some companies that you can see really like making games. Troika seems to be one of them. It certainly looks like they care about what they're doing, and care about not only hard core gamers, but also those that might be a bit newer to a particular genre without skimping on the details. Greyhawk: Temple of Elemental Evil is looking to release in late October and early November at the latest. Either way, it seems that RPG fans have something to look forward to.
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Après qqes louanges sur les graphismes très fins et colorés du soft, une conclusion vraiment positive de notre ami Dan Adams.
- Autre preview tjs aussi dithyrambique d'actiontrip.com
http://www.actiontrip.com/previews [...] evil.phtml
Ptit extrait pour l'aspect technique du soft cette fois:
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It's no surprise that the game uses isometric graphics. This is, by all accounts, a great advantage, considering Troika's experience with that kind of technique (i.e. their involvement with the Fallout series and Arcanum). Although slightly outdated, the isometric view always proves ideal for complex and intricate gameplay mechanics of RPG's. In any case, we were pleased to have seen such a huge variety of colorful visual effects that are achieved through dynamic lighting, solid particle effects, and realistic fog and smoke. The game will be taking us through an amazing variety of unique-looking environments (check out the trailer and screenshot gallery). Also, I think you'll agree that character art and model design is a very important aspect of any RPG. From what we've seen, characters were precisely drawn, well-animated, and then transferred into the game with meticulousness and great skill (courtesy of lead artist Mike McCarthy and lead designer Tim Cain, and of course the rest of the creative team at Troika).
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Les screenshots suivent
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