Overlord is, essentially, a diablolic mixture of Pikmin and Fable, with the addition of the Dungeon Keeper-esque twist that you play an Dark Lord who fights against the forces of good.
You, as the newly awakened Dark Lord of a run down and empty castle, are tasked with rebuilding your former glory through any means necessary. You can kill anyone who get in your way or help out helpless farmers...for your own benefit of course.
To do this, you are given control over minions who carry out your every whim with no complaints. There are four types of minions: brown, red, green, and blue. This is where the Pikmin element comes in. Alone, you can do almost nothing. However, with the minions you can do everything. Brown minions are your standard fighters and workhorses, reds are your "archers" and they can travel through fire, green can travel through and neutralize poisions, and the blue can travel through water. You can control all four types of minions at one type, but you are constrained by how much influence you have [stone statues gathered from various areas give you control over more minions]. Minions, on top of fighting, also can carry large objects back to your base, which help bring it back to its former glory.
The setting, art style, and level designs are all very reminiscent of Fable. It's fairly standard fantasy stuff with a linear path, for the most part, that you are set on. I'd say that it's probably larger overall than Fable, with four large areas that have several different dungeons each. The first area has three dungeons so far and I've been playing on it for slightly over three hours. There's trolls, halflings, elves, farmers, castles, villages and so on, just as you'd expect. Nothing really standout here, aside from the level design which is done very well.
I'd say it's definitely worth some attention.
Yeah, I saw the commercial for this the other day. It looked good, and seemed to have a bit of humor as well.
It looks like something I'll pick up when the price drops to $20 or so.
Where do you get "Fable" out of this?
That it's on the PC and an Xbox platform, I guess? I don't see much of a connection either...
Yeah, it definitely sounds like Pikmin meets Dungeon Keeper. But is it good? It sounds more "decent but unspectacular"... too bad. The studio can do great things, as their past work on the Age of Wonders series shows... they should have stuck to PC fantasy TBSes, perhaps. :)
No it really does seem like a great game. I mean, are you really coming up with a final score of "they shouldn't have made this game" from GR's mini-review? Surely you should need more than that to come to that conclusion.
Quote:Where do you get "Fable" out of this?
This:
Quote:The setting, art style, and level designs are all very reminiscent of Fable. It's fairly standard fantasy stuff with a linear path, for the most part, that you are set on. I'd say that it's probably larger overall than Fable, with four large areas that have several different dungeons each. The first area has three dungeons so far and I've been playing on it for slightly over three hours. There's trolls, halflings, elves, farmers, castles, villages and so on, just as you'd expect. Nothing really standout here, aside from the level design which is done very well.
???
GR, there are a few fantasy games out there that don't have the "Fable" name on them (:)), so the setting means nothing for that...
Quote:No it really does seem like a great game. I mean, are you really coming up with a final score of "they shouldn't have made this game" from GR's mini-review? Surely you should need more than that to come to that conclusion.
They went from making hardcore PC strategy games (and the Age of Wonders series is pretty hardcore...complex, deep strategy games, kind of like Heroes of Might & Magic but more complex...) to a much less complex console game (that is also on PC but is clearly mainly designed for the 360). It is a step back in many ways.
I've seen that art style in a lot of places, and it doesn't really remind me that much of the specific nuances that make Fable's art unique. Wallace and Gromit does, but that's an aside (toe headed little guy). Nothing about it says "Fable" to me any more than any other fantasy game does. Fable's not a very good game anyway. I'm certainly not that interested in Fable 2, as the first "scale back" has already been announced (those promised pirate ships are gone, GONE, NO, not the tiny boats!). Anyway, the gameplay does nothing to remind me of Fable. The levels are, well, typical for this sort of thing. Fable was hardly original there either, and in all honesty that was a disappointment in Fable rather than an accomplishment (they were originally promising something far more vast). At any rate, I'm impressed with the game, but for my part, Fable doesn't really fit anywhere in what I've seen.
ABF, I'd play the demo of the game before passing judgement. Simpler? I won't deny that. The gameplay is intentionally simplistic because it's a Pikmin-style strategy game. That's not a bad thing though, and it doesn't make it a worse game for it. I'd give it a try. Then again, we differ on these matters anyway. I also argue that Smash Bros.' elimination of convoluted control mechanisms is an improvement over other fighting games, as, in theory at least, such a reduction in control complexity if the same degree of moves are available and the same style of combat is used (parrying, combo cancelling, and so forth) makes for a better game. You however argue that the skill involved in remembering and actually pulling off those convoluted moves in and of itself makes the game more complex and is therefor better. I don't really follow that logic, but that's why we disagree.
Yeah, and what I remember from when I rented Pikmin 1 was wishing that it was more complex because it was so simple that it was kind of boring in comparison to a 'real' strategy game... I can't say whether this game is like that or not of course, but... Pikmin was okay, but there's better out there... like Dungeon Keeper for instance. Great game. :)
Quote:I also argue that Smash Bros.' elimination of convoluted control mechanisms is an improvement over other fighting games, as, in theory at least, such a reduction in control complexity if the same degree of moves are available and the same style of combat is used (parrying, combo cancelling, and so forth) makes for a better game. You however argue that the skill involved in remembering and actually pulling off those convoluted moves in and of itself makes the game more complex and is therefor better. I don't really follow that logic, but that's why we disagree.
Yeah, I'd say we pretty fundamentally disagree on this then. :)
More complexity does not make a game good, but I do appreciate complexity in games and don't like it when something that works well as it is gets simplified for no reason other than to try to attract a larger market... that doesn't mean that such games shouldn't exist, but that I like complexity.
To a degree anyway. I mean, I found Europa Universalis nearly unplayable because of how ridiculously complex it was... though I haven't played it, or any of Paradox's other strategy games (none of which I own other than that one), in years... and Age of Wonders 2 is perhaps a bit more complex than Heroes of Might & Magic 2 or Disciples II (and both of those games are less complex as well, I'd say, in some ways), and I've played a LOT more of those two games than AoW2... but even so, I wouldn't want them to simplify AoW just because I liked Disciples more. :)
As for fighting games, I also said that making the moves require complex motions adds more skill to the game. Not just complexity, but skill -- you need to be skilled in order to do the motions right. That's not true in something like SSB. As a result it's harder to get good at a traditional fighting game than SSB. Also virtually any fighting game from the past decade has FAR, FAR moves per character than the three or four unique moves that most SSB characters have, and that counts for a lot... normal attacks (SSB has this aspect), special moves (SSB has a few of these but not many), super moves (SSB and SSBM don't have this at all), super specials or whatever other kinds of unique moves the game supports (guard-breaks or whatever; SSB has that shield thing in addition to blocking for instance), etc...
I'll agree about the complexity of things like parrying, counter parrying, and so on.
My disagreement is that making it harder to pull off a move because you have to press a ridiculous button combo makes the game better somehow. I consider that fake or forced complexity for it's own sake rather than something that actually genuinly seperates a player base. It's akin to games that create fake difficulty by using random elements you can't predict to determine a winner. If I lose a battle because my strategy sucked or I'm just not very quick on the draw, I consider that perfectly fair. Reaction speed and strategy are legitimate to me. If I lose because I forgot how to perform some controller move or in the middle of it my thumb slipped and so I couldn't pull off that pile driver, that's just stupid to me. Hardly a legitimate means of determining actual skill.
For my part, I can see a lot of fun even in a game like Pikmin. Sure it's rather simple, but you work within that simplistic system and you can get some pretty nice methods going, and you do have to do a lot of planning out of your next moves. I enjoyed that. Pathing took precedense over something like resource management or troop morale. I didn't need to worry about building a museum to keep up citizen spirits so I could raise the taxes I needed to afford researching the next military upgrade. I just needed to worry about using that 24 hour period to send troops in EXACTLY the perfect formations and spread to both get those great food pellets over there, two different ship parts, and also build a bridge and tear down two walls (true story). That means I'll be resetting the level like 20 times, but it's fun, and as with pokemon, there can be a level of depth hidden in what appears to be a simplistic system.
I do enjoy complicated games though. Let it not be said I don't enjoy having to get my surfs to harvest all their wheat by the end of the 4th grain season and so on and so forth. I just enjoy a simple game (when done right) as well.
Quote:GR, there are a few fantasy games out there that don't have the "Fable" name on them (), so the setting means nothing for that...
Do I have to write you guys an essay? Everything from the way the levels are designed, to the way the NPCs look, to the way that you're mostly set on a linear path, to the way your character moves all scream "Fable!!" at me. It's not rocket science here, folks.
Quote:ABF, I'd play the demo of the game before passing judgement. Simpler? I won't deny that. The gameplay is intentionally simplistic because it's a Pikmin-style strategy game. That's not a bad thing though, and it doesn't make it a worse game for it. I'd give it a try. Then again, we differ on these matters anyway. I also argue that Smash Bros.' elimination of convoluted control mechanisms is an improvement over other fighting games, as, in theory at least, such a reduction in control complexity if the same degree of moves are available and the same style of combat is used (parrying, combo cancelling, and so forth) makes for a better game. You however argue that the skill involved in remembering and actually pulling off those convoluted moves in and of itself makes the game more complex and is therefor better. I don't really follow that logic, but that's why we disagree.
You're talking to a hardcore PC nerd here, DJ. If it doesn't have multi-tier tech trees, heavy resource management, and a thousand different skills bases then it's dumbed down console fare that doesn't deserve a second glance.
Quote:You're talking to a hardcore PC nerd here, DJ. If it doesn't have multi-tier tech trees, heavy resource management, and a thousand different skills bases then it's dumbed down console fare that doesn't deserve a second glance.
While partially true, this argument breaks down when you consider that DJ is mostly talking about fighting games, a very much console-centric genre... :)
Quote:Do I have to write you guys an essay? Everything from the way the levels are designed, to the way the NPCs look, to the way that you're mostly set on a linear path, to the way your character moves all scream "Fable!!" at me. It's not rocket science here, folks.
Essay? Yes, that would be nice. :)
What it actually screams is "Generic Fantasy!!", I'd say. Not that that's a bad thing.
Quote:For my part, I can see a lot of fun even in a game like Pikmin. Sure it's rather simple, but you work within that simplistic system and you can get some pretty nice methods going, and you do have to do a lot of planning out of your next moves. I enjoyed that. Pathing took precedense over something like resource management or troop morale. I didn't need to worry about building a museum to keep up citizen spirits so I could raise the taxes I needed to afford researching the next military upgrade. I just needed to worry about using that 24 hour period to send troops in EXACTLY the perfect formations and spread to both get those great food pellets over there, two different ship parts, and also build a bridge and tear down two walls (true story). That means I'll be resetting the level like 20 times, but it's fun, and as with pokemon, there can be a level of depth hidden in what appears to be a simplistic system.
I didn't say that Pikmin wasn't any fun at all, just that it was really shallow and that simplicity got boring after a while... I'd consider getting Pikmin 2 if I saw it cheap though (to avoid the stupid time limit the first game has). It's definitely as much action game as it is strategy though, to try to make up for the lack of depth presumably...
Quote:I do enjoy complicated games though. Let it not be said I don't enjoy having to get my surfs to harvest all their wheat by the end of the 4th grain season and so on and so forth. I just enjoy a simple game (when done right) as well.
Like what, Settlers or something? :) Never enjoyed those Medieval economic sims...
... ancient city-building games were kind of cruel too. Caesar II must have been one of the hardest games I had ever played back when I was playing that game... darn that "you lost and became a galley slave" video! :D
Anyway, yeah, I know. You've played Starcraft and stuff. That is definitely a different kind of strategy and complexity from a fighting game... focused on reaction speed and strategy but not memorization of special moves and luck (if you can pull them off successfully) fighting-game style...
Quote:My disagreement is that making it harder to pull off a move because you have to press a ridiculous button combo makes the game better somehow. I consider that fake or forced complexity for it's own sake rather than something that actually genuinly seperates a player base. It's akin to games that create fake difficulty by using random elements you can't predict to determine a winner. If I lose a battle because my strategy sucked or I'm just not very quick on the draw, I consider that perfectly fair. Reaction speed and strategy are legitimate to me. If I lose because I forgot how to perform some controller move or in the middle of it my thumb slipped and so I couldn't pull off that pile driver, that's just stupid to me. Hardly a legitimate means of determining actual skill.
I know that luck is a big part of it, and even the best fighting game player probably isn't going to pull off every move every time they try it, but even so I like them a lot... luck may not be fair, but it's an acceptable gameplay element. Another example would be Rush 2049's stunt mode. It's pretty much luck as to whether you land on your roof or not (there's a little skill to it, and you can sometimes save yourself, but you will often blow up without any chance of saving it and with luck as the main element), but I've put 35-40 hours into that mode over the years and really, really love it... Best racing game ever, in fact. :)