A Review or a Joke

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A Review or a Joke

Written by Administrator

Tuesday, 09 July 2013 01:05

During the development a few potential publishers expressed concerns regarding the cRPG genre and particularly how nowadays reviewers don't have willingness and sometimes required knowledge to dive in such complex titles which typically results in poor reviews regardless of the final score. Some even said that without detailed interactive tutorial which will take their hand through the game we are doomed, that is, unless we obey the rules of the capitalism. First they notice the game, in our case on Kickstarter and Steam, then we receive emails from marketing guys:

"Hi guys, we like your game, would you like a preview, review and to put a banner on our portal?"

"Sure, why not"

then the sobering emails would come back with banner prices that are far away from what we could even consider.

So if we are not paying customer maybe a little training-review is in order.

As our little story goes we were a few hours late with delivering keys at the release day and unfortunately several disappointed backers polarized the atmosphere on forums into haters and knights. Soon a few tens of haters generated hundreds of threads and almost anybody who'd share positive experience with LoD was under suspicious of LoD knighthood.

Thousands new players kept joining despite all those threads and great majority are being busy playing the game.

Sure, there will always be disappointed customers, and there will always be configurations struggling with a piece of software but in our case those a measured in per mills and we try to address the issues and bugs as much as we can with every patch delivering a few extra features requested on forums.

So OK, some tried to prepare us for media attacks but did we expect to receive the lowest mark ever given to any game?

Lowest mark it is, but is this a review? What do we really learn about the game from reading it?

A nice start being called names in the title itself.

Those who were following our forums will quickly recognize copy-pasted problems some of our users had and a very little original stuff;

"Combat is too slow to be anywhere near comparable to a Diablo."

Whoever spent some time playing LoD knows that game mechanics is far from Diablo as it is from COD or NFS.

In short these are not comparable games and we'll ignore the fact that he is comparing a $15.99/$19.99 title to the triple-A $50 blockbuster.

"When it's over and you need to recuperate, chowing down food or potions could help, but those ran out quickly."

We put custom levels at the beginning so there was always an option to configure it at super easy (baby-easy will not be added though).

"Health automatically regenerates with time, but there's no rest button, so I found that the often best thing to do in Legends Of Dawn is standing still."

There are a few ways to regenerate and we left them for players to discover [There are at least five different ways to regenerate health]. The worst way is to stand still but at least reviewer managed to find it out on his own.

The system of magic with sacrifices which many find interesting isn't mentioned. Crafting is mentioned but from the screenshots we see that the reviewer is at the very beginning so how could he figure out how this works. The game is not designed to craft a megablast-killeerreview sword within just minutes of playing. Most probably he is accustomed to kill everything and everybody at L1 but only if his computer doesn't melt down or a virus doesn't fry his display as he was probably told that some evil games do such things.

Anyway these are his experiences and despite the lack of proper explanation of how the game works somebody found this worth putting online.

Not much was invested in playing and reviewing the game (standard is to give scores separately for graphics, sound, music, gameplay etc) and the biggest effort went in finding complaints on forums to integrate into the so called review.

Out of respect for our efforts and thousands of users who enjoy Legends of Dawn we'd like to balance out by copy-pasting several comments from forums;

"I'm enjoying this game immensely so far. It's a throwback to the good, immerse RPGs of old..."

"This is a wonderful game which reminds me of my old school RPG days of exploration. I see that it isn't for everyone, as nowadays gamers have gotten extremely spoiled and lazy, wanting everything handed to them...

...Overall, I love this game. It is huge, filled with many hidden secrets, has a great storyline, and is just plain fun. This was Kickstarter money well-spent, and I am touting its greatness to all my friends, most of whom are fans of true old-school RPGs."

"Huzzah! Ive been telling everyone its like Diablo and Balder's Gate mixed. The best combination."

"Ok, straight up, this game is frustrating and fun in about equal measures."

"So many good ideas, I love the spellcrafting, the lore is wonderfully fleshed out, you can tell a lot of love and care was put into building Narr"

"I was overjoyed to NOT see quest markers over NPC heads. lol"

"Not easy, and tons of exploring and experimenting."

"I really like that there is a whole underworld layer instead of an instance for each cellar etc."

"yeah i love the game also played all night"

"I'm loving this game too, Baldur's Gate come Neverwinter Nights but open world, awesome."

"I am enjoying the game, the fact you have to think and not have your hands held on everything is great and makes you want to experiment and explore. We need more games like this."

"I am enjoying the game, especially since there is no RPG of note out there to play"

"For die hard RPGers this game is a must have!!! This game is great in the story/world sense."

"I want to give this game a 9 out of 10 because I know there are updates coming that are going to improve things."

"A diamond in the rough. I am enjoying this game. The more I get into it, the more I like it."

"Another reason why this game rocks is the producer is pretty and she has an attractive accent."

OK joking aside, we know well our limitations that had to be "built in", we are not claiming that Legends of Dawn is among best games ever built but it is at least equally far from the other end.

We are happy to see sparks of honesty spreading around in the form of independent bloggers who simply state what they think without hidden agendas. Those we listen and we try to fix all complaints we hear from them. The other reviews are out with 60/100, 69/100 and 72/100 ratings...

We learned the lesson and are sending hundreds of codes to bloggers and we hope others will be able to look through this farce as well.

As for us this is already too much distraction, back to patch 1.07. We have balanced few creatures and are working on implementing additional fast travel as mentioned on our forum. Also, we are working on GPU optimizations for above-ground part of the map. We'll keep you posted.

Last Updated ( Saturday, 20 July 2013 19:35 )

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