Law & Order: Legacies Episode 1 - Discussion and Feedback
The first episode was released last night and some of you have had time to play through it already. So, what are you thoughts?
If you're a Law & Order fan in general, did it feel like an episode of the show to you? How cool was it to have all those characters from Law & Order history interacting with each other?
There's two different ways the final case can play out, so how did it go for you? What'd you think of that ending?
We're looking forward to your thoughts! Thanks!
If you're a Law & Order fan in general, did it feel like an episode of the show to you? How cool was it to have all those characters from Law & Order history interacting with each other?
There's two different ways the final case can play out, so how did it go for you? What'd you think of that ending?
We're looking forward to your thoughts! Thanks!
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Comments
Anyway I only played it once and the gameplay contains investigations and courtroom battles straight out of the phoenix wright games.
Not sure if I could win the case but it seems that if did a proper job I probably would have won the case but no matter.
I was really struck by how similar it was to phoenix wright games and that´s why I liked the gameplay we have objections here too
The first case sort of starts of what I suspect is a bigger plot in later episodes.
Anyway I kind of liked it been catching up with the tv series lately as well.
So all in all not bad will be interesting to see how it progresses.
It´s basically the same thing as in phoenix wright if you object to things that is not to be uhhm objected. Or make the wrong call in a interrogation.
It´s a point based system and when you are in court you have a meter that shows how much the jury is buying your case. If you suck at making your case the other meter will start filling up red and that means the jury is on the other side.
Played a bit of the first episode, so far so good. The graphics do their job nicely and the presentation works. It does feel like the game runs on training wheels, telling you exactly when you interrogate just right after every single scene. It's not too much of a bother though, you get used to it. Still it would be nice to have a 'hardcore' setting where you see your performance only after the interview ends. Still, loads of fun.
In a L&O fan side, the voice actor behind Lenny Briscoe is doing a good job, and the actress giving voice to Olivia Benson could be Mariska Hargitay herself. Rey Curtis... it's serviceable, but his accent and spanish is definitely off. It's funny that Curtis got cast as the computer illiterate when interviewing the hacker, since he was the one who introduced Lenny and L&O in general to cyber crime. In one of his first cases, no less.
All in all, great job TT. This is a series I'll follow through to the end.
I actually won the case and since i did well I could ask for the maximum sentence.
Bought Eps. 1 & 2 - playing on an Iphone 4
Pros:
- Good gameplay
- Good dialogue
- Interesting story
Cons:
- No idea how the scoring works - some of the courtroom scenes give you no points at all
- No ability to restart the game. Sometimes you just want to restart the episode but you cannot. You can only restart the scene you were on. Other than that, you have to finish the game to restart it.
- No idea what is a 'good' ending and what is a 'ending' - if you plea a defendant to murder 2 - is that the same as having the jury convict on murder 2? Do you get more points or a better ending for not making plea offers? (that is the 2 endings - but is one better?)
- Red herrings - there is no explanation if finding a red herring is a good thing or bad thing to your game
- Objections - not all of the objections available are explained. Also Ep 1 allows you to withdraw your objection yet Ep. 2 does not - it seems like this game was rushed past QA to make a deadline rather than really looking at the gameplay and checking to see if it made sense.
Improvements:
- Allow you to quit and restart the game - rather than just the scene you were playing on
- Allow you to turn off the transcripts - make the player rely on his/her memory when playing
- Make the answers randomize - make users pay attention when going thru the game again
- Give a better scoring breakdown - let the user know where the points came from - the law side and the order side
- Let the user know if he/she found the best ending
I hope that helps. I am still on the fence if I will get the other episodes.
Ha! I'm glad you caught this! This was a little inside joke about Rey Curtis, and how he's gotten older and out of touch with the FTPs over time. It's inevitable... During the 1999 episodes, he will still be schooling Lennie about the internets.
I'm interested if you went all the way to the jury, or if you used your advantage to plea bargain.
BTW, if you are at 90%+ Jury Confidence, the jury WILL always find the guy guilty. (It's not totally accurate to real juries, but we wanted a way to guarantee success if a player had really worked hard for it.)
I took the plea bargain and did so well that I just asked for maximum sentence. I did another playthrough and there the jury just found him guilty.
I admit I bite my nails even when I know I've got it in the bag.
On a side note, I'm hearing that lots of people are taking the plea bargains right away. I thought it would be a more 50/50 split between people making deals and people trying for convictions.
Law & Order franchise has two shows *SVU and Criminal Intent* that are in my top ten favorite tv shows and the original show is great too. Love that Telltale dropped the LA bit and is doing a 'best characters get together' kind of game. The first episode seems to take place after the first show and in between the last two seasons on SVU since Stabler just left the department.
Guess other episodes will take place in the past since Lennie Briscoe is in at least one of them. Guessing its set in the early days with him and Logan.
Just a few complaints though
-Its dang choppy sometimes on my little iphone
-I HATE the circling method of this game, it barely gets it any of the time at all.
-Benson's voice actress did an awful job. Mariska Hartigay just has too distinct of a voice.
I'm a huge L&O fan (main series, anyway) so I was anticipating seeing this on PC. An incident with a pool and a phone meant my Samsung Focus was out of commission, so...Wound up back on an iPhone until contract renewal time.
So...Caved in and picked it up on the app store.
Overall, I'm mixed on my take of it, but generally I like it with reservations.
The overall writing and presentation is very much L&O. Feels like it's pulled directly from a season of the series. Dunno if NBC gave you access to their writers to help out, but either way, great job.
One of the immediate negatives I noticed is the thing's incredibly slow and/or buggy at times. The iPhone 4 isn't the newest iDevice out now, but it seemed like every third cinematic/transition was choppy or the audio lagged. Dunno if it's a matter of lacking optimization, IOS 5 or that it's simply intended for the dual core devices, but....
Gameplay wise, it was....different. Like another said, I was never sure whether the "red herring" dialogue choices which were pretty obvious were intended to be a negative or a positive for selecting.
Some of them were definitely entertaining as was the case with Curtis and the FTPs.
The question/answer aspect I initially didn't really like too much as it reminded me of the earlier Sherlock Holmes titles from Frogwares where gameplay consisted largely of "end of chapter" quizzes. It grew on me somewhat as the case went along.
The trial section was very well done for the most part.
I'm impressed that Telltale actually makes an effort to introduce and explain basic objections to testimony (shades of Legacy Interactive), although the system for objecting bothers me a great deal.
It's not so much in the selecting an objection and what not, that's great. It's more Telltale's decision to place "objection" checkpoints usually after the witness has answered the potentially impermissible question.
Just annoys me since it's kind of a moot point to object to a question after it's answered unless the witness veers off into diatribes or wanders beyond the scope of the question.
I was also a little disappointed that there was effectively only one crime scene to "investigate", although given the investigation mechanics, I guess it's not a huge loss. Just was a little jarring, is all.
Overall, though it's definitely enjoyable for what it is. Wouldn't call it a typical Telltale game (at least not as that used to be understood), and I suspect it's going to draw a lot of ire for the lack of traditional gameplay mechanics, but....Hell, if I wasn't worried about the complaints about double charges or purchases not working, I'd go ahead and buy the other 6 episodes.
I was quite happy to look past that though, because if the game's fun then the voice acting's not so important, but unfortunately it turned out that that was the least of the problems.
The way the conversations are structured, so that you can jump around between topics, really doesn't work. Often the detectives just start talking about things you haven't heard about yet and sometimes will act like they don't know anything about things you've just heard them discussing.
The spotting lies mechanic seems good in theory, but in practice it's mostly either too easy (Why couldn't Rachael have deleted her voicemails? Because she's been dead since the opening cutscene) or requires the player to make unfounded assumptions, like when Baran claims he was Rachael's boyfriend and you're supposed to know that was a lie because the woman at the hotel (who said she didn't really know Rachael at all) had said that she didn't think Rachael had a boyfriend. Or later in court when he says that he doesn't know if he had his cane with him when he met Rachael, and that's supposedly inconsistent with him having said he had it when they had sex... were we just supposed to know those were the same occasion somehow?
And speaking of the cane, I was really thrown off by the whole evidence aspect of the game. When did we have the DNA tested? When did the cane get sent to the ME to match to the mark on Rachael's neck? When the game asked me "Do you have evidence?" I thought the correct answer was "No" because none of it had actually been confirmed, but apparently all that happened offscreen and was supposed to just be assumed, without anyone even saying as much.
These factors make the game really confusing and mean that getting the correct answers often comes down to guessing rather than reasoning or even just observation and memory.
Overall, a very frustrating and disappointing experience, wish I hadn't bought the complete series as I'm unlikely to ever play any of the subsequent games (unless I hear that they're substantially better).
I'm not really an L&O fan already, though I like court plots. The game definitely made me feel like I was engrossed in the case even as it took some weird turns.
The only serious criticism I have was that there seems to be a part of the story I missed. At certain points, it seemed like there were just facts that were now taken as known, even though I didn't know where they game from. Like, I was interviewing the hacker and suddenly I had the dialogue option to say something about the girl's blog. My reaction was, "Since when did she have a blog?" There seemed to be this whole side story about who the girl was that made me feel like I had just skipped a scene entirely. I went back through the transcripts and couldn't find anything there either.
Also, I took the plea bargain as soon as it was offered, even though I had 100% success in the courtroom. I didn't realize that there was an option /not/ to take it. I feel like it would have been clearer if there was a choice that said, "Force it to jury" or something.
And when questioning the son, the game again forces you to make unfounded assumptions and penalises you for being honest. It seems like I was meant to have more information than I did, just like in the investigation phase where the detectives seem to know about things that have never been brought up in dialogue.
Then there's the plea bargain. They accepted a deal for the maximum sentence? Defense counsel should be disbarred, because that is batshit crazy. Why would you take a 100% chance of being convicted over even a fraction of a percent of a chance of going free? There is no reason to take that deal at all since the worst case scenario at trial is that you get exactly the same thing. It just makes no sense.
Here's the thing, it was between Murder 1 and 2, I would not want Murder 1. Murder 1 can carry life in prison (with our without parole depending on the state), and a chance for the death penalty. Murder 2 is 25 years. And if you played your cards right, the defense was definitely going to lose.
That being said, I didn't really offer any plea deals except in Episode 3 when I played it the second time-there was good reason for it. I don't want to spoil much.
WHAT? That whole scene was just really confusing then, because I'm pretty sure it said that the deal you were offering them was the maximum sentence. Not the first place in that game where the dialogue is misleading or confusing either. I would not have offered the plea if I'd known that, because I was obviously going to win. In fact, as that scene started, all I could think was that in the show the defense lawyer would have been laughed out of the room for even thinking about asking for a deal at that point.
And I just remembered another bit that made no sense in the trial: There's one part where the defense lawyer is questioning the accused and he totally undermines his own defense, and you can't call him on it and it just seems to pass completely unnoticed.
You were trying to convict them on max sentence (Murder 1). When plea bargains came around, you could offer them as high as Murder 2 (Murder being the original sentence) or no bargain, wherein the two could duke it out between acquittal and the original sentence. There would be no point offering Murder 1 in plea- that's what he'd get anyway.
That's why I thought it made no sense, the dialogue there made it seem like we were offering them a deal of the exact same thing they'd get without a deal.
The dialogue in this game (not just this scene, all through it) is really confusing and poorly written.