Money Aspect of the game?
Hey
I just wanted to know what you guys think. After ive seen the game trailer and so. I got kinda worried that the money aspect of sam & max will be kinda annoying a repetetive..
I men in the old Sam & Max, there were all these rich and colorfull inviroments where you would get that you needed in som crazy and funny way :P like the things inside the big ball of twine..
But else game looks and sounds good
cant wait for it.
//René
I just wanted to know what you guys think. After ive seen the game trailer and so. I got kinda worried that the money aspect of sam & max will be kinda annoying a repetetive..
I men in the old Sam & Max, there were all these rich and colorfull inviroments where you would get that you needed in som crazy and funny way :P like the things inside the big ball of twine..
But else game looks and sounds good
cant wait for it.//René
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Keep in mind that we have not released screenshots of all of the environments in episode 1. We want to keep a few of them as surprises for you guys! Also, episodes 2-6 will have new environments that episode 1 didn't have, so by the end of the season you should have experienced a pretty varied selection of locations.
"Sam and Max will frequently revisit their home office as a kind of hub area, and they'll need to line their pockets with cash to purchase all of Bosco's expensive (and experimental) weapons. To earn cash, Sam and Max can use a patrol minigame in which they hop into their Freelance Police cruiser and pursue other motorists" unquote
Just wanted to know how much time would be spend on that and how important part of the game that is? I just think it could get really tiresome and repetative always doing that to get cash to progress in the game or maybe im wrong :P
//RMJ
It's definitely not a repetitive chore... it's a puzzle. (A puzzle that Gamespot's preview unfortunately gave away the solution to.
P.S. The game looks awesome! Can't wait to play it!!!
* One a month!
* Except we're skipping over most of the month of November!
* So we'll get episodes in October, December, January, February, March aaanddd...
... that means the last episode is schedule to come out some time in...
drumroll...
APRILish! Mark your calendars, kids!
It's at least six times faster than any other episodic gaming release has been so far.
But anyway, yay, every month I will hold a festival to celebrate Sam and Max's awesomeness by playing a new episode featuring their zany adventures! [\:D/]
Places like the neighborhood (like Bosco's and Sybil's) will appear in more than one episode, but locations that are specific to the story being told in one episode won't necessarily be accessible in the another episode... unless it also ties in to that episode's story in some way.
oh...
I'm not sure if the episode will, but the animated shorts might.
because it adds to the sense of open/non-linear gameplay (a quality highly appreciated by some of us gamers).
also, it adds to the difficulty factor: you got more choices from where to look for clues when you get stuck (if i had a penny for each time i uselessly visited every location on 'hit the road'...)
finnaly, it'd help it to look like a 'bigger' game, to contrast the 'short' sense that it's episodic nature may give it.
but i'm just speculating here, and i've learned in the past that i must not critizise without knowing, so i guess i'll just wait and see...
edit: thinking again, i think i understand why you're confused by our reaction: you've seen the final product and know how independant each episode will be, while we're still imagining it like just one big game split in six small parts.
Have you played any japanese RPGs (such as the Final Fantasy series)? There's tons and tons of grassland and other meaningless locations just to give the immersion of a large game world, and boy does it work. Very rarely these remote areas on such games have anything of relevance in them, maybe a monster or two native to the region, but you still wander around there just exploring. It's fun and if you happen to stumble upon a Very Secret Place it makes the game seem really cool and rewarding.
I can't see how it would hurt the game to have previous regions opened in the later chapters - maybe by the installer checking if you have any other episodes on your hardrive and unlocking the areas that come with it.
If you really don't see the point of opening areas without anything new, consider this: Adding an easter-egg to one of the areas that isn't part of the episode to one of the other areas. Just a couple of simple lines of dialogue or something similiar, unlocked for the people with the correct episodes installed.
To be fair, Telltale has made it clear for awhile now that it will work exactly as Emily just described it - the episodes will be independent save for some story threads. The idea has been to make each episode self-contained. For example even though people playing from start to finish will probably get more out of the story, someone should be able to jump in to episode four and it should work as one satisfying little game experience.
But what works for an RPG won't necessarily work for a graphic adventure game. Putting new locations into Sam & Max probably takes a lot of time and work on the part of the artists. For a top-down RPG it's probably less of a deal to make huge empty areas where nothing goes on, but it wouldn't translate well to an adventure. It's not cost-effective to spends months building a gorgeous environment only for it to serve no real purpose. I don't buy that it adds to immersion, either...putting a bunch of empty space for players to traverse seems like an artificial way to generate an epic feel, and probably a transparent way to bloat game time. Sam & Max episodes may be short, but if they're any good they'll be rich. When you play the season as a whole you'll visit all sorts of locations and see a big story and you may very well experience some sort of an "epic" feeling, but as Emily said, what's the point of unlocking an unused location? If it had a purpose it would be in the episode in the first place. You're right that Hit the Road gave you unrestricted access to all kinds of locations, but that's not how this game is working. (And, from the sounds of it, isn't how Freelance Police worked either.)
All that said, there are probably some cool possibilites that you could do with unlockable content in Sam & Max, but you're thinking of the season one way and Telltale designed it another.
'Nuff said.
That's not what I am saying at all. Let me break it down to you in a couple of points, maybe making more sense:
1) I don't demand it to be this way - I simply see it as a positive instead of a negative; just an idea.
2) What I did suggest was to have the areas that would be made anyway (the areas that are featured in other episodes because of the storyline there). These areas exist anyhow, so it doesn't require the team to create new environments.
3) It will most probably be very clear as to which areas are the relevant zones for the episode you are playing. It wouldn't cause you to get lost and start 'pixel hunting' all over again.
If there was a possibility to get lost in the vastness of the world caused by having the excess areas around, they could as well be greyed out in a world map or however you navigate in the game, so that you would know which zones are relevant to the current plot and which aren't.
4) Here are the positive things that this could potentially give:
- Possibility for TellTale to hide easter eggs if they feel like it into the unused zones; if you feel like it, you can hunt them down, but it's not necessary and the eggs aren't anything super awesome. Think icing on the cake.
- If a player wants to, for one reason or another, go check out "that one thing" from another episode (maybe because of a joke made in a later one referring to it or similiar), they don't have to exit the current episode and start up the episode that he wants to check out.
- Once players are playing the final episode of a season, they see a much more complete picture of the way things went with a complete road map with them.
5) The negative things that this could possibly cause:
- Some people don't like freedom of movement, so they want to be confined to the bare bones .. I don't understand why.
- Executed poorly, this might cause confusion, but it is very easy to make clear which parts are extra, which not.
There. On a more personal note, in many adventure games, I have wanted to afterwards go check out some references or just see if there's some info on a certain matter been available earlier that you didn't notice on your first time through a location. I guess that's just me.
Hope I made sense. 8-}
Yes, the episodes will be short, yes, they might be a little bit more connected than a sequel might be, but they are separate games, with their own locations, dialogue, and puzzles. Some locations may be reused, but for a reason.
The problem (and the great thing!) about adventure games is that they look like this:
Adventure games are stories. Stories are always linear. If a game isn't in any way linear, it doesn't have a story. Sure, you can have a bit of side-tracking (the different coloured paths in the picture), but in the end you always go from A to B. And B is the end. After the end, the story is over, and there's no use being able to roam about. When the game is over, it's time to turn off your computer and go to bed. Is this a limitation of the genre? Perhaps. But if it is, it's also a limitation of any other type of game that tries to tell a story. And of films. And of novels. And of bedtime stories. And of time itself, even.
You might be right. We'll see when the season is out whether any of my points are valid. The thing is that I don't see what a feature like this would subtract from the game for players that don't find it necessary.
It doesn't have to be. This is essentially like saying that "it is a limitation of computer games that you can't dish out a sequel a month after the first game". If you catch my drift.
It benefits them more to have less replay value and sell more games.
I think you'll find that the Sam & Max episodes are well designed and you'll be engrossed, regardless of how many locations are in the episodes. I'll be interested to revisit this topic at the end of the season and see if people still feel that allowing access to an episode 1 location in episode 4 is necessary.
Have you played Syberia? It has huge expanses of area just to wander for environmental purposes, and while it starts off giving the game a nice open, and successfully melancholy feel, after a couple hours you realize you've spent half the gameplay time walking through empty environments that contain no puzzles or dialogue relevant to what you're solving, and want to punch your computer screen and uninstall the game.
On one hand I see people on this board and other AG forums constantly asking for dense adventure gaming experiences - as dense as possible - and on the other they're also asking for expansive needless areas which have no relevant puzzle or story points to spread the game out... I don't really think these two requests are complementary once you set them side by side, and at Telltale - at least with the game universes and stories we've told so far - we really prefer dense tight storytelling and dense environments over huge expanses of nothing.
Who knows what we'll be doing in the future - maybe it'll be a story which emotionally hinges on feelings and atmospheres you can only create by structuring your game in that way, but for now 1) We're not really interested in doing that sort of thing at this point in time, 2) Implementing some sort of tracker which figures out which locations you do and don't have installed and allowing Sam & Max to visit those in every episode won't realistically fit in our production cycle for the Sam & Max episodes anyway, and 3) I don't think it really even fits in a Sam & Max storyline to have them needlessly go and chat through a bunch of idle loop dialogues with uninvolved characters.
Still, I understand the points made. This isn't a huge thing for me, just thought it might be something nice to have around. I really didn't think it was going to happen - though it seldom hurts to toss an idea around a bit.
I, too, am interested to revisit a quite a lot of topics after this game is halfway through the season. It's like the weather - you can tell if it seems like it's going to rain, but after a few hours it might be sunny!
How's that for a wacky metaphor?
I saw a demo of URU yesterday at a GameTap press event and was talking to Rand Miller about the real-time nature of URU. It's going to be really cool... basically a world with a story going on in it. If you don't play for six months, when you come back the world will still be the way it was before (for the most part), but the story will have progressed by six months. I'm really interested to see how that works as an adventure game.
They weren't patronizing, and they had a tangible friendship that surpassed the digital pixels they were created with. I related to that. Not that I'm digital pixels...well, maybe...but, no other game, besdies DOTT, allowed me immediate access to the characters like HIT THE ROAD did. IMMEDIATE, at a GLANCE! I knew what they were about.
It's nice to see the gaming industry with such a boom of fresh ideas recently. With episodic gaming, Wii and games like URU there's really a sense of invention going on.
It's millennium, with two Ns.