Dear Esther Getting Commercial Release

    Quote from Chimeray

    A review should never be an opinion. It should review the product as accurately and objectively as possible and keep in mind the general public and set aside his own personal feelings, so basically the opposite of his own opinion. I hate reviewers that don´t get this. I´m not interested in the reviewer, I´m interested in the product.

    A review by its very nature is an opinion, an evaluation. What you're asking for is a press release minus the extra-flowery marketing text. [Blocked Image: https://migrationtest.mapcore.org/public/style_emoticons/default/mapcore_smilies/emot_shakehead.gif]

    Can't wait to finally check this out after seeing you guys spew on endlessly about it for the past two years.

    started the game, fell in the water and died.

    huge meaningless diversions at a walking pace that is physically painful.

    broken narration, voice acting that tries it's hardest with the mindless hipster shit that is the script.

    great art, nicely executed, really well done visually. pity about the pretentious hipster shit that went along with it.

    you should give the level to someone who can tell a story and knows that enabling running doesn't make a game less of an art.

    i give it 10/10 arts

    0/10 gameplays for hipster faggotry

    I'm lost for words, That was such a beautiful experience. I've never been so immersed in a virtual environment, everything about it felt alive. The sound effects in the caves were just incredible, i felt like I was there, the water trickling and splashing, just amazing. The Final level I felt was the most beautiful, I couldn't get my head around it, it was as if I was actually inside a painting. The moonlight on water broken up by half submerged rocks was perfect. And then being able to see all that from such a height was breathtaking. The soundtrack set a great relaxing yet unsettling atmosphere, and the clarity of the voice acting was fantastic. I will play this again and again for years to come, I also will probably never go outside again.

    This is truly an outstanding achievement, Robert you should be extremely proud of yourself as well as the rest of the team, and its already top seller.

    Keep your blog updated as I check it regularly.

    Cheers, Red.

    Quote from Serenius

    A review by its very nature is an opinion, an evaluation. What you're asking for is a press release minus the extra-flowery marketing text. [Blocked Image: https://migrationtest.mapcore.org/public/style_emoticons/default/mapcore_smilies/emot_shakehead.gif]

    [Blocked Image: https://migrationtest.mapcore.org/public/style_emoticons/default/mapcore_smilies/emot_shakehead.gif] No. Don´t wanna get into this too much but... Bias and subjectivity are fine when dealing with opinions, it´s what they are. However, when you´re dealing with a review, I want to get it pure, unbiased. I think a bad review is a review you can disagree with. You can´t disagree with an unbiased evaluation, it is what it is. You can say it´s incomplete, states wrong information, the conclusion is drawn with the wrong purpose in mind (not getting the product/close-mindedness), etc... but that´s it. Opinions are for blogs... And you can say "Yes I agree" or "That´s not true" to those. And as a result get irritated/confused every time those show up in a text that supposed to talk about the game rather than the reviewers feelings towards it.

    You can never get rid of all of that subjectivity, it´s only human. But the thing is that the reviewer needs to review the game, that is the focus, not himself... Not shoving his opinion down our throat. That´s just egocentrical. Where possible, just leave it be. A lot of times when I see bad review scores when others reviewed it positively it´s because of a lack of being open to it and saying the game sucks and giving all the wrong conclusions because the reviewer himself disliked it, rather than thinking what the people that actually like this want out of this game. Often also overlooking to write about chunks of information that those misunderstood readers need and then the whole think becomes a rant AND lacks substance.

    Still haven´t read that review though so I´m not talking about that specifically but just in general... Some reviewers are just douches.

    And I think there might be something wrong with my monitor Might just have to go with it even with all this tearing :S

    Quote from e-freak

    And the third thing - it didn't play the credits when the game finished. Maybe I just missed out but having to manually go back to the main menu (after waiting a minute or so) felt a bit odd. I had hoped to get a deep breath, like the final pause in an orchestra piece and then see the credits and go back to the menu. As said: really really minor, it didn't spoil my experience.

    this happened to me, too.really, really liked it. i knew it looked good from seeing screenshots, but holy shit do they not do the game justice; it looks amazing. better than skyrim.

    a few questions, and since i can't tell where the questions end and the spoilers begin, i've blacked it all out:

    1)

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    is there any way to get into the cargo ship? it looked like there was a hole in the seaward side, but i couldn't find a way to swim out to it.

    2)

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    was that a grave behind the bothy by the two stables?

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    did my soundcard glitch, or was there

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    a second voice briefly talking when i came near it?

    Just finished it. Loved it.

    The art was just amazing. My jaw hit the floor on several occasions during the cave- and the beacon section. Every corner of every environment of every chapter felt handcrafted but looked natural. There were no seams, no eye sores and no dull areas. Just consistent, wonderful environments. These environments are masterly lit and the use of audio sealed the deal when it came to immersion. I have not, in recent memory, experienced a game which gave a stronger sense of place than Dear Esther. I applaud the game in this regard.

    The music was fantastic. The voice acting and the narrative was pretty strong and I mostly overlooked their shortcomings because the music and visuals were so vivid and gripping. While I'm assuming the story is supposed to be slightly cryptic and hard to decipher, I felt that the narrator introduced too many concepts, characters and analogies to keep track of and that some of the choices of words seemed a bit forced. Despite this, the pieces of the narrative that I did puzzle together created a storyline which I was content with when the game ended. It felt like I just scratched the surface of the game's mystery, but that I understood enough of it for it to be a meaningful experience.

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    I was particularly fond of the segment where you drop down into a pool of water and revisit the crash site, albeit submerged.

    By playing Dear Esther, I hope mainstream game designers take to heart that slightly longer exploration segments can be really powerful if done right (though they have every right in the world to increase the walk speed).

    I commend our fellow MapCorian Rob for his work and I award the game five out of five animated hurgs.

    I think we all waited for a few minutes for the credits, kind of shows how good the experience was.

    First things first, the not so good parts:

    - Navigation could be improved. There where many times that it was hard to figure out where to go next specially on the sections before the cave, I'm guessing it was due to the low contrast between the textures, and that made me backtrack a lot and get a bit frustrated at the beginning. But let me say that the light/sound (the part where theres a loud seagull sound and you see the seagull flying to where you're supposed to go next was really smart) cues on the cave and the final sections where brilliant.

    - There where a lot of clipping issues that where made worst by the fact that you couldn't jump. I had to restart twice because i got stuck on the geometry. Also it wasn't always clear what rocks you could walk on and what ledges you could climb/jump off, and there where many invisible walls that kind of ruined the immersion.

    - I noticed some texture and shader issues but couldn't take any ss of them. I remember that in the final section I could see a big white semi opaque wall on the top of the cliffs from the "beach" that was probably a clip texture or something like that.

    - There was a bug with the water. When I entered the water everything turned black, which I think was intentional, but the "darkness" remained even after leaving the water which made me have to restart the game twice.

    Now the good parts

    I'm definitely going to play this again since I think I missed some important locations. I also noticed that when you restart a section some of the narrations are different, so I'm guessing the story is kind of dynamic and it wont be the same on every playthrough, so I'm curious to see how different the story can be.

    The candles were awesome at the beacon

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    Having played the mod I was looking out for the ghost, and when i saw it i shit bricks. Twice. And the one at the actual beacon really shit me up.

    I'm so glad to see this kind of game really work out sales wise

    I finished it last night, it was pretty awesome. I didn't go in having high expectations from a gameplay perspective or a "quality-game-hours-spent-per-dollar" perspective, so I knew what to expect. I loved the caves from a visual standpoint, it reminds me of my caving adventures I've done in my past except much more beautiful. The final section was really impactful though atmosphere and story wise. Loved it.

    I just hope most of the people who bought DE knew what they were getting into, and followed a similar mindset that I took to it. In that, paying to support interesting experiments, while also getting the chance to experience art-gallery levels of art direction in a game. From a gameplay perspective I can't say it was worth $10, but it was worth that "investment" for my previously mentioned points. I'd just hate for it to get all sorts of hate because of what it isn't, for the price. Certainly justifiable complaints but it's not why people like us are interested in this anyways

    EDIT: Also, I wanted to say how much I got massive Myst vibes from this. I've always wanted a game with the same level of atmosphere and "visual fidelity" of Myst to happen in an actual free-moving game world

    Quote from barrakid
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    ever seen Crash? my interpretation of the game is that it's something like that; you play as a guy who is tripping out as he dies. as his brain begins to slowly lose oxygen, everything gets more and more surreal, and all his memories begin to interweave and pile on top of each other, with the freshest memories (car crash, hospital) being the strongest and most vivid, and with earlier memories painting broader strokes; i think the herebrides were somewhere he visited as a kid that had a large impact on him.

    just my two cents.

    Quote from dissonance
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    ever seen Crash? my interpretation of the game is that it's something like that; you play as a guy who is tripping out as he dies. as his brain begins to slowly lose oxygen, everything gets more and more surreal, and all his memories begin to interweave and pile on top of each other, with the freshest memories (car crash, hospital) being the strongest and most vivid, and with earlier memories painting broader strokes; i think the herebrides were somewhere he visited as a kid that had a large impact on him.

    just my two cents.

    Yeah, I've seen that movie before, it gave me one of the weirdest boners ever lol. They're having sex but they're all so messed up that all the sex scenes become repulsive. But I think your interpretation makes sense

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