The Conduit - Official Thread

thas · 07-24-2008, 12:21 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by iOwnage

Anyways, the screenshots look really bad and looks nothing like the game. The videos to more justice to the game.

Like I have said before that is because it is in jpeg format which reduces quality. The videos also reduce quality, we wont know what it actually looks like until we play the game.

Zorba · 07-24-2008, 01:26 AM

i cant get over how many people really want voice chat. i personally wouldnt get it even if it was out.

generally all you get is "I PWNZ YOU NOOB" and "F*** OFF YOU CAMPING W****"

ill pass thanks.

thas · 07-24-2008, 01:36 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Zorba

i cant get over how many people really want voice chat. i personally wouldnt get it even if it was out.

generally all you get is "I PWNZ YOU NOOB" and "F*** OFF YOU CAMPING W****"

ill pass thanks.

I would normally agree, but I wouldn't use voicechat with random people. Most of the people I would play with don't seem like the type to say stuff like that.

ZEROLAZAR · 07-24-2008, 02:08 AM

^That's a gross misunderstanding, voice chat with friends is great, and why do you get offended over e-talk? I don't get why they didn't make it a headset, as now your whole family can hear the swearing, but whatever.

vashivihan · 07-24-2008, 02:47 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thas

I would normally agree, but I wouldn't use voicechat with random people. Most of the people I would play with don't seem like the type to say stuff like that.

perhaps like me?

Zorba · 07-24-2008, 03:48 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ZEROLAZAR

^That's a gross misunderstanding, voice chat with friends is great, and why do you get offended over e-talk? I don't get why they didn't make it a headset, as now your whole family can hear the swearing, but whatever.

i never said i get offended, but that doesnt mean i want to hear it. it doesnt improve the gaming experience so why bother.

the other guy said that he wouldnt use it against strangers, only people he knows. but someone also said they dont want wiispeak to be for friend codes only. so its one way or the other. or have a choice.

either way, when im playin online games, talking to the other people is the last thing on my mind.

Wii-Fi · 07-24-2008, 04:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by ZEROLAZAR

^That's a gross misunderstanding, voice chat with friends is great, and why do you get offended over e-talk? I don't get why they didn't make it a headset, as now your whole family can hear the swearing, but whatever.

I never thought about that... But yeah it's true..

nic7 · 07-24-2008, 04:47 AM

Yeah.. my friends are annoying as hell.. especially on Xbox live.. but it doesn't really bother me.

zapasant93 · 07-24-2008, 04:56 AM

i only find voice chat good when friends are online, because you know when they insult you or wear or whatever, its all in good fun, i usually tend to turn off my headset when i have no friens online, i dont like to hear that i got teabagged every other second by a 10 year old british kid

all in all, voice chat is stupid IMo without friends

vashivihan · 07-24-2008, 05:21 AM

here is another preview from TVGB:

Quote:

If The Conduit released tomorrow, nine months ahead of time, it would probably still have graphics on par or greater than the prettiest Wii game we have seen as of yet. It’s true; we saw it running with our own eyes on a high-def screen at the Figueroa Hotel just a few blocks away from the LA Convention Center during the last day of E3. The guys at High Voltage were nice enough to invite us over and set-up some hands-on time with the game along with handing over some exclusive screenshots. And while graphics don’t make a game, in the strange world of publishers consistently releasing half-assed games on the Wii, in this case they might.

If the game was released at this moment — they say that the single-player campaign just needs a polish up run through which we’re hoping will take care of a few of the bland backgrounds we saw — many of the graphics would challenge early 360 games and with nine more months of development ahead of it I don’t see why The Conduit won’t look even prettier. As High Voltage’s chief creative officer Eric Nofsinger put it: “It won’t be Gears 2, but it’s going to real good.”

As previously mentioned, graphics do not make a game great. What does make a game great is creative game design and interesting play mechanics, and from the early level that we saw, The Conduit should be providing these things. The player takes on the role of the mysterious Mister Ford who has been hired by the mysterious government agency The Trust to help fight against an invasion by creatures of unknown origin. Needless to say, the plot is quite mysterious with a few twists and turns coming at us. We, however, really didn’t get to see much of it play out as the level played had more to do with exterminating enemies than unfolding the storyline, which was fine by us; that’s what we came there for anyway.

So how was it? Well, we wouldn’t call it a revolution in the genre of the FPS, since it quite obviously is inspired by games like Halo and Half-Life, but from what we played and saw, we would lean strongly towards it being a new standard for how an FPS should be done on the Wii. Normally we’d take you through the controls here, but there is really no point. Everything, and we mean everything, can be adjusted, switched, rotated, divided, hammered, twisted, reworked and fooled around with. You can pretty much map any action to any button. When we played, we shot with the B trigger, jumped with A, threw grenades by shaking the Nunchuk, melee by thrusting the Wii remote and performed a plethora of other activities with different buttons, but it didn’t matter because we could have switched it all around easily. In fact I personally would have liked jump to be mapped to the C or Z button.

Still, being able to remap buttons is pretty standard, though not usually to this depth, but being able to adjust the look sensitivity and bounding box all while in-game is not. Not only can a player adjust multiple variants on the look sensitivity but they can do it all while playing the game so you don’t have to switch back and forth between menu and gameplay. The bounding box is the same way and is not only adjustable in ever increasing square sizes but allows the player to increase length and width separately, meaning gamers can pretty much achieve any style of FPS gameplay they like, hopefully clearing up many of the complaints with early Wii Fuss.

As I jumped into the level, which took place in a destroyed part of downtown Washington DC overrun by aliens, and swapped through my weapons (pistol and rifle to start, with an alien plasma blaster readily available after I shot the first bad guy dead) Matt Corso, the creative director at High Voltage pointed out how the lens scope on my rifle reflected the city street behind me, as I moved the reflection changed. This attention to detail can be seen all over the place. Cars reflect light, clouds move in the sky, grenades look pretty when they explode (or stick to bad guys). If this were a game on the 360 or PS3 I would call it standard fare, but sadly the norm on the Wii is not at this level so pointing out these things is important.

The guys at High Voltage didn’t just stop at pushing the graphics either. One of the things the Wii has always claimed to be is a bastion of innovative control, and yet most of the FPSs don’t seem to utilize the controller in any new way other than aiming (or letting you turn your hand sideways for no reason like in Red Steel). The guys at High Voltage though have done some thinking and introduced a gun that could only work well on the Wii. The Deatomizer is a Trust energy based gun which shoots out two blasts simultaneously. When one of the blasts hits an object, the other becomes attracted to the object and flies towards it, circling it and hitting anything in its way until it too hits the object. The key here is how it fires. As you charge, the guns reticule splits in two and the points move apart from each other, you can rotate these points around the center of the gun by twisting your wrist. This means you can aim with one point at any angle and hit with both balls making playing around corners and over ledges an entirely different experience. I’m not sure how useful it will be throughout the game but it was hella cool to play around with.

Sadly, not everything lived up to our expectations. The All Seeing Eye (ASE) which sounded like an interesting game mechanic, came off a bit gimmicky in the level we played. After knocking down a secret wall, we were able to shine it on a symbol, triggering a simple turning puzzle that utilized the Wii remote and unlocked a door which led to the Deatomizer. At another point, invisible enemy landmine-like creatures needed to have the eye’s light shined on them to reveal their location. It felt pretty standard as far as special items go. It does sound like the ASE will become a bit more than a fancy flashlight as the game progresses though. Both Eric and Matt stressed that work was still being done on its mechanics and that later in the game players would be forced to use the ASE in more complicated puzzle and battle scenarios involving some more difficult enemies.

We were playing through an early level on easy (embarrassingly, I still died once) and Matt and Eric said that the final game would be more challenging, which we hope is true because once we started playing smarter it got a bit easy to take out enemies. Not that the AI wasn’t intelligent, but they weren’t always making the smartest decisions. Most of the time, a few well placed shots would take one out.

Melee felt solid despite the fact that we didn’t get to land it much thanks to the enemies being too smart to run up to us and get hit in the face with the butt of our gun. Sometimes good AI is just a pain in the ass.

As for multiplayer, the team is still working on it. We asked if Nintendo’s announcement of Wii Speak meant they would be using the group speaker too, but answers on voice chat were still limited to the standard “We’re working on it,” though it seemed like they had known about the possibility. Nintendo had been keeping many of its other plans close to the chest though, as MotionPlus had been as much of a surprise to High Voltage as it was to the rest of us. They said they would definitely be seeing if there was any benefit to reworking the control scheme around MotionPlus, but if the opening level was any indication the game doesn’t really need it.

We’re pretty excited about the game. It isn’t going to blow the FPS market out of the water – this isn’t a Halo killer (if such a thing exists). But it looks like it’s going to prove that the Wii can be a home to high-end, well produced, visually compelling games with adult oriented themes and action. What we can’t tell you yet is whether or not The Conduit will move beyond just being a must-have because it’s the only game in town, and step up to the level of classic FPS action that will make it a truly great game. We’re sure hoping it does.

linkage

ZEROLAZAR · 07-24-2008, 05:38 AM

High hopes.

Fillieto · 07-24-2008, 10:05 AM

this game just keeps sounding better and better.

vashivihan · 07-24-2008, 03:03 PM

i realize that many people are saying that this game is nothinkg special in terms of story, etc but hers my take on it:

the selling point of The Conduit isn’t the storyline. It isn’t the gameplay. It isn’t the concept, and it’s not even the graphics. It’s the story behind it.

Here’s a bunch of people who see a console with IMMENSE potential, All this potential is being wasted completely on party games, and throwaway spinoff titles and ports. Now, here’s a developer who wants to make a first person shooter - a game genre Wii, for reasons beyond all my understanding, lacks significantly - that takes advantage of the Wii as much as possible. This developer came out of nowhere and ass raped 90% of Wii games on spread eagle on the street.

The ironic part? Before The Conduit, all High Voltage Software made were licensed shovelware, Lego Racers for PS1, and Liesure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude.

High Voltage Software’s story, combined with the actual show of effort, and results of their out-there claims, is what makes The Conduit so interesting. Anything else is just icing on the cake. this is what gets us so excited.

sremick · 07-24-2008, 03:25 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by thas

Like I have said before that is because it is in jpeg format which reduces quality. The videos also reduce quality, we wont know what it actually looks like until we play the game.

JPEG sucks. Someone could take the extra 3 seconds and save the original screen captures as PNG instead, which is lossless. You know, use some modern technology versus something crappy from the 90s.