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Mystery Game X - Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers, 20th Anniversary Edition

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The same essential argument/discussion is taking place on the LSL Reloaded thread. I doubt it will be resolved here any more than it will be resolved there.

     

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Shnubble - 20 October 2014 05:57 PM
DaveyB - 20 October 2014 04:01 PM

But he said he hasn’t played the remake (nor the original)...(“What I’ve seen…” doesn’t sound to me like someone who’s played the game)

I can’t speak for him but what some people here seem to have a hard time understanding is others can take one look at the graphics and immediately decide that the remake looks a lot worse than the original.

Without actually having played either of the games?
I seriously doubt that, I mean… come on… at the very least you need to have something to compare it to.

Shnubble - 20 October 2014 05:57 PM

Everyone will have a different opinion on this, of course, but for me it’s purely about production values, artistry and craftsmanship.

Sure people will have different opinions, but looking at a static picture and actually playing a game are two very different things. And if all you truly care about are production values, artistry and craftsmanship, well… why are you then playing adventure games? AG will never (again) be able to compete with other genres in these areas.

Shnubble - 20 October 2014 05:57 PM

Edit: If I say “playtest” I’m not talking about bugs but about playing purely in order to see what was changed in what way.

That would also be the absolutely worst reason for anyone to play the game.

El Manny - 20 October 2014 04:17 PM

I don´t know, maybe I am blind and I don´t see all this things that some people are complaining about, or I am not as nitpicky as some people are, but the more I play this remake the more it feels like the original, and I hope that I will be able to finish it because in the original game I had a bug at the end that made it impossible for me to see the ending, but at least I could see it on youtube.

First of all, I’m happy to say that you are not blind!
In fact you are one of the few people that have not caught the virus, that makes the victims stare themselves blind at even the smallest imperfections, and cause them to expect absolute perfection in everything.

Also I am happy to tell you, that it is entirely possible to play the game from start to finish without encountering a single bug!
I can’t guarantee that there aren’t any, just that I didn’t encounter any myself.

Trumgottist - 20 October 2014 01:03 PM

Hi, Cesar. I don’t visit this forum much these days, but your post here was ]brought to my attention elsewhere.
...

Sooo… let me see if I have understood this correctly.
You don’t know anything about the background for his post, the amount of flack, negativity and in at least some cases, the outright hatred that has been aimed at POS?

You don’t know anything about neither the original game nor about the remake?

You don’t actually have any opinion of your own about the game, but is instead just echoing the opinions of Richard Cobbett?

And now you are making a hit and run, because someone dares to point out that you haven’t gotten the slightest idea of what you are talking about?

Did I understand that correctly or did I miss something?


Oh… And welcome back to the forum Wink

     

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To add to my earlier post on Grace’s dialogue tree and the three cut lines, here’s even more examples of some other dialogue that might have been more appropriate to cut instead of those three lines about Grace’s history. I already mentioned that a couple of the less interesting Chat options might have made more sense to cut instead, but let’s suppose the team didn’t want to cut those and still needed to cut something to shorten the dialogue tree and leave room for the lines about Grace’s history.


In that case, why not instead cut…

...redundant responses?

Grace, like many characters, often tells you twice when she doesn’t know about a topic, even in the remake. For example:

GABRIEL: What do you know about the Voodoo Murders?
GRACE: Just what I read in the papers, same as you.

And if you ask again:

GABRIEL: What do you know about the Voodoo Murders?
GRACE: You won’t get far questioning me about it, Sherlock.

This second response made sense in the original game since topics merely grayed out rather than disappearing entirely when you had exhausted each topic. Having an extra response reduced the feeling of repetition if you didn’t take the hint from the first response and asked again.

In the remake, though, with topics disappearing once they’re exhausted, this redundant second response is less useful since the topic could have just disappeared after the first response instead.


...or multiple discussions of the same subject?

Grace has two different lines (under different topics) where she mocks Gabriel’s mathematics in his bookkeeping, and two different lines (under different topics) where she talks about her Tai Chi class. Surely if the goal was to shorten the dialogue trees, these instances could have been combined or reduced to one.


I’m not saying cuts needed to be made; I’m sure many people would rather that all the dialogue be left as it was in the original game, and indeed I’m one of them. I’m just saying that even if we assume that it’s a worthwhile goal to make cuts and shorten the dialogue trees to make the game less verbose, and even if we take a non-purist’s sensibility toward the remake, then that still doesn’t mean that the remake team chose the right bits of dialogue to cut in the service of that goal. So that’s why I’m giving examples of other things that could have been cut instead of those three lines which actually told the player useful things about Grace’s motivation and history.

And if the concern was that the player needed to click too often on the “Anything At All” option to exhaust it, why not just move those lines about Grace’s history to a different question entirely? Gabriel could ask Grace about her family, for example, to cover two of those lines.

Why am I talking about such a minor thing as three cut lines? Because the remake is full of small details like this that don’t feel very well thought through to me, and there’s really no better way to illustrate this stuff than with specific examples.

     
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Iznogood - 20 October 2014 07:11 PM

I can’t speak for him but what some people here seem to have a hard time understanding is others can take one look at the graphics and immediately decide that the remake looks a lot worse than the original.

Without actually having played either of the games?
I seriously doubt that, I mean… come on… at the very least you need to have something to compare it to.

Well, stating the obvious, it’s easy to look at videos of the same scene side-by-side on YouTube, and make a decision about the relative quality of both scenes.

If the person played GK1 in all its retro-pixelated glory, I think he/she has a perfect right to comment.

However, as this person seems to be making a comment about graphic quality, (which I happen to agree with,) without have any experience with the original game whtsoever, then I agree with you.

     

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Well, this is getting exhausting.

Iznogood - 20 October 2014 07:11 PM

Without actually having played either of the games?
I seriously doubt that, I mean… come on… at the very least you need to have something to compare it to.

I certainly know about a lot more games than I’ve played and can judge if I like the graphical style and execution.

Iznogood - 20 October 2014 07:11 PM

Sure people will have different opinions, but looking at a static picture and actually playing a game are two very different things. And if all you truly care about are production values, artistry and craftsmanship, well… why are you then playing adventure games? AG will never (again) be able to compete with other genres in these areas.


First of all production values might have been a misleading choice of words. Lets call it quality of execution, style, whatever. Money is important of course, but not the deciding element, here. There are still games around that hit the mark, in my opinion, whether you want to call them adventures or not. Ghost Trick:Phantom Detective, most things from Bill Tiller or Daedalic, Broken Age, Kentucky Route Zero, Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments, The Wolf Among Us, anything from Amanita. The new Book Of Unwritten Tales and Whispered World seem to shape up nicely as far as production values go. Ethan Carter and the games from Quantic Dreams if we’re being generous.  Not perfect in every aspect of course, but graphically all of those games hit their mark.

Secondly, though, you took my statement completely out of context.
We are comparing one and the same game to itself, here. Only one time done by experienced specialists and one time done by a pretty inexperienced team.
Gameplay and story are for the most part out of the picture.
It’s likely that POS will be experienced enough to convince me in the future, but not this time.

Iznogood - 20 October 2014 07:11 PM

First of all, I’m happy to say that you are not blind!
In fact you are one of the few people that have not caught the virus, that makes the victims stare themselves blind at even the smallest imperfections, and cause them to expect absolute perfection in everything.

I see. Virus, victims, blind, smallest imperfections, absolute perfection.
I guess I should be glad the butt plug talk is over, but maybe we could stop already to disrespect other posters opinions. I have no problem whatsoever with you thinking the graphics are good enough. But you don’t seem to get that people have the right to be pissed about this game and express their opinion accordingly. If the developers want to defend themselves they can do so on their own. They usually are more relaxed about it, too.

Iznogood - 20 October 2014 07:11 PM

You don’t know anything about neither the original game nor about the remake?
You don’t actually have any opinion of your own about the game, but is instead just echoing the opinions of Richard Cobbett?
And now you are making a hit and run, because someone dares to point out that you haven’t gotten the slightest idea of what you are talking about?
Did I understand that correctly or did I miss something?

It’s very easy:
He sees the graphics of the old game that are known to everyone who hasn’t lived under a rock.
He sees the graphics of the “remake”. Maybe he thinks something along the line of: “Well, this is bullshit…”
He reads about a response from one of the developers and thinks: “Well this is bullshit!!”
Since he is a human being he feels the need to make his opinion known. He could have been a bigger man and kept it to himself, but he doesn’t need to.
Now he did also read a review online that pretty much exactly sums up his sentiments towards the presentation and the points made concerning other stuff sound convincing as well.
He chooses to point to that review instead of writing an essay.
He realizes there are people who just can’t deal with the fact that there are opinions which differ from their own and regrets having ever posted.

     

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I have just finished playing the anniversary edition and as I hadn’t played the original for ages, I really got that feeling of rediscovering a gem , familiar enough to feel like coming back home but still impressive and sometimes even challenging, as I didn’t really remembered any puzzles or solutions in detail. Gabriel Knight is a classic that seems greater now that when I originally played it, because I can compare it with all the adventure games I’ve played since and only some remarkable exceptions like TLJ or Syberia 2 have given me a similar feeling of wonder while playing them.

To give a little bit of background, I played and loved King Quest VI, all of the GK games and GM so when Jane Jensen announced her Pinkerton Road kickstarter I jumped in to get their first two games. Unfortunately I didn’t like Moebius at all, I uninstalled it after playing a couple of hours, a thing that I almost never do with adventure games at all. It wasn’t because of the problems with the animations as I really liked Cognition that had similar shortcomings, but the whole thing seemed dull and without a real soul and in the end playing it felt more as a chore than anything.

I had no problems with the graphics of the GK remake neither, I’ve loved the cutscenes, liked the backgrounds and mostly ignored the portraits, as normally I just read the dialogues pretty quick and I don’t wait for the voiceover to end the lines anyway (I noticed that Gabriel’s was probably the worst one and the handyman at the cemetery had one of the best ones though). Gabriel’s voice was jarring at places, but in general voices were nice enough.

If anything, I’m just a bit disappointed that they didn’t use this remake to polish some gameplay details that were already annoying in the original (yes, GK wasn’t a perfect game neither and I think that a remake was more than welcome). The mime puzzle and parts of the snake mound were close to infuriating. In this day and age, you can’t keep controlling a character in such a sluggish way and it makes heavy rain’s tank controls seem acceptable in comparison. These particulars puzzles should have been redesigned. Also, the interface is better this time around (no surprise there, that was expected), but sometimes I clicked on something and I couldn’t find how to cancel the action at all without playing the interaction (it happened to me twice on the snake pound’s exit and I felt like killing someone).

In the end, I’m happy to have played this remake and I’m going to replay asap the rest of the GK games, so in that way, it’s a successful remake. But it could have been better, as it is, it didn’t improve the original game that much.

     

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It probably doesn’t mean much -since it is not completely new game- but how would people rate it, if there never was original Gabriel Knight 1?

     

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Just find a review by someone who never played the original if you can to get the idea there.

My own opinion of the game is that as a remake it is neither outstanding nor the massive disappointment that some have been saying.  On the positives, I like the extras thrown in, the comic style cutscenes are great(this is one thing POS has been aces on since Cognition), the 2D backgrounds are beautiful from a technical standpoint, and the remastered music is nice. 

On the negatives, I do agree that the character models are a bit stiff, much better than Moebius but still not great, the beautiful 2D backgrounds lack a bit of the personality of the original(hidden object game feel on the remake) as well as the 3D characters versus the 2D sprites, the added puzzles for the most part are not great, and the voice acting is from an overall perspective, decent, but unsurprisingly not up to the standard of the original cast.

From an overall perspective, the game is worth getting for fans of the original and I think good enough on it’s own merit to draw new people in, especially on the mobile market.

     
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Iznogood - 21 October 2014 12:11 AM
Shnubble - 20 October 2014 05:57 PM

Everyone will have a different opinion on this, of course, but for me it’s purely about production values, artistry and craftsmanship.

And if all you truly care about are production values, artistry and craftsmanship, well… why are you then playing adventure games? AG will never (again) be able to compete with other genres in these areas.

Journey won GOTY.
HeavyRain won GOTY/BAFTA.
TWD S1 Won GOTY.
LANoire sold like anything.


Food for thought.


Come to think of it when it comes to Heavyrain, most of the people here and around the globe called Cage frustrated director, bad writer, cliched storyteller etc.
Thats not personal, thats not rude, thats Human and constructive criticism, and when
you say POS games look bad graphically… them double standards. Pan

     
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nomadsoul - 21 October 2014 04:46 AM

Journey won GOTY.
HeavyRain won GOTY/BAFTA.
TWD S1 Won GOTY.
LANoire sold like anything.


Food for thought.

But are they really AGs in the sense that Iznogood meant? LA Noire is very much a shooter in many occasions, Journey is, well, Journey (something like a platformer), Heavy Rain is a modern hybrid adventure - an interactive movie - and TWD which is closest to a “pure” AG certainly isn’t anything special in the visual or other such side (and is, again, something of an interactive movie). TWD was so successful because of the story and that stuff.

But other than that, I’m staying out of this discussion Grin I’m not really even sure what you’re talking about…

     
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UPtimist - 21 October 2014 05:31 AM
nomadsoul - 21 October 2014 04:46 AM

Journey won GOTY.
HeavyRain won GOTY/BAFTA.
TWD S1 Won GOTY.
LANoire sold like anything.


Food for thought.

But are they really AGs in the sense that Iznogood meant? LA Noire is very much a shooter in many occasions, Journey is, well, Journey (something like a platformer), Heavy Rain is a modern hybrid adventure - an interactive movie - and TWD which is closest to a “pure” AG certainly isn’t anything special in the visual or other such side (and is, again, something of an interactive movie). TWD was so successful because of the story and that stuff.

But other than that, I’m staying out of this discussion Grin I’m not really even sure what you’re talking about…


http://www.adventuregamers.com/topreviewed

You sure you are posting on Adventuregamers Grin

     
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There’s a demo out of the game, so people can try it out now and I must say, I am very positively surprised. It definetly is way above Moebius technically. Some character models are a bit wonky and some BG art looks like placeholder stuff, or at least Jackson Square looks like it is still several passes behind in quality of the rest of the scenes on the demo.

What irks me the most is the voice actor for Gabriel, who is like a mix between Elvis and Tim Curry impersonator. The voice just makes me gringe.

But all in all, just based on the demo, I’d say it feels like a solid game and definetly the best game POS has done. There’s small glicthes here and there, but with a bit polish this doesn’t shame the original at all and seems like a good way for people to get acquainted to the series.

     
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Shnubble - 20 October 2014 09:17 PM

Well, this is getting exhausting.

It sure is, but I’m not going to give up just because of that. There are a lot of principles in the air here.

Shnubble - 20 October 2014 09:17 PM

We are comparing one and the same game to itself, here. Only one time done by experienced specialists and one time done by a pretty inexperienced team.
Gameplay and story are for the most part out of the picture.

Why are gameplay and story suddenly out of the picture?
They are two of the most important parts of an AG, so why should we suddenly ignore some of the most important parts of a game, just because it is a remake of an old classic?

In your previous post you said yourself that you wouldn’t do a “playtest”, in order to directly compare the old and new version, but now you are advocating that this is exactly how we should look at it. That it is all about making a direct comparison between the two and not about whether or not the new version is actually a good game.

Well this seems to be one of the major points on which we disagree, because I believe that both this and all other games, should simply be judged on they quality, even when they are a remake of something else.

Was this remake absolutely necessary or is it significantly better than the original, perhaps not, but that is completely irrelevant and a moot point now that the game has actually been made. What matters is whether or not it is a good game, and if people both players who has never even heard of the original and fans of the original, will actually enjoy playing it. 

Shnubble - 20 October 2014 09:17 PM

But you don’t seem to get that people have the right to be pissed about this game and express their opinion accordingly.

You are right, I simply don’t get that.
Why do people have the right to be pissed about a game that they have never played?

If you have spend your hard earned money on buying a game and it turns out to be a complete disaster, then I can understand that some might get pissed and write angry posts about it.

But writing one angry post after another about a game that you have never played and have no intention on playing, nope, I simply don’t get it.

And the fact that pretty much everybody with a few exceptions, that have actually played the game more or less all say the same thing, that it is actually a quite good game that has captured the spirit and feeling of the old game, that doesn’t count for anything?

Shnubble - 20 October 2014 09:17 PM

It’s very easy:
He sees the graphics of the old game that are known to everyone who hasn’t lived under a rock.
He sees the graphics of the “remake”. Maybe he thinks something along the line of: “Well, this is bullshit…”

Lets be honest here, it is not like the picture by picture comparison that Colbett made is actually a fair comparison. In one case he is showing the screenshots in their actual resolution, and in the other he is showing a severely downsized version. It is fair enough for the points he is using them to illustrate, but it doesn’t give you a accurate “picture” of how they will actually look if you play both in full screen on a modern monitor.

And without at the very least knowing the context in which the screenshots appear?
Sure if you don’t like the graphics, don’t buy the game, but…

Shnubble - 20 October 2014 09:17 PM

He reads about a response from one of the developers and thinks: “Well this is bullshit!!”
Since he is a human being he feels the need to make his opinion known. He could have been a bigger man and kept it to himself, but he doesn’t need to.

And I and everybody else has the right to point out that he doesn’t know the full story, or for that matter that we simply disagree.

I don’t think I understand your point here, is it that he has the right to express his opinions, but no one has the right to challenge those opinions?
If that is the case then I think you have misunderstood the point of free speech, or the concept of debating an issue.

     

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Trumgottist - 20 October 2014 01:03 PM

If you want the reasons why, read Richard Cobbett’s review at RPS and to some extent his later article at PC gamer. He puts it better than I could have.

The second article is interesting. I never thought much about it before, but the background art in the original GK1 is more like the art in a graphic novel, while the background art in the remake tries to be more photorealistic. With the story in GK1, I think the stylized approach of the original, using colors to differentiate Gabriel’s world from Malia’s, works better—creates more atmosphere than the more photorealistic approach of the remake.

Gabriel Knight and the Colours of Voodoo - 18 October 2014 08:31 AM

On a wider level, the colours subvert the usual concept of warm being comfortable. Here, they’re always charged. The church that you expect to be safe is where a man dies horribly.  The voodoo ceremonies are dangerous and intimidating, with a raw power that has nothing to do with any magic that may or may not actually be happening… at least, early on. And when those sequences reach a crescendo, the colour scheme is quick to back that up as it shifts colour all the way to blood red.

None of this would work if not for the words and the storyline driving the game, but it acts as a multiplier - just one way that all the disparate elements of the game pulled together towards a common goal. The game already rests heavily on symbolism, especially in elements like Gabriel’s family medallion and the use of dragon and snake imagery. Where those are always pushed front and centre though, not least in the introduction, the colours are there to be felt more than actively noticed.

This kind of direction is, for me anyway, the main thing missing in the recent remake…

I think the photorealistic backgrounds in the remake are why they are sometimes being accused of looking like backgrounds from a hidden object game. Not that there aren’t some hidden object/casual games that aren’t stylized and use colors and shapes to say something about the gameworld rather than to copy it, such as the Drawn series. Not that the backgrounds in the remake aren’t nice renderings, but with the more realistic colors, the emphasis is different.

semi-spoiler about game environment:
Mr. Cobbett himself seems to have missed the reason the castle (the ancestral home of the schattenjagers) had winter weather in the middle of summer in the original. It reflected the way the schattenjager line was “in winter”—without the medallion, with Wolfgang’s failing strength, and without a clear successor to take up the mantle of schattenjager at the time. This is not a realistic game. It’s full of symbolism and magic and in that context it makes perfect sense for winter to have descended on the area surrounding the castle. It always made perfect sense to me why the castle was beset by winter.

     
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Iznogood - 21 October 2014 12:47 PM

Was this remake absolutely necessary or is it significantly better than the original, perhaps not, but that is completely irrelevant and a moot point now that the game has actually been made. What matters is whether or not it is a good game, and if people both players who has never even heard of the original and fans of the original, will actually enjoy playing it.

Now that the remake is made, it may be irrelevant whether it was necessary or not, but I don’t see how it’s irrelevant whether it’s significantly better than the original or not.

If I were a new player who was interested in Gabriel Knight 1 but had never played it, and I wanted to know which version to play, that question of which version is better would be very relevant to me.

Don’t get me wrong, the remake has its advantages. But it has its disadvantages, too. It’s not a clear-cut case. And if I were a new player I would want to know about both the advantages and the disadvantages, so that I could decide which one I would want to play.

Now, personally, I do think people in this thread are focusing unnecessarily on just the art and the voices, which are very easy to form an opinion about by simply looking at a video on YouTube. I don’t blame people at all for wanting to talk about those: it’s natural to want to discuss them. But the truth is that more valuable knowledge will be obtained if people point out or ask questions about the subtler differences that not everyone would notice on their own. This is one of the reasons that the Richard Cobbett review was so useful. I’d be willing to bet that even a lot of people who played GK1 in its original form don’t still remember all the little details like the thermostat repairman or Gabriel hugging his grandmother that were changed for the remake.

Not to mention many more such things Richard Cobbett didn’t mention like the girl in the original game who runs the Voodoo Museum when Dr. John isn’t there, which makes the world feel more real than just having the store being closed. Or the fact that Bruno, who wants to buy Gabriel’s father’s painting, used to visit repeatedly in the original game trying to make a deal, whereas in the remake he only shows up conveniently on the day that the game wants you to sell the painting. (And strangely, given the sequence of events in the remake, you don’t even exactly know why you need to sell the painting. You know you need the money from the painting to buy a certain object, but you’re missing some information you had in the original game about why the object you’re trying to buy is relevant and useful.)

It seems to me that only some folks here like zane are able to articulate how much the structure has been altered and how the sloppy handling of those structural changes has led to inconsistencies like Sam being retired and hanging out in a bar (like in the original game) but still taking out an ad in the newspaper for his jeweler services (a change made for the remake). There are a lot more inconsistencies that haven’t yet been mentioned here, subtler than the Sam one, but they’re there if you look. Most came up in the Backer Beta feedback thread on the Pinkerton Road forums, which not everyone here will have access to, but at some point I’m sure the ones that remained in the retail release (which seems to be most of them) will be compiled in a more public place.

I would want to know that details like this were changed in the remake if I were a new player. Now to be clear, I wouldn’t want to know every detail, because that way spoilers lie. But I would want to get enough of a sense of how my experience will differ if I play the original vs. play the remake.

Incidentally, there is a Gabriel Knight wikia on which some people have begun to list a comparison of the original and the remake. It’s a bit of a mess right now and is still missing a lot of the interesting differences. At the moment it focuses too much on art and not enough on the writing and design changes. But if there’s anyone out there with the familiarity with both versions and the ability to do a side-by-side comparison who has the time and wants to contribute, that’s probably a valuable service you could do for the community whether you love the remake, found it disappointing, or have mixed feelings about it.

     

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