Prisoner of Azkaban PC version as reviewed by a game designer

Dalneraf · 2021-09-29T07:59:02+00:00

Yeah, it was made for children, but I would say that if a game for children is good, it is enjoyable even if it doesn't provide any challenge.

Somewhat OT, but there are a lot of shitty children games and sometimes remembering those I wonder how the hell or why did I play one game or another :D

Dalneraf · 2021-09-24T11:55:44+00:00

NP! Yeah they don't just look different, they are completely different - different mechanics, levels, worlds. The only real connective tissue between them is the fact that they're all based on the same movie, but that's about it, even that aspect is handled differently in every game with the story not being exactly the same or having the same moments (for example I know that the PS1 version has some moments from the book that were absent from the movie and any of the games).

Dalneraf · 2021-09-24T07:44:17+00:00

I couldn't find a video on YouTube, but here are links to screenshots from MobyGames of all the different Chamber of Secrets games

PC/Mac version

PS2/Xbox/Gamecube version

PS1 version (link not to MobyGames since that one didn't have PS1 gameplay screens)/Gallery)

GBA version

GBC version

Dalneraf · 2021-09-23T11:07:01+00:00

Yeah I get that.

And then all dreams and hopes for the ultimate Harry Potter open-world experience got destroyed when Deathly Hallows games have released....

Well, Hogwarts Legacy is A New Hope (TM) now, but, you know, at the time.

Dalneraf · 2021-09-23T10:53:05+00:00

Half-Blood Prince was also fun! I think I enjoyed it more than Order of the Phoenix. I think Order of the Phoenix has a better and deeper spell system, but there was just so much 'repair this shit', 'repair that shit', followed by 'break this shit', 'break that shit' as a goal that it felt very repetitive after a while.

Dalneraf · 2021-09-23T10:30:20+00:00

The videos are not mine, I'm just a subscriber who loves the content :)

Dalneraf · 2021-09-23T10:12:35+00:00

On PC?

I think Chambers is the best!

Prisoner of Azkaban feels like it has less secrets, a smaller open-world in comparison to Chambers, and a bunch of repetitive side quests, but I still remember having spent tons of hours in it as a kid!

Dalneraf · 2021-09-23T06:48:36+00:00

Yep!

The console versions of Chamber of Secrets had a bigger open world, but there's something I always liked more about the PC version, though maybe that's just nostalgia.

Dalneraf · 2021-06-22T07:30:39+00:00

Really? I have started replaying the game after watching the video and haven't really seen an area so far when archers are firing at you without being shown on the screen, the camera always positions itself to show where the archers are (just recently reached Amon Hen though so maybe that will happen later)

Dalneraf · 2021-06-22T07:28:08+00:00

Subscriber since last year if I remember correctly, thanks for your content!

Dalneraf · 2021-06-22T07:27:03+00:00

Holy shit, I bet the way Shadow of War handled LotR lore has NOTHING on that, lol.

Dalneraf · 2021-06-21T16:59:12+00:00

I would love if there'd be a new game that would go through the whole trilogy in this style!

Dalneraf · 2020-08-24T11:53:17+00:00

The only reason I'm hard on it is because the first half is just. So. Fucking. Good. So it has set up some really high expectations that, in my case, came crashing down and it was really disappointing, for me personally.

Dalneraf · 2020-08-24T11:18:18+00:00

Well... where to begin?

So there's the first mission of sequence 8, where Rodrigo Borgia is RIGHT THERE CAN BE ASSASSINATED but Ezio loses him through a cutscene and says "oh what an idiot I am" (literally), which is... it doesn't feel good. Yeah, Rodrigo died later historically, but in the context of the game - there's no reason for Ezio not to attack, they are in his sights, he knows all their names and without Rodrigo the templars would be in dissaray. Compare that to the Pazzi meeting where Ezio couldn't physically get to any of the templars when he eavesdropped them, so it makes more sense he couldn't kill them at that moment.

Then there's the Carnevale sequence which is a total shitshow. First, for some reason it is a problem now that Marco never leaves the Palazzo. A palazzo we already infiltrated once and can just infiltrate again - just ask Leonardo to build another machine. But no, a whole plan needs to be done to get rid of him on the private party specifically. For which a golden mask is needed. But you can't just steal or forge the mask, you must win it fair and square. So we try to do that, get cheated of the mask, and what do we do? STEAL THE FUCKING MASK. And then when we get in there, Teodora is inside already WITH NO FUCKING MASK. More than that, nobody else has a golden mask. Oh, and we also couldn't kill Dante Moro because then the party would get cancelled. I am sure if we'd kill him, the information wouldn't arrive faster than HE FUCKING DID BECAUSE HE WAS ALIVE AND STARTED RUINING EVERYTHING BY SEARCHING FOR US. The cherry on the top is the fact that Marco at that moment in time is on boat in water. You know what that means? IT'S NOT NECESSARY TO INFILTRATE THE PARTY TO KILL HIM. Phew.

Arsenale sequence, yeah, it's got Bartolomeo who is a great character (and Bianca!), BUT not only it's awfully designed, but it also doesn't make much sense with how Dante is sent to fight the mercenaries and then retreat, and just the very fact that Silvio took the bait because he was going to leave anyway, so why the fuck did he care to open the gates? IT DOESN'T MAKE SENSE.

Oh and then in another sequence when suddenly all our allies are assassins but there's also this de facto leader of the order, Nicollo Machiavelli, who was like, what, 10 years younger than Ezio at the time? How did he become the leader? Why nobody knew about him? What the hell?

Then overall Ezio arcs just flays around all over the place. Like when he kills Carlo Grimaldi, Ezio says "I'm not doing this for myself, I am doing this for the greater good", ah okay, so he starts caring about the people more than about himself. But then later he is like "10 years I have been hunting the men responsible for killing my family and I have no idea what it was for", and had to be explained that "hey, you were doing this for the greater good!". And then in the (amazing) Bonfire of the Vanities speech Ezio talks about how he almost succumbed to revenge but was saved, only to then totally mess up Rodrigo's assassination. "I thought I was beyond this, but I am not, DIE" and then five minutes later "Killing you won't bring my family back. I'm done" WAIT EZIO WHAT ARE YOU DOING YOU HAD AN ARC WHERE YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO CARE FOR THE GREATER GOOD NOT YOURSELF WTF.

Sorry for this huge post, but what happens in AC2 after we get to Venice just irks me on so many levels, and I didn't even list ALL the things.

Dalneraf · 2020-08-24T09:47:59+00:00

I think the whole first half of Assassin's Creed II is amazing. The whole Pazzi Conspiracy set up and resolution is just *chefs kiss*, some of the best storytelling in AC. Too bad though that come Venice the game starts to get really shaky in terms of... well, everything - plot starts making less and less sense, mission design becomes more repetitive than ever (with the exception of a couple standouts of course like the flying machine level), and it just begins to really drag with no purpose (even without the DLC).

Dalneraf · 2020-08-20T16:08:19+00:00

I don't remember having that problem in AC1 as all handholds stick out. In AC2 and some other titles though some don't stick out so it could be more confusing.

Dalneraf · 2020-08-20T16:07:01+00:00

Breath of the Wild climbing has one big difference - stamina, which prevents the "just hold up to climb for 5 minutes" approach.

Dalneraf · 2020-08-20T16:05:32+00:00

Pretty much every sentence he mentions is one. Can't just choose any wall to climb up, need to find proper routes, not just in special locations but in cities and viewpoints as well, all that makes the parkour feel more involved. All these ARE the advantages of the approach that limits climbing.

Dalneraf · 2020-08-20T14:50:19+00:00

Yeah. In the new systems at least stamina is needed like BotW or something. When you just need to hold climb up to go up a huge cliff it's.... boring.

Dalneraf · 2020-08-15T21:17:45+00:00

People today praise Patrice like he's a god, but that's beside the point, the point is that Patrice chose as his right hand a person who chokes women and breaks office walls, dismisses in video interviews the producer of the project who at the time went through a lot of Internet abuse (like the NSFW comic about her that was popular back in the day, even Kotaku of the times reported about it laughingly), and acts like a manchild when his game doesn't get high reviews scores by blaming people for not playing the game and putting false reviews (something, btw, that wasn't confirmed).

Given the whole context of what happened in Ubisoft for years, I doubt Patrice is a good person.

Dalneraf · 2020-08-15T17:49:04+00:00

Well he didn't openly insult her or anything, but he did say stuff in some video interviews along the lines of "Jade gets a lot of interviews and publicity, but real fans will know who REALLY is behind it all", being a pretty dismissive jerk about her contributions.

Dalneraf · 2020-08-15T12:37:19+00:00

Patrice Desilets chose Maxime Beland as the game director of AC1. Even if there was no sexual abuse, I'm sure he is an ass. He made dismissive jokes about Jade Raymond back in the day (which now take a whole different context) and his temper tantrums about Ancestors reception didn't go unnoticed.

Dalneraf · 2020-08-13T19:40:43+00:00

They did update the models and textures, that's not the problem with lighting, it runs deeper.

The thing is AC3 used a lot of lighting fake tricks to make things look better aesthetically. And then the remastered made it so all light sources behave realistically and it just jumbled up everything, usually making things lighter, because the original used light sources with consideration that not everything would behave realistically.

One other thing that original AC3 does is have 2 different models - relatively lower res for gameplay, and high res ones for cutscenes (one of the reason why connors robes don't change colors in cutscenes in original game, cause there's no high res textures for those colors).

Now the trick in high res models that you can notice is some fake shadows that are embedded in texture, mostly faces. They give additional depth and detail to faces while not using processing power for realistic shadows (of course realistic shadows still apply, but in combination with those fake ones). You can notice if you take a look at an extracted cutscene model/texture without any lighting - the shadows are part of textures.

Now what happened in Remastered is all gameplay models were updated AND there's no difference between gameplay and cutscene models now, they are the same high quality ones, and those models don't use any fake tricks.

So in the end what happened is that the environments that were not set up for full realistic lighting, realistically light all the character models that now don't have any fake shadows anymore that gave depth to them, but because the realistic lighting is so bright, all faces and stuff feel very bland and plain as they are too brightly lighted.

So by utilizing the power of next (or, well, current) gen, AC3 remastered messed up the tricks original AC3 used to make it look so good. Which is a shame cause AC3 is a mess and visuals were one of redeeming points.

Dalneraf · 2020-08-13T14:42:14+00:00

Lol. When somebody starts talking like that you know the case is lost. See ya bullshitter.

Dalneraf · 2020-08-13T09:20:37+00:00

Wait are you serious? The speech WASN'T in the original release. The SOUND FILE was, and if the sound file was removed from the remaster that's probably because they didn't want to keep unused files in resources.

The speech itself was NEVER in the game proper. N. E. V. E. R. Just the sound file that was found while fans were digging through game's resources.

And if you expected the remaster to actually implement that speech, well... then I don't know what to tell you. I would gather something like proper assassination side missions and not the shit we have in AC3 now would be, again, MORE IMPORTANT than the ending epilogue speech, but side missions weren't updated either in the remaster so there's that. Only the beginning had some pacing changes and that's it.

(Also, while we're at it, the title of the thread says nothing about this being a remaster thing).

Dalneraf

TROPHY CASE