Forums

Topic: Metroid: Other M Hype/Discussion Thread (MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS SO BE CAREFUL)

Posts 141 to 160 of 1,742

turtlelink

I don't know if i should pre-order this game, or get DQ: Sentinels of the starry skies.

TurtleLink's backloggery
Brawl FC: 4425-1340-4519
The Sister Complex Kingpin of Steel!

romulux

DaVeMaN99 wrote:

the shooting just doesn't look too hot.
After watching some gameplay clips from E3, it just doesn't look satisfying to kill enemies, and it looks a little clunky, running and shooting all over the place, not knowing what you are locking on to.

in all fairness, a lot of the people playing at E3 really suck. any game will appear to have clumsy, unresponsive controls when you give a clumsy, unresponsive person the controller, and something tells me the people overwhelmed with waiting in line for hours on end to see all the different exhibits weren't bringing their A game.

goldeneye- 5447 4748 5174

RandomWiiPlayer

I'm skipping this. Screw auto-aim.

The Game.

Is it after 9PM EST? You should probably ignore the above post.

Mandoble

WMotion as movement controller, autoaiming, static first person 3D view for me make the difference between buying it first day or waiting for a quite cheap used copy.

Mandoble

Adam

What is WMotion, and what does it have to do with Other M?

Come on, friends,
To the bear arcades again.

retired_account

I have to say, all of the trailers have been fantastic, but the E3 in-game gameplay footage looks pretty stale to me. Samus looks like she moves way too quickly, the camera looks too zoomed out, the combat looks really boring, and I see a lot of potential for camera issues.

Hopefully the combat will get more interesting later on, but my initial impressions aren't good. :/

retired_account

jbrodack

The in game footage looked a bit boring but its just the first few minutes of gameplay so I'm not too worried from that. I'm just hoping it keeps the same sense of exploration the series is known for. This seems to be more action oriented so I hope its not all fighting and wrestling moves.

Still, this definitely should be different for the metroid series with the third person view and melee moves. I'm excited to see how it turns out.

wii code: 2630-2655-0027-8482
onslaught friend code: 1977-7779-8949
bomberman blast: 1634 2282 0930

romulux

samus has always been fast, though the prime games may have made you forget it. take a look at super metroid to refresh your memory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cUhzxZzZZFQ&feature=related

auto-aim shouldn't hurt the running and gunning combat that felt so good in super metroid. i've said it before, but in metroid you do most of your shooting while running and bashing the fire button to obliterate everything in front of you without aiming anyway; auto aim lets you do the same with a little extra guidance to your shots. keep in mind that with the 1st person mode you still have total control over your shooting whenever you want.

goldeneye- 5447 4748 5174

Adam

Samus has always been fast, but never in third-person 3D space with D-pad control. Super Metroid was nothing but smooth, but this looks awkwardly animated and perhaps awkward to control.

Aiming was not difficult in Super Metroid, but auto-aim often makes a game feel like I'm not the one playing it, even if it requires no less skill in comparison with previous games that I liked.

Just my impressions from the game play footage. That could all well change the moment the controls are in my hands.

Come on, friends,
To the bear arcades again.

Mandoble

weirdadam wrote:

What is WMotion, and what does it have to do with Other M?

WiiMote, sideways, the very very worst controlling method for my taste.

Mandoble

Adam

That's... not called WMotion, but that clears it up. I think it's ideal for side-scrolling games, but I share your skepticism as to how well it'll work for Other M.

Come on, friends,
To the bear arcades again.

romulux

the negative single-sentence comments aren't very interesting to read. nintendo's trying something new and unless you've played it yourself you have no idea how it really works, so to judge it as trash from early youtube videos seems a little harsh. have a little faith: this isn't one of the many iffy 3rd party wii gambles, it's one of the highest profile series nintendo has and they're not going to release it if the controls aren't great. just look back to metroid prime, and how wrong all the naysayers were proven once they actually had the game in their hands, and remember that you can't judge a book by it's cover.

besides, most impressions about the controls have been positive. being a metroid nerd i've read everything i can find about the game and i've yet to hear any testers say that the auto aim failed them or made the shooting boring.

goldeneye- 5447 4748 5174

Adam

I was excited about Metroid Prime until I got my hands on it, so I can't hold anything against any hypothetical naysayers. Not that it was bad, but not really exciting and kind of tedious after awhile. This looks potentially better though.

I don't put any stock in early hands-on previews. They are playing very small sections of a game, not a complete product. Some game ideas, like auto-aim, can be fun in short play times but not when stretched across a gave of Metroid's average length.

Edited on by Adam

Come on, friends,
To the bear arcades again.

romulux

weirdadam wrote:

I don't put any stock in early hands-on previews. They are playing very small sections of a game

that's kind of the point; if it's too small to make a good impression, it's too small to make a bad impression. your reasonable skepticism is fine and i admit that i don't know how good the gameplay will be either, but people completely writing the game off as a failure so early with little to no reason is stupid.
i wish people who love nintendo enough to spend their time on a forum devoted to it wouldn't be so quick to pretend that they're suddenly incapable of making a good game after years and years of massive successes (often in the face of equally massive skepticism).

...

now that that's over, here are some things sakamoto said recently in regards to the controls:

"I realize that there’s a lot of influence over a control scheme in the way that you feel about a game: When it’s in 2D, it feels more direct in terms of moving exactly where you want. There’s a certain dynamism with the screen in that regard, so the player has an exact understanding of their location and orientation of their movement. We wanted to bring both elements of the immersion of 3D and that kind of connection to your location on screen that you get from a 2D game.

We’ve been able to come full circle in terms of controls. We’ve been able to take the feeling of immersion and depth of the 3D games and marry that to the accessible control schemes available in the first games."

sakamoto's not bumbling along and altering the gameplay without reason. the remote only controls are an extremely deliberate attempt to make a 3D metroid feel as much like a 2D metroid as possible, which is why you have auto-aim and no nunchuck.

team ninja themselves voiced concern about ditching the nunchuck before sakamoto convinced them otherwise, so they're aware of the potential problems and you can bet that they're giving a lot of attention to making sure the game feels good without it. the game really will feel like super metroid in 3D if it works, and according to nearly every impression, it does:

...

"The game’s auto-aim works wonderfully at targeting enemies off to the sides or above the horizon line." game informer

"You'll quickly find that while there's no real lock-on system from third-person mode, the heroine very accurately auto-targets the nearest enemy. Simply face her into the general direction, press the 1 button and your chances of success are very high.

The controls feel very responsive and Samus moves through environments extremely fast -- an attribute of the character missing from the Prime games. " ign

"Moving around and killing things in Other M is, frankly, a bit brilliant. There's a handy auto-targeting whenever the regular slithery, spiny, spiky monsters make their appearances, clinging to the walls and ceilings or popping from vents, and the controls snap nicely from one nasty to the next... it's a pleasure to pick them off one at a time before moving on." eurogamer.net

"Holding the Wii-mote horizontally is not what we were expecting, but it works. The game's intuitive enough to know where you're going using D-pad controls... The most important thing for us though was how easily we grew accustomed to the new controls and the fresh new feel that Metroid: Other M brings to the series." neurope

"players guide Samus around 3D environments with the d-pad. Digital movement in three dimensions? It sounds like madness, but this unusual idea works, partly thanks to the responsiveness of the controls. Holographic enemies are sent in for Samus to blast, with a helpful auto-aim ensuring that shots fired roughly in the right direction will hit their target " videogamesdaily

you get the point. that's just from a quick google search; there are pages and pages more out there like this. even if these are just quick impressions, it gives you a pretty good amount of confidence that what sakamoto and his team are doing is a good idea.

Edited on by romulux

goldeneye- 5447 4748 5174

Mandoble

"the remote only controls are an extremely deliberate attempt to make a 3D metroid feel as much like a 2D metroid as possible, which is why you have auto-aim and no nunchuck."

And what is the reason to make a 3D metroid feel like a 2D one??? After reading that I've got the impression that this is just aiming to save development/testing hours, not to make the live of the player easier. It also gives them the opportunity to degreade the level of detail of the graphics, as with current POV the player's eyes will be always "far away from the scene", except for static shooting in first person view, and there you cannot move. I would really wish to be wrong, but all this doesnt smell well for me, I sounds like lets create a cheap metroid, lets hope it sells as good as the great old ones, and lets sell the idea that all this new control/view/fire design is aimed to return to the real roots of original Metroid.

I've played and finished all the 3 Metroid Prime FPS games and never got a single movement/aiming/shooting problem with the nunchuck, it was all smooth, intuitive and user friendly.

Mandoble

romulux

Mandoble wrote:

And what is the reason to make a 3D metroid feel like a 2D one??? After reading that I've got the impression that this is just aiming to save development/testing hours, not to make the live of the player easier.

the analog stick has been the standard for well over a decade. at this point it's not going to bust the budget to use one; do you really think nintendo is pinching every penny so hard with metroid, one of their top franchises, that they won't even spring for the same analog control scheme used in every cheap old game for the last 13 years? don't you think spending the time figuring out how to make D-pad controls to work effectively in 3D space is much more difficult for them than just using any tried and true analog scheme?

having grown up with super metroid i think the appeal of making a metroid that feels like the old games again is self explanatory, but if you don't understand, the point is that metroid changed a lot during the prime series and, as great as it was, it sacrificed a lot of the things that made samus herself. she went from being one of the most smooth and agile characters around to a stiff and slow moving tank in the prime games.

sakamoto and his team made the original games but not the prime series, so this is the first 3D metroid from the original creators and they have a very different vision of what a 3D metroid should play like than retro studios did. to them, super metroid is still the definitive metroid and this is their attempt to bring that style of gameplay into the modern era without losing what made it what it was.

Mandoble wrote:

It also gives them the opportunity to degreade the level of detail of the graphics, as with current POV the player's eyes will be always "far away from the scene", except for static shooting in first person view, and there you cannot move.

i have to say, you're being cynical to the point of making no sense.

goldeneye- 5447 4748 5174

Adam

Being in third-person most of the time (though I agree looks too zoomed out) isn't going to let them cut corners with the graphics considering you can enter first-person view at any time. Graphics will have to be detailed for then. They're also doing a lot of FMV, it sounds like, perhaps more than Retro did. That's not cutting corners or penny pinching. I see no evidence at all of trying to make a cheap cash-in -- if they wanted to do that they could have reused MP3's engine and just made new levels with one or two new features (hey, SMG2, what's up) -- but instead they develop a brand new game from the ground up and hire a high profile external team to help. Not that I'd blame them if they would make a cheap sequel as long as it ends up fun, but it really does look like they're putting all their resources into this. If Sakamoto makes comparisons to the 2D games, it's because he has never worked on a 3D Metroid before, and it's his series.

Edited on by Adam

Come on, friends,
To the bear arcades again.

Mandoble

Saying that "super metroid is still the definitive metroid" is like forgeting that the most advanced, playable, enjoyable, detailed and immersive Metroids to the date are just these comming from Retro S, and not from Sakamoto. At least this is my point of view, which might sound to you as cynical as you want.

This also comes from Sakamoto:
"Sakamoto has stated that he wants to live up to public expectations of Nintendo to deliver products similarly unique to those of his youth, describing WarioWare, Inc. as a prime example of this effort. Regarding his professional relationship with Shigeru Miyamoto, he believes his own mission is not to compete but to "always come up with something very different from what Mr. Miyamoto is likely to do"".

Mandoble

Please login or sign up to reply to this topic