Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

[NSW] Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing In Disguise

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    [NSW] Deadly Premonition 2: A Blessing In Disguise

    I should write my closing thoughts on Panzer Paladin by can't seem to come uop with anything decent, so let's dive into Deadly Premonition 2.

    I've only played a couple of hours and I won't spoil them: let's just say it's delightfully Deadly-Premonitionly, with weird characters, even weirder dialogues, janky controls, and terrible framerate.
    You can't really escape from it, DP2 runs horribly. Inside buildings the framerate varies wildly between 20-or-so FPS and slightly below 10, depending on the complexity of the scene. Outside, while going around the city of Le Carré, framerate dips to new lows, with aggressive pop-ins and 2D elements replaced with 3D models when really close to York; shadows are there, but not all of the time, and the clouds on the skybox are a mass of badly-defined pixels. But then again, while gazing at the skybox, I discovered two UFOs hauling wooden boxes around. DP2 reminds me of D4 in lighting, user interface, and overall style, and it's like that game's engine forced to run on a Switch and manage an open world with very little or no optimization. There's a lot of stutter, too: after getting a gun, I was asked to shoot five wooden boxes: after shooting the gun, the game froze for a second, possibly to load the box's destruction animation. Loading times are longish, and before the load is complete, any animation on screen freezes, and every time I fear the game has locked up.
    Another, minor, thing, some subtitles are out of synch with the dialogue. Voices are exactly what you'd expect from a Swery game: York is still York, and the voice actor almost revels in his performance. The rest of the cast sounds...well, Deadly-Premonitioly as well, and fit perfectly in the game.

    The first two hours are somewhat linear, and are used to introduce characters and plotline. It's nice to bask again is DP's weirdness, and I could go on describing some of the best things happening, but it would be a disservice to anyone wanting to play it. Yes, it's the first two hours, but these two hours are a great introduction to the game.
    As for mechanics themselves, I think movement and aiming are better than DP1, and the overall pacing is much quicker, with a lot of unnecessary fluff cut for good measure. Unfortunately a lot of flavour text and secondary interactions have been cut as well.

    I'd say that right now DP2 feels exactly like how a DP game should feel like, which is a good thing.

    #2
    Cheers for this. Do you think the overall structure will be similar? Openish world etc?

    Any chance of a review for the site when done?

    Comment


      #3
      The structure is the same: a city acting as overworld, with locations available depending on the time of the day. It's DP thru and thru, only in a different city. Maybe less Twin Peaks references, but let's see about that :P

      Comment


        #4
        It's insane this is out and I've yet to start it, still waiting for some performance patches in hopes of playing it in a bit of a better state

        Comment


          #5
          The recent patch improves the framerate a bit. It also helps to close the game every 2 hours and restart it. Seems like the game may be bad at garbage collection in the background and slows down over time.

          The game is a technical mess but it really isn't bothering me. I'm not saying releasing a game in this state is ok but I'm so absorbed by it that it isn't really affecting my enjoyment.

          The first game was a labour of love made over about 7 years so there were lots of small touches, depth to the town and quirky little features that aren't in this. It's on a new engine (Unity, which is a very poor choice for an open world game) and everything has been built from scratch so the game is missing lots of the little audio cues, animations, interesting side quests, world building etc of the first. This feels a bit like a proof of concept compared to the first game.

          All fo that said, I've played 36 hours so far and I've just hit what I think is the halfway point. I'm absolutely in love with the game. It isn't as charming or as good as the first game but it is so far my GOTY 2020. It's weird and obtuse and broken and lacking but York is still York and it's nice to be back in a weird budget mystery game.

          Comment


            #6
            Originally posted by chopemon View Post
            All fo that said, I've played 36 hours so far and I've just hit what I think is the halfway point.
            Woah - are you going hard on the side quests? That seems long.

            I got this at launch but will admit that I'm holding back a bit to see what happens re: patching. I understand the patch so far was primarily to address some poorly-executed story elements surrounding a trans character, and there are some vague commitments to address overall performance in later ones. I enjoyed DP1 a lot, and I expect a certain level of jank, but I know a lot of people in a similar position who are still finding the current performance to be pretty miserable.

            Comment


              #7
              PC version when?

              DP1 was my 27 out of 8 Game of the Lifetime.

              Comment


                #8
                I actually think the game clock might be lying. I had some weird save game disappearances last night and I don't think the clock is accurate. It doesn't feel like I've played that much.

                I played through the trans bit that was patched last night and it's a bizarre bit that people got hung up on. The complaints were that York dead names and misgenders the character. Two lines at the end of the chapter have been rewritten to stop him doing that

                but the character dead names herself and and discusses her past as a different gender herself. That character is obsessed with her past and won't let go of it. Not just her gender but all aspects of her past. So before the patch, York just follows her cue and refers to her in the same way that she did when talking to him. I'm a cis guy so my opinion isn't as important as a trans person's on this, but York was not being nasty or intentional with the language he used, he just copied how the woman talked about herself.



                i am absolutely in support of trans rights and am disgusted by transphobia but in context, this didn't seem as problematic as people were making it out to be. Again though, I'm a cis guy so I have a very different take on it than a trans person.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Hearing that the latest patch has made a pretty big (positive!) difference to the frame rate of the open world bits.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    PLEASE say this is gonna come out on Xbox One???!!!

                    I *would* get a Switch to play it on but I don't really wanna buy a Switch at all.

                    But if I have to, then I'll have to!!!

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Game completed. Took way less than expected, though I didn't spend too much time clearing sidequests.

                      And...what a disappointment. Deadly Premonition 2 has the charm and quirkness Swery games have came to be known for at the beginning and the end, but everything in between is so generic, hollow, underdeveloped or downright unfinished that it hurts. This is a skeleton of a game, something that requires at least 6 months of further development to address the many technical faults, flesh out story and characters better, and make for a more interesting game.
                      Patch 1.0.3 does address some of the framerate issue, but loading times are still horribly long, and there are second-long stutters whenever the game needs to load in world elements, enemies, or even animation for objects that are already in the scene (like wooden crates crumbling down). At times subtitles aren't synched with the dialogues, and during a whole chapter the animation of York lighting a cigarette wouldn't play, despite hearing the sound effects. Button inputs are another problem: at first I thought it was due to the framerate because I was trying to get off the skateboard while the game was struggling to stream city assets, but with the latest patch I had buttons stop working entirely until I found the one that for some reason did, which would then unlock the others.
                      The game looks barely competent, all assets look bland and are repeated to the Nth degree; animations look like they were done by a junior artist who just learnt how to use a 3D program, something you would see in a game done with free assets taken from the Unreal/Unity store.

                      Deadly Premonition 2 uses elements from the first DP and D4, albeit from the latter in a more passive form. The game is divided between 2005, in which you play as York in the city of Le Carré, and 2019, where you take the role of Aaliyah (spelling 99% wrong) and Simon, two FBI agents investigating Zach in his apartment in Boston. The 2019 sections clearly recall D4 in graphical style, interface, and progression, but everything you need to do is going through all possible hotspots. Not all hotspots are required to progress, and more than once the game advanced while I still had things to inspect; you can use one insight point to see which hotspots are required, and this appears to be the only use of this feature...multiple times I've used insight hoping to see an extra, even optional, interaction point, but alas this proved futile every single time.

                      The 2005 portions are more in line with Deadly Premonition 1, but feel like a massively scaled down version of it. The skateboard is a very nice addition, and allows you to travel fast between both distant (say, the opposite sides of the map) and close locations (say, 100-200m), but the city of Le Carré is empty, with locations spread all over the map and only token animals and UFOs to shoot in between.
                      All elements from DP are there, but are much more linear and much less fleshed out: gone is the flavour text dedicated to random objects, and York's ramblings are much less pertinent to the case and more about random stuff. I do admit that these ramblings are fun and more than once made me smile, but I would have loved more insight about the case. His interactions with Patricia, a little girl acting as his assistant, are much more interesting but there are two-three new dialogues each chapter, and there's a lot of repetition. Also, if you bump into anything (even a bad pavement/sidewalk connection or a generous invisible wall), get targeted by an enemy, or press the wrong button, these dialogues stop abruptly and you'll have to wait them to pop up again.
                      Crime scenes investigations aren't really investigations but, again, choosing an hotspot and listening to York basically explaining everything to you. Despite the game putting an emphasis on Zach's profiling abilities you never profile any possible perpetrator, you are just thrown into a story in which main characters, or what you think are main characters, appear and disappear in the span on a chapter. Interactions with other NPCs is kept to a minimum within the main plotline, and dedicated sidequests only reveal slightly more than what perspired from mandatory plot points. Mysteries are very badly kept, and there are a couple of twists there for the sake of twists, rather than being meaningfully woven into the narrative.
                      And don't play DP2 if you haven't completed DP1: you'll completely miss what the ending is all about.

                      Every once in a while York will hit a story-induced roadblock, and there Hougan will come to help in the form of a not-so-cryptic oracle. I love how York mimicks Hougan's Cajun accent when recapping what he said, and after receiving an oracle, you'll need to tell York where to go. Only that York already knows where to go, and he's sort of testing you out. All oracles are pretty simple, and if you wait long enough York will basically spell the location out. In just one occasion I felt there was a leap in logic, but there are no penalties for failing, if not receiving less money...but money isn't exactly a problem, you only need to buy a lunch per day, enemies drop enough bullets and restorative items to keep you going.
                      Enemies range from stray dogs, passing through squirrels, to alligators. And that's about it for Le Carré during the day. When you reach an anomaly, new opponent threaten York...or do they? Not really, no enemy, not even bosses, are menacing enough and go down with a few well-placed shots and some dodges. I'm not complaining much about how good the combat is, DP2 is not a third-person shooter, but how "grounded" these fights are, and how boring going through anomalies is. The only two interesting boss fights (again, not about the fight itself, but about the idea behind the boss and the fight) are the final ones, and are still a far cry from what DP1 offered.

                      Not everything about Deadly Premonition 2 is bad, in fact some elements shed part of DP1's clunkiness, but whereas DP1's qualities shined through the tick girt of questionable design ideas and poor technical performance, DP2 only has a fraction of that: it really feels like a rushed product most of the times, with only a hint of what made DP1 so beloved.

                      Comment


                        #12
                        Oh dear. Gutted. But you never know what'll happen, this is 2020 innit.

                        Comment


                          #13
                          I'm two-three hours into this and so far a little mixed. Much of the experience has been a real drag, the game takes an immense amount of time to surrender some control to the player so feels like it's really indulging itself with some boring cutscenes. When it eventually let me out and about I braced for the framerate (which is terrible) but as I move from mission to mission it's starting to build a stronger sense of that DP personality up.

                          It still amazes me this is a Switch game, the least suited format and hardware for a game of this content and also shoddy build. But, a bit like Shenmue III, I'm trying to just surrender myself to enjoying the fact that against all odds it even simply exists.

                          Comment


                            #14
                            I played this for 2-3 hours and gave up, it just didn't click at all, and this comes from someone who really loved the first game. What a disappointment.

                            Comment


                              #15
                              So, about a third of the way in I assume with Episode 1 complete taking down 20 of the 60 or so missions. There are definitely issues and cut corners but having held with the experience I have to admit the last hour has really pulled it back to feeling like the original experience more. The chain of events basically being after spending hours wandering the dull town and spending little time getting to know the locals because the game doesn't prioritise this as much as the original I finally entered the first real enemy filled area.

                              There's nothing new or interesting about it but it was a welcome change of pace given how many hours the game withholds combat from you. I worked through the enemies and end up facing a giant unborn baby. Then the next boss, a minute later York made me laugh out loud at work as he goes 'Excuse my French Zach.... but this case can go f--- itself' which was unexpected and hilariously frank for a chage from York, timed perfectly after what you just witnessed. Less than a minute later I'm watching a man in his underpants playing the saxophone and it just felt so utterly like Deadly Premonition.

                              I'm back into the start of the town wandering stage of the game for Episode 2 so it'll likely climb back down as an experience but there's already part of me thinking that if they made a better paced Deadly Premonition 3 on PC then they could well recapture the magic of the original.

                              Comment

                              Working...
                              X