And here’s the first screenshot of Star Revolution!
What’s that, you say? It looks just like Inaria? Ah, but there is an important difference – all the graphics you see here are actually textures being drawn on billboards using OpenGL, instead of the SDL’s sprite system. Thus, I can combine 2D and 3D elements in the same scene, which will be a necessary technology for Star Revolution.
I ended up watching about four hours total of Gamespot’s Oblivion stream before I had to go to bed.
That was a fantastic idea, and I hope they do it again with other games. Watching someone play a game for an hour or two will tell you much more about whether or not you’re going to like it than a review.
Greg played for 12 hours straight, taking only a few short breaks. When he got to the twelve hour mark at 6 AM, he was actually willing to continue playing, but had to stop when the fire alarm went off! The maintenance crew was testing the alarm and had assumed that no one would be in the building at that time of day.
As for the game itself…it’s basically Morrowind on steroids with a lot of bugs and interface problems fixed, and there is nothing wrong with that. I like how bashing someone upside the head with a mace really looks like it hurts. Unfortunately I didn’t get to see anything in town, so I still don’t know how effective the much-touted Radiant AI is. Plot looks interesting, but not really exceptional. Horses were extremely difficult to control, but the “travel anywhere” feature makes them pretty much irrelevant anyway.
I’m still completely stoked about the game and can’t wait to get my hands on my own copy. Collector’s Edition, with the making-of DVD, of course.
