WOT - don't think there is a demo. It should be ass-cheap now though. Unreal/UT tech, but quite advanced from Unreal itself. You play a female magic user, there's a pretty cool variety/combination of spells. I liked it a lot, in fact I can't see of anything seriously detrimental, but your mileage may vary of course.

Agree with all your comments in that post.

Although the issue of combat from a FPS perspective. You can have simple melee combat from an FPS POV, in fact you could probably have more complex melee combat with combos and all. Sure it won't look as good as from 3PS, but there's no need for fantasy FPS to be restricted to magic only... Aside from melee there's bows, crossbows, repeater crossbows, blunderbuss (yay for fantasy quake!), simple pistols, throwing daggers, throwing axes, crude grenades/bombs, primitive flame throuwers....very FPS suitable whilst retaining a strong fantasy theme.

Hellgate looks cool. But in a different way.

BTW, you've played Undying, right? Not quite the same but some good fantasy/gothic shit in that fo sho. 

...

http://www.projectoffset.com/

Not much there yet, but if they finish this it would be very close to the kind of thing I've been wanting. Specifically the, "If you are an archer, you can lead targets, because it is an ACTION GAME and FPS skills apply" - is awesome. 

Considering they have only 3 men to make this AAA game i assume they'll never finish it :) 

A couple of things I'd like to clarify briefly:

"Project Offset" is our working title for the game, not the actual name.

We are using a new engine that I started development on about a year ago, not an existing solution.

Lastly, and most important: we have no intention of developing the entire game with just the 3 of us! We are actively looking for investors and publishers, and encourage interested parties to email us. (See the team page).

Thanks to everyone for checking out our latest update, and keep us bookmarked for future updates.

Sam McGrath

http://www.projectoffset.com/news.html

Lets hope they do finnish it 

Swedishing it. 

Is the use of 'to' in your title correct, or should it be 'too' ?

I'll be keeping an eye on your posts in future mister Phait 

=P 

Now obviously this is VERY early days, but I think the idea sounds excellent. Like really cool indeed. In fact, someone page Tronyn after he was asking about fantasy FPSs on his Hexen/Heretic thread.


Guess someone did page you ;) 

It looks pretty promising. It'd be a shame to see it go to waste =/ If they don't finish it #tf can do the work! 

where's that post from? 

The whole fantasy/medieval setting is pretty cool. Artwork, themes, weapons, gore. For me, Hexen II is still one of the best looking shooters i've seen. Imho, the whole H/H thing was let down a bit by shitty churn-em-out level design, though Hexen II had some great levels and Heretic II was a very nice game. I couldnt even play Heretic till i discovered the Doomsday engine; otherwise, it was just too "Serious Sam" for me.

Modern games are just a dollar industry now. I did catch a little of Painkiller but probably not enough to comment.
New games == vista == industry upgrade == mostly crap
Love to see someone make a fist pumping Hexen III. Maybe they haven't because they dont want to remind people they made these flawed titles ?

: Remember When Raven Software Was Good ?
Raven's newer games are ok... Quake IV was my favourite in ages. And even so-so games like Jedi Knight, SoF and Star Trek Elite Force got rave reviews, and have a style and quality that set them apart.

@Tronyn
Saw Rapture recently ... Storm level and Mjolnir - f-ing great ;>

"Go in peace and you will surely die." 

I'm partial to fantasy-type themes (not cliche, RPG fantasy if possible, but fantasy anyway). That particular map was inspired by Rune (new at the time!) with the Nordic theme and all.

In my opinion, Raven made Quake IV because id wants the Quake series, like basically all of their series' now, to go on indefinitely, so that there will always be a new game in development (on whatever platform)... but I was really disappointed that they chose to do that, because to me Quake IV looked _exactly_ the same as Doom3. I suspect this is a consequence of id designing an _extremely_ limited engine with Doom3, which was really only suited to rendering dark, futuristic indoor environments. They (id) have come a long way from the groundbreaking, dark violent bunch of nerds who unleashed Quake on the world, and I think they've basically lost everything which made them great in the process. And Raven has basically gone down the same path with them.

On the bright side, though, now that Intel has purchased Project Offset it is almost guaranteed to actually come out. My PC will NOT be able to run it, but I'm sure I'll be able to play it somewhere. 

On the bright side, though, now that Intel has purchased Project Offset it is almost guaranteed to actually come out.

Word. Word? Hit me with some details homie. Was always well keen on Offset. 

I don't know any more than they posted at http://www.projectoffset.com/news.php

The only fact I can derive from this is that it almost certainly will come out. Intel would be dumbfucks indeed to buy an engine and spend the money on nothing. Even if the engine is used for TONY HAWK TIGER WOODS FOOTBALL WARCRAFT THE SIMS NOOB AWESOME LOOOL games, even if that is what Intel wants to do with this engine, the game itself based on this engine (aka, conceived and created, for the most part, before some asshole in a suit had a chance to influence it in any way) WILL come out. Dark Messiah was great (I loved the archery), I can only hope this will be even better. 

They will probably never make a game of it and just use it for tech presentations. 

Cynic.

Of course it'll get released, why give out a tech demo for free when you can charge people 30� to install it for you? 

Sadly there aren't too many cool Hexen 2 maps, even though it's based on Quake... the textures are nice... the monsters are supernice...

why is no one making maps for it? I'd play them...

I think the original game's levels weren't convincing enough, for example the castle wasn't constructed properly, it was a bit like some nerds from California (or wherever) imagined the middle age...

now if there was a Hexen2 unit that looked like Day of the Lords... and was pretty dark... oh yes please... I actually really like the game, just the maps weren't convincing enough.

Raven, hire some history students, lock them into some Scottish castle with the extended version of LOTR and enough beer and pizza, and remake it properly... 

was utter rubbish. It was ultra disappointing. The level design was sub-par at best, enemies were lame and unimaginative. The puzzles were either too easy/dull or too difficult/unfair. The reason no one maps for it is because it fux0ring sucks (even though I've contemplated mapping for it.)

If you want to map for a cool game, map for that Quake mod on the Doom 3 engine. There's a lot of promise there. If you want to map for a cool Raven game, map for the original Hexen. Actually, that sounds like a good idea. Anyone wanna work on a Hexen map pack? 

Hexen II. With some Exotic Moods of Les Baxter playing in the background. There's a lot of kitsch-gothic to it and Q1 engine is at it's best here, say, as a 'mod'... Hexen II being the ultimate final fantasy Quake ever! I rushed 2 times across the Portals. (Praevus = lotsa giggle but challenge). [Kona], beyond all mappers, captured and sublimated such climate in Quake. (Thinking to Hrimfaxi's Castle of the Winter mappack too). I'm sure they might be wicked ways to map for Hexen II. 8)

I'm reluctant to play the current Hammer of Thyrion (solid Win & OS X HX2 port, btw) cause there's no fov cvar implemented, wtf... But, yeah, I'm a huge fan of this underestimated game.

OK... I've to go back to Grim Fandango... 

This is a huge mod for H2 -
http://ravenhurst.raven-games.com/Main.shtml
It's a bit meandering at times, but do-able, and worth playing through. 

I WOULD play it, but I don't have my install CD anymore, and you can't patch it unless you have that, so it won't run on modern systems for me - fuckers.

The level design I thought had a good style to it, BUT, the layouts were confusing, cramped, and generally bad. I didn't like the hub-based system either, I only made it into the Egyptian episode, and never finished the game.

Heretic II was a better example of Raven doing something unique yet keeping strong action and straightforward gameplay. 

Aargh! I meant Fortress of Four Doors -
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/uhexen2/fo4d.tgz?modtime=1140774887&big_mirror=0
http://www.filefront.com/?skin=120&file=16183&transfer=1

> The level design I thought had a good style to it, BUT, the layouts
> were confusing, cramped, and generally bad.

Yeah. The combat had good moments, but generally didn't hold a candle to doom or quake. 

no. 

I liked it, but it was very buggy, i.e. you take a "not intended" route, some script breaks and progress would become impossible, that cost me more time wandering around than the puzzles, which were good. 

Coincidentally, i saw this at techreport.com:

<quote>
Nvidia CEO talks down CPU-GPU hybrids, Larrabee ... Huang summed up Nvidia's position on Larrabee in one sentence: "We're gonna open a can of whoop-ass [on Intel]." ... [Nvidia VP Tony Tamasi] went on to shoot down Intel's emphasis on ray tracing, which the chipmaker has called "the future for games."
<quote>

Hmmm. If Nvidia are right and Intel have problems producing a proper GPU (which they insinuate in the article), maybe Offset wont get seen ?

http://techreport.com/discussions.x/14538