The Brütal Legend thread

[Udvarnoky]

Since we've got a 15th anniversary retrospective to promote, let's see if the game can justify a dedicated thread. Does anybody here have getting-killed-by-Tim-online on their resume?

[Laserschwert]

56 minutes ago, Udvarnoky said:

Does anybody here have getting-killed-by-Tim-online on their resume?

 

I do:

 

Edited Wednesday at 04:23 PM by Laserschwert

[ThunderPeel2001]

Super enjoyable article.

 

As a player you forget all about the weird legal antics that were happening back then. What a rollercoaster. I wonder what the terms of the settlement were... did Vivendi actually have a claim to the game after dumping it??

 

Anyway, I just remember the game now... which was an odd one. My memory is this: I loved the story and the lore and the characters. The world was amazing... so creative and clever, but the RTS stuff was such a massive slap in the face when you were playing it. It really comes out of nowhere. You get no opportunity to get better at it, you're just thrown in the deep end. It's such an odd experience.

Maybe if the RTS stuff had featured more regularly, from the beginning, and had given the opportunity for players to learn the ropes. And maybe if there had been sub-missions that allowed the player to practice tactics in the RTS game in return for rewards and abilities in the open world, it would have been perfect. It would have felt cohesive.

But, as I remember it: If you loved the RTS stuff, then there was a big story mode in the way. And if you loved the story mode, there was RTS stuff to content with. And the open world things just felt sort like and disconnected... if they'd managed to merge the two better, so they both justified each other's existence, it could have been brilliant.

Edited Thursday at 10:37 PM by ThunderPeel2001

[Laserschwert]

I really liked the premise, the setting, the visuals, the soundtrack, the cast... but never finished the game. After playing the demo, I fully expected a God of War type game, which I would have LOVED. But if I remember correctly, I never made it past the first stage battle, which is really a damn shame.

Edited Thursday at 06:35 AM by Laserschwert

[Lagomorph01]

Same here, I loved the world, characters, setting and atmosphere, but the gameplay just wasn't for me. I finished the game and after that never picked it up again.

[Udvarnoky]

I’d be curious to know exactly how stripped-down Tim’s original conception was. It sounds like he basically set out to do the RTS battles, but it’s a Double Fine game – it’s hard to believe they didn’t always intend to reserve ample real estate for the lore stuff. Maybe not though! The budget must have been a fraction of what it grew to if at the outset it was just the multiplayer with an accompanying tutorial.

When the single-player campaign was greatly expanded at Vivendi’s direction, I can imagine Tim looking at the unplanned evolution as, “Well, now we’ve poured all this extra frosting around the cake – what’s the bad news?” But the way you experience it as a player, the frosting is substantial enough to be taken as the real thing, so when the first RTS battle comes around, you can easily feel as though a rug has been pulled out from under you, especially if you’ve really been digging the God of War stuff.

My memory of the first time playing it was that I didn’t object to the swerve in that I enjoyed the stage battles, but I ended up slightly disappointed when the Zelda of it turned out to be somewhat shallower than I thought was being promised in the early going. Retrospectively it’s easier to accept the game as “a little bit of a bunch of things”, but there was a real failure to set expectations. If the entire open-world action/adventure game was ultimately meant to be the most overproduced tutorial ever, they did themselves no favors by leaving the player to find that out along the way.