The Conduit Walkthrough

[BreakABone]

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The game doesn't look bad.
Doesn't look special either.

[Dyne]

Looks fantastic. I hope it gets a publisher soon.

You can tell they spend more processor power on the actors rather than the environments, though. I don't know. I kind of like it.

[magus113]

Hmmm. Looks pretty damn decent visually at least for something off cam and with bad flash compression.

[BreakABone]

Some early impressions

One element that bleeds into the game from graphics to gameplay and everything else is detail. High Voltage is treating everything with extreme care, and it shows. No matter how minor the detail, they are pouring a ton of work into it. That’s because they understand that little things can make for a big impact. Take this little bit, for instance. The sight on your sniper scope reflects the game world around you, in real-time. Walk up to a car, and you’ll see the car. Face your back to a building, and check it out in the scope reflection. You can even point the gun at the ground, and in the scope reflection, you’ll see the cloud patterns moving…once again, in real-time. This is the passion that is going into every facet of the game.

One of the highlights of my playtime was checking out the various weapons. I watched a playthrough first, and then jumped in for my own try. The weapons that were in the playtest ranged from typical FPS fodder to some ridiculous alien tech…and I mean that in a good way. There is one gun that shoots a homing shot that’s guided by your pointer. It’s almost too much fun to shoot a shot down the street, and then have it curve in and hit an enemy out of nowhere. While that gun is great, my favorite was yet another alien weapon. This one had an attack that I haven’t seen in any other game. It shoots some sort of ammo that literally wraps around whatever it hits, and continues on that path. The team demoed the weapon by shooting it at a lamp post, and the shot wrapped around the post and spun in circles. Neat, but why would you want that? Well, say you have an enemy that is around a corner. You could aim at that corner, shoot, and have the shot attach and whip around the corner to take out the enemy. Tell me that that isn’t awesome.

[Vampyr]

FPS for the Wii. I'm there. :)

[magus113]

Last FPS I played for the Wii was Medal of Honor Heroes 2. The controls for the regular campaign were wack for me, and I was using the Wii Zapper too. The controls without it were terrible.

[BreakABone]

Last FPS I played for the Wii was Medal of Honor Heroes 2. The controls for the regular campaign were wack for me, and I was using the Wii Zapper too. The controls without it were terrible.

What was your beef with the game?
(Yes asked same exact question on AIM)

Part two of developer walkthrough

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[Angrist]

Looks good to me.

[manasecret]

Looks pretty boring to me. Oh look, a city street with aliens coming after you, make sure to shoot them if you weren't sure what to do.

Maybe I need to see some of the story to get me interested.

[BreakABone]

Some impressions from GAF.

The Conduit feels really good to play. The team employed a really interesting (maybe controversial in a minor way) decision to heavily limit the Y-axis aiming--so you can't look straight up, for example. This does mean the gameplay won't be particularly vertical--Corso noted that level design is of course affected by that choice--but it makes you feel hugely more stable and in control. [EDIT: Just to clarify this, you can aim as far as you want up on the screen, but you can't move the entire camera up very far.]

Basically, you never get that thing that I even got in Metroid Prime 3, which I did really love as a game, where your cursor goes gets sort of "stuck" at the edge of the screen and you start spinning around. The Conduit's controls are very tuned to the point where the game does a lot of work smoothing out your aiming and keeping everything even.

There's a nice array of weapons, including pistols, zoomable rifles, a gun that shoots what is essentially a bolas made out of energy, and a thing that acts like the Half-Life 2 rocket launcher that you can guide after firing with the cursor.

Design-wise, I would say the biggest thing to improve at this point would be creating a little more visual guidance through levels--I had a few times where I'd kill all the enemies in an area, then not be sure where to go next, until I finally noticed a hole, or an open door, or something. Some of the city environments have sort of a Half-Life 2 vibe--so if the developers take any further influence from that series, that would be a good place to do it.

It looks quite nice--obviously you aren't going to be mistaking it for a 360 or PS3 game, but is genuinely good-looking. I fought a pretty large normal-mapped multi-legged boss that was pretty unusual for the system, and there were no framerate drops I saw there either. I also didn't notice any loading throughout the whole level I played, which is nice.

Apparently the game is largely content-complete, but there are about nine months left of development, and the team will be doing optimization passes among other things. I don't know if it's going to blow the doors down in terms of revolutionary FPS game design (it still has that kind of "find an area that happens to be populated with a bunch of aliens, kill them, move on" thing going, but so do a lot of other games), but as far as taking advantage of the Wii graphically and control-wise I'm pretty sold.

It was a lot of fun just using the controls--and, thankfully, unlike most console shooters regardless of system, you can remap every single button. (Why doesn't every game do this? Come on now.) I didn't get a chance to look at the options for tweaking the remote dead zone and all that, but I was promised that's pretty extensive as well.

Anyway, looking forward to it, we'll see how the whole thing shapes out.


EDIT: I forgot to mention the locking on. The lock on is sort of like Prime 3's expert mode, where the camera locks to the enemy but the reticule doesn't, except it's even softer--so the camera isn't hard-locked either, it just sort of roughly focuses on the enemy. It works really well, and makes locking just feel like a slightly more focused version of regular aiming, rather than a separate "mode."

And a control modifier video from IGN..

http://wii.ign.com/dor/objects/14248157/the-conduit/videos/conduitDF7_controladjust_07.html

And seems like IGN has new hands on gonna read now.

[manasecret]

I don't know if it's going to blow the doors down in terms of revolutionary FPS game design (it still has that kind of "find an area that happens to be populated with a bunch of aliens, kill them, move on" thing going, but so do a lot of other games), but as far as taking advantage of the Wii graphically and control-wise I'm pretty sold.

Exactly what I was saying. Looks ho-hum.

[Vampyr]

That's basically what all FPS's are.

It needs an engaging, GOOD multiplayer, which seems so hard to accomplish now days. Team Fortress 2 does it perfectly. (or as near as can be)

[manasecret]

You're right, that is basically what all FPS's are today. But others on other consoles and on PC have other things going for them. As you said, multiplayer is one of them.

But also some have jaw-dropping graphics. Some have amazing stories. Some have innovative ways of telling stories. Some have great AI. Some have a combination of all of those (HL2).

What does Conduit have to set it apart? Jaw-dropping graphics are out, as decent as they may be. So what does that leave Conduit?

Superior controls (compared to other console FPS's) are distinct possibility. Story is another. Awesome multiplayer stemming from the superior controls is another.

I haven't seen anything like that yet. So right now it just looks ho-hum.

[Dyne]

What does Conduit have to set it apart? Jaw-dropping graphics are out, as decent as they may be. So what does that leave Conduit?

It's a third party Wii game that looks like it doesn't suck. And probably the third FPS for the entire console, worth noting anyways.

Case closed.

[KillerGremlin]

The particle effects look really bad and the walls look pixelated...like Quake 3 pixelated....

It better have amazing gameplay.