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Yooka-Laylee


villarule123

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Haven't really looked into the Kickstarter stuff before, but I noticed that the Banjo Kazooie guys from Rare have started a Kickstarter to make a spiritual successor to BK.

 

It broke the record for the fastest selling Kickstarter, gaining over £1m in pledges in under 1 day. Currently at over £1.25m at the moment.

 

I've pledged £20 so I'll get the PS4 and Steam version. BK is one of my favourite games of all time so I just had to go for this!

 

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/playtonic/yooka-laylee-a-3d-platformer-rare-vival

 

af60ee6f31bafedd3e9b6b3bea9f4bba_origina

 

 

^ That footage is from 2 months of development time btw

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Interesting one for me as I'm a little biased against Rare after working for them for four years. Just had a look at the ex-alumni and they have Chris Sutherland which is a bonus since he was a pretty big fish towards the end of the glory days. No surprise he's left considering the garbage Rare have been making over the last six or seven years, just surprised he didn't do something like this sooner.

 

As for the rest of them, a bit meh really. They have Price who was a designer on Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts and the Kinect Sports games which doesn't fill me with much confidence, and then a guy who I don't believe was with Rare when I was there, but he has Perfect Dark Zero as a design credit which really doesn't bode well.

 

It'll look and sound great, and as long as the level design is good and harks back to the good old N64 days then it could well be a success. This is the move that Rare themselves should have made years ago.

Edited by Ginko
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Optimistically looking forward to this. Could still turn out to be utter gubbins but the industry as it stands needs more games like this. Everything at the moment is so generic, safe, boring and the same.

Fingers crossed for this!

Edited by Ingram85
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Nope, much too easy to blame it all on Microsoft. They came in and some talent did leave, admittedly, but Microsoft gave Rare the freedom to make their own games when they first bought them out. They were allowed to do Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, Viva Pinata, VP2, Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Diddy Kong Racing and I'm sure some others I'm forgetting before Microsoft realised they were, for the most part, pretty shit and not selling. Only then did they tighten the reigns and make them their Kinect bitch.

Edited by Ginko
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  • 1 year later...

Noce for nostalgia but it's a blatant rip-off and I'm amazed Rare and Microsoft haven't had them for this. Not that I care much for Rare and Microsoft after my poor experience and treatment working there, so if this is a big FU to them I'm all for it.

Doesnt really look like they've tried to make it at least a little bit original though.

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On 12/7/2016 at 04:47, Ginko said:

Noce for nostalgia but it's a blatant rip-off and I'm amazed Rare and Microsoft haven't had them for this. Not that I care much for Rare and Microsoft after my poor experience and treatment working there, so if this is a big FU to them I'm all for it.

Doesnt really look like they've tried to make it at least a little bit original though.

Which is amazing for us :) 

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On 06/12/2016 at 20:47, Ginko said:

Noce for nostalgia but it's a blatant rip-off and I'm amazed Rare and Microsoft haven't had them for this. Not that I care much for Rare and Microsoft after my poor experience and treatment working there, so if this is a big FU to them I'm all for it.

Doesnt really look like they've tried to make it at least a little bit original though.

Gaming wouldn't work if companies could just "have them" for something like this.

Iteration leads to perfection is a term I have always used and it is important in every creative sphere of life. Writers aren't necessarily good writers. I'm not a good writer although I have written for websites in the past, but iteration makes me a good writer as I can write and re-write a paragraph a hundred times until it's perfect. Same for art and it's derivative which is gaming. There is always the first Wolfenstein 3D, or Mario, or anything, but if that company was allowed to copyright or just have executive say on what can and cannot use what makes Mario, well Mario then gaming wouldn't exist today.

We are fortunate that our hobby hasn't really been plagued with copyright issues. Namco are one if not the only company to ever have a copyright filed in their favour for something gaming related. That copyrighted feature was other games playable during the loading screen for the main game. That was accepted and thus no game until last-year could have another game during load screens to pass the time. Imagine if iD Software the creator of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom. The innovators of the 3D first person shooter had filed for copyright of that gameplay and succeeded. Thousands of games wouldn't exist right now and the game that did manage to circumvent that copyright may have flat out sucked, but if not then they would copyright that and well we're back to square one again. 

Many of our favourite games are iterations of something else. Gears of War is often quoted as the game that invented the third person cover system, but it was Kill Switch in 2003 which invented it - iteration just allowed another company to make it better. This is why gaming is so great as it allows a company to take so much of what works and merely change a couple of things. Yooka-Laylee may be Banjo Kazooie, but who knows what they have tweaked and tried to improve on. In a way it's no different to what Banjo Kazooie did in the late-90's after games like Spyro The Dragon and Crash Bandicoot had changed the landscape of platforming with the 3D platformer. 

So I am glad that Rare or Microsoft cannot "have them" for Yooka-Laylee as it would derail gaming as we know it.

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On 06/12/2016 at 20:47, Ginko said:

Noce for nostalgia but it's a blatant rip-off and I'm amazed Rare and Microsoft haven't had them for this. Not that I care much for Rare and Microsoft after my poor experience and treatment working there, so if this is a big FU to them I'm all for it.

Doesnt really look like they've tried to make it at least a little bit original though.

I get the feeling they haven't even pretended that they were trying to be original.

You only have to read the name of the game to see that

Edited by Stevo985
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Looks like it is due on April 11, rrp £34.99 and will have local 4 player co-op/multiplayer

Now up for pre-order on microsoft store.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/yooka-laylee-toybox-pre-order/bw799fwn0zb7

If you pre order you also get the Toybox demo early

https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/store/p/yooka-laylee-toybox-demo/c0k2lq4tzm52

Open the Toybox! Pre-order Yooka-Laylee today and gain instant access to this fun-filled, spoiler-free playable sandbox, offering a taste of the platforming to come in the final game! There are moves to try, custom-built props to play with, secrets to discover and shiny collectibles to hunt out! We’ve even included a never-before-seen NPC to chatter with and some seriously catchy tunes. TRY TODAY: OUR NEW BUDDY DUO: Sample Yooka and Laylee’s awesome arsenal of abilities including underwater exploration and the spring-powered Lizard Leap! A CAST TO LAST: Meet a brand new NPC and experience the personality and humour of Yooka-Laylee! A MODERN COLLECT-EM-UP: Seek out the hidden 100 Quills and enjoy a slice of our brand new collectibles roster, designed with gameplay progression at the core! A DREAM SOUNDTRACK: Experience the latest melodic masterpiece from legendary composer Grant Kirkhope!

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  • 3 months later...

reviews starting to appear & not looking good.

Crap controls & camera, boring/tedious/unfinished levels...

Every level seems longer and more arduous to get through, the gimmicks each world is built around fall flat. The tropical setup of the first world is nice, it undercuts the general bland environment that is the game’s hub world, but then as the ice realm opens up and you start to think… hang on, there’s just less to do here. The level is bigger, there are the same tokens and collectibles to unearth and sniff through… but largely it just takes longer. It never gets any more enjoyable or any more fun.

What doesn’t help is the game’s awkward controls: if you persevere through some of the more tedious mini-games and occasionally badly-designed tasks you have to do, you may end up getting put off by just how annoying some of the platforming can be when navigating from one place to another.

http://www.xboxachievements.com/game/yooka-laylee/review/

 

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Most of the criticism (performance issues aside) seems to be criticising it for being what it set of to be - an N64 era platformer. Which is what the audience that supported it wanted.

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I gather its more that its narrative is too heavy handed with the in jokes and self awareness, instead of being subtle and clever with it they have chose to have every other line of text be a gag or what not. Overkill. Instead of being its own thing while still being nostalgic it just hits you over the head repeatedly which gets grating early on apparently.

I can put up with minor technical stuff like the camera. Mario Sunshine had the worst camera ever and I bloody loved that game.

Still want to play it though when its cheap.

Edited by Ingram85
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  • 2 weeks later...

Camera is occasionally annoying.

The controls are the real issue though. Yooka handles weirdly. They've got the inertia and movement wrong. It instantly doesn't feel right and it makes navigating the world irritating. Couple this to tasks requiring precision and speed and it isn't fun.

I hope getting used to this will improve it, because it has its charm, but it's a hurdle.

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On 14/04/2017 at 21:31, Chindie said:

Camera is occasionally annoying.

The controls are the real issue though. Yooka handles weirdly. They've got the inertia and movement wrong. It instantly doesn't feel right and it makes navigating the world irritating. Couple this to tasks requiring precision and speed and it isn't fun.

I hope getting used to this will improve it, because it has its charm, but it's a hurdle.

What's your verdict on this then? I've sold my Steam key as I'm playing Zelda at the moment and I won't have time for this. 

I'll probably get it a few months down the line and some of the problems might be fixed by then. 

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19 minutes ago, villarule123 said:

What's your verdict on this then? I've sold my Steam key as I'm playing Zelda at the moment and I won't have time for this. 

I'll probably get it a few months down the line and some of the problems might be fixed by then. 

It's literally Banjo-Threeie. With everything that entails. The world has moved on since then and in many ways you can see why. You could quite easily spend hours in the first world alone to clear it out, so it instantly has a feeling of being a slog. But that's what Rare N64 platformers were.

It isn't as charming as it should be, and it feels like 80, 90% of a finished product somehow. It lacks some variety, it's not as slick somehow as you feel it should be - you want to skip through dialogue faster than it wants you to, everything is slightly slow and slightly clunky and has a feeling of being constrained. The controls are odd initially, and things like first person aiming are too clunky. You'll sometimes have to press some actions a couple of times for them to work - I had a moment where I wanted to go straight to first person after a jump and the game wouldn't respond as fast as i wanted to it to, i wanted to go instantly to first person on landing but the game wanted a split second between them which was bizarrely jarring. 

But it's alright. You get your head into the way it plays and adjust your sights and it's fine. It's a completionist nightmare and I can see the hub world being irritating, but for what it is I like it. Not something I'd rush out and buy though had I not backed it.

Saying all that, I think a sequel has promise. This is pure nostalgia in every way. A sequel, where they keep much of the structure but update the way the game handles to a more modern style and I think they've got something here. They need to make everything more polished and updated, slick. Movement and actions need to be more urgent, have more flow, scale the worlds back but put more variety in, etc.

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I should also add there's lots of this that simply is not fun. Races that require absolutely perfect runs to win, old school mini games that were horrific 30 years ago and unforgivable now, etc etc. Unless you are very patient or supremely skillful, you will not 100% this.

I've turned off in disgust earlier at a race on the first level. You can't make even the smallest error, or you will fail. And by error, I mean take a mildly 'off' line. If you miss a power up (exceptionally easy to do, even on the 30th attempt), you will fail. Mistime a jump by a millisecond, you will fail.

This has genuinely put me of wasting another second on it.

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