That assumes a consistent motive over a long period of time, though. It certainly appeared to me, for a long time, that he was absolutely enjoying trolling people with it. Or, perhaps, I misread him and he was always dedicated to his masterwork. In either case, it's possible, and I wonder if even likely, that circumstances changed, and he now has a stronger motive to raise some quick cash by releasing what he has, and fixing it as he goes along.
What I mean is that players can obviously choose to play much longer than they need to. There's no question that TES has the content to support it.
I don't personally think TES has a great deal of visual variety, but it has more than Grimoire at least from what I've seen. In terms of fidelity though, yeah.. that's like comparing a Volkswagen to a Ferrari.
No, I'm not. I've never claimed that Grimoire is a perfect game. But it's size and complexity are undeniable. Wizardry 6&7 would fit into a corner of the map and leave space for might & magic and Eye of the Beholder 1&2. And that makes it a very different type of game to the ones you were trying to compare it with. I've no real idea why Cleve did this, but it clearly isn't about cashing in the first week on steam, something you don't appear to recognize.
But didn't someone say the game was beaten at 80 hours with the player only missing a couple areas? That does not seem anywhere close to 600 hours of content, unless there is Skyrim+ amounts of hidden content in the game.
And The Quest is great, but I didn't find it huge. You could do most of the content and beat the game before the 50 hour mark. Really neat game, though.
The core game is closer to 30-40 hours. But yes, with all the expansions I'm sure it's closer to a 100 hour game.
I just beat Planescape: Torment EE which took close to 100 hours. Gothic 2 with the expansion took me over 100 hours. That game was way bigger than I expected. Divinity: Original Sin took us 140 hours, we just about 100%'d it, but the number was probably slightly inflated due to the co-op aspect.
But I am definitely waiting to see some reviews after a couple hundred hours of Grimoire. I'm curious myself just to see if the game really has as much content as advertised.
Well, the Leisure Completionist run is somewhat close to my number. I would classify my style as that as well. I tend to be slower in RPGs.
Let me know when the Lesiure Complete numbers for Grimoire come in.
I try and not be OCD about it nowadays but for most of my RPG gaming life I've tried to 100% the games (to a reasonable extent, I don't go for achievements and that stuff.)
Well, you're clearly impressed by numbers - but you don't actually know what content is available throughout.
Not long ago people were claiming that the whole thing was a scam, that the super demo was all there was and countless other things. All those things have now been shown to be wrong. The game is largely as Cleve said it would be. Maybe more so, in that the level of detail is quite surprising. It is certainly *possible* from my current POV that there is some desert of content somewhere in the game, but if so no one has found it yet (perhaps they are all really Cleve in disguise and doing a cover up?) and many are much further into the game than I am.
And to answer Fluent's point: It is possible in most games to create some OP party and rush to the end of a game, ignoring most of the content. In Grimoire you can turn off some encounters and the recruitable NPCs are currently way OP, so that would make it even easier. What I do know is that there are some 250 maps and that it has taken me several hours to mostly explore a couple of them. You can do the math. And as I said earlier go look at the Grimoire world maps. Personally, I sacked recruitable NPCs and other crutches and restarted, and am not rushing anyway.
Grimoire critics are starting to to sound like AGW deniers…
FWIW I'm 25hrs in and I reckon I've probably cleared about twenty maps in that time. If the total number of maps is correct then I've still got a long, long way to go. There is clearly a question about whether the quality of the later maps is as good ("sparsely populated" has been mentioned) but no answer for that yet.
There is a lot of tileset reuse if that kind of thing bothers you. I'm ok with it so far because the map designs are great and there is plenty of variety in the enemies. After another 50hrs I might want to see a different type of dungeon though.
Well, considering the scope and amount of content available in a modern TES game, I think there's a pretty staggering amount of variety.
But if we go back a while to games like Daggerfall and Arena - then I agree that the scope far outweighed the actual variety.
In fact, I don't think it was until Skyrim that I, personally, felt there was enough variety to justify "hundreds" of hours of time spent in that world.
Morrowind and Oblivion always felt a bit too samey to me after a few dozen hours. Still, they were impressive in their own ways.
I was only referring to visuals. I wasn't talking about quest content or variety in general. Personally, I wasn't impressed by Skyrim much in that way, but I'm not a big fan of the look of that region and climate when the entire game is made of it.
Visuals are subjective though. I found Morrowind more impressive (for its time) than Skyrim, and I still think it offers more variety especially when it comes to the different styles of architecture in the game.
Skyrim is definitely more colorful though.