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From Dust - Awesome tech demo

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gorcorps said:
I've seen several videos of this, and I just don't see the game here. The tech looks cool... but I've watched quite a bit of gameplay vids and it was nothing more than drawing lines with stuff to get little villagers to a certain point. Water's in the way... well you can steal dirt from somewhere and build a bridge, or take lava and build a bridge, or even take part of the water away Moses style to have some dry land. Regardless of how you do it I just don't see how you'd get much gameplay or enjoyment out of it.
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Ever play Lemmings?
 
paperfist said:
So it's Lemmings and not Populous?

Here's a review http://www.destructoid.com/review-from-dust-207068.phtml basically calls it a cross between SimCity & Lemmings without the detail.
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-Yeah unfortunately it seems like moving earth is literally the only gameplay mechanic in the whole game. Sounds like it could use a serious shot of B&W to the arm to allow more interaction with the villagers whom you're supposed to guide.
 
Still it interests me, the guy who made this made 'Another World' way back when and was a treasured game of mine. I also can't help but wonder about the reviewer's take which seemed like he wasn't into the game.

I see the short comings due to lack of detail, but I'm the type of person who could spend hours with Simcity 4's terrain editor.

I wonder why they did invest more time into gameplay? Sure you can call it a tech demo, but do companies buy engines like that from small market devs?
 
Man, I want a replacement for Populous 2.
Played that on and off for a few years. Nothing like the rush of running your shaman into the enemy village and randomly fireballing peasants and warriors 😛
 
BoberFett said:
It's a puzzle game. The demo was interesting enough that I picked it up on the Xbox, it's cool so far.
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I have it for the PC and am loving it. It's definitely not like Populous although you do lead a tribe and have some god like powers, no where near as in depth. As a puzzle game it's neat in that you don't necessarily have one determined path to get to the end - kind of like how Defense Grid is. With the awesome graphics and a way you can manipulate the environment it's a great tinkering game with some unintended consequences stemming from environment manipulation.

There's some maps that I've changed the earth a bit too much and watch as the sea reclaims the land taking with it my tribe 🙂 Other times while trying to build a wall of protection from lava I inadvertently burned down my village. There is one volcanic map that turned out to be epic, wish I had a screen shot. The whole island is ravaged with a few volcanoes and one source of water and you need to get your tribe to some interesting places. Well I prolly took the long way, but I was content to have my small stream tame the lava flow. It took a while, but in the end I extinguished the flame and was rewarded with massive flooding which turned the volcanic rock of an island into a vast, lush green paradise. It was quite cool to see the almost blue-green colors come to life after staring at ash and lava for 30 mins.

The game also makes me laugh as each time you get to your destination on an island you're rewarded with the same cut scene and same music which sounds eerily like a movie I can't quite remember the name of. The same 3 guys pop out of the hole with the same 2 copied animations and one original animation. Not a lot of work went into that lol

I got my monies worth so far, but it's no AAA title like Arkham Asylum.
 
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War on PC gamers continues: Ubisoft misled on From Dust DRM


What's worse is the utter lack of care given to the game, even after the delay. The title is locked at 30fps, with no graphical options. There is also no support for anti-aliasing, causing the game to look jagged on the PC. To add insult to injury, the game has already been successfully cracked, making the activation requirement apply only to paying customers. Pirates, once again, get a fully functional version of the game.
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😀 go fuck yourself Ubisoft.
 
I started to play it. It's not anything super great but its fairly fun.

Some annoying things -
controls seem really twitchy and imprecise, at least with the mouse. Scrolling with the keyboard is much easier but the mouse always wants to seem to take control and it's difficult to keep the camera on the spot you want.

The game will show you where something is and then it pans back to your village. Can't stop this from happening and is really annoying if you know where everything is and just want to keep playing.

After each "level" you see the same exact animations. It's really dumb and you can't skip it (that I have found). Completely pointless.

Some of the directions aren't really clear as to what you need to do or how certain things work.
 
pontifex said:
Some annoying things -
controls seem really twitchy and imprecise, at least with the mouse. Scrolling with the keyboard is much easier but the mouse always wants to seem to take control and it's difficult to keep the camera on the spot you want.

The game will show you where something is and then it pans back to your village. Can't stop this from happening and is really annoying if you know where everything is and just want to keep playing.

After each "level" you see the same exact animations. It's really dumb and you can't skip it (that I have found). Completely pointless.
Click to expand...

The mouse thing appears a issue people are having. Option called "Mouse Scroll" needs turning off. Makes a HUGE difference (consolitise?).

Being shown something is so-so, but npt being able to skip that (while the game keeps playing in the background) is one reason why I stopped gathering the side(?) story stones. Having it also auto-rotate my view is not something I find good when in the middle of a problme (ie: lava/fire hitting village).

End game /start game animation is crap, espically as you can not skip it. Once is nice to see, but being forced to watch it when re-starting a map (done only once so far), that just deserves giving the developers a one finger salute.
 
paperfist said:
There is one volcanic map that turned out to be epic, wish I had a screen shot. The whole island is ravaged with a few volcanoes and one source of water and you need to get your tribe to some interesting places. Well I prolly took the long way, but I was content to have my small stream tame the lava flow. It took a while, but in the end I extinguished the flame and was rewarded with massive flooding which turned the volcanic rock of an island into a vast, lush green paradise. It was quite cool to see the almost blue-green colors come to life after staring at ash and lava for 30 mins.

The game also makes me laugh as each time you get to your destination on an island you're rewarded with the same cut scene and same music which sounds eerily like a movie I can't quite remember the name of. The same 3 guys pop out of the hole with the same 2 copied animations and one original animation. Not a lot of work went into that lol

I got my monies worth so far, but it's no AAA title like Arkham Asylum.
Click to expand...

That volcano one nearly had me re-starting, but I just uprooted the villages as needed and moved them. No more needing to protect them in the middle of no-mans land. Though the water was important to use, it was no long term fix as eventually the lava/water would build up a large rock wall and then go wandering over the map into areas I did not want it.

On the up side, by the time the flooding started, I did not need to add/change much as the water was already "tame". Though I did laugh at how often one flood followed the previous one. Thinking back on that one, those floods occurred only so-so for me, but that was partly due to getting the last village was hit/miss as no sooner did I have it, I lost it before I could move it.

Soooo many times on that map I would "save" a villager from death or open a path for them, and they would take a 30 second break, and miss the window. Got to the point that if they where being swept to their doom, I just let them go.

As to the same video, while it was laughable, after the third or so map/time of seeing it, I was crying on the inside instead. Though I think the 3rd "man" is actually ment to be a women.
 
greenhawk said:
That volcano one nearly had me re-starting, but I just uprooted the villages as needed and moved them. No more needing to protect them in the middle of no-mans land. Though the water was important to use, it was no long term fix as eventually the lava/water would build up a large rock wall and then go wandering over the map into areas I did not want it.

On the up side, by the time the flooding started, I did not need to add/change much as the water was already "tame". Though I did laugh at how often one flood followed the previous one. Thinking back on that one, those floods occurred only so-so for me, but that was partly due to getting the last village was hit/miss as no sooner did I have it, I lost it before I could move it.

Soooo many times on that map I would "save" a villager from death or open a path for them, and they would take a 30 second break, and miss the window. Got to the point that if they where being swept to their doom, I just let them go.

As to the same video, while it was laughable, after the third or so map/time of seeing it, I was crying on the inside instead. Though I think the 3rd "man" is actually ment to be a women.
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Looks like a women to me also, but the game is about 'men' so I'm confused.

I only ended up rerouting the first place you can settle a village to a spot above the flowing water. Since the villagers can repel lava I guess that wasn't even necessary.

Yeah it's a little irritating that after you save a villager they just kind of hang out... And place themselves in DANGER again! lol. "Hey lava is coming! Get the F out of the WAY!" I ended up saving as many as I could because one of the previous maps when I didn't understand that sea water was kept at bay with fire trees I kept loosing villagers to sea and had to restart a few times cause I couldn't keep 1 village going.
 
pontifex said:
I started to play it. It's not anything super great but its fairly fun.

Some annoying things -
controls seem really twitchy and imprecise, at least with the mouse. Scrolling with the keyboard is much easier but the mouse always wants to seem to take control and it's difficult to keep the camera on the spot you want.

The game will show you where something is and then it pans back to your village. Can't stop this from happening and is really annoying if you know where everything is and just want to keep playing.

After each "level" you see the same exact animations. It's really dumb and you can't skip it (that I have found). Completely pointless.

Some of the directions aren't really clear as to what you need to do or how certain things work.
Click to expand...

I think the controls are okay, but the pointer seems to drift on its own and sometime that makes the camera go where I don't want it to go.

Yeah you can't skip crap in this game, not the intro movies, cut scenes or any other repetitive part.
 
paperfist said:
Looks like a women to me also, but the game is about 'men' so I'm confused.

I only ended up rerouting the first place you can settle a village to a spot above the flowing water. Since the villagers can repel lava I guess that wasn't even necessary.

Yeah it's a little irritating that after you save a villager they just kind of hang out... And place themselves in DANGER again! lol. "Hey lava is coming! Get the F out of the WAY!" I ended up saving as many as I could because one of the previous maps when I didn't understand that sea water was kept at bay with fire trees I kept loosing villagers to sea and had to restart a few times cause I couldn't keep 1 village going.
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On the opening stage, The game tells you to press "F" (IIRC) to zoom into the villager. So definitly both sexes present. Though that feature did not get used again.

As to that map, their was a reple lava? Must have missed it until the end then. Makes the level a bit more challanging 🙂 I just moved and if needed, raised the land height buy dropping dirt onto the village 🙂.

The fire trees I found good and bad. Mostly bad though. They can keep some water at bay, but only small amounts. I have managed to drown them on the map with the tide. The water trees appear to give out a heck of a lot more water than they absorb and the third type. Well, I turned my back on a part of the map to only come back to find a massive hole while another time, a hole in a embankment that was keeping a village safe.

The only bad thing with the trees was that they sometimes get washed away and ended up outside the map where I could get them back.

Though thinking of the maps, the "desert" map was looking like a easy one, until I had "too much" 😉.

The "Wall" map was looking nice, until the volcano grew too much and started to ignite the first viliage.
 
Phokus said:
Yeah, i'm not into game piracy, but fuck them for their dishonest tactics in marketing their game, i hope anyone who wanted to play this game pirates their game.
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Not saying I support your statement, but I'm very glad I waited before buying. The demo for xbox looked so interesting I wanted to get it for the PC on the first day, but then I saw it was Ubisoft that made it and red flags immediately popped up. Sure enough, my money will be going to other better things like SPAZ. Screw Ubisoft.
 
greenhawk said:
On the opening stage, The game tells you to press "F" (IIRC) to zoom into the villager. So definitly both sexes present. Though that feature did not get used again.

As to that map, their was a reple lava? Must have missed it until the end then. Makes the level a bit more challanging 🙂 I just moved and if needed, raised the land height buy dropping dirt onto the village 🙂.

The fire trees I found good and bad. Mostly bad though. They can keep some water at bay, but only small amounts. I have managed to drown them on the map with the tide. The water trees appear to give out a heck of a lot more water than they absorb and the third type. Well, I turned my back on a part of the map to only come back to find a massive hole while another time, a hole in a embankment that was keeping a village safe.

The only bad thing with the trees was that they sometimes get washed away and ended up outside the map where I could get them back.

Though thinking of the maps, the "desert" map was looking like a easy one, until I had "too much" 😉.

The "Wall" map was looking nice, until the volcano grew too much and started to ignite the first viliage.
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Ah I didn't pay a lot of attention when it told you to hit the F key and I think that's the only time I did.

I don't remember reading anything where it said they could repel lava, but unless I've gone mental they were doing that just like they do with water (on their own) to the point that they had a huge crater around their village.

At least your bad run in with the fire trees turned out good 🙂 I didn't like them at all as I always ended catching everything on fire.

I've learned to keep either running water or a pond if you will near by a village with proximity to lava 😀 Oh and the 3rd type of tree is the exploding one that goes off when too much heat is around.

PowerYoga said:
Not saying I support your statement, but I'm very glad I waited before buying. The demo for xbox looked so interesting I wanted to get it for the PC on the first day, but then I saw it was Ubisoft that made it and red flags immediately popped up. Sure enough, my money will be going to other better things like SPAZ. Screw Ubisoft.
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I'm not a big fan of DRM, but I per-ordered this game and then noticed the big flop over what they did by including it after release. However, I've been able to play the game flawlessly for about 8 hours except for the minor issue of trying to launch with synced saved games enabled. Granted if I did have an issue trying to play the game I'd go nuts!
 
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Normal liars, even brazen ones, stop lying when they realize no one believes their shit anymore. Sociopaths like Ubisoft and Ubi's PR-people are missing the part of their brain which is supposed to tell them further lying is futile, and will just keep going with new lies. "Clearing up a misunderstanding" my ass. I won't pay Ubisoft one cent for any of their games until they apologize to their customers.
 
Did anyone finish the story mode? Man that was one wacky and crazy finish.

Anyway great game for the price and since I'm done with the story I see there's a challenge mode I can play. Might even give the story mode another run through.

I really hope someone uses this engine, it could easily spawn another Populous franchise.

----

Looks like UBI is removing the DRM:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/08/22/ubisoft-u-turn-on-from-dust-drm/

“We recognize that one of our posts in the From Dust forum regarding the need for authentication in the game was not clear. We sincerely apologize for the misunderstanding. Our tech teams are working on a patch that should release in approximately two weeks that will eliminate the need for any online authentication. This development time is required as we are working to ensure that those who have already started the game, and who’s progress is currently saved on our servers, will receive and save their game information locally. Once the patch is ready, players who already have the game will automatically receive the update on their next login and subsequent game sessions will be 100% offline.”
 
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pontifex said:
crappy? Splinter Cell is crappy? Settlers is crappy? why are they crappy? If they are crappy, why do they keep making them?
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Because crappy devs thing the games they make are awesome so they think they are awesome and everyone will love them.


Same reason douche bags put spinners on $1000 cars.
 
I'd like to play but each time I've started the game I get a BSOD so far, first time was during the opening cutscene and the second two were both within about a minute of starting the actual game after the cutscene :/

I think I need to check my GPU temps during the game but even still, it looks nice but it's not that heavy.
 
imaheadcase said:
Because crappy devs thing the games they make are awesome so they think they are awesome and everyone will love them.


Same reason douche bags put spinners on $1000 cars.
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if they were crappy people wouldn't keep buying them.


not sure what spinners on cars has to do with this...
 
imaheadcase said:
Because crappy devs thing the games they make are awesome so they think they are awesome and everyone will love them.


Same reason douche bags put spinners on $1000 cars.
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Have you been drinking? This statement makes absolutely no sense.

none

at all
 
I, too, pre-ordered and had no idea Ubisoft was even involved (shame on my for not checking). Glad to hear they're fixing it, but Ubisoft HQ should still fall in a pit.
 
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