So, without any prior knowledge (aside from playing Longest Journey for the first time a month or few ago), I started on Longest Journey Dreamfall this afternoon.

It has combat.

It. Has. Combat.

After my initial "w-why are there combat controls in an adventure game?" came the realisation that yes, the game ACTUALLY wants me to ACTUALLY play a beat-em up in an adventure game.

I suck at beat 'em ups. I always have and I always will. Hell, I was already struggling with the controls NORMALLY (since my brain is wired for joysticks and doesn't like controllers (and I don't have one anyway) but using mouse-and-keyboard is awful. I don't play figthing games and I don't like them in vast majority. I would almost certainly make any True GamerTM (sic) gouge out their own eyes rather than see me bumble around. My preference is for games that have ideally, in no circumstances, anything that resembles combinations button presses (and ideally no quick-time events).

I just about managed on about the forth try in the gym to beat the gym leader, but more through random button-mashing (which is the sum, maximum totality of my beat-em up skills, (and those are only marginally more above zero than my platofrming and shooter skills). One feels like it will only get worse from there.

There doesn't see to be any real guides or anything other than a lot of people saying "yeah combat sucks" - heck, my first recourse was to see if there was a mod or something.

So I will ask: is there ANYTHING out there that can help (short of the obvious route of Do Not Fight Combat If In Any Way Possible, which I will be doing)?




Much Later Edit: Beat-'em up combat and lots of enforced stealth portions, excellent, two of the three things in games I dislike the most (quick-time events being the third). It's a good job the story is engaging, because between that and the fetch quests, the gameplay on the sequel is several notches down. (Fortunately, I have managed to button-mash-right-click through most of the fights on the second ot third try (as far as Chapter 5 anyway), but damn. Please tell me Dreamfall chapters won't make me do stuff like that in the next game...

Thank frack.

Though one feels at this point, it'd struggle to be worse.

I've just finished the chapter 5 catacombs and FRAG, very quickly giving up in disgust (the moment I realised that it was not only going to insant-kill you, but unlike the other instances of instant killing you, pretended for a few seconds it was a fight) and even using a walkthrough, that was a miserable experience. I ended up doing it basically twice, since I fell down the hole in the wall and realised I'd obviously set the first statue wrong and couldn't figure out how to get back up and it was actually QUICKER to do it all over again. I do hope that was the low point; judging by the comments made on the walkthrough I watched, that section is... Not highly regarded.

Chapter 5 in general seemed to be mostly comprised of nothing BUT tiresome, dreadful enforced stealth sections and really poor level design. The story's great, don't get me wrong, but if it wasn't (and I wasn't so bloody minded about completing games) I'd have rage-quit several hours ago. In terms of just gameplay (and controls), this has to be singularly the worst adventure game I've ever personally played.



Edit: Finished. Apart from seeming like the game is, like, missing the entire final act (which one hopes Chpaters deal with...?) when it wasn't trying to be the Worst Action/Stealth Game In History, it was perfectly fine otherwise.

I think I wasnt getting mad cause I really like this game. I started with "The longest jouney" when I was very young and finished it with "Chapters" 20 years later. Thats maybe one of the reasons. So I'm absolutely not "objective" =)

For me a good game is like an interactive (brain-) movie. A really good story (very important), that means a deeper characterization of the actors too (you can really understand why they do what they do), the possibility of a good interaction with NPCs, good graphics and first person view when the game is newer, cool areas to explore, not too difficult riddles and they have to be a part of the story, no stand alone mini games/riddles, and of course no senseless fights and time limited actions... oh, and I really prefer games with mouse control and max. 3 keys or so. What I mean is... I want to explore, chill and enjoy the story with no stress by dealing with the game or doing annoying things.

Its not like I hate fights by default when it happens not too often and when it makes really sense for the story ("you are the good one and hes the evil and he eats little babies, kill him" is not story, its just super boring for me). I'm not a hardcore pacifist or whatever, but normally my motivation to fight or kill monsters is extremely low. For me its just something annoying you have to do to reach the next step of the game (*god mode enabled*).

So I think the three games of this saga are very close to perfect cause of a very good storytelling. Not perfect, but close. And Dreamfall... yes, some mistakes. But this part is important for Chapters. All three games = one story.

I don't have a particular objection to combat. I have a particular objection to THAT sort of combat and especially in that sort of game.

(Enforced stealth sections, along with quick-time events, and increasingly time-limited actions can all go die in a fire, though, they have never worked.)

As you say, adventure games are much more of a chill sort of game (I mean, like, a SIGNIFICANT chunk of them are even outright straight humorous games). Ramming action gameplay into them I was absolutely immersion-shattering to me. I feel that if they'd made the combat, like, I dunno, more turn-based or something, I would not have batted an eyelid. Making it more like a puzzle would have been a far better fit for the genre, changing from real-time be damned.

Sure, I see the reasoning behind it, since the other fault of Dreamfall was that it sometimes thought that immersion to the point of inconveniance was a net positive*, so they clearly thought that doing anything other than beat-'em/action style fighting would have gone against that immersion; but it doesn't work (very evidently, given the backlash).



The story is very good (though I can imagine how fracked-off people were at the ending to Dreamfall being so inconclusive - hell, watching the "what has happened before" section were telling me things that I was going "dude, I literally watched the ending to Dreamfall five minutes ago, that wasn't very clear..."). My current concern is whether Chapters is 3/3 or really sort of 3/4 (given what I read on wiki) regarding April, since unless it's expanded more than her scene at the very start, her arc was very unsatisfying; but I'm still doing Zoe's day-job at the moment in chapters, so I guess we'll see.

(While trotting around doing the thrilling job of planting algae, I snickered to myself that despite the mundanity of the task, it was light-years better than Dreamfall's combat and stealth section...)


(Voice actor change was jarring. Never a fan of that. The new one is fine, it's just the lack of continuity bothers me.)




*As a youtuber once said of another game they were talking about, Dreamfall was just not very respectful of your time at some points. There's a lot of backtracking to and fro for fetch quests that seems like could have been condensed to one round trip instead of two back-to-back. The waiting around for the guards/monsters to follow and stuff in chapter 5 was the nadir, but it was things like when you have to pick up two potions to give to Zoe and April has to hand them to Crow one at a time (instead of having a single item that was both, as they'd only be two items when given to Zoe) struck me as just needless busy-work. Or the statues in the catacombs that you had to rotate one turn at a time going click-menu-use-click-out to April-repeat- I'm pretty sure that even in Longest Journey on those rotating pillars on the island that you did't have to go all the way back out to April to rotate them more than one turn, and you could just rotate them on the use screen. That sort of thing.

Like I said, Dreamfall's actually mechanical gameplay (as diversed from the narrative) is generally only functional at best. It's buoyed up by its strong narrative elements so that doesn't drag it down to being awful (in, perhaps, a similar way that one of my top favourite games of all time, Planescape: Torment, succeeded despite being on AD&D's pretty mechaically dreadful base system.)

it will. well, no combat. but there ARE quick time events. and some stealth.