LiS2 has been sitting on my PS4. I should probably get around to playing it before the deluge of big 2020 releases.
Just to touch on the non-spoilery stuff, yeah, I think the animations especially are really improved, but the graphics overall are great too.I know I'm extremely late to the party for that, but here are my episode 1 impressions:
I was immediately surprised about how nicer the graphics are looking. It's not necessarily a night and day difference, but the game definitely has more depth visually than LiS 1/BtS.
I would have liked to go to that party and interact with Sean's friends a bit. But maybe it would have been too much like LiS 1.
It was surprisingly political. And it was very well done on that front. I liked it.
It was so cool to go back near Arcadia Bay! In my case, everything was destroyed...
Like in LiS 1, so far the supernatural aspect is not too distracting, and doesn't take too much place in the experience. I hope it stays that way.
That was a long episode. I hope the others are also of similar length.
While I would love to see LiS1 remake in UE4 along with motion capture, no way would DONTNOD be on board. That's setting aside whether or not SE would greenlight it. Though with the game's 5th anniversary being this year, they may announce something.
I corrected myself up above when I found out that LiS1 had motion capture. Huh, that's an interesting fact.Well Life is Strange 1 & 2 also have motion capture (done in Quantic Dream's motion capture studio).
Fun fact: the actress who has done Chloe Price's motion capture in the first Life is Strange is the actress who plays the android Chloe in Detroit ;)
i don't think Before the Storm has facial performance capture.
Once again, a wild Natiko appears in one of my community threads lol. :PCouldn't find an OT for the second game specifically, so you're all stuck with my thoughts now that I've beat LiS2.
Wow, I really did not like that game. For a game that decided to put an emphasis on the brothers, it frequently went out of its way to have the relationship between the two feel forced for the sake of the narrative. It made the relationship between them feel hollow - with Daniel basically always going to lose control and hurt people.
Speaking of, the focus on the brothers led to almost every other character and relationship in the game feeling hollow. So few of them had any time to build. It led to me just not giving much of a shit about them, which when coupled with how my feelings on the brothers soured led to me just disliking everyone.
It also honestly felt like the game very much by the end wanted to paint you as the 'bad guys' no matter what choices you made leading up to that point. I thought the game would have a much bigger focus on the injustices minorities face, and while it did touch on those topics, by the end your choices are basically live shattered lives with the noble police having done their jobs by putting the bad Mexican killer behind bars or become super villains and go on a killing spree. Just felt very gross to me.
Hugely disappointing as someone that loved the first game and the prequel.
with Daniel basically always going to lose control and hurt people.
These are both things that have to do with your choices and how you raised Daniel. In my playthrough, Daniel was not always losing control and hurting people, and he did not kill anyone or choose to cross the border with me at the end of the game even though that's what I chose to do, so no being super-villains together either.by the end your choices are basically live shattered lives with the noble police having done their jobs by putting the bad Mexican killer behind bars or become super villains and go on a killing spree.
Hi friend :POnce again, a wild Natiko appears in one of my community threads lol. :P
The thing here is, when you say stuff like:
These are both things that have to do with your choices and how you raised Daniel. In my playthrough, Daniel was not always losing control and hurting people, and he did not kill anyone or choose to cross the border with me at the end of the game even though that's what I chose to do, so no being super-villains together either.
Now, as for the other points, I disagree about the brothers' relationship feeling hollow, but I do agree on the side characters not having much draw to them. I think there was some Meta involved in that though, just in that I knew the structure of this particular episodic narrative adventure game meant that these characters I was meeting were not going to be coming back in any meaningful way, so it made it hard to force myself to care too much when I knew they'd be replaced by a new face in the next episode.
Hi friend :P
Then the way it calculates what can happen seems really off. I dissuaded Daniel from telling people about his power and I virtually always told him not to use it when given the opportunity. The only times I diverged were the times someone was in danger (cougar, grandpa, and Merrill). Yet somehow by the end he's fucking everyone up in this police station to get to me. I also tried to go out of my way to be nice to him and do what he wanted, but in episode 3 and 4 he still basically seemed to hate me anyways. I didn't have him do the heist, I refused to join when we caught up to them, but none of that factored in because I had him use the power when people were in dangerous situations and needed help? Just seemed bogus.
So you had him kill the cougar with his power, use his power to move a shelf off their grandpa's leg, and used it to attack Merrill? I didn't have him kill the cougar, I had us all use our hands to lift the shelf, and I can't quite remember what I did at the end of episode 3, that was all a blur, but I don't think it involved powers except the incident at the very end of course.
He was definitely being a shit in episode 3 regardless, pretty sure that was just a pre-written thing, but I didn't feel that way about him in episode 4, that was more like he's been brainwashed and in the end he got over it and we got out. Did you have him hurt anyone at the end of episode 4 by the way? I did not, the cult lady survived.
It sounds like you had a back and forth playthrough, or there was a disconnect between how you viewed the situations and what choice you wanted to make versus which ones the devs considered to be the "good" and "bad" choices. I do think the bigger choices are probably weighed more heavily than the smaller ones, but I don't know for sure how that is all determined, a lot of the interactions between them can add to it either silently or obviously.
Because you sneezed at the wrong time that one time. Daniel noticed that shit. Doesn't matter if you always told him it's okay to use powers to help people.why couldnt daniel just mindmove the tornado away from arcadia bay :(
what a shitheadDaniel literally wasn't aware of his power back when Arcadia Bay was taken by the tornado in LiS. He would have been like 6 years old or something.
Daniel using or not his power is also highly linked to his morality. Did you allow him to think that stealing was OK? Lying was OK? Repressing his power isn't always the answer here, as he'll grow extremely frustrated at you if you always repress him no matter what, and it'll hinder your relationship with him and your opportunities to help and influence him positively. It's all in the subtlety of teaching him the difference of whether it's good and ok to use powers for a good cause, and whether it's actually totally not OK at all.
In my play-through, I allowed Daniel to kill that cougar, which was also a good way to make him feel how his powers could have grave consequences if he didn't learn to control them, but at the same time, I never allowed him to steal, and I tried to set as good of an example as possible. He didn't end up killing anybody at all throughout my play-through, and when I told him to stop playing with the scorpion on Episode 5, he agreed to stop because he had learned that it wasn't cool to do so. He wasn't perfect, and he did some stuff I wasn't happy with (He lied to Chris about his powers and never told him the truth even when I vividly asked him to), but in the end, he knew better, and always used his powers as a very last resort where all other options failed, and when he did so, it would always be in a non-lethal way.
I'll read the whole thing shortly, but it's interesting to see them reflect on the release schedule and how that affected people's investment in the story and characters, definitely something I've thought about.Nice interview here (And spoilers OBVIOUSLY)
with some post mortem analyses from the creators:
After all of the pressure, all of the expectations, the worry over if fans would accept Sean and Daniel, the rocky release schedule, and everything else—how did he, and the team, think Life is Strange 2 turned out in the end?
"That's a really good question, one that I'm not sure I've thought about," Koch said with a chuckle. Letting his guard down a little, he admitted that the game may have been too ambitious at times, both in its length and in the events that happened with the brothers. Unlike the original's consistent two months between chapters, Life is Strange 2's episodes took far longer to arrive, and when they did, the wait between them wasn't always even. Koch explained that the game's content simply took far longer to create than the team had originally expected, and that the side effect of an extended schedule was that players had a harder time staying invested in the characters and their stories. He also talked about how he wished there had been more time to develop some of the secondary elements, such as Lisbeth and her cult, who ended up feeling a bit too one-dimensional without a deeper look into how she truly cared about the people in her community.
"We received a lot of letters from players saying that the game helped them to better understand something about themselves, or maybe just accept some issue that they were facing," Koch said. "Or, even just knowing that someone out there might be living the same thing, that helped them. So, it was really touching for us to read all that, to know that our game could have done that for players. When you create a game, of course we want the players to experience it, but if it then brings something to their lives or helps them in a way, that's even better."
That split between those who wanted Max and Chloe back and those who wanted the girls' story to stay finished brought me to one of the questions I'd most wanted to ask Koch during our conversation: if the team had ever thought they'd made a mistake by moving on from the pair.
"There was a lot of anxiety about that, because we knew that some players really just wanted to have Max and Chloe back. Yet, on the opposite side, we knew that we would never be able to give them something that would be satisfying," he told me. "I mean—by the end of the first game, Max and Chloe, if you ask me, the players have come to own them. They have their own ideas of what would happen next in the lives of the girls. We've seen so many fan fictions that are really great, where the players have gone in every direction with Max and Chloe. And we know that if you start to make a direct follow-up that sets their future in stone, you are making tons of players unhappy, because it's not what they want."
That separation of the player from the power didn't come instantly, though. Koch told me that the studio knew it wanted to tell a story about brotherhood, and family as a whole, but that the decision to make the non-playable Daniel special came shortly after. Once those deeper ideas of how power should be distributed among the game's characters started to form, they definitely proved interesting.
"Educating a kid is already really complicated," Koch said, laughing. "But, if this kid has a superpower, and can become really violent or really angry, it causes much more anxiety to you as a player. You have to make sure that you're trying to raise this kid in the right way, because he's powerful. And, as a secondary subtext in the game, we also ended up talking a lot about characters that are facing oppression, and who are somehow powerless. So, it was interesting to have the main character himself be powerless in his own way, at least in a gameplay sense."
Hey, thanks for posting your impressions!I finished playing all 5 episodes of LiS 2.
It was good, I really liked it. Dontnod are really master at storytelling.
Some random thoughts:
- I liked the political aspect of the game, it was very well done. It doesn't make me want to go to the US very much, though.
- The relation of the two brothers felt believable to me.
- The few references to the first game were great. When I realized who David was in episode 5, I was so happy! It was so great to get news about what Chloe and Max became!
- My favorite episode was definitely episode 3. To me, Life is Strange is at its best when there's a lot of interaction with people, and ep. 3 was all about that. I loved learning about the life of everybody. It was great. Seeing Daniel getting more and more distant was also interesting. I romanced Cassidy during the episode because I thought she was an interesting character. I heard you can also romance Finn, and I wonder how. I'll try to do it in my next playthrough.
- In contrast, I didn't really like episode 4. It wasn't bad by any means, but it didn't really grab me. I was glad when the episode was over.
- The part with Chris in episode 2 was super cool. It was great meeting him again and seeing some of the choices made during the demo carry over.
- If I had to rank the episodes, I think it would be like so: 3 > 2 > 5 > 1 > 4
- The ending I had was Sean forcing his way through the border, and Daniel jumping out of the car at the last moment. I liked the ending.
- Even if I really liked it overall, the story of LiS 2 didn't leave as strong an impression as LiS 1/BtS, though. Maybe it's because you're more isolated (physically and emotionally) most of the time. And like I said above, I like Life is Strange more when there is a lot of interaction with people.
Now that it's over, though, it kind of left a void. These games are so emotional, I love it. But now I don't know what else to play that would be as great an experience.
As for other game recommendations, have you ever played Night in the Woods? That's one that left me with similar vibes as LiS, really great game.
But now I don't know what else to play that would be as great an experience.
I suspect Deck Nine's next game with SE may release this year too, depending on the scope.
I suspect Deck Nine's next game with SE may release this year too, depending on the scope.
I'm much more interested in what Decknine is doing than Dontnod. I've lost faith in their ability to tell a story with any kind of nuance, and writing a story about a trans person without hiring any actual trans people... no thanks. I already know that this is gonna be tragedy porn by and for cis people. I'm good. Decknine has, by and large with few exceptions, shown a sensitivity and subtlety that Dontnod never had with their blunt approach. As well as actually hiring diverse voices for their writer's room, which isn't just nice for diversity's sake, but leads to better quality writing.
wow cool meme very original thanks for the reply. you have anything of interest to say or nah?
Didn't hear about that, though it seems co-director Webb Pickersgill is still there. Though going by job postings on their website, they either have two projects in the works or are having trouble behind the scenes.Yeah they are probaby working on a new narrative game (maybe a new IP),but ths year ? i am not sure about this.(the BTS game director left the studio few month ago).
Speaking of the comics, I just finished Volume 2 and I really dug it! The first volume I was kinda lukewarm on, but I really appreciated how Volume 2 finally moves past tragedy and also follows up on Before the Storm in some neat ways. And honestly I'm just really excited that they meaningfully brought backRachel, and had her and Max get along rather than trying to manufacture some trite romantic rivalry thing over Chloe. The three of them have more than earned some happiness together, so I'm pretty thrilled that the writing seems to be pushing in that direction.
That's awesome to hear they're releasing more issues! The close of Volume 2 already makes for a better ending than the games ever had, I think, but considering how well the comics have handled the story so far, I can't wait to see where they go next.