Nancy Drew (Herinteractive)

Mystery of the Seven Keys looks, dare I say it, cozy. Still very cluttered, but better than Midnight in Salem.

Edited by Argon2 on May 7th 2024 at 11:57:39 AM

They're still doing these games? I'm glad. I thought midnight in Salem killed the franchise.

No, just sent it into a coma. The game after Salem was released like a day ago, which is why I made the thread now.

It's out? Jeeze. That was fast.

It... looks better than Salem. But that's not saying much.

I'm still bothered that, in their goal to achieve full and live rendered 3D, they kinda made their games look way more flat and less interesting. The lighting looks worse than back when it was a static image. The sets of the 10s-20s era of the games always drew me in. The character models also move A LOT less fluidly, which says something when the older games had fluid but limited poses.

Idk. The mystery seems... eh. I don't know what we're really looking into? Like, I get that there's "Jewel Heist" as the catalyst, but talking about jewels isn't interesting in of itself and that's usually where the mystery pivots into the part we actually find interesting.

Like Last Train, no one was super interested in Lori Gerard getting kidnapped on the train. It hooks us in, but it'd be a pretty boring game is that was the whole thing. It's why that mystery smartly solves Lori's disappearance early into the ride after it's successfully hooked us on Jake and Camille's mystery.

Or Treasure in the Royal Tower; the vandalized library is really just the hook into Dexter's backstory and Marine Antoinette's mystery.

Point is... idk, Salem was such a dud and the company itself is pretty terrible. The game sure does exist and... I'll probably watch Gab Smolders play it, but I don't know if I could get back into my first video game franchise ever.

I think recent ND games are trying to minimize animation difficulty as much as they can, which means backgrounds are always clean and urban. There's no forests, no grime, all the houses look like an Ikea showroom, and everything is brightly lit (except some bits of Salem). It kills the ambience.

I appreciate what H are trying to do, but puzzle games aren't about graphics.

Does Nancy still say "it's locked"? Because that's what's important to me.

Sadly, no.

In a game about 7 keys!? Nevermind then, Nancy Drew is dead to me.

x4

I don't think it's animation difficulty really. Like, the old games *were* animated. The characters could be perfectly expressive. They just weren't live rendered in the environments of the game. It's all pre-rendered. They had limited animations in terms of specific poses and gestures, but that's more of an animation resource/budgeting issue, not a game engine one really. You could theoretically pre-render as many animations as you want- as many as a live rendered game does. I believe, like, John Gray in TRN as a character FAR more than *literally anyone* in Salem with their constant standing and jittering movements and bizarre posing.

I think it's a false assessment of "modernization". Modern games have live rendered environments, full motion exploration, etc. So I'm sure some exec is like "We need to modernize to get more gamers to justify the cost of production". After all, we do know for a fact that Her was operating in the RED for a VERY long time even when their production output was high quality.

The problem is, sure, you can swap to live rendering, but to maintain the environmental detail quality of the pre-rendered AND be live rendered takes A LOT more processing and programming than Her is used to. Hence, as said above, Ikea showroom environments in comparison to, like, the Herjelkeid in So D or Jake Hurley's Train in TRN.

And I think it's missing the forests for the trees. I kinda got invested in these locations inspite of their low rendering capabilities. I get wanting to modernize the games- get a more mass market appeal- but you can't do that when your live rendering capabilities and resources aren't there yet. If you swap to live rendering when you aren't capable; you've isolated your base audience who see the drop in quality and you've not hooked a new audience who sees the poor render quality in comparison to better funded games like the Sherlock Holmes franchise. You didn't bring in the people you wanted to appeal to.

I'm surprised they couldn't or haven't taken it into a stylization direction instead? If they're incapable of replicating the pre-rendered realistic environments of the earlier games due to low budget and resources, why not go a more stylized route? Something that could do live-render with lower poly counts and less detailed environments, but where it's not going to look weird when you've done so. Hi-Fi Rush, Sly Cooper, Okami, and others get a lot of milage out of styalized environments and characters that don't even aim for ultra-realism. The absence of things like cloth or hair physics are also a lot less noticeable at that point too. Also, they visually have an identity where Salem and 7 Keys really didn't have much.

They also AGE far better. The old Nancy Drew games really show their age.

Nancy Drew had a comic series back in the mid-to-late 00s and I liked them- Why not crib from that styled take?

Thanks for the explanation re: animation. I don't know much about it.

To break it down extremely simply (and also with my non-expert knowledge)...

Animation is simply taking a character model that has been rigged (as in it has the data as to what parts of the model can move in what ways; if a finger bends, it knows where the joints to bend are) and then having that model move go frame-by-frame through a movement. Most HER games tend to use canned animations; that is to say there is a specific set of animations and poses a character will hit on command at specific scenes. This is opposite to having scenes uniquely animated to that specific scene.

So, let's take this scene from Haunting of Castle Malloy- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdKbQ9fQs1c

At 10:20~, Kyler hits the animation and pose of "Hand out, eyebrow-raised". Then she returns to "left hand on right elbow, eye contact with player" and she'll keep that pose until the player clicks a dialogue option.

At 10:40, she strikes the hand out pose again, but then raises her hand a moment later, and then returns to the "left hand, right elbow" pose again.

HER got better at it by later games- characters had more individual poses and would change them regularly or the characters would have poses for certain parts of their body that could be mixed with others- look at how Kyler's face constantly changes expression (side glance over left shoulder, player eye-contact, lowered gaze to floor, etc) but her hands and body are still hitting the other 5 poses.

But the point is, HER would make a batch of animations (that batch varying in size as time went on) and would program scenes around the character switching between the same dozen or more poses while they talked.

To bring this all the way back to pre- vs. live-rendered, when these characters are pre-rendered, it's not an actual model in the game world that is striking these poses in real time. It's for, well, it's basically just like watching a gif of a character model doing the animations. You're just watching footage really. The model performing animations only needs to be rendered ONCE and that's by the developers on whatever hardware they have to "record" it from.

Whereas live-rendered is, well, live. The model actually exists in the game world and interacts with the other game models and the model will run through the poses and animations in real-time. Those animations might still be canned animations (see Mass Effect 1 or Dragon Age: Origins for other live rendered games that are not subtle in their over use of canned animations), but you're not watching footage that had been recorded by the developers.

Assuming you have an animation staff (and we're dealing with hypotheticals here), they can just keep making and adding more animations to the character models really, regardless of it being live or pre-rendered. The limitations, to my understanding, would really be on your file constraints (obviously, adding more animations takes up more data) and your rendering capabilities (i.e. Can your computer actually live-render the animations on the hardware it has).

That's actually why Nancy Drew games were rather famously accessible- because everything was pre-rendered, there was very very little in terms of video CPU processing to be done. As long as your computer could display an image and run a gif in the proper resolution, there was little reason a computer couldn't run it. You didn't need a dedicated gaming PC here. *ANYONE* could play them really.

Yeah. I found the ND games because my mum picked one off a library rack and insisted it would be fun. That couldn't really happen with computer games nowadays.