Re: The Longest Journey
Reply #2 –
In the case of TLJ sometimes even if something seems obvious, first you have to mention it to the right character or some such. That's usually not a problem because a lot of the fun is in going through the dialog options, but it can throw you off the scent if you do something "too early".
Btw, are you sure you're thinking of
TLJ? It doesn't look terribly good compared to
Dreamfall. The scenes rendered in real time by your GPU in Dreamfall hugely exceed the quality of even the prerendered cutscenes in TLJ.
Anyhoo, I don't have anything against walkthroughs or other means of "cheating" past the point where it stops being fun. In Dreamfall there was this one part with a bunch of trolls (or grubbers I think they're called) which might've been a reasonable puzzle, but because you had to sneak around while doing it, it was a lot harder. After dying three or four times I just couldn't be bothered and searched for a savegame at the end of that puzzle online. I also didn't care too much for the umptieth evade the killer robot business. Don't make noise so they don't hear you and stay behind them so they don't see you. Yeah, yeah, I get it already. The actual adventure game parts weren't terribly satisfactory, the "action" parts were something like boring at best and frustrating at worst, but all in all the graphics & voice acting were fairly good and the story was decent, so as a sort of interactive movie that returned to Stark & Arcadia it worked.
One thing I really appreciate about a certain variety of adventure games is that you don't die. They just find a way to stick you back to where you were. Dreamfall does that too because it has autosave right before points where you might die, but it's a bit more... traumatic.
Suffering DRM is sort of your own choice if you want to pretend to be on the right side of the law. Entirely optional.
I've bought something like two games with DRM since '03-ish, excluding a bunch of Wii games. I neither buy nor play DRM-encumbered junk, because most of it isn't worth playing anyway. I've only bought DRM-free indie games like Osmos and Achron.