Ori and the Blind Forest
- Thread starter The Wolf King
- Start date
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2015-02/16/ori-blind-forest-hands-on
Microsoft's 'Ori' wants to make games hard again
Outside of hardcore gamers, the term "Metroidvania" might seem total nonsense. Mention it to players who weaned themselves on the challenging action-platformers of the 80s and 90s -- particularly Nintendo's Metroidseries and Konami's Castlevania, whose signature gameplay gave rise to the portmanteau -- and it conjures memories of navigating challenging 2D levels, unlocking increasingly powerful abilities, and using them to progress ever deeper into the (sometimes literal) labyrinth.
It's a gaming genre that doesn't get much attention nowadays. Even its progenitors have long since switched to 3D worlds for their core entries, save for the occasional 2D throwback released on handheld consoles. However, developer Moon Studios is looking to bring it back to life with its debut title, Ori and the Blind Forest. WIRED.co.uk goes hands on, and discovers it to be at once a genre-appropriate challenge but also an incredibly charming effort.
Players control the eponymous Ori, an orphaned forest creature in a fantasy world, aiming to save his home of Nibel after a powerful storm threatens its existence. The game world is one of bold, rich vistas, Ori himself often only a comparative speck against beautiful painted backgrounds. Animation is at the heart of Ori -- both the character himself and the world he inhabits move beautifully. That's more than merely an aesthetic consideration though, with the precision of the character's movements an integral part of the gameplay. You'll soon realise exactly how far you can creep to the edge of a platform, and how far Ori's leaps will take him, just from his positioning and pose.
We played the Forlorn Ruins section, which occurs late in the game. By this point, Ori has acquired several of his key abilities, allowing for glide-jumps using a leaf parachute and more powerful attacks. Each area introduces a new ability, and here it's gravity control. Playing around with natural phenomena is no great innovation in games, but here it's done with a twist. Carrying a sacred artifact allows Ori to traverse the ancient ruins, climbing walls and ceilings to reach new areas. Orientation doesn't change though, so if you walk left onto a curved wall and follow it around to the top, left becomes -- to the player's perspective -- right. It's rather mind-bending, and you'll find yourself twisting your head to keep track of Ori's concept of "forwards".
Many of the puzzles continue in this vein. Jump onto floating rocks made of the same stuff embedded in the walls, and you'll have to navigate jumping between them. "Down" becomes an abstract concept, relative only to Ori's location. Walk to the side of a block and jump off its edge and you'll plummet horizontally across the screen, landing -- hopefully -- on the desired next step. Thankfully, the game allows you to create save points anywhere, a feature you'll use frequently to prevent a maddening repetition of tricky platforming sections.
Inbetween, enemy creatures prowl the forest, corrupted by the supernatural forces affecting Nibel. Ori channels spiritual energy to attack and defend, firing blue sparks that hone in on opponents. It's all very low-violence, painting the game as one entirely suitable for families or younger players, even when the overall difficulty is likely to test experienced players.
"Difficulty is something we've been aware of as part of making the game from the beginning," Microsoft's Mark Coates, executive producer on Xbox Live Arcade tells us. "Over the course of finding what people see as difficult, we learned a lot. For one thing, different people find different elements challenging. Where one might find the concept of gravity and adapting to it hard, others might find the twitch gameplay in the Ginsu Tree section tougher. We have to allow affordances in the game to allow people to overcome those challenges."
It's hard to pick out anything truly original about Ori and the Blind Forest. It's undeniably the child of its ancestors, and deliberately so. What it succeeds in though is refining the experience and updating it for a modern era. It's astoundingly beautiful to look at, especially for animation connoisseurs, and its precise, demanding gameplay remixes the best of its influences into something that manages to feel fresh. If the full version can avoid too many frustrating moments as you progress through the world, this could be a rebirth for the Metroidvania subgenre.
Microsoft's 'Ori' wants to make games hard again
Outside of hardcore gamers, the term "Metroidvania" might seem total nonsense. Mention it to players who weaned themselves on the challenging action-platformers of the 80s and 90s -- particularly Nintendo's Metroidseries and Konami's Castlevania, whose signature gameplay gave rise to the portmanteau -- and it conjures memories of navigating challenging 2D levels, unlocking increasingly powerful abilities, and using them to progress ever deeper into the (sometimes literal) labyrinth.
It's a gaming genre that doesn't get much attention nowadays. Even its progenitors have long since switched to 3D worlds for their core entries, save for the occasional 2D throwback released on handheld consoles. However, developer Moon Studios is looking to bring it back to life with its debut title, Ori and the Blind Forest. WIRED.co.uk goes hands on, and discovers it to be at once a genre-appropriate challenge but also an incredibly charming effort.
Players control the eponymous Ori, an orphaned forest creature in a fantasy world, aiming to save his home of Nibel after a powerful storm threatens its existence. The game world is one of bold, rich vistas, Ori himself often only a comparative speck against beautiful painted backgrounds. Animation is at the heart of Ori -- both the character himself and the world he inhabits move beautifully. That's more than merely an aesthetic consideration though, with the precision of the character's movements an integral part of the gameplay. You'll soon realise exactly how far you can creep to the edge of a platform, and how far Ori's leaps will take him, just from his positioning and pose.
We played the Forlorn Ruins section, which occurs late in the game. By this point, Ori has acquired several of his key abilities, allowing for glide-jumps using a leaf parachute and more powerful attacks. Each area introduces a new ability, and here it's gravity control. Playing around with natural phenomena is no great innovation in games, but here it's done with a twist. Carrying a sacred artifact allows Ori to traverse the ancient ruins, climbing walls and ceilings to reach new areas. Orientation doesn't change though, so if you walk left onto a curved wall and follow it around to the top, left becomes -- to the player's perspective -- right. It's rather mind-bending, and you'll find yourself twisting your head to keep track of Ori's concept of "forwards".
Many of the puzzles continue in this vein. Jump onto floating rocks made of the same stuff embedded in the walls, and you'll have to navigate jumping between them. "Down" becomes an abstract concept, relative only to Ori's location. Walk to the side of a block and jump off its edge and you'll plummet horizontally across the screen, landing -- hopefully -- on the desired next step. Thankfully, the game allows you to create save points anywhere, a feature you'll use frequently to prevent a maddening repetition of tricky platforming sections.
Inbetween, enemy creatures prowl the forest, corrupted by the supernatural forces affecting Nibel. Ori channels spiritual energy to attack and defend, firing blue sparks that hone in on opponents. It's all very low-violence, painting the game as one entirely suitable for families or younger players, even when the overall difficulty is likely to test experienced players.
"Difficulty is something we've been aware of as part of making the game from the beginning," Microsoft's Mark Coates, executive producer on Xbox Live Arcade tells us. "Over the course of finding what people see as difficult, we learned a lot. For one thing, different people find different elements challenging. Where one might find the concept of gravity and adapting to it hard, others might find the twitch gameplay in the Ginsu Tree section tougher. We have to allow affordances in the game to allow people to overcome those challenges."
It's hard to pick out anything truly original about Ori and the Blind Forest. It's undeniably the child of its ancestors, and deliberately so. What it succeeds in though is refining the experience and updating it for a modern era. It's astoundingly beautiful to look at, especially for animation connoisseurs, and its precise, demanding gameplay remixes the best of its influences into something that manages to feel fresh. If the full version can avoid too many frustrating moments as you progress through the world, this could be a rebirth for the Metroidvania subgenre.
GamesRadar
"Even now, after four years of development, I find myself playing Ori almost every day and still enjoy it so much.” Show-off. The rest of us have had to put up with a lengthy delay to Moon Studios’ console-exclusive debut. But, as director Thomas Mahler explains, Ori’s entire existence can be put down to, almost literally, the waiting game.
“When I worked at Blizzard,” he explains, “we had a mantra that the game will be released when the developers spend more of their time playing it than they do developing it. To me, that’s the sign of a great game. For Ori, we spent years just polishing everything and ensuring that people just can’t put away the controller."
"Even now, after four years of development, I find myself playing Ori almost every day and still enjoy it so much.” Show-off. The rest of us have had to put up with a lengthy delay to Moon Studios’ console-exclusive debut. But, as director Thomas Mahler explains, Ori’s entire existence can be put down to, almost literally, the waiting game.
“When I worked at Blizzard,” he explains, “we had a mantra that the game will be released when the developers spend more of their time playing it than they do developing it. To me, that’s the sign of a great game. For Ori, we spent years just polishing everything and ensuring that people just can’t put away the controller."
That's one great thing about Blizzard. People can love or hate their games all they want, but Blizzard releases their games when they feel like it. And they typically are very polished and smooth playing.
It can be 10 years between sequels. No worries.
You don't see any annual release BS to hit a release date, for the sake of sales. And coming from Activision (a big publicly traded company), you'd think they would be churning out annual releases of all their games to maximize sales.
id too. They churned out lots of sequels in the 90s, but over the past 10 years they've really only released a handful of big budget games. The rest are classic remakes.
These devs don't seem to have release dates marked in whatever strategic business plans they discuss at work. Only after things are all set, ten they'll announce a release date.
Imagine how much more sales Blizzard could have made releasing just a few more Diablos and Starcrafts in those 10+ year gaps? Some devs would have milked it.
Why isn't Microsoft promoting this on the Xbox One dashboard? It's not even listed in the coming soon section.
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Could it see another delay?
I am a first day buyer but MSoft doesn't seem to put a lot of marketing behind their arcade portfolio. I remember MTCB not getting any either.
Yeah, they need to get back to the Summer of arced promotions and marketing. But on a more regular basis.
I'll definitely be getting this. Played through Revelations 2, and now playing Guacamelee, which is badass.
They really are horrible at promoting smaller titles unless it is a big promotion like Summer of Arcade. I really don't know why. They have plenty of avenues to do so.
Yeah it's a damn shame that they are not promoting this one at all....at all!!! How hard could it be to just put the game on the dashboard so that people can see it's coming soon? Why can we not preload it yet? Come on man, this one deserves some attention!!!!
Yeah you would think they would promote one their few high profile indie games.
Exactly. And it looks so good and is apparently around 10 to 12 hours,....i can barely call it a indie game anymore. Cause usually those don't look this good and are this long?
If you're gamer and can spare that 20 bucks YOU HAVE TO buy this game just out of respect for the developers. Yes even if it sucks (though I doubt that) even if you're not interested. I was sold the minute I saw the first trailer for this game, yes it was unbelievably gorgeous, but it also got me emotionally. I was willing to pay that full retail price but now they announce it as 20 bucks ? Really ? Talk about a STEAL. How many times do developers milk a game by rushing it and letting us pay full price for a broken game ? Here we have a developer who has taken an insanely long amount of time to make the best game possible. I want to support that type of company. Not like most others rolling around today that are just in it to milk it. I feel like it's my duty as a gamer to support them in this. I really hope it'll be a major hit because they deserve it.
