The biggest culprit of this are all the robot rewiring puzzles (I think there’s about 5 of them?) where one character knows solution to the rewiring or how to rewire a robot in a certain way, but it’s the other person who needs that knowledge to do something. There’s a number of puzzles where to solve something as Shay, you need to find information that only Vella learns/knows, and vice versa. However, in Act 2, after Shay and Vella switch places and environments, this principle gets thrown out the window. Everything is based on character knowledge. In Act 1, you don’t need to switch to the other character to figure out how to get past the obstacle that your currently selected character is facing. Be warned, there will be spoilers!ġ – Puzzles start getting based on player knowledge, not character knowledge.
But I do want to discuss what I think are glaring design issues with the game, Act 2 specifically, and why they’re such a big problem. So this post I’m not going to talk about my thoughts on how the character arcs set up in Act 1 weren’t fulfilled, or how Act 2 jumps the shark with a bunch of strange twists or motivations. I’m so disappointed by Act 2 that I think I’ve spent 3 or 4 days constantly complaining to everyone I know about it. And… let’s just say, Act 2 is not as good as Act 1, both narrative-wise and gameplay-wise.
#Broken age youtube full
It prompted me to binge the full game from start to finish. That is, until I got recently the final backer reward – the collector’s box for Broken Age. Though, because my save files were somehow lost, when Act 2 was released I didn’t play it. And when Act 1 got released, I was absolutely blown away.
Back in the day, I gave some money to its Kickstarter campaign, at the time known just as Double Fine Adventure. You can read our review of Act 1 here and Act 2 here.I think Broken Age has got to be the game I’m most confused what to think about. The studio split the game into two parts and sold the first half to help fund development of the second. In my dream world it would be big enough to fund AAA games and it would be the way we fund all games going forward."īroken Age Act 2 launched in April, more than a year after the first act. "It used to be no money in the world outside of publishers, and I think crowdfunding is here to stay, I think it's hopefully going to grow. "The biggest change is that we don't need the publishers anymore," he explained. So we will just about make that back."īut even though Broken Age won't be a huge financial success, Schafer said that crowdfunding was a good experience and it allowed Double Fine to make games without turning to publishers. But we made it, like, twice as much almost as we got in. "With Kickstarter, the risk is gone of losing money on it, so you know you've broken even if you just make the game to that amount of money. "My expectation with Broken Age in the end was just to break even," he said in the video. This resulted in Schafer and his team having to shift his expectations and predict that the game wouldn't turn a profit. In the final installment of the Broken Age development documentary (which you can watch above), studio head Tim Schafer explained that the cost to make the game far exceeded the amount that the Kickstarter brought in.