[Subtitles by danielsangeo] Hey! Welcome back to Ross's Game Dungeon. Now last episode got a little intense. I had a few people contact me to
tell me that it made them feel ill; it definitely left an odd aftertaste, so I wanted to detox with a game
that's practically the exact opposite: "Hinterland". This is an action RPG/city
management game. Not a lot of those. This game checks off a few boxes
the same as "Dungeon Siege": totally generic medieval fantasy,
the story doesn't matter, and great gameplay I
haven't seen anywhere else. Well, that's not completely
true but I'll come to that. So if we begin, this is one of those games where you have to make a
bunch of decisions right away. Now normally, I'm not the biggest
fan of games with no story that you tweak every parameter
of like this right at the start, mostly because it erodes the illusion for me that this is its own little world and not
just some game with numbers to check off, but there's no avoiding it here. What's worse is that
this screen is literally the most important decision
you will make the entire game, but you can't really make an informed
decision until you PLAY the game. So here, I'll do you a favor and suggest
THIS is what beginners should try out. These classes you can start as
make a really big difference. In general, you have to decide whether
you want to focus more on combat, more on city management,
or something in-between. "Seasoned soldier of the realm
who knows everything about combat "and nothing about running a town." Hm. Now, I know this is going
to disappoint some people so I should just get this out of the way: If you've ever wanted to play as the Green
Goblin chucking pumpkin bombs at everybody, you can't do that here. You have to choose one or the other:
pumpkin bombs OR the Green Goblin. You can't have both. I know... I know... But you CAN play as a dwarf warrior. As if I'm going to pick something else now
that they've dangled that in front of me. ...maybe the dwarf foreman. Still, there are a lot of good
options here to mix up the gameplay. Except the elf.
Who'd want to play as an elf? Well, maybe you would, but look at
this guy. He's only good with a bow. It's such a bad-- You know what? I'm
getting ahead of myself. Let's start. So here's the closest thing
we're going to get to a story. This is even more anemic than Dungeon
Siege, but I'll take what I can get. So the really short version
is the king needs you to build a town and clear
out this region of monsters. And that's it. Except for
the town-building part, you could probably apply that
a hundred different RPGs. I like how the king looks
half-bored, half-grumpy. I get the feeling as soon as
he's done talking with me, he's going to throw something at
the jester to try and feel better. I don't think he wanted this job. Okay, so the first thing you want to do
depends entirely upon which class you pick and what's going on when you start. Now I'm playing as the dwarf,
and for all his strengths, he didn't bring a lot of
food with him; he ate it all. So I have just a
couple days before I starve. I can hire people to help produce food
for me, but I can't just pick anybody. I have to wait until somebody
useful visits my town. If you're lucky, you'll get a farmer
or a rancher right off the bat. If you're unlucky, you'll get a bard. Yeah, I'll invite a bard to join my fledgling
town struggling to get off the ground. Might as well sign my own
death warrant right now. Man, you don't want the bard. Some of these visitors are really useful
later once you have more resources, just not at the start of the game. But not the bard. At no point
in this game do you NEED a bard. Get the hell out of my town. Outside of town, this game
turns into a "Diablo" clone. Enemies run at you and you
bash them into submission. On the minimap, the little dots
represent how tough the enemies are. The farther you get from town,
generally the tougher they get. And once you clear all
the enemies in an area, some regions have special
bonuses that benefit your town. Like if you free up a
region with stone or iron, that lets your blacksmith
craft more advanced items. And hey! Monsters don't respawn! You
clear out a region, they're gone for good. It makes you feel like you're
actually doing something here. Also, when there IS loot, a lot of it is
stuff that benefits specific professions. So you might get a snare to give
your trapper, a hoe for your farmer, then when you're back in town, they can
equip it and get boost in productivity. This gives a lot more purpose to
the loot than most Diablo-clones and makes me appreciate it a lot more. And see, that's the beauty of Hinterland. Because, while this is a city-building game, maybe you're not the
best mayor in "SimCity". But that's okay. You just have to
beat the crap out of everything. I am totally down with this. We
have a beatdown-based economy. Okay, maybe you guys can debunk
or reinforce this notion, but I get the impression that people who are really, really good at city-management
games are more likely to be accountants, programmers, system administrators,
something like that. I suspect there's some
sort of correlation there. Well, this is the city-building
game for everybody else. I tend to be okay at city-management games, but the more variables they like to throw
at me, the more I can get overwhelmed. Usually my style is I
tend to have mild success, but then all it takes is one disaster
and I'm stuck in a ditch forever. Oh no! The town's flooded! Now the police
are on strike! Citizens are moving out! IT'S RUINED! EVERYTHING'S RUINED! I'LL NEVER RECOVER FROM THIS! OR EVEN IF I DO, IT'LL HAPPEN
AGAIN AND BE EVEN WORSE! THERE'S NO POINT TO ANYTHING! Well in Hinterland, you can
always just pick up your sword and solve all your problems by
killing everything in sight. How great is that? And once you have some gold, you
can build houses for your visitors, then you're on your way
to developing your town. Imagine wanting to move to a new
town but you can't afford the houses, so instead the mayor goes
out and kill goblins, then builds your house for you. And hey, if you still
don't have enough to eat, well then the mayor runs
out to kill more goblins until he has enough
supplies so you DO get fed. He will not rest until your needs are met. World's Best Mayor. Now before I go praising things too much,
I may as well get this out of the way: This game came out in 2008, and by then, most developers have figured
out how to handle widescreen resolutions, but not everybody. So while this technically
does support widescreen, it's like "That Ski Game" where all they
do is chop off the top and the bottom. Not only does this make you feel like you
have your nose to the ground the entire time, but it's a big disadvantage because enemies
can come at you where you can't see them. But most of all,
look at this town view here. I literally cannot build up at the top here
anymore, and there's no way to scroll up. The mid-2000s were really the
dark ages for this sort of thing. I always find this frustrating
because, unlike 2D games, old 3D ones CAN have proper widescreen, likely very easily with the right
code tweak. They just don't. Back to 4x3. So after fighting every monstrosity
outside your glorious village, you start to notice that they're
taking a piece of you with them. Now you do start with some health
potions depending on the class, but these are hard to
come by in the beginning, and you can't rely on them
to carry you through this. So what do you do? You run back to town, that's what. As soon as you cross this little rocky
border, all the characters heal in town. But the dwarf heals outside of
town too, because he's awesome, but not that much; you still have
to run back to town for a break. Except this guy. If you want to play as the
undead, he heals anywhere. He has no connection to town or
much of anything in this life. I guess you can do that, but I can't imagine your denizens
are going to trust you then. I mean, how could they? I don't. You run back to town an
awful lot in this game. I can't decide if
that's a good thing or not. It certainly adds a sense
of urgency to things. It's like real life. You go to the grocery, notice your apartment is on
fire, so you have to run back. Uh-oh! Enemies are going to kill
me. Better run back to town. Whoops! Looks like I need to tell another
bard to get lost. Better run back to town. Uh-oh! Raiders are coming from the
north. Time to run back to town. Yeah, an optional feature is that your town gets attacked by
raiders every few minutes like clockwork. Oops! A gang of barbarians
is coming to trash the place. Oops! A gang of giants is
coming to trash the place. Oops! A gang of dragons is
coming to trash the place. It's a good concept; it's just
too predictable in practice. I'd rather see two goblins
show up, maybe a stray dog, then a whole month passes
and nothing happens, until one day an army of 200 barbarians
from the north descends upon me. Something like that. I can take it. I'm a dwarf. Yeah, come get some, elf. ELVES! Okay, let's talk about why elves suck. Look at this guy, thinking
he's all that with his bow. Yeah, a bow is EXACTLY
what you want in this game! No, it's not. Okay, different RPGs can
favor different play styles. I'd say "Titan Quest"
favors melee characters since almost every enemy
just runs right at you. "Divine Divinity" on the other hand really
favors ranged characters to start off. Well, Hinterland definitely
leans towards Titan Quest. Every enemy runs right at you or
else ranged ones just stand there. No enemy runs AWAY from you. Ever. So yeah, you can show up with your
fancy bow, but they're going to be smashing your face in with an ax before
you can draw two arrows, so why bother? Okay, I've done my duty here. If you still want to play an elf after
what I just told you, that's on you. So this is pretty much the
pattern for the rest of the game: You build up your town more and more and continue your campaign
of Manifest Destiny until you can tame the
far corners of the map. Now you DO level up and get better items, but overall, you do NOT keep pace
with how tough the enemies get. You need help from either brewing
potions, wizards or something else. Now you can recruit any member in town to stop what they're doing
and come fight with you, so maybe we can find a use
for these bards after all, but as much as I love the idea
of putting my own posse together to clean up these hills, I
found this tricky in practice. There are a lot of variables that
go into keeping your crew alive and they typically didn't add up for me. If they die, that's a
real pain in the ass, too, because this isn't "WarCraft". I can't
just train another equally capable soldier. I have to hope somebody else qualified
visits my town in the next few days, AND I can salvage gear off the old one's
body, re-equip them... it just sucks. Plus, my guys like to fight to the
bitter end, which is...problematic. See, the secret to survival in this
game is knowing when to run away. King Arthur had the right idea.
That's why he was the king. ["RUN AWAY! RUN AWAAAAAY!"] Now lets talk some more
about how this game can suck. I guess we have the music. The music does NOT suck--it's pretty
great--except there are only FOUR TRACKS: menu music, town music, wilderness
music and raider music. That's it. So it's good, but you're inevitably
going to get tired of it. It's very difficult to pull off a music
theme that you don't get tired of. [stringed music] Oh, and let's talk about portals. If you clear out a region with a portal,
you can fast-travel back to town. I HATE these things. Why? They are TOO DAMNED LOUD! Look at how far away I am
and I can still hear it. There. That's about the boundary. This is terrible sound design. You're going to get sick of this sound. This extends to town, too. I have to go to the complete southern
end of town not to hear this. The vast majority of all residents in town are going to hear this
portal sound at all times. I can see why people want a bard now. They want to hear something, anything,
besides this damned portal sound. [loud humming] [growling]
[loud humming] [loud humming] Next, you may have noticed how this isn't
necessarily the smoothest looking game. Well, it's not. Look at this! Look at his shadow! It's moving
at a slower frame rate than he is! There must be some interesting physics
going on this world for that to happen. And speaking of interesting light, did you notice how this game
has a night and day cycle? See? There it is. A new day. While the lighting is
always exactly the same, you can hear the night in the sound effects. [ominous humming] Yeah, that totally sounds
like a bright and sunny day. But back to the frame rate,
because we're not done with that. Here are the loading times for
running this game with VSync off, so the computer runs at an uncapped
frame rate. Nothing unusual there. Now let's take a look at
the times with VSync on, so that means on my system, it's
capped at 60 frames per second. Man! That might be the biggest
differential I've seen. This also happened in "The
Chosen: Well of Souls"; I just didn't mention it since that
was the least of that game's problems. So you can either waste time
and get a cleaner picture, or waste power and get faster load times. Even if you have one of those monitors
with a stupid high refresh rate, because I'm sure people run a lot
of games at 240 frames per second-- What? --unless your screen has
over a 1 kHz refresh rate, you're still going to see
some slowdown with VSync. I made fun of it in another video, but I guess that's what Fast Sync was
designed for. This game right here. And The Chosen. And while we're staring at things, I will
say these loading screens are all awesome. I think this one my favorite. It
really captures the life a farmer. And look at this guy's face. You know this
fight is going to change his whole life. You can just look at this and tell
this is the beginning of the story. The menu screen is great, too. I can only assume that's me, looking
determined to settle this land, with my trusty assistant who's probably
going to die before the game is over. Hm. Could this woman be a witch? ORCS! Now there's a secret to this
game, but before we get to that, I guess we'd better
talk about orcs a second. See, technically this
game isn't "Hinterland", but "Hinterland: Orc Lords". This used to be digitally distributed only, but in 2009, they released a mini-expansion
for it where you can play as orcs. This was part of a move of putting
this as a boxed copy on store shelves. And despite all this great loading art, they managed to put the lamest
picture I can imagine on the cover. It's another class remix. They eat twice
as much, but the humans count as food, so it all balances out. It's not that big a deal though since you
really don't get the full orc experience. You don't get to burn enemy
villages to the ground, unleash packs of wolves
upon women and children, construct effigies
made out of human heads... It's really just another class. Now the reason I'm pointing this out is, today, this would be DLC
that you pay a few bucks for. But no. This was completely
free if you owned the game, and this is on top of the Halloween update which added the undead guy,
scarecrows, and pumpkin bombs. I'm mostly just bringing this
up for historical purposes. Once upon a time, DLC used to be free! And you only paid money
for an actual expansion! And people used to use
telegraphs to communicate! Yeah, the genie's out of that bottle now. "While working at my Pumpkin Farm
I can produce 2.0 food per day, "and exploding pumpkins." Sold! Okay, so here's the secret to this game: If you play on long mode,
this could take a while. Take a look. I'm not even halfway
done clearing out the map. Well that doesn't matter, because if you can hold on long
enough to get a necromancer, you've already won the game. Now they're not easy to come by since
they have a lot of requirements, but if you're patient, you can
glide your way to the finish line. Before a necromancer will
join you, you need an acolyte, which you can turn to worshiping
at a temple of good or evil. I found it amusing that this is such
a casual choice for the acolyte. Like he's totally cool with
whichever one you pick. "Oh, a temple of evil? Yeah, that's
cool, man. No problem. Go Team Evil." Now once you recruit a necromancer,
they'll start summoning skeletons. Well, you need to tell
them to put a hold on that, and RESEARCH more
powerful skeletons instead. After some time,
the skeletons will level up. But here's the thing: Best I can
tell there's no level cap on this. If you don't tell him or her to stop, the necromancer will just keep on
researching more powerful skeletons. More and more powerful. [distorted voice]
More and more powerful. So now, this is going to be like a cooking
show and we're going to take a break here and just leave Hinterland
running in the background. I'll check back in a while and
we'll see what things look like. Okay! So I've left Hinterland
running for a couple hours now, and if I my necromancer isn't STILL
researching more powerful skeletons. [deep voice]
MUHAHA! Well, I think they've had
enough time in the oven, so we'll start summoning some now. We'll cut back to that, but before we do, let's show you what would happen if I were
to try to solo the outer region by myself. This is REALLY stupid; I'm only doing
this because I have my save backed up. I'm coming for you, giant! Huh. Doesn't look like
I'm hurting him too much. All right, there are his friends. Yeah... And see I'm a dwarf warrior so I'm stronger than any other
class in the game pretty much. Or rather any LIVING character! Now we'll skip ahead a bit and here we
are with a pack of summoned skeletons. I am the same level I was before,
territory still unconquered. NOW let's pay those giants a visit from the
Medieval Fantasy Homeowners' Association. Things are going a little more smoothly now. Sir, you are in violation of
Ordinance 5103 -- Being a Giant. I'd like to emphasize these are the hardest
enemies in the game on the hardest difficulty. If I pick on somebody more my
own level, they snap like twigs. So if you're willing to let
the game idle a couple hours, anyone could beat this with a necromancer. But let's do it the real
way, through dwarf might. I finally clear out these damned dragons
and congratulations, I cleared the realm. This is a pretty pathetic ending, but I can't say the game was leading
me on to expect anything different. You can try to beat my score if you want, which you probably can because
I didn't care about bards. So Hinterland leaves me with
a lot of mixed impressions, but mostly with a good sense of frustration. This is another one of those games
that occupies that no man's land between a casual game and a
fleshed-out one with some meat on it. The end result is it leaves me
hungry for more, because this formula of mixing a hack-and-slash with
city building is really satisfying. You both create and destroy. It's
got the duality of man covered. Your hammer can be used to craft armor or
bash some orc's face in. It's like poetry. Now I've said I haven't seen
gameplay like this anywhere else. Well, there is one game series
that comes pretty close: "ActRaiser". That has both the city-management and
action combat together in one nice package. Now while I think the presentation and
atmosphere of ActRaiser is WAY better, I think Hinterland still
wins out on the gameplay. The transition between
the two types of gameplay is so much more fluid and
connected in Hinterland, whereas it's a WALL separating
the two in ActRaiser. Okay I guess there's also
"Depths of Peril", but... Ah, that game... This is not a game that needs a remake, but it's screaming to be a
foundation for something else. I'm not sure how you would expand upon this because if you made your town too big,
it would become more of a strategy game. But if you kept going out
farther into the wilderness, you might lose track of your town. It must be a tricky balance. That's a job more for the dwarf foreman to
figure out. I was just the dwarf warrior. I kind of want to just lock
a game designer in a room with nothing but Hinterland and ActRaiser, and not let them out until
they figure out a new design. This game is gold ore. I see
the potential gleaming within, but it's rough in its current state and I'm sure that many would pass it by
not realizing what they're looking at. I almost did. Okay, that's the episode!
Stay tuned for the next one [distorted voice]
for a back-to-school special. [music] What, you thought I was going to talk about
pumpkin bombs and not show them off? C'mon! Let's do this. Okay, got my bombs! Equip them
in hand. It's pumpkin time! [deep voice]
Oh yeah! What? That's just a crappy fireball! These are the worst pumpkin
bombs I've ever seen! Look! It doesn't even show up in his hand
but you can see the pumpkin in the shadow! I'm sorry everyone. Here, I need to revise this. Where is he?! YOU! YOU THINK YOU'RE THE GREAT
PUMPKIN! YOU'RE A DISGRACE! GET OUT OF MY TOWN AND TAKE THAT PATHETIC
EXCUSE FOR A PUMPKIN BOMB WITH YOU! Friggin' pumpkin scammers...
from the first minutes, the game sounds interesting enough to try it out. Can somebody say if its good or not? Dont want to get spoilered watching the rest of the video.
Holy shit this is a blast from the past. I played so much of this back when it came out. No one I've ever mentioned it to has heard of it.
Anything from Ross gets an automatic upvote. I lost it at the bit with the loading screens (14:25) and then again at the bit with the acolyte (16:50).
Hopy sheet, Ross is doing a game I've already played? I am getting old