16 Minutes of new Bloodstained Gameplay (Demo SPOILERS)

Just some notes here.

I haven't watched much of the 16 minute spoiler video. But I feel like I should write some things down here.

Screentearing: Check fullscreen and on source, not through this forum. The screentearing the footage, not the game.

Animations when they speak: Still in WIP, so is movement, lip sync and expressions. Its something of low priority that needs fixing later, not so much now. 2 languages, and both need to on point, this along with any other crazy things happening in the environment while doing so

People are concerned for "strange" reasons, i doubt they will master lip sync, for obvious reasons, i mean won't the game have a japanese language option? Do you see the problem here? Not to mention lip sync is pretty hard to achieve, i have no expectation for such a thing. Screen tearing is VERY LIKELY due to youtube enconding (or any other video share community), if it's not it need to be fixed, however i believe that's an easy thing to do anyway.

Liked:
- Voice acting (perfect).
- Overall gameplay and mechanics as expected.
- Upgraded environment.
- Save room (wish i could hear more about it's design decision from Iga).
- Enhanced Vepar's boss fight.
- Overall difficulty increased (i suppose), the first demo was way too easy, the majority of people shouldn't be able to defeat a boss on their first try, lose and learn should be part of the mechanics. It would be interesting to set goals on statistics on how many random players are able to get to the boss without dying and how much will die during the boss fight, just an example: >50% must get to the boss first time, 50% of these (25%) will defeat it on first time.

Disliked:
- Dialogue animation, could be fixed with more poses and expressions, however that's hard to do and takes time, could be better just to zoom in and not "get out of the game" for the dialogue to happen, but still decent as it is.
- Lack of polishment in some specific objects, specially those which appears close during scenes (igavanias are know for the superb art design).
- The very beggining scene lacks some elements, specially sound effects (thunders/wind/stuff).
- Getting a new shard animation still the same (frozen in the air), it would be better to do an infinite loop animation (shaking) during her side-view shard perfuration, the frozen front view is a bit awkward.

IGA said the main quest takes around 10 hours, so I wonder how big the castle will be and how many different areas it will have, since this was supposed to be a big jump from SotN, I thought. Does 10 hours sound right?

Surprisingly, some of the rain/weather effects coming through the broken sections of the ship didn't look as strong as the E3 2016 demo, but the waves and mist were improved, so I suppose it was a trade-off to maybe showcase different effects or an uneven storm outside?


The screen tearing is reportedly a video capture issue, so if that's true, we're good there, too.

As for the lip-sync...when you consider this will be in at least two languages, it's really not too bad. The mouths do seem to open and close in time with the start and stop of dialogue. Improvements could be made perhaps, but this isn't a deal-breaker for me. Though I'm not sure Johannes has to be bouncing so much in his standing animation...unless he's supposed to be out of breath there.

I predicted a 2019 release a while back, and I'm fine with that if it's what happens. I think the hard work put in is paying off. Once this was 2.5D, there was always going to be a difference in what the visuals looked like compared to what was 100% desired in the mind's eye, but they've made the best of the situation, and there is still time to continue to polish the visuals to continue to make them look less "CG clean." I think it's similar to the adjustment one has to make with the recent Mega Man 11 development, which looks good but still a bit different.

And with all the modes coming, it's really quite a treat. I'm very glad this game exists.

This already looks better than Mighty No.9, and I'm one of those gamers that liked Mighty No.9 a great deal. While I can understand using it as an example of something that didn't quite turn out right, I feel it's overstated. Peel back the Kickstarter drama, and while it was rough around the edges in a number of ways, it was a very fun and unique game. I think it probably overstepped its mandate by being something more than a Mega Man revival. It was more Mega Man Powered Up meets Mega Man X meets Sonic the Hedgehog. Once you mastered the core mechanics, though, it had some great flow to its gameplay. For that matter, it had more variety to its stage design and gameplay than one would expect, even going so far as to have three playable characters with completely different styles of play. There was a lot of personality and charm with this. (To quote Mega Man 11's producer in a recent interview with Engadget: "Reviews that took a look at [Mighty No.9] and treated it like a Mega Man game did not review it well," he explained. "But for people who played Mighty No. 9 without those expectations, who treated it as its own standalone title, came across saying that 'no, it's its own fun game.' That really, really drilled home the fact of needing to set expectations [with Mega Man 11], making sure that people understand that this is the type of game we're offering...") And yes, unfortunately, MN9 had some technical issues, like two areas I recall where the game slows down to an NES chug, but that's something a seasoned gamer can deal with, and the reward was worth it. The DLC with Ray really rounded out the game and better highlighted how the game should not be treated or played as purely a Mega Man clone. Treated simply as a first entry--a "Mega Man 1" rather than a "Mega Man 11" in terms of development of its core concept--it was enjoyable, and in and of itself, removing the extracurricular stuff that went on with it, it was a much-needed gaming experience in this time frame of gaming, I feel.

ill wait till i get to play it, but a couple ideas i have on the faux talking, they could pull off not actually syncing up through something akin to oldschool animation and kabuki, adding in small pauses to the lips, making each pose have subtle movement and adding in a couple small gestures to each 'mood' to get across the feeling and personality of a character without needing to create 1:1 conversations for each and every interaction in the game

^Good. Now I'll know where to send feedback.

Would you recommend that we also provide screenshots?

I mentioned this in the Castlevania Dungeon, but I think they might actually do very well to have static face portraits rather than close-ups of the models for dialogue. Just put the painted portraits next to the text boxes. That's just what Symphony of the Night did, so doing that for Bloodstained might give a lot of fans some good memories. Plus, the portraits would naturally be done by Mana, and that's always good. Just small box face portraits wouldn't be too difficult for her to draw, right?

They are experimenting. If they like it, they have my support of having 3D. I will wait until I see the finished version of the animations and lip sync.

Something about the 3D models seems kind of dead to me, not really sure what it is.

roguedragon05, I'm not entirely certain of that. I would think that at the least they would be have phonetics information automatically generated from the vocal tracks and use that as a basis for synchronizing the lips. To do the lip movement manually seems like it would be a silly amount of work.