User interface/Combat

The interface

Adventure games can have great graphics and interesting storyline but if the game has a poor user interface it looses whatever advantages it may have had. Dreamfall's user interface has what Funcom is calling the "focus field". It's a visible cone that starts at your playable character and extends out. It allows the player to examine and sometimes interact with objects inside the cone. The idea is to bridge the gap between the point-and-click nature of most 2D adventure games with simply walking up to objects in normal action games. NPCs are of course a part of Dreamfall as well; there are a ton of people to chat with in the game and your characters will have a number of varied answers to give them.

Combat

We mentioned combat before and while all three characters can do some sort of fighting in the game it's Kian that gets to do the majority of it in Dreamfall. Funcom has said the combat is akin to what BioWare developed for their 2005 Xbox action-RPG Jade Empire. There are three types of combat moves in the game (light, heavy and block) and the combat is being designed so that players don't have to be masters of fighting games to figure it out. It's cool to see that Funcom is trying to bring in new elements in the adventure genre.

The build we got to see at GDC was the Xbox version and it looked pretty darn amazing. The art style of Dreamfall looks more like an illustrated novel than a slick video game with lots of grand vistas, buildings and other locations. Character models are well done as is the user interface in the Xbox version. We were assured that the PC version of Dreamfall (which we did not see in our GDC demo) will look even better thanks in part to higher resolution graphics.


Even though we only got to see a brief Xbox demo of the game at GDC, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey already looks likely to be the adventure game to beat in 2006. The big question is not whether the game will do well on the PC but whether people will pick up this game on the Xbox, which hasn't had the best of luck with adventure titles. Aspyr plans to release this game for both platforms in the US later in April.