Hype. It’s becoming more and more frequent. In some cases the hype is real: Halo 3 and BioShock didn’t fail to deliver the goods, giving us all we expected and then some. Then there’s the other side of the coin. Over hyped games that sputter and fail to live up to the expectations: in recent context, we have Lair.
We were promised an epic war game in beautiful next-gen glory, consisting of realistic politics, an awesome story, all while flying a gargantuan fire-breathing beast. Or as Julian Eggebrecht put it in a recent interview with G4, "You’re a super cool dragon rider pilot." Yeah, I thought it sounded cool before he talked too.
What did we get? Good graphics that chug and a dragon that flies like a walrus stranded 3 miles from water. At least the story was good?
Eggebrecht responded to critics (like me) in defense of his work, claiming "Lair is a little bit experimental in a sense, and we were expecting some controversy."
He also explains why they chose to make the dragon’s control so sluggish by saying they aimed to make "the physics on the dragon real, which means the dragon has some real weight. We’re not only simulating it, but you will feel it., especially on the motion control. When you bank, it will feel heavy." And feel it we did.
Fair enough, but it was so "realistic" that it made the game nearly unplayable. Besides, when was the last time you flew a real dragon in order to compare it against the real physics in the game?
Check out the rest of the interview:
