Puzzle Quest 2 Previews
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First up is Siliconera, where they quote producer Tim Ramage:
In a sea of puzzle brawlers, how does D3 solve puzzle of market oversaturation? I brought the question to Tim Ramage, Producer, of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix and Puzzle Quest 2.
(It's a challenge,) Ramage candidly commented. (It's been three years since Puzzle Quest 1 and since then there have been a lot of games that saturate the market. Spanning out from those games is definitely a challenge. We have the benefit of the Puzzle Quest label, the benefit of working with the developer that invented this genre to help us standout. Then it's just a matter of making sure that we've done the things to refine what we did in Puzzle Quest 1 that were successful, recreate those in Puzzle Quest 2, and improve them as well as a few new touches that make everything standout.)
And then we have a much more informative preview at GameXplain:
This overarching RPG context has been tweaked slightly for the soon to be released title, but seemingly for the better. Gone are the sprawling, nonsensical JRPG stylings of the first game. Instead, we're given a Puzzle Quest-ian take on a dungeon crawler. You are a hero charged with protecting a town from an incursion of monsters that was awakened by something or other. Nothing all that interesting, but simple; and enticingly similar to Diablo.
That Diablo comparison held true as I was confronted with the myriad of differences between this game and the first. Instead of the overworld map progression of the first title, you have control over an actual character as he or she walks through the world. Along the way, you can talk to various people, interact with parts of the environment, and confront enemies. Interacting with the environment usually meant a puzzle-based mini-game not all that different from the normal combat game, although Tim promised that there would be some greater variation for things like picking locks and learning spells. During these RPG stretches, the game is shot from an isometric persepctive, and does vaguely feel like a dungeon crawler. The anime-influenced artistic sensibilities of the first game were also abandoned, making way for a Western-ized art design. I was kind of attached to the out of place manga-stylings of the first game, but I wasn't irked at the change either since fighting is still just as fun as ever, and I was too distracted by this to be bothered by how the characters looked.
