Last News update on Steam is from 2020, i think it needs a new newsletter to let people know whats happening at least. I think its fair.
I remember enjoying this game back when it launched, as I did many PC first person shooters in that magical era of gaming in the late 1990s/early 2000s, but at the time thinking the graphics, well, specifically the character models looked kind of weird. I don't think time has been very kind to this game as looking at the trailer the game looks downright bizarre with their steroid-infused wobbly looks. Other than the visuals and remembering liking it at the time I cannot remember anything else about it. Not sure I would want to revisit this game on that basis because if I cannot remember anything else about the game other than its odd visual style then it is likely something I wouldn't want to play now. Doom and Quake have stood the test of time with memorable level designs and so on, even with dated graphics, but I am not sure this game has.
Kingpin is definitely, almost, a bit of a niche game. A lot of people went into it thinking it was a run/gun kind of shooter. And the game doesn't do a good job of explaining a lot of it's mechanics to the player. You start the game... and within a few minutes, you're introduced to the ability to buy an item, to interact with a game with either a positive or negative response.. have a hostile encounter that you can avoid. And the game tells you NOTHING about it. It doesn't explain the positive/negative response, that you can search dead enemies for money.. I've always told people that, if you're playing Kingpin for the first time... play on Easy. I've always loved Kingpin, replay it every few years. But, even then, I will fully accept and say some it's design works against it. Mostly in how poorly it conveys information to the player.
It's kind of a game that probably tried to do too much too early. It feels like quake engine didn't allow them to exactly do what they wanted so it ended up with weird and poorly explained mechanics and systems tacked on to a straightforward shooter engine. The setting itself has its charm though.
Yea the game is so dark, gritty and damp. Could almost smell the stinky water by the wharf when playing the game the first time.
It actually does a lot really well, dismemberment and location based damage. Friendly NPCs.. hubs, AI team mates that (unlike Daikatana) would follow you up ladders, jump across gaps with you.. It's just challenging. If you try to play it like a fast paced shooter, you're going to die. A lot and really fast. And, the initial release had some bugs.
The game came out in old times when CD was accompanied with a manual. It has everything explained including the most important in later stage of the game crew management mechanic when you can hire goons and be kingpin for real.
The game came out in old times where majority of games you could buy in poland were russian bootleg reprints (actual rips with stripped videos to fit on CDs) with poor polish dubbing being done by single russian dude playing all characters in every game he chose to dub. All you were getting was a plastic CD sleeve with the game and two sides of the box printed on a paper sheet on both sides of the sleeve. Barely anyone had internet and majority of people were none the wiser that there was anything wrong with those bootlegs. Amusingly, the story extends further as that's how some local "titans of industry" started - going from juggling bootlegs to legitimizing their trade, becoming proxies in undesirable country for other publishers and then once they started stepping in by finally shifting into making games.
Yeah, and lots of people playing now... experienced it for the first time on Steam, with no manual. And hell, even back when the game first released, I know plenty of people that never read the manual. And jumped right into the game and got their butts handed to them.
So this happened during Realms Deep today: I'm really torn. So it sounds like a lot of work went into this but I'm very underwhelmed with this trailer. And why did they add those massive, floating $ signs over corpses? It's a very strange decision to add such a thing in such a gritty looking game. It almost makes it look like a mobile game. Hopefully it plays like a dream.
All textures have been upscaled by hand, lighting (which is not final in that footage) is updated, along with ambient occlusion, updated shadows. Gameplay has seen updates to weapon and enemy balancing, the notepad and inventory are improved. The money icons are there as one of the main things we heard from people was that they never knew they could loot corpses for money. The game never tells the player this.
It's a shame they were unable to get rid of the polygon wobble like nightdive has with quake 2 (I know it's using kex but still). Also the $ could be more subtle as it looks kinda like a arcade game.
Keeping the vertex wobble was decided when the project first started. For technical reasons, and based on personal preference. A lot of people like the wobble of the Quake 2 engine.
I'm not a fan of the model wobbling in the Quake 2 engine. I can understand some people like it. But it would have been better to have the option to choose that an an option to fix it. I don't think it's impossible to have perspective correct texture mapping, instead of affine texture mapping. And floating point coordinates for geometry, instead of integer. Lightspeed Studios did that for Quake 2 RTX.
