The Silver Lining episode 2 dated!

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TV-Geek
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The Silver Lining episode 2 dated!

#1 Post by TV-Geek » Thu Sep 16, 2010 12:52 am

GREAT news! We are thrilled to announce that The Silver Lining, Episode 2: Two Households will be available for download this coming Saturday, September 18th at 1 PM PST/4 PM EST! The download will be available, for free, at tsl-game.com!

Filled with more gameplay, more puzzles, more locations, more characters, and new features, Episode 2 will fully launch the player into Graham's quest to save his children and learn the identity of the cloaked stranger who has cursed them.

Get ready for Release Day 2.0, and go check out the new trailer for Episode 2 now, and enjoy a screenshot from Episode 2 on our blog!

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pbpb33
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Re: The Silver Lining episode 2 dated!

#2 Post by pbpb33 » Sat Sep 18, 2010 12:02 pm

When I first saw your headline ("The Silver Lining episode 2 dated!") I thought you were announcing that Episode 2 is out-of-date/old-fashioned!

I noticed a few recent (and rather glowing) reviews posted in the POS Forum Fan Feedback section, even though Episode 2 hasn't been released to everyone else yet. Anyway, I'm looking forward to it. Should be coming out today!!

Lambonius
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Re: The Silver Lining episode 2 dated!

#3 Post by Lambonius » Sat Sep 18, 2010 7:42 pm

I'm particularly looking forward to your review of it, pbpb33. Until I get TSL working in Wine on my iMac (haven't had a chance to fiddle with it in a few days), I won't be able to play it. So I need to read an objective review from someone who saw the same issues with Episode 1 as I did. ;)

MusicallyInspired
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Re: The Silver Lining episode 2 dated!

#4 Post by MusicallyInspired » Sat Sep 18, 2010 8:27 pm

I don't really understand their reasoning for including the updated Episode I in the same install file. Why not just upload the updated Episode I separately for those who don't want it?

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Re: The Silver Lining episode 2 dated!

#5 Post by Billetwound » Sun Sep 19, 2010 2:41 pm

I Believe they included episode 1 in the download for episode 2 due to some of the changes in they seemed to implement into it. Its not even working right on my machine, so none of it matters to me. At the beginning Graham's nose is missing most of the time, the Druid is floating, half the floors are missing. Its really wierd acting. Certain parts of at the beginning really lag bad. ( And i didn't have this problem with the initial release of episode 1).

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Re: The Silver Lining episode 2 dated!

#6 Post by navynuke04 » Mon Sep 20, 2010 5:36 pm

At first it bugged me that I had to redownload episode 1 even though I didn't have an interest in replaying it. I can see why they did it though. All the episodes see to be tied together in the same executable and not as stand alone programs. Maybe they made a change to the main executable that rendered earlier vesions of episode 1 unusable. Still, I hope they come up with a better way of distributing, because I'm not looking forward to a huge download where I have to download three episodes at the next release...

Episode 2 seems to work fine on my computer. Overall, I'm really pleased with the game and am having fun with it. There are a few parts that annoy me, but they are things I can look past.

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Re: The Silver Lining episode 2 dated!

#7 Post by adeyke » Tue Sep 21, 2010 6:46 am

I've now played episode 2. I really like the interface improvements. It's nice to be able to run everywhere, it's great that it really supports widescreen now (rather than being pillar-boxed), and the optional of bigger fonts is a nice improvement (on a high resolution, the "large" fonts are still quite small, but they're not eye-strainingly so). So those changes did make me happy.

I do have some problems with it, though (white font due to potential spoilers):
1. The narrator. I didn't really have a problem in episode 1, but that's probably because that didn't have puzzles. Episode 2 does have puzzles, and puzzles mean that you try out different things until you get the solution. And every single time you try to do something that isn't part of the solution, the narrator insults you, calls you crazy, and is just generally abusive. It's as bad as Space Quest 6. I'm fine with a narrator having personality, and I'm fine with having humor. However, the narrator should be laughing with the player, not at them. If the narrator is making the player feel bad about not already knowing the solution, that's just not fun.

As an example, when I found the hole-in-the-wall that wanted to return home, I tried to do that. It turns out that I needed to actually use it for something, but the narrator didn't even hint at that. Instead, I was apparently crazy for trying to do what I'd promised to do.

As another example, there's a person sitting in the outdoor part of the restaurant. It's apparently an inanimate object, and I'm crazy for attempting to talk to her.

2. Not enough puzzles. It seemed that half of all game-relevant actions involved throwing my wealth around. It's much better than episode 1, but it's still really, really short.

3. The editing. In the written texts, there are some clear errors. For example, in the newsletter's comment about "One Winged One was quite as lucky", there should presumably be "not" in there. And in the sea folklore book, "fisherman" is used as a plural (instead of "fishermen"). For me, having things that really are objectively wrong really break the illusion of professionalism, much more than subjective things like graphics and voice acting.

4. It's pronounced archiPELago.

5. It seems that alt-tabbing causes the textures on things like the magic spell scroll thing and the newsletter to break.

6. This one's admittedly minor, but if you have no further conversation with an NPC, it should give a special message (e.g. "You have nothing further to say right now"). Right now, you have the silly "Hello. Goodbye" conversation.

7. The episode name seems rather unrelated.

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Re: The Silver Lining episode 2 dated!

#8 Post by wilco64256 » Tue Sep 21, 2010 6:02 pm

navynuke04 wrote:At first it bugged me that I had to redownload episode 1 even though I didn't have an interest in replaying it. I can see why they did it though. All the episodes see to be tied together in the same executable and not as stand alone programs. Maybe they made a change to the main executable that rendered earlier vesions of episode 1 unusable. Still, I hope they come up with a better way of distributing, because I'm not looking forward to a huge download where I have to download three episodes at the next release...

Episode 2 seems to work fine on my computer. Overall, I'm really pleased with the game and am having fun with it. There are a few parts that annoy me, but they are things I can look past.
We are actually working on that very thing - we wanted to do that for this release but there really was so much that had been modified in Episode 1 that it became rather difficult to separate the two. For all future releases we'll actually have two different downloads - one that includes all episodes up to that point and another that is just the new episode with any patches for previous stuff for those who already have the other episodes.

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