GAAAMER

Frozenbyte announced that Trine 2 will be released in 2011. The original Trine is a delightful game to write about, because it's a good game on the cusp of greatness. It's worth analyzing what worked and what didn't work in the original Trine to temper our hopes for the sequel.

The original Trine was almost great. It had lush environments, charming animation, and precise control. It would be unwise to underestimate how much the graphical flourishes, such as the animated gears on conjured boxes, made the world feel alive. The music was memorable, and the sound effects were serviceable.

There's been a lot of focus on Trine's aesthetics, which are admirable, but the real triumph of the game is its seamless integration of physics into gameplay. The physics system did an exquisite job of imbuing every object in the game with a sense of weight. When you crush a skeleton with a conjured box or kick a skeleton with the knight's mighty boot or shoot fire arrows in rapid succession into a group of skeletons, the player feedback is as wonderful as the skeletons are plentiful. It's delightful to fall on an enemy accidentally and realize that it can't get up because you're standing on it.

I especially enjoyed the consistency of the game's rules. Trine is unique in the way it treats both the player in the enemy NPCs equally. Most games reprehensibly cheat and favor enemy NPCs over the player. In Trine, the same deadly spikes and chasms that threaten you also threaten the enemies you face.

A string of minor problems held Trine back: lack of enemy variety, absence of any bosses, and failure to support on-line cooperative play. The gorgeous in-game art awkwardly clashed with the cheap-looking still images of the cut scenes. Its storybook frame was pleasant enough, but embarrassing voice acting and Ken Burns-style camera panning detracted from it.

Trine isn't the kind of game that relies on a compelling narrative, but there was definitely a feeling of aimlessness as you moved through the levels. Because the game had no bosses, and no specific antagonist was introduced until the end of the game, there wasn't a sense of urgency or progression. The most compelling games understand that pacing is integral to the player's experience. When a game has no bosses, no crescendos, and no lulls, it's difficult to sustain the player's interest through the entire game.

The game's anti-climax was utterly disappointing. In the last level, after the game finally introduces us to the antagonist, we're not allowed to engage the boss directly. The player is given no control over the climax of the game. Consider the final boss encounter in Super Metroid, which wisely plays all its cards. Super Metroid's ending allows us to control Samus at the height of her powers, and it's cathartic in the way it satisfies the player's desire for revenge. A game like Super Metroid releases the emotions that it built up over the course of the game, and Trine leaves us with no outlet.

It's minor compared to the pacing problems, but Trine had some technical issues. In a three player cooperative game, it was relatively easy to break the camera and lose characters, and the game's performance on the PC was poor. Even a Geforce 480GTX buckles at 1080p+ resolutions with aggressive anti-aliasing.

Frozenbyte released a couple of patches to fix bugs, adjust the difficulty of the last level, and add a map, but it has a history of quesitonable post-launch support. If you want to see someone tap dance more expertly than Gene Kelly, read Shacknews' interview with Joel Kinnunen, in which he prances around the question of patching Trine with on-line cooperative play. According to Joel Kinnunen, Frozenbyte "always conditioned [an on-line coop patch] to the sales of the game(s). With Trine, it looks like the chances are higher than they were with the Shadowgrounds games." He suggests that the success of Trine could lead to an on-line coop patch. Was Trine a success? It made enough money to justify a sequel.

It's even possible that Trine was successful enough to change Frozenbyte's plans for its next game. In the interview with Shacknews, Joel Kinnunen says, "Our next 'big' release is a new IP though." Either Trine 2 isn't their big release, or it was successful enough to be pushed ahead of the original IP as the company's next release. They've teased gamers twice with hints of cooperative patches, so I'm inclined to expect little post-launch support in the future.

In Trine 2, Frozenbyte claims to be addressing most of the shortcomings I've discussed. I'm cautiously optimistic about Trine 2, because there's a precedence for sequels that perfect the concepts in a flawed original title. I fondly think of titles such as Star Control 2, Warcraft 2, Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat 2, Thief 2, Samurai Shodown 2, and Virtua Fighter 2 in this regard. Even though it's not technically a sequel, DOOM is the perfection of the game that Wolfenstein 3d sketched out, and I hope that Trine 2 will similarly fulfill its potential as a great game.