The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Group Play

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter Group Play

The game releases tomorrow, so I'm just getting the thread set up

Find the game topic HERE, and here are the "official" rules for our group play:

The people who are participating come to this thread to discuss the game.  Anything about the game:  The graphics, sounds, story, impressions, and cries for help.  The only thing you need to remember is that we don't want to ruin any surprises or storyline specifics for those who haven't played yet, so please hide this kind of information!

There are two ways to do this:

Use spoiler tags, which look like this [ spoiler]Type your spoiler here.[ /spoiler] (without the spaces inside the brackets.  When you do it right, it will look like this once you submit your post:

Spoiler:

You can click on the Preview button (to the left of the Send button) if you want to be sure you've done it right before submitting.

Change the color of your text.  To do so, highlight the text whose color you want to change, click on the button at the top of the reply box that looks like nine little colored squares, and choose the color you want.  Once you post, the background will be a light blue color, so keep that in mind ;)

The goal is to have fun playing this together, whilst still having the information in the thread be helpful for anyone who comes along later -- even if it's a year from now!

If you need help, try asking in the thread (don't forget your spoiler tags!)

Enjoy.  It looks like a great game!

Thanks genki for transferring my post here.  I was over in the other link thinking that's where we were supposed to be.  

There are two ways to get thru this game, one is a challenge and you must solve the crime before you can have a Save.  The saves are auto and if you don't solve the crime and you want to exit the game, you start over again.  A horrible way to do it.  There should have been manual saves or if they want autos, then do them frequently.  

The second way to play is to just go thru, no crime solving and be done with it...no fun imo.  

The other thread is just fine -- I wanted it in both places to be sure that everyone saw it

I wanted this game for a very long time and the anticipation was killing me. So it was bittersweet when release day came and we learned they were patching so another indefinite wait loomed large. Finally at about 7:20 pm EDT it arrived. So after downloading.... launch... black screen... desktop. Huh? Try a few more times - same. Reduce AA and filtering, turn off v-sync, lower res - now it runs. This tells me you need a seriously powerful and relatively new video card to take advantage of the eye candy. My 3 year old card with a gig of VRAM does an adequate job once I toned things down enough.
So now that it does run - wow. I think this is the most gorgeous and realistically rendered game world I have ever had the pleasure of exploring. I don't know about anyone who finishes in 3 - 4 hours. I think they are missing out by not taking the time to just slow down and look at the beautiful world they they are immersed in. The ambient sounds and music fit perfectly with this empty and eerie place. There really is no hand holding as you need to figure out what to do and how to progress on your own. Which segues nicely into a pet peeve of many many players that has since been kind of addressed by the devs - the dreaded autosave feature. I played for almost an hour on my first go... and quit. When I went back in, I was starting over - ??? Then I read threads about how obscure the save function was and how it was only triggered when

Spoiler:

. Now with an additional 1.1 gigs of patching, you can clearly see when the game saves and exit without fear of losing any partial progress - but do NOT quit unless you just saved or you will be doing things over until the next save point. Now that I understand how and when the game saves it is not so problematic anymore.
The game itself is quite intriguing as you sort your way through the mysteries which lie hidden in Red Creek Valley. A controller works very well with the game for those so inclined. It is a desolate and deserted place and you can almost feel the ghosts as you explore. Did I mention how beautiful it is? Photorealistic springs to mind and those with a high-end video card will really be able to appreciate how amazing the world is. Gameplay consists of you using your psychic visions to piece together the chronologies of the killings which occurred and you need to wander fully throughout this place to discover all the secrets it holds. At almost 6 hours in I figure I am halfway towards discovering what really happened and look forward to continuing this amazing journey.

UPDATE: Finally finished at about 9 hours of play time... the early bugs which impede/ derail gameplay are fixed. The play through itself was a marvelous journey of discovery in a richly detailed world and I would love to play more games in such beautifully realized locales. Without any spoilers... the end contains more questions than answers.... much of what you may surmise is speculatory at best. I still highly recommend the game to anyone who likes to explore virtual worlds and think about what they are experiencing.

That is awesome information, ChristerDoo, and   to the forum!

Check out this article (if you didn't already see it in the game thread):  http://www.theastronauts.com/2014/03/visual-revolution-vanishing-ethan-carter/  It explains all of the loving detail they put into the game!

I really like this game, very good game and there is sooo much to it.  Know that where ever you see objects to interact with, there is a crime to solve.   

The only flaw and it is a big one, is the Saving feature.   The crime must be solved before you leave the game, or you start over with that particular crime.  I learned the hard way.     I understand that the devs are working on better Saves, let's hope they make more improvements with their patches.   

   I finished - 20 hours.  In the final scenes, there is a map and it shows the crime/murder areas, I solved all of them.  There are this many to solve,

Spoiler:

  , plus there are side discoveries, but I don't know if I got all of them.

Fantastic game...wish there were more like this, one of best I've played.  

Just one flaw out of an otherwise perfect game and that is a few more Saves would be nice.  

Awesome, Marianne!   Hopefully you can help the rest of us out once we're able to get / play the game!

I put everything on the lowest setting and was finally able to get the game to play without exiting to my desktop!   I got to play for about 15 minutes before... (paraphrasing) "You have run out of video memory; closing application."    I guess I need a better computer before I can enjoy the game!