Guillermus posted:Unless you play Serious Sam BFE wich forces you to backpedal due to lovely design overall. I can't believe they hosed up so much that game when they nailed TFE and TSE I hated BFE. gooby on rails posted:Good luck doing that with kamikazes involved, though. That's when you "rarely leave the thick of battle". 
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Mar 1, 2013 19:04
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Dominic White posted:Key-hunts in Doom might stick in the mind, but they're not really gameplay - they're just arbitrary colored points at key (ha) points in a given level. They're window dressing. Remove them and just make the level a long, linear stretch of setpieces and you'd have the same effect, so long as the combat was up to par. Hand Doom to someone who's never played it before and watch them get completely lost. For better or worse, the maze-like design of the original Dooms and their clones are a huge part of their pacing. A linear series of set pieces only matches the pacing of the games if you have them completely memorized. As for Serious Sam, the comparison feels apt mostly due to the weapon and enemy types. The level design is completely different, but it can kind of scratch the same itch and is a drat fine series taken on its own merits (though the later games obvious have more issues than the first couple).
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Mar 1, 2013 19:23
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sethsez posted:Hand Doom to someone who's never played it before and watch them get completely lost. See, that's something I consider a flaw in the core Doom design. It's no fun to run round the same handful of hallways you've already cleared out, looking for that switch or key that you missed. Especially as switches can look like just about anything, sometimes. I can't help but think of the Hells Cathedral map of Deus Vult 2. That's Doom at its best when it works (if you're moving in the right direction, the fights are amazing and well choreographed, varied in style and pacing), and absolute worst, as there are some seriously obscure switches and keys hidden around that it's very easy to miss, freezing progress. Dominic White fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Mar 1, 2013 |
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Mar 1, 2013 19:25
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The central room barriers being lowered by pressing like 10 out of like 16 pentagram floor switches was so badly explained in that map. The library was super confusing too. Shame because some of the arenas are exceptionally well choreographed.
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Mar 1, 2013 19:41
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Korendian Leader posted:Please don't play HR2 with brutal doom. I attempted it after trying it normally and still utterly failing, don't worry.
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Mar 1, 2013 19:42
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Korendian Leader posted:The central room barriers being lowered by pressing like 10 out of like 16 pentagram floor switches was so badly explained in that map. The library was super confusing too. Shame because some of the arenas are exceptionally well choreographed. Exactly. Varied combat in complex architecture? Great. Arbitrary switch-hunts? Bullshit, especially when switches can be disguised as just about anything. I'm not suggesting that the game have flashing waypoints (although an emergency 'where next?' ala Dead Space wouldn't be bad). Good level design leads the player along visually, through a carefully laid-out path of interesting-looking doorways, powerups and enemies. Getting lost in mazes because I didn't happen to be thinking along exactly the same wavelength as the mapper amount to just about all my negative memories of Doom. Thankfully, those are relatively few and far between.
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Mar 1, 2013 19:47
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A decade of hallways has destroyed the modern gamer's spatial visualization ability. By now, many cannot find the out of their own homes!
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Mar 1, 2013 19:51
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Dominic White posted:Good level design leads the player along visually, through a carefully laid-out path of interesting-looking doorways, powerups and enemies. I want to be able to get lost. Makes it feel like I'm exploring and conquering a map, not like I'm running through a theme park or running along a race track.
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Mar 1, 2013 20:24
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What did BFE even stand for anyway?
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Mar 1, 2013 20:25
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Cat Mattress posted:Though personally I think it should be subtle enough about it that the player doesn't feel like his hands are being held. The developer commentary for Half-Life 2: Episode 1 talks about this a lot. It's pretty interesting.
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Mar 1, 2013 20:29
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xanthan posted:What did BFE even stand for anyway?
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Mar 1, 2013 20:39
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Korendian Leader posted:The library was super confusing too. Shame because some of the arenas are exceptionally well choreographed. God help you if you play at lower resolutions. Or if it gets covered up with bullet/explosion/scorch decals. Or got some blood spatters on the walls. Here is a video perfectly demonstrating its bullshit. I guess it's supposed to have you laugh at how "blind" the dude is, but it really just makes me cringe a little. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l67mwc9WKmc Cat Mattress posted:I want to be able to get lost. Makes it feel like I'm exploring and conquering a map, not like I'm running through a theme park or running along a race track. If the corridors, halls, and paths are at least similar in theme or locale, or there's even a hint that switch A could/would/should affect area B, then it's good. If it's just slapdash "hit this button to open a small wall for five seconds on the other side of the map", then it's really just bullshit and getting lost is no fun at all. In the end, it's better to be shooting at poo poo than to not be shooting at poo poo. I think this is what made Scythe II so damned good. It's the perfect balance of exploration and linearity; paths always lead directly into other paths, and there's rarely an instance where you're not in the field of view of where to go next. But it never explicitly leads you down that way, outside of the first few maps. TerminusEst13 fucked around with this message at 20:43 on Mar 1, 2013 |
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Mar 1, 2013 20:39
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TerminusEst13 posted:If it's just slapdash "hit this button to open a small wall for five seconds on the other side of the map", then it's really just bullshit and getting lost is no fun at all. Hexen. 
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Mar 1, 2013 20:42
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Dominic White posted:See, that's something I consider a flaw in the core Doom design. It's no fun to run round the same handful of hallways you've already cleared out, looking for that switch or key that you missed. Especially as switches can look like just about anything, sometimes. To an extent I agree, but a well-designed level that still requires backtracking and features multiple actual crossroads is infinitely preferable to me than a glorified decorated hallway. At their best Doom levels felt like places, however abstracted, and although a series of setpieces keeps the action going it loses that aspect.
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Mar 1, 2013 20:51
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Yodzilla posted:Hexen. Hexen did one up and had switches that often affected obscure things on another god drat map.
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Mar 1, 2013 21:11
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A couple of folks were asking about Quake mapping back in January... if you're still hanging around there's a few tool releases you'll be interested in. New level editor for Windows and OS X: http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60908 New compiler toolchain: http://celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60906
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Mar 1, 2013 21:11
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I think Doom 3 captured the spirit of the original Doom more than most people gave it credit for. Doom 1 is meant to be a horror game; it's about running blindly through high-tech bases with hell slowly bleeding through while enemies appear out of nowhere. Doom 3 has the same feel, and even though it's slower paced and the enemy density is much smaller it presents similar situations where each room is its own set piece with the monster/level design interactions providing variety and fun. Doom 2 (especially in the mid to later levels) was a much more open game where the challenge was the hordes of monsters thrown at you; the gameplay is much more run-and-gun, if you stop moving you'll probably be dead soon. Playing Doom 1 as a child had me legitimately scared, Doom 2 not so much. Doom 3 brought back that feeling for me very well and a lot of the complaints about it (darkness, monster closets, lack of flashlight/gun simultaneously) were parts that I really enjoyed. Maybe it's just nostalgia talking.
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Mar 1, 2013 21:16
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sethsez posted:To an extent I agree, but a well-designed level that still requires backtracking and features multiple actual crossroads is infinitely preferable to me than a glorified decorated hallway. At their best Doom levels felt like places, however abstracted, and although a series of setpieces keeps the action going it loses that aspect. See this is what I see as the core of the disconnect. Some people think that Painkiller and Serious Sam are the heirs to doom because their gameplay and tactics (run/strafe around like a madman emptying whatever you've got into hordes of monsters) closely mirror what some doom designers did with some levels. The level itself is the backdrop, a good "setpiece" in which to have the battle, the best levels will make the fight itself more interesting by their design. More often than not the fan maps take this approach. Some people think that key hunt/puzzle levels of doom are what made it good, so you cannot call many games heirs to doom. Perhaps some of the more puzzle focused FPS games like American McGee's Alice or the RPG/Survival hybrids like Resident Evil 4+ or Dead Space and of course Doom 3. Petersen and McGee both took this approach a lot, and it can be fun, but it can also be infuriating. It also doesn't really make the whole "doom is a map, game X is a line" criticism any more correct, Doom is still a line, its just a line that doubles back over on itself to pick up keys. Many of the modern "linear" FPS games do the exact same thing. My biggest problem with Bad Company 2 (which was a fantastic game solely because you could explode your way through walls like some sort of paramilitary kool aid man) was that it was too much like doom. It would have me go to a place, get a thing that I need, then double back over where I just went only this time a bunch of monster closets have opened up and I have to turn left halfway through to get somewhere new. My bias should be pretty obvious by my descriptions, but the amount of hate for the direction that nigh every FPS in the post quake 2 era has taken surprises me. While secret hunting/map exploration can be a valid and fun part of the gameplay (and still is in many games, Black Ops and Halo 3's secrets are loving elaborate as poo poo) most people view the shooter part of the first person shooter as what draws them. Most people who play games don't enjoy getting lost for a while after killing all the monsters because they cannot find the red skull key. To its credit, very rarely does Doom make finding something that is required to progress fiendishly difficult, I think if it had it would've been a far less successful game.
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Mar 1, 2013 21:17
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Backtracking works well if the goal you're looking for is clear. If maps make you press switches and find what obscure part of the map it opens before the switch resets (ala Hexen or Eternal Doom), they've hosed up. That's boring, frustrating and a momentum killer. If yo're not sure that someone can easily find the door or elevator that a switch activates, use enemies to guide them towards their goal. It's fun and helps them keep track of what's going on.
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Mar 1, 2013 21:23
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sethsez posted:To an extent I agree, but a well-designed level that still requires backtracking and features multiple actual crossroads is infinitely preferable to me than a glorified decorated hallway. At their best Doom levels felt like places, however abstracted, and although a series of setpieces keeps the action going it loses that aspect. You don't have to lose that aspect at all, really. Levels can easily loop back on themselves over and over again and still be intuitively navigated. Make the most interesting-looking path at any given time be the right one to follow. End the path in a setpiece fight and give the player a key as a reward. You want the player to know where to go after finding the blue key? Just make sure that along the way there, they HAVE to have seen an obvious blue key door. Make it more memorable by putting a window by it - let the player see a new gun just out of reach. You've just set up some basic positive feedback. You can keep excitement up by perhaps dropping in a few ambushes or teleported-in waves of enemies during the hike back. Keep the interconnectedness, but make it intuitive. More importantly, keep the player moving through interesting environments with varied combat.
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Mar 1, 2013 21:28
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Evan Montegarde posted:I think Doom 3 captured the spirit of the original Doom more than most people gave it credit for. Doom 1 is meant to be a horror game; it's about running blindly through high-tech bases with hell slowly bleeding through while enemies appear out of nowhere. Doom 3 has the same feel, and even though it's slower paced and the enemy density is much smaller it presents similar situations where each room is its own set piece with the monster/level design interactions providing variety and fun. Doom 2 (especially in the mid to later levels) was a much more open game where the challenge was the hordes of monsters thrown at you; the gameplay is much more run-and-gun, if you stop moving you'll probably be dead soon. The thing that I hated in doom 3 the most was the dull, samey levels. I don't remember if any levels aren't "dull grey" or "vaguely industrial". The constant monster closets didn't help but most of the time they were very obvious. I never understood the whole flashlight complaint because it takes what, less than a second to switch to a weapon and you could beat a monster in the head with it before backing up if you ran into one. I always thought FEAR sorta carried on the spirit of the gameplay of doom, too bad the levels sucked and you fought two types of enemies the entire game, but you could do a slow motion dropkick and that was always fun. More games should have that.
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Mar 1, 2013 21:28
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0 rows returned posted:I always thought FEAR sorta carried on the spirit of the gameplay of doom, too bad the levels sucked and you fought two types of enemies the entire game, but you could do a slow motion dropkick and that was always fun. More games should have that. FEAR was a good game that happened to run on what may be the stupidest FPS engine to ever get popular. There are not enough words in the English language to convey just how much I loathe Lithtech. To stress how immensely irritating Lithtech is, my computer that runs F3AR in full 1080p everything maxed to the gills, no fps issues at all, cannot run the first Fear at all if I have a Microsoft mouse plugged in. Due to the way it detects mouse capabilities, the CPU will get overrun with IRQs aimed at the mouse and the game will stagger along at 2 FPS. Red_Mage fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Mar 1, 2013 |
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Mar 1, 2013 21:36
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I'm still waiting for the next release candidate before I try it again (I'd quite like to play the final boss fight without it exploding straight away), but ZDCMP2 is a great example of how you can have a complex interconnected environment with key-like elements, a variety of locations and high-spectacle setpiece combat all at once without really sacrificing any particular element. For those who haven't seen it, it's an enormous collaboration project. A whole episode-length adventure spanning a broad range of environments all in a single map. If you're ever lost, there's literal signposting to most key locations, and you have a mission tracker that tells you where your next key objective is. There's a lot of optional areas and secrets to find, but it moves along at a good pace. Dominic White fucked around with this message at 21:42 on Mar 1, 2013 |
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Mar 1, 2013 21:37
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Dominic White posted:See, that's something I consider a flaw in the core Doom design. It's no fun to run round the same handful of hallways you've already cleared out, looking for that switch or key that you missed. Especially as switches can look like just about anything, sometimes. The game has a freaking auto-map!  That's not just modern sourceports, it always did, even the floppy version. Use the automap. They took the time to program it and then designed the game to use it. I've never been stuck in doom for more than a few minutes.I don't know what you want. I'm so freaking sick of obvious corridor shooters and "Press A to play game" Oh noes, we have to actually stop once every 5 minutes and use our brains to figure out which way we should go? gently caress that noise. Yodzilla posted:The developer commentary for Half-Life 2: Episode 1 talks about this a lot. It's pretty interesting. Developer commentary on all Valve games is Must-Watch material. Seriously brilliant stuff, watching the Portal ones in particular taught me a whole lot about player psychology and level design. The TF2 one teaches you a lot about conveyance of gameplay mechanics through art design. Amazing stuff, well worth the few minutes it takes to boot up the map and watch. Zaphod42 fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Mar 1, 2013 |
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Mar 1, 2013 22:45
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Dominic White posted:I'm still waiting for the next release candidate before I try it again (I'd quite like to play the final boss fight without it exploding straight away), but ZDCMP2 is a great example of how you can have a complex interconnected environment with key-like elements, a variety of locations and high-spectacle setpiece combat all at once without really sacrificing any particular element. It's also non-linear as gently caress. Even if you have to go blue key->yellow key->red key before you can get into the corrupted caverns and hell areas, there are plenty of routes available, with entire sections of the maps that you can skip entirely. And if you go through these skipped sections in your next playthrough, it allows you to skip sections that you went through in the previous. As for the exploding boss issue, it was a ZDoom bug (a code change made without taking 3D floors into account) which has since been fixed if you use an SVN build (ZDoom r4152+ or GZDoom r1530+). Cat Mattress fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Mar 1, 2013 |
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Mar 1, 2013 22:47
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Speaking of levels and WADs with poor flow, I just finished "Demons of Problematique". I'd consider it a reasonably challenging WAD with some great atmosphere and aesthetics, but the first time I tried playing it, I put it down because I kept losing momentum. Secrets would place you further into the level, sometimes enabling you to skip large parts of the map, but other times requiring you to backtrack until you found a key, switch, or trigger than enabled you to progress. One "secret" teleporter in particular dumped me outside of the structure (where the entire level took place) without any reason. There was no discernible reward, except for a second teleporter that returned me to where I had discovered the secret. Another secret teleporter placed me in such a way that I was past a gate that was triggered to close (thus preventing you from backtracking) but, because of my placement, triggering it to close prevented me from progressing. The second "Demons of the Problematique" is a lot better, at the cost of being a lot more linear. If I have to spend more than 3 or 4 minutes backtracking to find a key, switch, or door, and I don't have any idea what I'm even looking for, your WAD and garbage and gently caress you.
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Mar 1, 2013 22:54
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Zaphod42 posted:The game has a freaking auto-map! And I just gave an example where no amount of auto-mapping will help you. You could have the map set to overlay and still be lost for hours trying to figure a route out of that level. Moments like that are rare, but that's why I brought that particular level up as an example of Doom at its very strongest (aside from a few sticking points, the non-linearity is great) and weakest.
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Mar 1, 2013 22:55
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A map only helps when you don't support room-over-room. Some of the levels in Marathon 2 and especially Infinity are utterly incomprehensible on the map view.
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Mar 1, 2013 22:56
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gooby on rails posted:A map only helps when you don't support room-over-room. Some of the levels in Marathon 2 and especially Infinity are utterly incomprehensible on the map view. That's just because they have a lovely mapping system. 
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Mar 1, 2013 23:07
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gooby on rails posted:A map only helps when you don't support room-over-room. Some of the levels in Marathon 2 and especially Infinity are utterly incomprehensible on the map view. Doom wads that try to cheat and imply room over room with teleporters (chexquest for example), actually work far better than some doom levels that just cram it all in there on the automap. I'd love to see someone make a map with labels for a Doom wad though. Automap really ends up being useless much of the time because unless you spend a LOT of time playing Doom, the shape of the map doesn't necessarily make it obvious where something you are looking for might be.
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Mar 1, 2013 23:10
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Red_Mage posted:Doom wads that try to cheat and imply room over room with teleporters (chexquest for example), actually work far better than some doom levels that just cram it all in there on the automap. I'd love to see someone make a map with labels for a Doom wad though. Automap really ends up being useless much of the time because unless you spend a LOT of time playing Doom, the shape of the map doesn't necessarily make it obvious where something you are looking for might be. Solution: spend a LOT of time playing Doom
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Mar 1, 2013 23:12
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Red_Mage posted:Doom wads that try to cheat and imply room over room with teleporters (chexquest for example), actually work far better than some doom levels that just cram it all in there on the automap. I'd love to see someone make a map with labels for a Doom wad though. I swear one of the maps in ZPack: Random Maps For Doom (the "Blackrock" map) actually did this because the map was pretty huge. There were icons imposed on the automap to help you navigate to objectives.
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Mar 1, 2013 23:30
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The City of the Damned Apocalypse also has automap markers to help you find the "moon shelters" quickly. A neat thing about automap and room-over-room is that in ZDoom and GZDoom, if you have enabled textured automap, then the textures used will be that of the highest visible floor below your eye level. This can help in multi-story buildings, provided of course they use different floor textures on each story.
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Mar 1, 2013 23:40
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Cream-of-Plenty posted:Neither game (Doom 3 or Painkiller) had a satisfying double barreled shotgun, so neither game is a true Doom game. Resurrection of Evil doesn't count. The shotgun in The Golden Souls (Mario 64 wad from a few pages back) is basically the perfect video game shotgun. The guy needs a job in game design just for that. Super satisfying to use and actually acts kind of like a shotgun. Come to think of it, are there any other games that have an over/under shotgun? I can't even think of any other mods that have one, yet alone a commercial game.
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Mar 2, 2013 05:09
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A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:Come to think of it, are there any other games that have an over/under shotgun? I can't even think of any other mods that have one, yet alone a commercial game. I'm...pretty sure Call of Duty: Black Ops, Fallout: New Vegas, and Serious Sam: Double D had one. Which is basically just a drop in the barrel, admittedly, but hey! They exist!
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Mar 2, 2013 05:27
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I just realized that I miss JailBreak for Quake II back in the day. Any games (old or modern) have that kind of mod that have actual players?
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Mar 2, 2013 05:32
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A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:Come to think of it, are there any other games that have an over/under shotgun? I can't even think of any other mods that have one, yet alone a commercial game. The STALKER series features over/under shotguns prominently throughout all three games. Play STALKER, by the way.
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Mar 2, 2013 05:33
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dark1x posted:The best Doom levels are those which slowly peel back layers of the map as you throw swithces and find keys. You don't simply blow through an area and move on to the next, no, you return to areas you've already traversed finding new challenges and new paths along the way. You could enter a map with the exit door placed just in front of the entrance and then spend the rest of your time there trying to figure out how to open the passage way to that exit. The environments are built to explore rather than simply jogging through them blasting everything in sight. The keys are, dare I say, analogous to the power ups in a Metroid game in that you will find areas early on that must be returned to later with the appropriate trigger item. This. This is what I love about what, for lack of a better term, I will call "pre-Half-Life level design". This is what made Thief, System Shock, Deus Ex, Pathways into Darkness, and Marathon amazing for me. Levels that are spaces you can explore rather than just a linear sequence of encounters. Corridor shooters can be fun too, but what I really, really like is exploration. Along those lines, I've long considered Looking Glass Studios to be the masters of that sort of level design, and I've been working on a tool to generate nice HTML5 maps of System Shock levels. It still needs a lot of work - the layer toggles don't do anything yet, for example, and slope-implied walls aren't drawn yet - but you can still get a good view of most of the levels. Deck 1: Medical is actually one of the most linear maps in the game; there's a fairly unambiguous "intended path" through the level. At the same time, there's a lot of side branches, shortcuts to unlock that make the level more interconnected (and some that you can use without unlocking from the "far side" first), and glimpses of goodies that you won't be able to get until you circle back around with more keycards, access codes, or lowered level security. On the flip side, you have Deck 7: Ops, which gives you a bunch of objectives to accomplish and lets you explore the map in pretty much any order you want. I think System Shock is pretty much the pinnacle of this style of level design, although one could plausibly argue the Thief games instead. A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:The shotgun in The Golden Souls (Mario 64 wad from a few pages back) is basically the perfect video game shotgun. The guy needs a job in game design just for that. Super satisfying to use and actually acts kind of like a shotgun. Half-Life 1 and 2.
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Mar 2, 2013 05:38
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DoombatINC posted:The STALKER series features over/under shotguns prominently throughout all three games.
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Mar 2, 2013 05:39
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A FUCKIN CANARY!! posted:Come to think of it, are there any other games that have an over/under shotgun? I can't even think of any other mods that have one, yet alone a commercial game. http://killzone.wikia.com/wiki/StA-52_Assault_Rifle It only had the shotgun bit for Killzone 1, though, as they removed secondary fire in KZ2/3.
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