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I always felt that Doom 3 had an mini identity crisis about whether it wanted to be a slower, more vulnerable System Shock 2 style style shooter, or a darker themed but still more action oriented shooter like Doom 64/PSX. The repetitive monster closets, resource management not really being a thing & the over abundance of ammo even in the 2004 version meant you didn't have a great atmospheric survival themed experience for the most part. Some very early sections, Hell & the Delta labs have a nice creepy atmosphere I'll admit, but there wasn't enough . From an shooting perspective, most weapons feel & sound weak, damage feedback is abysmal (only gibs are the hilarious "brain popping out of zombies" for half a second before fading away and the over done flying ragdoll effects on massive enemies like the Hell Knight is WTF) didn't make it a great action experience either. On a Quake related note, I have a nasty feeling that unless it's a reboot of Quake 1, the next game will either be related to the Strogg directly, or be heavily influenced by its aesthetic: no time for Lovecraft, weird castles or inter-dimensional horror themes, Quake 2 Remastered recent success means Bethesda higher-ups will double down on the Strogg!
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Jan 20, 2024 13:40
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SS2 had a very rushed development & was using a still in development Dark engine. The SS2 Enhanced team does need a bit of visual polish IMO, since a fair number of new players won't be too happy paying full price for an "Enhanced" product with stuff like no muzzle flashes for most of the guns, hardly any weapon animations, fused fingers, no mouth lip sync & so on. I suggested slight but noticeable visual improvements to a developer on a SS2 Enhanced thread, but they're not a permanent Nightdive employee FWIW. It's worth noting that the latest gameplay trailer apparently isn't using either the Kex engine or the "NewDark" graphically updated engine (which many improvement mods use), but the original OldDark, so there's a lot of bugs and missing features, like no particle effects for enemies or weapons, messed up textures etc . Two of the trailer commenters are creators of the SHTUP graphical mod & SCP bug fix/consistency mod, so they can recognise their own work vs vanilla stuff. I can't remember if SCP also fixes the working bolt & shotgun pump animation to the weapons, or if there's another mod for that: those animations are ingame, but Irrational accidentally attached them backwards so they don't work.
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Feb 7, 2024 15:07
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It's worth playing the 2009 Wolfenstein game without mods first, but if you like it but wish it was more like RTCW, the great Retrostein mod has you covered. It changes the enemy health, behaviours, weapons effects for a more RTCW like experience, and there's more of an incentive for hunt for gold or Tomes of Power. There's two versions: one which removes the annoying "Tip: Press R To Reload!" pop-ups, but it also disables the "Press to select the next area" notifications as they're linked sadly. The second version keeps these popups/map notifications if you're not too familiar with the levels. Raven never released a SDK for it, which is a drat shame given all the enhancements they made to the engine.
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Mar 14, 2024 08:28
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I mention these two topics mainly because I was present on the old Black Mesa forums back in the 2000s, but the general subject/relevant quotes is an absolute pain to find: the archived Leakfree forums have no search function, the Internet Archive doesn't have many pages of the original forums fully saved & the useful community Wiki link (not the crappy fandom one) is broken. In both the 2012 mod and retail release, I noticed some improvements/differences with things like grenade use with the AI grunts, but not dramatic changes. I felt this especially the shotgun HECU, they felt identical to HL2 shot-gunners IMO. Since BM started as a free HL2 mod, many of the team left after the 2012 mod release, there's a ton of old technical debt that would be easier to re-use than rewriting everything etc, I would attribute this behaviour entirely to those factors. However, I'm a little curious, because I remember the Crowbar Collective team boasting on their forums about how HL2's AI behaviour was due to a mess of spaghetti code, so they spent a lot time rewriting it to be better than vanilla HL2. Specifically, they said: https://web.archive.org/web/20160831175033/https://wiki.blackmesasource.com/Main_Page https://web.archive.org/web/20160917062311/http://wiki.blackmesasource.com/HECU_Marines quote:Artificial Intelligence What happened then? Did the team actually use their custom AI code in all their game versions, only for it to ironically perform very similar to HL2 anyway? Was the level design the real factor i.e. in custom maps, you feels quite different, but in the Black Mesa levels, it feels mostly like HL2? Or did they rewrite it in 2009, realise it wasn't working or didn't really feel different in-game, so they just went back to using entirely HL2's system for their released builds? Fun random fact, the BM team also created their own Face Creation System in the late 2000s, instead of just re-using the random face feature already in HL2. Since I believe this technique of facial deformation wasn't widely used at the time (I think AAA games use a more sophisticated version of this nowdays), Crowbar Collective was a international team making a free mod & they did NOT have source code access at the time, it's very cool. Why did they go to all this effort trouble then? Unhappiness with the HL2 random face feature? A clever artistic choice to "replicate in spirit" the limited faces of the original Half-Life characters? They were double dared to? https://web.archive.org/web/20161023014542/http://wiki.blackmsasource.com/Face_Creation_System quote:The face creation system in Black Mesa is a very sophisticated yet simple system that allows there to be a wide variety of faces with very little work but high visual fidelity. The system utilizes a base face mesh to derive phenomes and other core assets that drive the facial animation system. On top of this system, it uses an optimized set of face-shaping facial flexors in real-time to deform any given face into a pre-configured appearance. The result is that in real-time any given character in game uses a combination of face-flexors, textures and submodels to create a unique individual character. Because of this system the developers are striving to have every character in Black Mesa have a unique personality and face. Granted, seeing HECU, guards & scientists all with the same base face model does feel a bit off. I don't know if they had to use the same heads for everyone in order for it to work (i.e. no "HECU only" or "Guard Only" model flags), or whether they just didn't bother making an extra head for the HECU. The point is, I'm an old man yelling at clouds who is curious about this things, but will probably never find out.
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Mar 22, 2024 11:34
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Black Mesa's Xen is way, way too long and constantly recycles plug puzzles over and over. HL1's Xen isn't really that bad, apart from the first level of Interloper, and there's a quick shortcut at 5:57 that let's you go onto the much better second map in just a few seconds. It's very short compared to Black Mesa's Xen chapters, so it does work better IMO as a final story climax compared to Black Mesa's. Bumhead is right, if you're not really feeling Half Life currently, you'll probably stop playing at the Xen chapters. I love the truly alien, other worldly feel & utter isolation of the border world in the original personally.
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Mar 22, 2024 12:55
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The Kins posted:The funny part is that IIRC Kaiser actually likes Lithtech. He worked on one of the FEAR expansions as a level designer at the start of his career! I wonder why there was a very limited custom level & mod scene for later Lithtech games. I know there wasn't an example level included in the FEAR SDK, which made things much harder to work out, but the modding scene wasn't really that great for NOLF2 either. Was it mostly a "Very poor documentation" issue for NOLF2/FEAR, or were the tools/map editors Monolith included just really naff?
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Mar 28, 2024 07:10
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Tiny Timbs posted:I’ve seen the argument that Valve has killed off all their HL3 projects because they don’t push the envelope enough and I think that is kind of a dumb reason not to make a Good FPS Game Agreed. Did HL2: Episode 1 push the boundaries radically in terms of story-telling or gameplay innovations, compared to HL2? Nope! What about HL2: Episode 2? Nope! Did that dramatically affect the reception or sales of the Episodes? Nope. Why would the community suddenly lash out if Valve had released an Episode 3 a few years after Episode 2 as they originally planned? Hell, even a 2011/2012 release would have been fine if it wrapped things up story wise, even with the out-dated Source engine. I could kind of understand the "don't make it if it's not a radical push forward" agreement if Valve had released an Episode 3 that properly ended the HL2 arc, and were now considering whether or not to make a HL3 in a new story/world in a fancy new engine.
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Mar 31, 2024 01:25
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Heavy Metal posted:And I know it sounds crazy to say I believe in Half-Life 3, but Valve could enter some new regime or era within the next 30 years or something. Unless there's a big shift in Valve's structure or philosophy, I sadly don't see it happening. They make a ton of money from Steam & microtransactions; they no longer want to mess about with engine licenses, supporting licensees or advanced modding, or constantly create new or existing IP projects that would take them a long time to complete: maybe a largish new title or two, every decade? I don't blame them at all, they wouldn't make as much money, and their flat structure doesn't incentivise it, but the Source 2 options are now "S&Box or nothing, you can only make levels in Alyx/CS2 and nothing else." If you ask Valve for a Source 2 engine license now, even if you're an experienced developer with shipped retail products, Valve's official response is "we no longer license out Source 2, go ask Garry Newman to use S&Box instead, and ask him for engine technical support, don't bother us!" Except that Garry is now rewriting the core engine to be just like Unreal/Unity, since he likes their systems. It's his baby, he can do whatever he wants, but why not use Unreal or Unity with their far better support/documentation then, if S&Box is eventually going to function similarly? Plus S&Box is a huge WIP, with a very small team constant rewriting code, they're not going to be very interested in constantly supporting a modder or developer whilst the rewrite is still going on. Alyx has mapping tools for custom campaigns, but not a full SDK, so you can't really make major changes or proper mods without a ton of hacky workarounds, and even then, you're still limited. Ditto for the Source 2 branch of CS2. If Valve released the full development tools for those games and said "Here's the full SDK for Alyx/CS2, we won't help you at all, plus our engine documentation is incomplete, lol, good luck figuring it out by yourself!", it'd still be a major positive step forward, than whatever they're doing now. It's been nearly 4 years since Alyx came out & still no proper SDK release, I don't think it's happening sadly.
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Mar 31, 2024 04:05
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