[NNC]

 OpenMaw, on 12 October 2020 - 03:37 PM, said:

For that matter, none of the retro shooters that have been made really capture Duke.

Ion Fury has some of the same elements because the engine is shared heritage to how the game is made, but the feel? Not quite the same. That's not a knock against it, don't take me that way, I'm saying it doesn't quite feel the same. Just as Blood and Redneck Rampage don't feel like Duke either, despite using similar formulas.

Ion Fury is way too detailed compared to classic Duke. Sometimes it was annoying when you were looking for secrets. It was, however, pretty close to modern Duke mapping, DNF TC 2013 had a somewhat similar approach.
Blood had a different design approach as well. There was much less emphasis on height differences, scaling, sector over sector or sector effectors. It was an important element in Duke. The weird palette also gave it a different vibe. Blood focused around enemy and weapon variety and crazyness better, it was a more important aspect of the game.
Redneck Rampage also relied on stuff like humor and enemy types, the level design was very average (not to mention the lead designer was also the lead designer of Doom's Master Levels, and it was very annoying as well).

Shadow Warrior got close a few times, some of Keith Schuler's maps like Bath House, Auto Maul, Floating Fortress or Water Torture felt Duke 3D-ish. Water Torture was actually a level that could have been placed in the Birth episode quite easily.

[OpenMaw]

In terms of gameplay most of them go for a more simple Quake/Doom flavor. Things like Dusk, though it is well done and brings a few of its own touches to the mix, is still much closer to Quake 1 than anything else.

Ion Fury is close, but it has a flavor that is distinct from Duke. If I ask for ice cream it is the chocolate chip mint to Duke's Neapolitan. A couple of the tweaks to the overall gameplay don't quite feel in line with what Duke did. They actually feel a bit more like, say, Half-Life 2. That is not a bad thing. Not even close. Ion Fury is a great game front to back.

The problem with Duke is that to make a character in the same spirit as Duke, you'd ultimately be compared to Duke. A tricky balance, just with the persona of a descendant of the Duke persona.

Getting the gameplay right is understand that specifically for Duke 3D it was the mixture of weapons, the environments focusing on semi-believable locations with interactivity scattered throughout, a sense of foreboding atmosphere at times, multiple paths to explore, secrets a plenty. All of it together is what gives you the winning formula. All in the right balance.

This is one of the reasons I disagree with people who say "Just make a Duke-like. Some chinny fuck named Chuck Puckem, that has some guns and likes titties." Because there were lots of off brand lame ass characters like that. We don't even remember them, because that's how weak they were. Duke himself, at the time of Duke 3D, was lightning in a bottle.

[NNC]

I don't know how Ion Fury would look like with less details on the maps or with other mappers in control. I think Ion Fury's definitive mapper is DavoX, he created the game's facade, people percieve his style as the Ion Fury style just like they do with Romero in Doom and with Blum in Duke. No matter how hard the others tried, when you close your eyes, think about Ion Fury, a DavoX area will appear. He wasn't my favourite however, I preferred Daedolon, whose maps had less colours and details, and his areas felt like an interesting mix of Half Life 2 and classic Duke 3D. But still, Daedolon's style don't define Ion Fury. DavoX style is shiny and crowded, even a normal room can be missed because of the abundance of details. That might give us the impression that IF is very far from Duke in its style.

[Aleks]

 OpenMaw, on 12 October 2020 - 10:12 PM, said:

In terms of gameplay most of them go for a more simple Quake/Doom flavor. Things like Dusk, though it is well done and brings a few of its own touches to the mix, is still much closer to Quake 1 than anything else.

Ion Fury is close, but it has a flavor that is distinct from Duke. If I ask for ice cream it is the chocolate chip mint to Duke's Neapolitan. A couple of the tweaks to the overall gameplay don't quite feel in line with what Duke did. They actually feel a bit more like, say, Half-Life 2. That is not a bad thing. Not even close. Ion Fury is a great game front to back.

The problem with Duke is that to make a character in the same spirit as Duke, you'd ultimately be compared to Duke. A tricky balance, just with the persona of a descendant of the Duke persona.

Getting the gameplay right is understand that specifically for Duke 3D it was the mixture of weapons, the environments focusing on semi-believable locations with interactivity scattered throughout, a sense of foreboding atmosphere at times, multiple paths to explore, secrets a plenty. All of it together is what gives you the winning formula. All in the right balance.

This is one of the reasons I disagree with people who say "Just make a Duke-like. Some chinny fuck named Chuck Puckem, that has some guns and likes titties." Because there were lots of off brand lame ass characters like that. We don't even remember them, because that's how weak they were. Duke himself, at the time of Duke 3D, was lightning in a bottle.

The sense of location (and a large variety of locations), making each of the original levels highly rememberable, is one of the things that really made Duke great. Also something that most people don't really think about, but which occured to me lately, the really nicely composed and paletted textures, which give the game it's characteristic look. I've never really got into Doom or Quake as a kid, because they just didn't have visual attracting gimmick which Duke had, DN3D levels weren't just random mazes and corridors filled with generic boxes, but actual relatable locations, clearly inspired by real life places.

Also, the music in Duke 3D was really exceptional. Ion Fury has a great and dynamic beats that go well with the action, but songwriting in Duke is something really remarkable. And music like Plasma, Lord of LA or Gotham aren't even that catchy or jumpy, it's just amazingly complementing the game's ambience and design, adding life and emotion to Build-simplified locations.

[NNC]

A friendly reminder that the City Streets was the best music piece in the game. Well, after Stalker, that is.

[jkas789]

 The Watchtower, on 12 October 2020 - 09:55 PM, said:

If nothing else, it was very important to me in my hospitalized time (and even now since I'm still in quarantine) as the only form of contact with my family and friends (and colleagues).

As someone who practically lives in a hospital for days (sometimes even more than a week) I feel this.

[necroslut]

I always thought Ion Maiden felt more like Half-Life (or post-Half-Life games) than Duke, both when it comes to level design, core gameplay and tone/style. It really does feel like a Build game that might have come out around 98-99 if they had still been made by then*, taking many influences from then comtemporary full-3D shooters.

*Yes, I know Redneck Rampage Rides Again came out in 1998, but it's more of an expansion to the original RR than a brand new game.

[NNC]

 jkas789, on 13 October 2020 - 08:15 AM, said:

As someone who practically lives in a hospital for days (sometimes even more than a week) I feel this.

As a patient or a nurse (or whatever its male alternative) or a doc?

[NNC]

 necroslut, on 13 October 2020 - 08:50 AM, said:

I always thought Ion Maiden felt more like Half-Life (or post-Half-Life games) than Duke, both when it comes to level design, core gameplay and tone/style. It really does feel like a Build game that might have come out around 98-99 if they had still been made by then*, taking many influences from then comtemporary full-3D shooters.

*Yes, I know Redneck Rampage Rides Again came out in 1998, but it's more of an expansion to the original RR than a brand new game.

So we have a Half Life style game with sprites, now we need a Duke style game with models and modern look.
I'm not sure if it's possible though. Part of the magic was the stylized art and style, and it would look weird with better graphics. I think Serious Duke tried to be like this, but in the end, it was more like DNF.

[OpenMaw]

It's the mixture of serious grit and splashes of color that give Duke the feeling it has. The grime and funk of the urban areas is contrasted with colorful easter eggs.

The real trick would be to look at the cinematagrophy of the films that Duke most famously borrow from. Escape From New York, The Terminator, Aliens, They Live.

[NNC]

 OpenMaw, on 13 October 2020 - 10:47 AM, said:

It's the mixture of serious grit and splashes of color that give Duke the feeling it has. The grime and funk of the urban areas is contrasted with colorful easter eggs.

The real trick would be to look at the cinematagrophy of the films that Duke most famously borrow from. Escape From New York, The Terminator, Aliens, They Live.

Yeah, the colour use definitely made a special intuitive atmosphere in Duke. Look at E1L1, the map is gray for most part, but when you go on the normal route you can see that tempting red sector above you can't reach initially. And that's the map ending, you can reach it from a different angle, after some butt kicking in the cinema. Completion added a huge accomplishment feel to the level unlike those levels that just end abruptly at a random place. And that famous secret is also red, another intuitive moment. When people use too much colour in the game, it loses its intuitive and emphasizing aspect. Too bad, this colour use was nonexistent in the 5th episode.

[necroslut]

 The Watchtower, on 13 October 2020 - 10:37 AM, said:

So we have a Half Life style game with sprites, now we need a Duke style game with models and modern look.
I'm not sure if it's possible though. Part of the magic was the stylized art and style, and it would look weird with better graphics. I think Serious Duke tried to be like this, but in the end, it was more like DNF.

I'm very sceptical that it can be done with "Crysis graphics". There's a ton of stuff in Duke (and other older games) that only work because the simpler graphics provide some abstraction. Like, in the original 3 episodes I don't think there's a single fake door (other than some level start/ends) -- with "realistic graphics" that would look ridiculous, but changing it will seriously affect how the map reads and thus plays. There's also the matter of platforming, and how you really need clear-cut geometry for that to work well, at least when its mixed with exploration.

Graphics are communication, and detailed but "meaningless" graphics mean there's a very bad "signal to noise" ratio. In games you bascially have a "complexity budget", and if you waste it on looking pretty you can't spend it on level complexity. To some extent it can be mitigated by good art direction and such, but beyond a certain point there's really not much that can be done about it other than simplifying the graphics again.

There's a ton of tricks modern level designers use to help players "sort through the noise", but a lot of that stuff only really works with more linear and simpler levels.
I remember thinking when playing some Call of Duty game some years back, that "this level is just a rectangle". There's lots of detail, lots of props, but none of that was really part of the level -- most was out of the level bounds and didn't even have collision! Modern games train players to ignore excess detail, but that only works when that detail isn't actually used to signal anything, and it leads to super simplistic levels that Serious Sam would be ashamed of.

That old meme that compares old and modern FPS level design might seem unfair at first because it shows all the vertices on the old map but just the "path" on the modern one -- but back in the day those were the same! In Doom, Duke, Quake etc there's a close to 1:1 relationship between what you see and what you can "touch". That simply isn't true anymore, and a lot of modern FPS level design really is that simplistic. It's sad, really, and what makes it even more sad is that, for a number of reasons, it pretty much has to be that way.

 The Watchtower, on 13 October 2020 - 01:11 PM, said:

When people use too much colour in the game, it loses its intuitive and emphasizing aspect. Too bad, this colour use was nonexistent in the 5th episode.

I believe the 5th episode was seriously hampered by forcing additional dynamic lights in there -- a lot of the maps feel underlit in classic mode. And mixing sector + dynamic lights never looks good -- it didn't look good in the Polymer maps/mods that used it, and it didn't look good in World Tour.

[Jimmy]

 The Watchtower, on 12 October 2020 - 09:55 PM, said:

I'm not sure if I can live without mine (also it's kinda hard to imagine we lived our lives without it for centuries lol). If nothing else, it was very important to me in my hospitalized time (and even now since I'm still in quarantine) as the only form of contact with my family and friends (and colleagues).

I dunno, I got used to it. I don't really talk to anyone on the phone regularly except my dad, I just borrow my girlfriend's phone now. It's kind of freeing in a way. You don't realize how much it introduces FOMO into your life until you ditch it.

 The Watchtower, on 12 October 2020 - 10:05 PM, said:

Ion Fury is way too detailed compared to classic Duke. Sometimes it was annoying when you were looking for secrets. It was, however, pretty close to modern Duke mapping, DNF TC 2013 had a somewhat similar approach.

Yeah honestly its the one thing I don't like about the game so much. I get that they really wanted to push the engine and people's perceptions of the engine, but it just comes across as very "busy" sometimes. A lot of modern usermaps have the same problem, I find it distracting and it usually makes locations feel less real, usermaps with weird texturing/palette manipulation have this problem much more than Ion Fury though.

 The Watchtower, on 12 October 2020 - 10:05 PM, said:

Shadow Warrior got close a few times, some of Keith Schuler's maps like Bath House, Auto Maul, Floating Fortress or Water Torture felt Duke 3D-ish. Water Torture was actually a level that could have been placed in the Birth episode quite easily.

I wish Schuler had actually made some maps for Duke 3D, official or otherwise, he seemed like a really underutilized level designer.

 OpenMaw, on 12 October 2020 - 10:12 PM, said:

Getting the gameplay right is understand that specifically for Duke 3D it was the mixture of weapons, the environments focusing on semi-believable locations with interactivity scattered throughout, a sense of foreboding atmosphere at times, multiple paths to explore, secrets a plenty. All of it together is what gives you the winning formula. All in the right balance.

Shadow Warrior is probably the only game in the time period that even came close to being like Duke's weapon selection. But it did change the FPS genre, almost every game that followed of any note had at least one "novelty" weapon. Duke had five novelty weapons, plus great versions of Doom's main arsenal that became the standard for pretty much every FPS that followed.

 The Watchtower, on 13 October 2020 - 08:06 AM, said:

A friendly reminder that the City Streets was the best music piece in the game. Well, after Stalker, that is.

Departure has slowly become a favourite of mine over the years. It's such a chill track.

 necroslut, on 13 October 2020 - 08:50 AM, said:

I always thought Ion Maiden felt more like Half-Life (or post-Half-Life games) than Duke, both when it comes to level design, core gameplay and tone/style. It really does feel like a Build game that might have come out around 98-99 if they had still been made by then*, taking many influences from then comtemporary full-3D shooters.

If you pay attention to Ion Fury's design you can create a checklist of "features" that are basically lifted from other games in that time period, like tracker music ala Deus Ex. It's really less of a love letter to Build, and more of a love letter to late 90s PC gaming.

 The Watchtower, on 13 October 2020 - 01:11 PM, said:

Yeah, the colour use definitely made a special intuitive atmosphere in Duke. Look at E1L1, the map is gray for most part, but when you go on the normal route you can see that tempting red sector above you can't reach initially. And that's the map ending, you can reach it from a different angle, after some butt kicking in the cinema. Completion added a huge accomplishment feel to the level unlike those levels that just end abruptly at a random place. And that famous secret is also red, another intuitive moment. When people use too much colour in the game, it loses its intuitive and emphasizing aspect. Too bad, this colour use was nonexistent in the 5th episode.

Don't forget neon lights and glowing eyes and little details like that. It really made the game stand out at the time and it's something we kind of take for granted today. I know you knock Levelord quite a bit, but really his use of total darkness/brightness contrast is pretty central to the spooky gritty nature of the game. You can see some of that design rubbed off on Blum in Episode 2. Freeway basically feels like Blum trying to replicate Levelord's style in his own way. And it's probably the best level in the whole game, it really captures what Duke3D is.

 necroslut, on 13 October 2020 - 01:19 PM, said:

I'm very sceptical that it can be done with "Crysis graphics". There's a ton of stuff in Duke (and other older games) that only work because the simpler graphics provide some abstraction. Like, in the original 3 episodes I don't think there's a single fake door (other than some level start/ends) -- with "realistic graphics" that would look ridiculous, but changing it will seriously affect how the map reads and thus plays. There's also the matter of platforming, and how you really need clear-cut geometry for that to work well, at least when its mixed with exploration.

Graphics are communication, and detailed but "meaningless" graphics mean there's a very bad "signal to noise" ratio. In games you bascially have a "complexity budget", and if you waste it on looking pretty you can't spend it on level complexity. To some extent it can be mitigated by good art direction and such, but beyond a certain point there's really not much that can be done about it other than simplifying the graphics again.

There's a ton of tricks modern level designers use to help players "sort through the noise", but a lot of that stuff only really works with more linear and simpler levels.
I remember thinking when playing some Call of Duty game some years back, that "this level is just a rectangle". There's lots of detail, lots of props, but none of that was really part of the level -- most was out of the level bounds and didn't even have collision! Modern games train players to ignore excess detail, but that only works when that detail isn't actually used to signal anything, and it leads to super simplistic levels that Serious Sam would be ashamed of.

That old meme that compares old and modern FPS level design might seem unfair at first because it shows all the vertices on the old map but just the "path" on the modern one -- but back in the day those were the same! In Doom, Duke, Quake etc there's a close to 1:1 relationship between what you see and what you can "touch". That simply isn't true anymore, and a lot of modern FPS level design really is that simplistic. It's sad, really, and what makes it even more sad is that, for a number of reasons, it pretty much has to be that way.

Very true. I can't play a lot of modern FPS games because my eyes are literally at a loss. I don't know what's an enemy, whats the environment, whats a prop. Duke3D is brilliant because it's very intuitive. If something looks interactive, it probably is.

Another problem with modern FPS games is that they have abandoned the Romero Rule, if you can see the area, you should be able to reach that area. Games today are just filled with extraneous level design that just exists for no real purpose.

 necroslut, on 13 October 2020 - 01:19 PM, said:

I believe the 5th episode was seriously hampered by forcing additional dynamic lights in there -- a lot of the maps feel underlit in classic mode. And mixing sector + dynamic lights never looks good -- it didn't look good in the Polymer maps/mods that used it, and it didn't look good in World Tour.

The dynamic lights ruined the level design. Terrible decision to add those when they should have been focusing on other things.

[jkas789]

 The Watchtower, on 13 October 2020 - 10:31 AM, said:

As a patient or a nurse (or whatever its male alternative) or a doc?

A doctor.

[necroslut]

 Jimmy, on 13 October 2020 - 02:57 PM, said:

Very true. I can't play a lot of modern FPS games because my eyes are literally at a loss. I don't know what's an enemy, whats the environment, whats a prop. Duke3D is brilliant because it's very intuitive. If something looks interactive, it probably is.

You gotta turn off your brain and stop thinking like a thinking person.

Quote

Another problem with modern FPS games is that they have abandoned the Romero Rule, if you can see the area, you should be able to reach that area. Games today are just filled with extraneous level design that just exists for no real purpose.

That's pretty much what I was getting at with that Call of Duty anecdote: a lot of "level design" in modern shooters is just a rectangle with a very detailed skybox -- and that's not a level design at all, that's a background image! In, say, Serious Sam plenty of levels are just rectangles, but then the actual level design is in the enemy spawns, weapon placement, item placement etc -- you know, the things that modern shooters have gotten rid of...

Quote

The dynamic lights ruined the level design. Terrible decision to add those when they should have been focusing on other things.

I wouldn't put it quite as strongly as "ruined", but I do believe it hurt it. You could probably say that the entire "port" side of the WorldTour package was a bad decision.

[NNC]

 Jimmy, on 13 October 2020 - 02:57 PM, said:

Don't forget neon lights and glowing eyes and little details like that. It really made the game stand out at the time and it's something we kind of take for granted today. I know you knock Levelord quite a bit, but really his use of total darkness/brightness contrast is pretty central to the spooky gritty nature of the game. You can see some of that design rubbed off on Blum in Episode 2. Freeway basically feels like Blum trying to replicate Levelord's style in his own way. And it's probably the best level in the whole game, it really captures what Duke3D is.

I often knock Levelord, although I always admitted he had strong merits and if he releases a map/set in the future I will play it in instant. I think my main problem with him was his preference of multiplayer over singleplayer and that was shown in most of his levels. His way of shading was very good, his monster placement was spot on, and despite my regular beef with episode 3 (because of the lack of novelties and true single player style levels), it has a very consistent and distinct look nobody managed to replicate ever since. Among my favourite maps by him were The Abyss, Warp Factor (not sure what was his input on this one), Flood Zone and LA Rumble. However my biggest favourite of all is Sewer, the unfinished masterpiece with every traits what made Duke great from the stylized realism through the strong shading to the very interesting layered layout. His new maps in World Tour were disappointing because he overdetailed his maps for the wrong reasons, and that give usermappy feel to those levels. Remove the french fat from Tour de Nukem, add some interconnections and you get a great sequel to Sewer though, because the layout was awesome again and he clearly didn't forget mapping. I think Levelord is a guy who needs someone else who always looks over his shoulders and doesn't allow him to go all over the place with mapping. Actually Broussard and him did complement each other well, despite the bad blood between them.

Quote

Very true. I can't play a lot of modern FPS games because my eyes are literally at a loss. I don't know what's an enemy, whats the environment, whats a prop. Duke3D is brilliant because it's very intuitive. If something looks interactive, it probably is.

That's my biggest issue too. Also the enemies don't have actual characters, they are just random soldiers without personalities. HL1-2, despite their problems, had this thing right, the enemies like the basic headcrab or the barnacle were all iconic ones, I think this went wrong with games like Halo or Call of Duty. Nowadays you can't even tell the difference what is an enemy and what is a supportive character. The simplified level design doesn't help too.

[Jimmy]

One thing I really like about Duke3D, that just about no other game replicates, is the recursive honey comb design that a lot of the levels have, largely Levelord's levels but even in many of Blum's. When you're about 80% complete with just about every level in the game, the level design has "opened up" and you have about a dozen different paths you can take. I think the decision to make all maps playable in singleplayer, deathmatch, and co-op is a big reason for this. This also strongly builds the feeling of realism too, because a map like L.A. Rumble (which is one of my favourites too) almost feels like a sandbox. It's just so open and interconnected. Shadow Warrior and Ion Fury have a little bit of this, but not to Duke3D's extent. Even moreso this is one of the biggest pitfalls for DNF, every level has one path and that's it. It's boring and narrative driven rather than focusing on gameplay and exploration.

[NNC]

 Jimmy, on 14 October 2020 - 01:11 AM, said:

One thing I really like about Duke3D, that just about no other game replicates, is the recursive honey comb design that a lot of the levels have, largely Levelord's levels but even in many of Blum's. When you're about 80% complete with just about every level in the game, the level design has "opened up" and you have about a dozen different paths you can take. I think the decision to make all maps playable in singleplayer, deathmatch, and co-op is a big reason for this. This also strongly builds the feeling of realism too, because a map like L.A. Rumble (which is one of my favourites too) almost feels like a sandbox. It's just so open and interconnected. Shadow Warrior and Ion Fury have a little bit of this, but not to Duke3D's extent. Even moreso this is one of the biggest pitfalls for DNF, every level has one path and that's it. It's boring and narrative driven rather than focusing on gameplay and exploration.

And for a weird reason, LA Meltdown was the biggest exception of this rule, L2, L3, L4 and L5 were all "serpentine" linear levels, they are the closest to modern style, despite being rather old levels.

Doom actually had the occasional open up the level routine, Vivisection from NRFTL was a typical example, also Romero's cage level in Sigil had this stuff, and to a lesser extent, other levels too.

[Mark]

I'm happy to see people are dissing World Tour and Crysis but not HHR. Oops, I shouldn't have said it. It has all the things players don't like.

[oasiz]

I really like interconnected style, I too think it's because of MP.
For Fury's zone3, that was one of my design goals, each map opens up and you can even skip half of the 2nd map.
I'm not sure but I feel like many are avoiding multiple routes or routes that allow major skipping since there just too many "expensive to produce" things the player would miss otherwise, i.e. approaching E1L1 with RPG skips a bunch.
When designing maps, I guess I always think of closer to DM style gameplay since I just slap the layout first and think later on how to make it look "real life plausible".
Feels more like a reward when the map just opens up and lets you explore it with less restriction since "you beat it", almost like getting an airship in a JRPG by the time the world/game is about to end.
Also to me just feels natural, if you create a virtual world, why not just have it feel like a well functioning "theme park".

Comparing Duke style to Fury is definitely true, it is more busy and aims for it's own style. Getting detail out of Build is all about pumping out so much smoke until you can't see the glitching mirrors anymore.
It did aim for a much simpler style visually but looked kind of eh, in the end we just wanted to push it as far as we could since it might have just as well been the only opportunity to do so. We did learn a lot though.

For a "new retro" duke game, I feel it should be closer to Unreal/UT/sin style tech and just have sleek brushwork but nothing too detail gimmicky.
Have lightmaps, simple cubemap reflections on shiny stuff and such.
I really enjoy the approach and creativity that HL1 mods used to have where they started to approach build-like ideas and concepts. Too bad that the engine isn't as flexible.
RR has nicer prebaked lights but the approach is not very nice. This era of an "engine look" would allow those important sort of cartoony interaction gimmicks to exist that a level designer could throw in during night hours without too much trouble.

[jkas789]

 Bubble Gum Chewer, on 14 October 2020 - 05:46 AM, said:

That's what I assumed first time you mentioned hospital. What's up, doc. What's cookin'?

Knee replacements and the moans of dying patients. So the normal, everyday stuff.

Quote

I'm happy to see people are dissing World Tour and Crysis but not HHR. Oops, I shouldn't have said it. It has all the things players don't like.

To be honest, I have at first hated World Tour but as i have been playing it I have soften to it more. It has is low points IMO like the maze in the egyptian level or the final boss fights but it has it high points as well, and generally I have learned to appreciate the level design even more. Also what does HHR means?

Quote

I'm not sure but I feel like many are avoiding multiple routes or routes that allow major skipping since there just too many "expensive to produce" things the player would miss otherwise

Which makes me think, is a set piece that is too expensive to produce really worth it in the end? Outside of the temporary wow factor. I would imagine that on later replays having the player funneled to a series of set pieces would become more of a chore than anything else for said player. I think having ways to skip certain parts should be more of a reward for the gamers that are obsessed with exploring.

I'm not a game designer so I'm asking this out of genuine curiosity.

[necroslut]

 jkas789, on 14 October 2020 - 01:04 PM, said:

. Also what does HHR means?

HHR is "Holywood Holocaust Re-Thinked" -- a one-level mod that tries to redo Holywood Holocaust in a "modern" style with updated graphics etc.

Quote

Which makes me think, is a set piece that is too expensive to produce really worth it in the end? Outside of the temporary wow factor. I would imagine that on later replays having the player funneled to a series of set pieces would become more of a chore than anything else for said player. I think having ways to skip certain parts should be more of a reward for the gamers that are obsessed with exploring.

I'm not a game designer so I'm asking this out of genuine curiosity.

If we're talking commercial game development, well, "pretty graphics" and cool setpieces definitely sell.

[ck3D]

 oasiz, on 14 October 2020 - 07:28 AM, said:

I'm not sure but I feel like many are avoiding multiple routes or routes that allow major skipping since there just too many "expensive to produce" things the player would miss otherwise, i.e. approaching E1L1 with RPG skips a bunch.

As a fan of this E1L1 gimmick (or how the jetpack will allow players to downright skip entire maps in the original episodes), I always appreciated it when people occasionally recycle it in user maps (which I guess is even more of a sacrifice there as then it's part of your full product that you're voluntarily truncating vs. parts of little bits of it in the case of a map set). But funnily enough I've also observed some people fail to grasp that line of thinking to this day, e.g.. feedback from players who happened to find the skips (because they played well and explored around) and report the map as 'broken'. I personally think that's hilarious as it means that the trick hasn't aged one bit and still works as both a troll to tedious, linear level design philosophy and an invite to think out of the box as well as it did in 1996.

And then you also have the occasional user mapper who rushes their releases and forgets to lock the doors. Always good times finishing a level with spare keycards.

[Ninety-Six]

I wish I had something more substantial to contribute to this discussion, but all I can really say is that I hope this entire page is archived because of the brilliant dissection of level design here and the varying schools of thought thereof. It's an absolutely wonderful read that has me rethinking how I view some of the levels mentioned.

[Jimmy]

The benefit of having a small tight-knit community where low quality noob-posting isn't openly welcomed. Having a huge userbase for a forum isn't all some people crack it up to be.

[Forge]

 ck3D, on 14 October 2020 - 01:29 PM, said:

As a fan of this E1L1 gimmick (or how the jetpack will allow players to downright skip entire maps in the original episodes), I always appreciated it when people occasionally recycle it in user maps (which I guess is even more of a sacrifice there as then it's part of your full product that you're voluntarily truncating vs. parts of little bits of it in the case of a map set). But funnily enough I've also observed some people fail to grasp that line of thinking to this day, e.g.. feedback from players who happened to find the skips (because they played well and explored around) and report the map as 'broken'. I personally think that's hilarious as it means that the trick hasn't aged one bit and still works as both a troll to tedious, linear level design philosophy and an invite to think out of the box as well as it did in 1996.

context matters

an episode of several maps has more "flexibility" to make open maps with shortcuts. It actually adds to the replay value.

single, stand alone maps don't have that luxury when you are trying to give the player the most game in the smallest package. Allowing them to jump over a wall at the start of the level and finish it in 10 seconds is counter-productive.

there are exceptions to the rule though

[oasiz]

 jkas789, on 14 October 2020 - 01:04 PM, said:

Which makes me think, is a set piece that is too expensive to produce really worth it in the end? Outside of the temporary wow factor. I would imagine that on later replays having the player funneled to a series of set pieces would become more of a chore than anything else for said player. I think having ways to skip certain parts should be more of a reward for the gamers that are obsessed with exploring.

I'm not a game designer so I'm asking this out of genuine curiosity.

I think set pieces are definitely worth it, these are the things you remember. As a concept they are not the problem overall.
Even Duke3D is littered with them but it also takes care that these transformative sections are at important junction points where paths tend to combine together.
I would argue that the game would be much less memorable without the E1L2 building explosion, that's probably the closest equal to a modern set piece and it really stands out, not to mention E1L5's quake.
Thing is that set pieces should not be afraid to be self-contained areas in the map and not rely on a series of events to occur before a series of hardcoded sequences can happen.

This also goes to the other part...
I think that story and NPCs are partially to blame here perhaps since those generally set a pre-determined path for you in game play, skip anything here and you will have to do a lot of housekeeping to teleport them back in or have some excuses on why things suddenly managed to proceed. This sets up self-feeding on-rails set pieces that are easy to add to and develop but extremely hard to adapt properly on the fly.
In old games "you" make up the story of how you got in and that's the beauty of games like deus-ex as well.

We see a bit of both in the end. I think both can be done very well but it does require treating game as a game (interactive player-driven fiction) and not letting your pride of "experiencing as intended" consume you too much. In the end games are sandboxes and your #1 goal is to make sure that whatever the player does is that he has fun and any limitations obey the rules you have set (like not expecting to get out of a car in outrun).
What ck3d mentioned about "bugtesting" are exactly the points where I tend to stop and think that a player honestly expected the game world to react in a way that I didn't think of, why not embrace it or at least give feedback. This is why the offices in Fury allow you to jump between windows or the chair-armor shard secret exists.

In the end set pieces cost to make, story and such drive towards a more linear path for better control and this in turn means that more "budget" can be used on set pieces since everything is better controlled.
To make your game stand out, you want expensive set pieces, but the ease of development can greatly affect the wow factor. More about giving the player an experience rather than letting the player make his own.

[ck3D]

I think the best thing to do often may be to find a way to incorporate the set pieces into the gameplay. E1L2 did it as the collapsed building can then be explored and holds not only items but also an alternative path out of the locked building. Had the same building been just a decorative element behind a tall grey wall, the effect would have probably been weakened. When an area looks good yet really has to be out of bounds for some reason, I find that it kind of works too to allow the player to at least get physically close to it (for instance via ventilation shafts with blocked exits), or generally provide them with as many angles of view as possible on the structure so that their curiosity is satisfied and the integration of the structure feels coherent as opposed to foreign and distant.

There's something to be said about the way Duke 64 handled the level redesign, surely a lot of the changes had to do with censorship and the Nintendo 64 limitations but reasons aside I always found that having to make do without parallaxed skies was also worked around with brilliance, those new sector-based buildings beyond the apparent world limits would actually work really well in terms of atmosphere on me as a kid, I remember naively dying to be able to no clip and explore what genuinely looked like more of the city. Duke 64 also had that optional grocery store in E1L1 that justified the addition of a door to the apartment building, although you could never open it and had to teleport to the other side, first finding out that the store actually existed felt like an amazing discovery. Also the connection between Red Light District and Rabid Transit was fantastic, although a bit random. I was never too sure who really reworked those levels and in which context (I assume the original authors with a comfortable level of allowed focus), but there was science to the craft like I would have liked to see spent on World Tour, which does hold some strong mapping but otherwise generally feels like it was treated as a casual one-off project as opposed to something serious (superficial aesthetics, broken finale, etc.). In the mid-to-late 90's I was primarily a Duke 64 player (I only got my own copy of Duke 3D a bit later) and when I eventually went back to the PC version, it really felt like a lot of the stuff was missing in there, and that's surely a big reason why so many of my own maps throughout the ages incorporate buildings out of bounds, etc.

[NNC]

The design of Duke64 is a hackwork for most part and I don't care about the reasons. The connections between Red Light District and Rabid Transit was a good touch, but again, it needed tremendous hackwork to modify the levels unnecessarily.