gemeaux333, on 20 October 2019 - 09:08 AM, said:
Doesn't that give you the will to ask/demand/beg Bethesda for remake or re-imagining of Future Shock and Skynet ?
I watched the video a bit while it was still on and honestly I'd refrain from any judgement for now. It might very well turn out to be a decent game, but certainly not anything like
Future Shock/
SkyNET I guess.
What makes you think though that Bethesda would make a better game? I haven't played any of the recent
Fallout titles (not a fan and can't be bothered) but as far as I can tell everything went ahead and away from the mid-90s designs. I imagine even if Bethesda will ever make a
Terminator title and it gets to be a good one on its own merits, I believe that, most likely, it will only vaguely resemble the original XnGine games from back then.
Don't get me wrong, I quite understand that we might value
FS/SN for completely different things. As I stated above, I like how the game was so ahead of its time, and innovative in many aspects. (BTW I only played the demo versions of both, with
FS also including a pre-release demo which is much darker) There's a lot more to any pretensions of "realism" than in any "
Doom clone" released to that point (the first demo is October 1995, months before
Duke3D and
Quake). I mean, you can blow up cars scattered around (which look no worse and maybe even better that
Duke3D's sector-based props), enter random buildings and generally roam around, there are real-time lighting effects and all that, some really meaningful use of true 3D terrain. But at the same time the engine clearly struggles with the limitations of contemporary hardware, movement feels clunky, and in no way there can be such fast, pumping action as in either
Duke3D or
Quake.
I almost think that maybe
Future Shock could indeed have been more successful as a game if they added more role-playing elements and toned down the pace a bit. I think
Daggerfall suffers much less from the engine's limitations (well, discounting the bugs of course) simply because, as an RPG, it has less of the actual
Doom like action.
Future Shock on the other hand (as far as I can tell) often pits the player against some really powerful enemies like the Terminators with very little room to manoeuvre where some circle-strafing or cover-shooting would be in order should this have been your regular
Doom clone in the good sense of the word. In the long run, a gameplay model where the player gets a lot of punishment that is hard to avoid, but gets to replenish health and armour after every such fight, is not very psychologically rewarding, to my mind.
I really appreciate how the developers of
FS did not restrain their imagination and came up with really cool stuff like when, in SkyNETs facilities, you have to jump over bottomless pits to get to certain areas, or find your way around a multi-story building by entering the elevator shaft etc., but the engine's limitations clearly stand out here because of how bulky and hard to manouvre the player is, and how easy it gets to botch the stupid jump (for example) because you failed to properly time your button-pressing as controls are not responsive enough etc.
To repeat myself, what I personally would have liked is probably an indie game that would recreate the XnGine's look in high-res (because I think it's cool), keep the oppressive atmosphere, but it doesn't have to be about Terminators at all, and certainly needs improvements in gameplay balance.