[NightFright]

IF got a rather poor rating of only 62% over at the German gaming mag GameStar. This must be one, if not THE lowest rating I have seen for the game until now. Their main criticisms were "outdated graphics", "abysmally bad enemy AI", "levelbosses partially too strong" and "barely any replayability value". I can't say I agree on any of these "shortcomings", and to me it seems the review was done by someone who didn't really grow up with shooters or is at least not that familiar with Build games, otherwise he would have appreciated the enhancements to the original engine features a lot more, I think.

Anyway, the honor of German PC gaming journalism has been saved by 4Players.de who gave the game 87%, which is a lot closer to what the title actually deserves.

[----]

 NightFright, on 19 August 2019 - 10:50 PM, said:

IF got a rather poor rating of only 62% over at the German gaming mag GameStar. This must be one, if not THE lowest rating I have seen for the game until now. Their main criticisms were "outdated graphics", "abysmally bad enemy AI", "levelbosses partially too strong" and "barely any replayability value".

They'd rate Schindler's List quite low as it doesn't have any caped superheroes or dinosaurs.

[Sanek]

I'm kinda late to the party, but I actually played the game since it's release, just didn't post about it because I was so pissed off at duke4.

I only completed the first two stages (and I restarted it becasue the third difficulty level turned out to be too high for me smh), but I already can say that the whole game is a monumental, lifetime achievement for everybody involved in the development (not the publishing lol).

The first area looks like heavily inspired by the Arsia Mons Colony from AMC TC, but mostly the game follows design choises of the first EA level (aka bonus level now). So much new things and textures introduced that I spend more time admiring architechture and all the cool stuff than actually trying to finish the level. I have some criticisms about the game but I'll better complete it in it's entirety so I can see the full picture.

[xMobilemux]

Are you fucking serious!?!
https://www.oneangry...h-policy/91195/

There goes any respect I had for Voidpoint and what little I had left for 3D Realms.

Never buying anything from either company again.

[Phredreeke]

One Angry Gamer is just as bad as the other side. Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you

[xMobilemux]

OAG is just as bad sometimes yes, but you can't tell me they aren't right on the money in this case.

Voidpoint and 3D Realms are fucking pathetic, not only censoring the game, but donating $10000 to appease the hateful fucks, that sets a VERY dangerous precedent, never have I felt so much regret and disgust buying direct from their website.

Shit, even Lunick has apparently lost his marbles, stating he hates gamers and is going on a banning and deleting spree over on Steam.

[Aristotle Gumball]

Fucking hell, lol. I wish I would've stayed off the forum honestly. Just came to give my two cents about the game, which is mostly great. Now I have a bad taste in my mouth. What an Orwellian nightmare we're living in.

[t800]

I know I will be hypocrite now after what I said. But this is just too much for me. Cant we really have nice things anymore? This whole thing reeks so much of toxicity and anger. I hope it wont break spirit of community. It would be really ironic after all that was achieved. Hell, how much bad luck one can get? Firstly cancelled Betas, than Hail to King, now this. I feel sorry for you guys and community as whole.
But one thing is sure, after all that has been done censorship really isnt helping things at all...
BTW I am not angry at you, I know that you are now part of corporate culture, so you have to cooperate. I am just disappointed and feel this will just make things worse.

[Phredreeke]

Those who want it can easily mod the old sprite back.

[t800]

Haha. No. That was not point of my post. But thanks for lightening up my mood.
I am worrying about health and relationships of this community, awful precedenses this poses for studio and diminishing sales.

[Tea Monster]

What the actual fuck?!

[cosmonautcowboy]

 xMobilemux, on 20 August 2019 - 01:31 AM, said:

OAG is just as bad sometimes yes, but you can't tell me they aren't right on the money in this case.

Voidpoint and 3D Realms are fucking pathetic, not only censoring the game, but donating $10000 to appease the hateful fucks, that sets a VERY dangerous precedent, never have I felt so much regret and disgust buying direct from their website.

Shit, even Lunick has apparently lost his marbles, stating he hates gamers and is going on a banning and deleting spree over on Steam.

While I'm disappointed at Lunick's reaction, I mostly blame 3D Realms, as I feel this has their fingerprints all over it. As soon as I saw there was some "controversy," and where it was coming from, I felt certain that 3DR would give in. I didn't think they'd offer an unconditional surrender that would make even the French blush.

There were two proper ways to deal with this. First is to just shut up and let it pass, as we've seen these things quickly do when there's no reply. They could have even quietly patched things out of the game without commenting on it. Second option is to actually stand up and release a statement saying that they might not agree with everything the devs said and did, but that ultimately have a right to free speech/expression, and leave it at that. That would have actually resulted in an explosion of sales, but people rarely have the backbone to do that. I guess expecting Europeans to go to bat for freedom of speech is an absurd expectation these days, but I guess that's a different discussion.

Anyway. I feel really bad for the VoidPoint guys who put in so much work on this game, only to have their moment of triumph shit on by the culture war. Ultimately, this is why I've been getting out of video games. It isn't fun anymore. I've been thinking about getting rid of my consoles, and I think all this has made the choice for me. The time and money I used to spend on games mostly goes into motorcycles now. I find I get much more enjoyment out of that, and it's a hobby that tends to reaffirm individuality, rather than browbeating you to join the hivemind.

If Fred sees this, I'd just like you to know that I bought Bombshell twice at full price (Steam and GOG), and twice on sale on Steam, giving away those keys. I would have bought Ion Fury on GOG, and likely on Playstation, as well, but now I will not be. I don't think I'm the only one. Congratulations on shooting yourself in the foot once again.

[SonicB00M]

Keep in mind that 3D Realms and Voidpoint did exactly what seemed right for their product. Going out and proudly shouting 'we support our devs' would have caused more controversy. 3DR and Voidpoint did the right thing and attacked the issue before it could've grown bigger. The headlines from big gaming websites now are 'Voidpoint and 3D Realms are donating 10,000$ to charity' and that in the end is the right move when you want to sell a product. It is not their job to participate in a political war but try their best to succeed in this climate. Now the consumer chooses how they will respond to that.

[Anacronox]

Hm i guess i better keep my initial gog version, all future patches be damned. Ty for head ups. Bloody hell, Stop the Earth, i want to get off.

[Phredreeke]

I don't like it either, but can we please take this to the outhouse?

[Anacronox]

Back on track. Is it just me or smth is very wrong with in-game vsync? "On" cuts my fps in half even though cpu\gpu both are hardly loaded, "adaptive" is better performance-wise but leaves lots of tearing. 0_0

[Phredreeke]

It has been suggested to turn VSync off in-game and instead enabling it in the settings panel for your graphics card

[Sledgehammer]

NightFright, on 19 August 2019 - 10:50 PM, said:

to me it seems the review was done by someone who didn't really grow up with shooters or is at least not that familiar with Build games

It really has nothing to do with growing up with these things, it's really a matter of taste and that "article" (or let's be real, it's a blogpost) is just an opinion. From technical point of view it's a fact that IF is a well designed game with level design and interactivity being very strong points. To this day this is the most well designed shooter I have ever played, it's almost perfect compared to other games in this style (shooters that have or pretend to have level design) despite being on the old engine. However, this game, like others, is not for everyone. Some people actually prefer games like Dusk or Amid Evil that are pretty different from IF, kind of like Iga's Castlevania and Super Metroid are also different, though I'd say the difference is bigger in that case. Some people also may not like this kind of games at all, some even play games for being experimental too. I know a bunch of people myself who don't like specific genres at all including classic FPS, so it's normal. Some people also love casual shooters or casual games as a whole, though when it comes to "journalists", most of them don't like to play video games at all.

For the record, I could be careless about "journalists" who present their opinions as articles, the reason I bring that up is that I've seen plenty of the people who had similar complaints that are subjective, especially something like "Dusk is better anyway". It's quite interesting topic if we speak of the people themselves. Not sure why they buy these games though, it was clear what kind of FPS IF is.

Spoiler

xMobilemux, on 20 August 2019 - 01:31 AM, said:

Shit, even Lunick has apparently lost his marbles, stating he hates gamers and is going on a banning and deleting spree over on Steam.

So, will 3DR issue an apology for that? Rhetorical question.

Phredreeke, on 20 August 2019 - 03:45 AM, said:

I don't like it either, but can we please take this to the outhouse?

To be fair, it would be nice if 3DR kept this shit to themselves too, then none of this would happen in the first place. They're the one that should be blamed for that.

Those people wanted shitstorm, they've got it I guess, especially Lunick. Doubt he asked for this.

[Doom64hunter]

xMobilemux, on 20 August 2019 - 01:31 AM, said:

OAG is just as bad sometimes yes, but you can't tell me they aren't right on the money in this case.

Voidpoint and 3D Realms are fucking pathetic, not only censoring the game, but donating $10000 to appease the hateful fucks, that sets a VERY dangerous precedent, never have I felt so much regret and disgust buying direct from their website.

Shit, even Lunick has apparently lost his marbles, stating he hates gamers and is going on a banning and deleting spree over on Steam.

Imagine thinking donating 10'000$ to a good cause is a bad thing.

Sounds more like you actually hate transsexuals to me.

[TerminX]

We didn't censor the game and anyone telling you we did is lying or gravely misinformed.

[Zaxx]

Oh man, some of these fucking secrets are just... uh.

I searched my ass off for one of the mega secrets but found absolutely nothing. So I went and looked up the solution online and I was like "HOW THE HELL DID I NOT SEE THAT TEENY-TINY FUCKING BUTTON???"

Umm... in my playthrough I shot a guy there and the sprite of his body obscured the fucking button...

[Sledgehammer]

That's why you should play the game several times, really. That's kind of the point of those secrets, playing more than once also gives you an idea about the gameplay and game mechanics itself better, along with design of course. It was the same with Duke when the game was new. Never managed to get all the secrets in Duke in one go, took me a bunch of playthroughs to learn everything about the game. Now this knowledge is partly useless because IF is designed differently when it comes to this.

[Forge]

TerminX, on 20 August 2019 - 07:21 AM, said:

We didn't censor the game and anyone telling you we did is lying or gravely misinformed.

People writing those "articles" are convoluting 3dr with voidpoint.
3dr are the cucks with their pandering pr announcements, voidpoint was left to face the wolves of the community for 3dr's decisions.

Choose your bedmates more wisely next time.

[Zaxx]

Sledgehammer, on 20 August 2019 - 07:49 AM, said:

That's why you should play the game several times, really. That's kind of the point of those secrets,

Yep, really I only blame my bad luck, it's just that when you get the "thought process" down meaning that you know exactly what to do and you're just missing a small portion of the puzzle you just can't really let it go usually.

That's why I had to look up the piano puzzle too sort of: I found all the clues, I knew what to do but then I realized that I just can't solve the puzzle due to my lack of knowledge (I can't identify notes by hearing). Now that I absolutely blame the game for, that's a bad puzzle.

[Forge]

Zaxx, on 20 August 2019 - 08:08 AM, said:

I can't identify notes by hearing

i have bad tinnitus, that puzzle will be impossible for me

[Phredreeke]

Just press the same keys as in the video

[Sledgehammer]

I think my problem about piano will be related to the fact that in real life it's easier to push keys on piano unless it doesn't matter how quick you should push them. However, I can understand why you wouldn't like it, though I bet it's totally worth it.

[NightFright]

In general, there are some really nasty secrets in this game. Some are the standard ones, like pushing a wall or opening a seemingly meaningless prop. For others you need to push chairs or trashcans to other places to use them as jump pads or something else you usually wouldn't do in a shooter. I am amazed how many different kinds of secrets the dev team was able to implement here. They really made finding secrets great again.

[Zaxx]

Yeah, apart from the secrets not being that rewarding gameplay wise finding a lot of them is fun because you have to do something different than what you'd do in other shooters. And when it comes to the stuff that's bothering me (mostly the platforming stuff and the piano) it's never because I see something lazy but because they went overboard with a few of them and that's a lot better than laziness.

[oasiz]

Piano is actually surprisingly logical, it's amazing how many overthink it
Since many have already seen the videos and whatnot, let me spoil a bit:

Spoiler

It's literally the secret jingle that opens the secret level (CDA CDF) -- As a failsafe the letters seen in z3a3 secret with the camera and piano tutor shows the exact keys visually. Not any more complex than something you'd find in some older adventure game as a basic puzzle
Letters were placed to be curious enough so that you could make the connection with something on the same level.
Wall has "Sonata for executioner" on the wall, whole area is a reference to Duran Duran's excessive machine from Barbarella
But it was intentionally a bit devilish to have a really big payoff without feeling too cheated.

And yes, I don't even normally play piano