[oasiz]

Even more TP stuff
One of them is the one being discussed and the other two are visual.

Technically two S3 references, other one hasn't been pointed out really, but should be obvious to any who have watched S3!

[Zaxx]

oasiz, on 05 March 2018 - 04:46 AM, said:

Even more TP stuff
One of them is the one being discussed and the other two are visual.

Technically two S3 references, other one hasn't been pointed out really, but should be obvious to any who have watched S3!

I think I remember seeing one of Dougie's sayings written somewhere but I wasn't sure if that was a TP reference.

[Doom64hunter]

oasiz, on 05 March 2018 - 04:46 AM, said:

Even more TP stuff
One of them is the one being discussed and the other two are visual.

Technically two S3 references, other one hasn't been pointed out really, but should be obvious to any who have watched S3!

Is it the bleeding computer monitor?
I was wondering what that was about.

(To find it, simply try shooting all the screens in the office. The one that doesn't break is the one you're looking for.)

[ryche]

Just wanted to stop by and say I am really enjoying this. Can't wait for the full version.

[Jblade]

https://www.rockpape...ew/#more-521507

RPS just gave IM their 'recommended' badge, which is nice to see

[NightFright]

Is it true what they write in that article regarding the preview campaign levels not being part of the full version?

If it is: Will the preview campaign be integrated into the full version in any way at all, e.g. like the shareware levels for Shadow Warrior (as a seperate mini episode)?

[MusicallyInspired]

Or Rise of the Triad.

[Forge]

NightFright, on 05 March 2018 - 09:52 AM, said:

Is it true what they write in that article regarding the preview campaign levels not being part of the full version?

if that's true I'd suggest making backups of the steamapps common ion maiden game folder before steam updates it to the full version.

i have the drm free version, so I'll always have the preview installer package, but the downside is that I'll have no access to the workshop (if there is going to be one), and no access to the steam multiplayer server (if it's going to have one).

[Hendricks266]

The Preview Campaign will never be taken away.

[Mark]

Is it illegal for you to get any fanmade maps from another Steam user? Or does Steam change them somehow so they will only run on the Steam version of the IM?

[Bloodshot]

cybdmn, on 04 March 2018 - 03:12 AM, said:

- The music is far to generic and repetive. I hoped for some midi tunes, like in the 90ies. I miss these Bobby Prince/Lee Jackson kind of classics. These kind of tracks, which burns into your head.

Gotta say I disagree on this. Repetitive maybe, but the first level's theme song was so catchy I ended up just minimizing and leaving it on a loop while i worked on something.

The music was the biggest surprise to me, I hate like 80% of new game soundtracks and feel they all end up horribly generic but this game has a very retro 80s, Unreal or C&C1 feeling soundtrack without ripping off songs directly from those games and it helped draw me into the game. It probably helps that it's tracker music and is comparable to deus ex which is a similar setting (unreal as well) and I really hope they don't go for a shift in style in the full game unless the worldspace specifically calls for it, because I love it. I'd rather have this than midi tbh.

Onto my thoughts on the preview game itself.

Great work guys, really. The levels are gorgeous, the secrets are logical so far and got me thinking, and the combat is very fun and is more like a refined version of blood then the at times frustrating pop-n-shoot feeling of duke3d. Here's some of my feelings put into a list

Pros:

Quote

-Memorable, catchy music

-excellent art style. I detect a hint of DNF 2001 in the visual design and it's also reminiscent of malice for quake a bit

-Meaty combat and good weapon feel. Enemies aren't bullet sponges, have enemy specific gibs, and I like the idea of a tri-barrel revolver and love the idea of bowling bombs

-intuitively designed levels encourage exploration and secret hunting but don't have you sitting there looking for a keycard you missed for 20 minutes. I always felt like I was making progress and the areas of levels are distinct and serve as landmarks which is great.

-great effects and destructability - cups, chairs, windows, all that good stuff seems to react to your shots.

-I love how the AI actually comments on you throwing a grenade

-the HUD face - it's perfectly retro and it fits this game perfectly.

Cons:

Quote

-the smg is underwhelming - it kinda reminds me of the vector in RL but i was never huge on that gun's design - also shells seem to come out of it too slow for the actual firing rate - being able to dual wield SMGs would improve this weapon a ton, which brings me to my next point -

-Sound design for weapons is just kinda there. The revolver sounds like when I bang my bathroom door, SMG is okay but could use a little extra punch, the shotgun sound is good but it seems too low. Same deal with explosions, they look great but kind of just go boom.

- enemies are lacking a bit. I like the skull robots, but they all seem to be lacking really distinguishable sounds. The soldier enemies look cool but each type could do with distinct chatter to help identify them without seeing them.

- AI could be more...reactive? I know basic AI is kind of a staple of these games but I feel like for soldiers they could use some blood features like being able to crouch or throw grenades, or strafing out of the way

- Shelly's lines - idk if it's the direction or the lines themselves but they leave a bit to be desired. I think it's mostly in the delivery of some of them. She's a good VO, just needs some tweaking IMO.

- secret rewards are a bit lacking - This is definitely a limited arsenal issue though so I'm sure that'll be remedied in the full release.

- ladders are kinda finnicky (though what game doesn't have that problem)

- the gattling gun tease kinda sucks. I understand why you did it, but unless there's one you can get in a secret in this demo all that means is the gun is in the demo and you don't even get like 10 seconds to try it out to give it a proper tease.

So yeah, that's my thoughts. A lot of nitpicky stuff, but that's because this is a surprisingly well done game, I look forward to the full release (and mods, since who are we kidding, it's on eduke, somebody is gonna make levels for the demo)

[Micky C]

oasiz, on 05 March 2018 - 04:46 AM, said:

Even more TP stuff
One of them is the one being discussed and the other two are visual.

Technically two S3 references, other one hasn't been pointed out really, but should be obvious to any who have watched S3!

Not to mention all the coffee everywhere!

Actually, I can't remember whether or not there's coffee in the offices.

[Danukem]

Bloodshot, on 05 March 2018 - 11:58 AM, said:

- AI could be more...reactive? I know basic AI is kind of a staple of these games but I feel like for soldiers they could use some blood features like being able to crouch or throw grenades, or strafing out of the way

I agree with this general point, but the enemies do strafe out of the way already, sometimes very effectively. If you make enemies do this too much it gets silly and annoying.

The main thing the enemies need is more animations -- without animations, there's only so much you can do with code, because the animations really sell it. As I said before, they would benefit from stagger animations, especially the stronger enemies who can survive a shotgun hit. I would also like to see separate walking and running animations. If you have both you can make an enemy move at a higher speed without it looking silly. A good use case for this is when you first come into a room, the enemies could follow preset paths to run into optimal positions to fight the player from. As a player, it makes the enemies seem way smarter and more interesting when they do stuff like that.

[Micky C]

Trooper Dan, on 05 March 2018 - 01:30 PM, said:

A good use case for this is when you first come into a room, the enemies could follow preset paths to run into optimal positions to fight the player from. As a player, it makes the enemies seem way smarter and more interesting when they do stuff like that.

I'm pretty sure many of them already follow a path (or at least move to a pre-defined point) after spawning. I remember in the offices there was a point where the wall exploded, and three of them came out and formed an arch pointing towards the door of the room you were in. Also, when you get the yellow keycard and look at the view screen, you can see those red hooded guys move into position from off-screen. There are probably many more examples.

[Jblade]

Yeah Micky's right, I've seen them do that as well.

The thing the enemies seem to lack to me is that they don't have any unique gimmicks or abilities like the other Build games' enemies do. Of course I'm not privy to what you guys have planned for the final release so maybe you already have something in mind; but I think each enemy would really benefit from having a unique ability each like Duke/SW/Blood enemies do (even basic stuff like throwing grenades, cloaking or jumping - Duke's enemies were always more about looking cool than being utilitarian like Doom's enemies IMO)

[funduke]

I like the Ion Maiden Beta!
First of all: there are cheats! I love to cheat.
The bomb is my favorite weapon because of it's look and behavior/way of handling.
The appearance of the spider-like enemy makes it my favorite enemy.
What i love in the levels is the massive amount of secrets and jokes/references to other games, pop culture, etc. This makes the game great.
Please keep the rest of the game in that way.

Greetings
Funduke

[Zaxx]

Somebody found a warp glitch (there's a secret shown in the video so don't watch it if you don't want to spoil it):

[PsychoGoatee]

Zaxx, on 05 March 2018 - 04:13 AM, said:

Damn, what an elaborate Twin Peaks Season 3 reference! I won't even post a screenshot, spoiling this for people who are yet to find it would be a cardinal sin.

I missed most of the secrets, loved Twin Peaks season 3! "Helloooooo". That said, I'll never see it in the game, so hopefully somebody posts it somewhere sometime.

(Already beat it and I'm not the best secret hunter)

[Zaxx]

Btw. I noticed 2 things:

- The fps limiter appears to be buggy at some places: I've been playing the game with the limiter set to 144 but sometimes I get limited to lower values without any reason whatsoever. For example while I was messing around in the subway station I got limited to 90 even though there was nothing on the screen that seemed performance heavy. After turning off the fps limiter it went up to around 300. Tried limiting the game with RivaTuner Statistic Server afterwards and that had the same effect so the problem seems to be not with the in-game limiter itself.

- The save files are huuuuge compared to the size of the game. 10 megs per save file?

[Zaxx]

PsychoGoatee, on 05 March 2018 - 04:29 PM, said:

I missed most of the secrets, loved Twin Peaks season 3! "Helloooooo". That said, I'll never see it in the game, so hopefully somebody posts it somewhere sometime.

I did not link it here in order not to spoil the fun of finding it but I did post a video of it on the Twin Peaks subreddit if you really want to watch it (but it shows everything, even the way to find it so SPOILERS ):
https://www.reddit.c...n_maiden_has_a/
It's pretty popular there btw.

[PsychoGoatee]

Zaxx, on 05 March 2018 - 04:36 PM, said:

I did not link it here in order not to spoil the fun of finding it but I did post a video of it on the Twin Peaks subreddit if you really want to watch it (but it shows everything, even the way to find it so SPOILERS ):
https://www.reddit.c...n_maiden_has_a/
It's pretty popular there btw.

Awesome, thanks! That rocks, very classy easter egg.

[Zaxx]

PsychoGoatee, on 05 March 2018 - 04:38 PM, said:

Awesome, thanks! That rocks, very classy easter egg.

Yep, if you're a fan of TP it really pushes the right buttons. Anyway if you want to get better at secret hunting I suggest doing what I used to do: in the case of most classic FPS games the first levels usually have a lot of secrets so look them up online and pay attention on how to find them. That way you can kinda nail down the logic behind them so you will find the rest of the secrets easier. You basically learn what to be on the lookout for.

[NNC]

Am I the only one who think some secrets need to be nerfed for the final release?

Yes, they are fantastic, I'm all pro-Easter Egg and all and it's a welcome fresh air from the linearity of modern shooters, but hunting for secrets shouldn't hijack your main campaign. In Duke there were no maps with 20 secrets, the biggest count was in Toxic Dump with its 14, but most of them are fairly obvious and there are 3 in a row with a simple crack blowing. Even the secret heavy Hollywood Holocaust showed 3 secrets out of 8 in the original demo, and they are very easy to access.

In Ion Maiden the first map has 20 secrets, with most of them are quite tricky, and some even annoying or cause death. The worst offenders are the last one with the long chair pushing (and it can get easily screwed if you pushed it into the elevator from the wrong angle) and the one where you have to jump from the restroom to the nearby room using a barely to see short platform outside with a long pit.

These kind of secrets might look cool at first, but for replaying the map they can hurt the gameplay dynamics quite badly at least for the completist players. To have an analogy, those who played platformers know that Yoshi's Island gameplay is badly screwed by the red coin and flower collection hunt. Despite the game has an amazing presentation, look, sound, characters etc., it's just not fun to play for completion, which however was part of the leveldesign. Ion Maiden is still fun, but to complete it for 100% it can get really annoying if every map and zone have this number of secrets. Also these secrets have advanced machinery and armor, without them it's easy to run out of ammo on higher skill settings.

Just my two cents.

[Player Lin]

Zaxx, on 05 March 2018 - 04:31 PM, said:

- The save files are huuuuge compared to the size of the game. 10 megs per save file?

I found my savegames with the final boss level are ~11MB.

Because of the hub(zone) system I guess, since all levels in the same hub(zone) has write into the savegame to store their states, you won't like shit happens if the engine just resetting the level(s) you were completed when you go back to find something because it didn't wrote the completed levels' state, for smaller savegame size, isn't it?

Those who played AMC TC v2 may understand what I mean...

And, 11MB isn't large enough compare to many modern games.

[TerminX]

The save size is cut nearly in half in the upcoming patch, IIRC.

[NightFright]

There will be a patch for the preview? In that case: Good reason to play it again.

[Danukem]

NightFright, on 06 March 2018 - 12:40 PM, said:

There will be a patch for the preview? In that case: Good reason to play it again.

Actually, that raises a good question. Did we pay for a preview + the full game when released, or did we pay for early access? If we paid for early access, then I would expect access to lots of updates along the way before release. I'm happy enough either way.

[Lunick]

You paid for the Preview + The Full Game but because it is also Early Access, any improvements to the engine and features are applied to The Preview Campaign as well such as the upcoming performance patch.

[TerminX]

What Lunick posted is correct. We don't plan on adding a lot of content to the preview but we do plan on fixing the important issues that have cropped up!

[NightFright]

That's pretty cool. I didn't expect to see any of the new maps before release of the full version, and tbh I wouldn't want to see more before it's done. Yet it's nice to have game improvements for the preview maps. Can it already be told what has been addressed so far or are you still gathering info?