[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?

[TerminX]

It fixes a bunch of stuff. The biggest user facing change is that the player input is now no longer locked to whole units as far as the player's resulting .ang and .horiz are concerned. This means that the player's view angle can be at values in between the engine's traditional .ang and .horiz units. It's way smoother!

[Perro Seco]

TerminX, on 06 March 2018 - 01:18 PM, said:

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!

Will the system requirements lower in upcoming versions? Sorry for insist about that; I really want to play the game but only have an old computer with 32-bit system.

[NY00123]

It's about one night since I've completed the IM preview under the "Ultra Viscera" difficulty in "Bombardier Trial" mode; I've also taken care of the secrets, although there's this one secret (in the first hub) that I haven't exactly found on my own.

The above play-through has possibly been a bit unusual, in the sense that I've had technical difficulties while attempting to record a video of it (mostly the fault of me not doing this often).

If you're curious to see, there's a segmented play-through of the 2nd hub atm, including all secrets: http://youtu.be/SzGho1r1GCw


To add further comments from my preceding post on the topic:
- I did see these bombs in at least one screenshot, but it was surely a surprise to realize their role as bowling bombs!
- It actually took a little while to get how are they used. I think that originally, I didn't even take advantage of them so often, or at least not the expected way.
- In case I had any doubt, "Bombardier Trial" surely taught me how to use them!
- There's something to say about the music, say the end-game music. There are cases it feels similar to something from a different game - and I'm not talking about a Build-based game at all. Might just be the style and/or the fact these are XM module tracks.
- I've had these few occasional stutters, mostly while games are being saved, but not only. I do suspect it's due to the usage of an HDD drive, rather than an SSD. (The PC in question is soon to be 7 years old.)


I shall mention that I've gotten an Early Access copy of the game!

To finish, do I recommend this preview? You can probably guess, heh.

[Micky C]

TerminX, on 06 March 2018 - 01:59 PM, said:

It fixes a bunch of stuff. The biggest user facing change is that the player input is now no longer locked to whole units as far as the player's resulting .ang and .horiz are concerned. This means that the player's view angle can be at values in between the engine's traditional .ang and .horiz units. It's way smoother!

That's interesting. I wonder if it'll make aiming with a sniper scope in the AMC TC smoother; atm it's incredibly jerky, possibly due to this issue.

I've tried a few minutes of Bombardier Trial. It's fantastic for replay value as it completely changes the gameplay dynamic. Although, is it normal that I have to look really high up to throw a bomb slightly above horizontal? I would have thought that at least with the chargeup on maximum, the bomb would be tossed where the crosshair is pointing, but it's tossed much lower.

[Zaxx]

Yeah, I think that's normal behavior for the bombs. When I started playing at first I was like "wut, this is weird" but once you get the hang of it you can aim pretty well with them. Guess the angle of the bombs was made like this because they are supposed to be bowling balls and from the hand animation it seems like she is throwing them like bowling balls. Nice, unique touch and combined with the physics it makes the bombardier trial pretty fun.

[Sanek]

Will there ever be a 32-bit version of the game?
How about 486DX compatibility?

[Micky C]

Sanek, on 06 March 2018 - 04:21 PM, said:

Will there ever be a 32-bit version of the game?
How about 486DX compatibility?

32? Why stop there?

https://forums.duke4...ducing-eduke16/

Btw, while I was initially concerned about the 25 HB in BT mode, it turns out that enemies tend to drop a reasonable amount of armour shards which helps toughen you up a bit which is great.

Edit: I think I found a bug. I was playing Bombardier Trial, then I loaded a save from regular mode. I then climbed up the ladder to the boss area with a level load screen, and suddenly I was stuck with the bowling bomb weapon. Using them decreased their ammo count, so it looks like it was stuck somewhere between the two modes?
I could provide the log if that'd be useful.

[xMobilemux]

So I finally managed to finish the whole preview and I really enjoyed what I played and eagerly await the full version(I bought of 3DR to fully support the devs).

From what I played here's what I liked, didn't like and some suggestions.

What I liked:

- The Music.
Especially that first track, really took me back to the Stalker theme when I played Total Meltdown for the first time.

- The visuals.
The build engine can still outmatch even modern engines with the right mappers and artists.

- Bowling Bombs.
They were a blast to use!

What I didn't like:

- Shelly.
So far she's the most bland, generic female tough girl I've ever seen, both in appearance and in personality.
None of her oneliners cracked me up and when I heard her lines make some call backs to how Duke did his like the "Nothing there" or "I really needed that!", none of them came close to how Duke did it, Duke actually made you chuckle at those lines when he said them.
And her appearance is just as bland as I said it was a few pages back. However I did like how the Armor pick ups actually slightly show on her HUD face, which brings me to this:
Why the HELL wasn't this her main outfit? Seriously, that looks sick!

- The Shotgun.
Both it's appearance and punch. For something that looks like a Grenade Launcher, it feels like I'm firing a slightly higher caliber version of the revolver.
I'd say give it a small redesign to loose the grenade launcher look and give it a gunshot sound that makes it feel like it's got a lot of kick.

- Weapon Reloading.
It's got to go. Even Doom 2016 got this right.
Reloading in the middle of a fast paced fight brings it to a slow down and I often try switching to the next weapon instead of reloading and I barely ever use the SMG cause it's got a long reload.

Still I'm really looking forward to the full version, at it's core Ion Maiden is a damn good FPS, it just has a bland and forgettable skin.

[Micky C]

xMobilemux, on 06 March 2018 - 07:42 PM, said:

What I didn't like:

- Shelly.
So far she's the most bland, generic female tough girl I've ever seen, both in appearance and in personality.
None of her oneliners cracked me up and when I heard her lines make some call backs to how Duke did his like the "Nothing there" or "I really needed that!", none of them came close to how Duke did it, Duke actually made you chuckle at those lines when he said them.
And her appearance is just as bland as I said it was a few pages back. However I did like how the Armor pick ups actually slightly show on her HUD face, which brings me to this:
Why the HELL wasn't this her main outfit? Seriously, that looks sick!

I didn't find most of the Duke one-liners to be funny. IMO it's a good thing that Shelly isn't trying to funny like Duke is in DNF. From what I gather, one of the problems in Bombshell was that Shelly often told these really long lines that were meant to be jokes but fell flat. Here, they're short and punchy, and are just meant to give a hint of insight into what she's thinking, and what the player might possibly be thinking as well.

xMobilemux, on 06 March 2018 - 07:42 PM, said:

- The Shotgun.
Both it's appearance and punch. For something that looks like a Grenade Launcher, it feels like I'm firing a slightly higher caliber version of the revolver.
I'd say give it a small redesign to loose the grenade launcher look and give it a gunshot sound that makes it feel like it's got a lot of kick.

Apparently one of the Shotgun's alt fire modes is being able to fire grenades. When you take this into account, its design makes a lot more sense.

[xMobilemux]

Micky C, on 06 March 2018 - 07:58 PM, said:

I didn't find most of the Duke one-liners to be funny. IMO it's a good thing that Shelly isn't trying to funny like Duke is in DNF. From what I gather, one of the problems in Bombshell was that Shelly often told these really long lines that were meant to be jokes but fell flat. Here, they're short and punchy, and are just meant to give a hint of insight into what she's thinking, and what the player might possibly be thinking as well.

I'm not talking about being like DNFs lines.

I'm comparing Shelly's "Nothing There" and "I really needed that!" to Duke's "Where is it?" and "Oooh I needed that!" from the original Duke3D.

JSJs delivery of those lines made them stand out and pretty much always gave a chuckle, which made them memorable. Shelly has nothing.

Shelly is not a character worth remembering or even coming back for a sequel. They'd best kill her off and create a brand new character without the generic restrictions that the 2016 game cornered this prequel into.

[PsychoGoatee]

I like Shelly, at least this iteration, has that plucky protagonist vibe with the fun retro vibe to it. Reminds me of a 90s voiced protagonist from a PS1 game or a dubbed sci-fi anime. I would like more lines and sure some more jokes as well. She's got some flavor I think.

Whether they have notable restrictions to work with, given the established character, I'm not sure. I guess that she gets a robot arm and maybe more attitude later?

Any more tips for finding more of the secrets? I'm used to classic secrets in that I hit use on various walls and panels in case they work, and just in any vent or jumpable ledge I notice etc. And the chair moving thing.

[OpenMaw]

I would say this rendition of Shelly is much better than her BS outing. She was shackled with some badly placed angst in Bombshell that didn't fit with the other half of her persona as some kind of a heir to the thrown of old-school badasses.

[Forge]

never played bombshell, so i'm not jaded by that experience.

this "version" of Shelly is fine. The attitude and grit in the voice is fine.

Needs more lines.
That's all.

Stick your finger in your woman's ass up to the second knuckle. Record what she says.
Give the results to the voice actor.
(not liable for damages to property or person if you take this advice)

[Bloodshot]

PsychoGoatee, on 06 March 2018 - 08:39 PM, said:

I like Shelly, at least this iteration, has that plucky protagonist vibe with the fun retro vibe to it. Reminds me of a 90s voiced protagonist from a PS1 game or a dubbed sci-fi anime. I would like more lines and sure some more jokes as well. She's got some flavor I think.

Whether they have notable restrictions to work with, given the established character, I'm not sure. I guess that she gets a robot arm and maybe more attitude later?

Honestly i kinda hope they distance her from her bombshell iteration. Right now she seems like a soldier with some attitude and it gives me a kind of starship troopers or aliens vibe and I think her new design along with this make her feel a bit more grounded and likable