K1n9_Duk3, on 26 September 2020 - 05:04 PM, said:
Romero claimed they did 12 games in 12 months, mostly working on two games at the same time, so each game was in development for about two months. They simply didn't have the time to playtest the levels (or let other people playtest) and improve the design where necessary. Tom Hall stated that Keen 5 took them only one month, which might explain why version 1.0 of Keen 5 was shipped with a bug that made it impossible to play the secret level on easy difficulty, meaning that the player was stuck in a dead end and had to restart the game or load an earlier savegame (or use the debug cheats to noclip past that level on the world map). I guess id could get away with their sometimes questionable game design decisions and lack of polish in some areas because of how technically impressive the Keen games were when they were first released.
I could tell that Vorticon was rushed; the sorry state of episode 3 made that pretty clear. However, I was not aware that nearly
all of id's pre-Wolfenstein games were made on such a tight schedule. That certainly does explain a
lot. I thought Cat3D had an odd menu when I first played it, and when I was going through Keen 4 one of the songs sounded really familiar until I remembered I first heard it in cat3D. Certainly explains why it had Paddle War and only one song that was inherited from Keen (at least I assume that's the order of events).
I was also not aware Keen 5 was made after 6, and perhaps that's why I'm having a much better time with it so far.
K1n9_Duk3, on 26 September 2020 - 05:04 PM, said:
I don't really get your point. Are you saying that since the game gives you the quicksave/quickload option, programming in a pistol start is pointless? That's not true, as I have just elaborated on. Also, you seem to be implying that the more sensible option is loading a saved game. Isn't that exactly what I initially wrote about losing a life (or losing your guns and ammo in Doom's case) being the punishment for not saving your game?
Not that it was programmed, but more that it was
exclusively playtested on p-starts alone. To me, that communicates that savescumming was not the intended method. Making sure the level was possible is one thing; completely
disregarding the overall game balance as opposed to per-level is another. It's perfectly possible to do both; Duke 3D proved that much (albeit 100% secrets wasn't
always possible).
To put it simply, if you don't die, your
reward is keeping your guns and having an easier time on later levels. If you die, your
punishment is starting from scratch with just a pea-shooter. It's possible to beat the level from a pistol start, just harder and most importantly: a lot more tedious. This sort of reward/punishment simply doesn't exist if savescumming was intended, and if it was it makes the
sole balancing around pistol starts completely nonsensical. If it's the non-intended way to play the game, why
exclusively balance around it?
I'll admit rewarding the more skilled/luckier players with an easier time while punishing the less skilled/unluckier players with a harder time seems counterintuitive. That being said, it's not like Doom or Wolfenstein would be
unique in this regard. A lot of games around the time struggled with that sort of concept, and to be perfectly honest even modern games don't have a great solution to it either. Nonetheless, I don't think that implies it wasn't still intended. Despite my ranting, I do still have a bit more faith in id's level design abilities than to make their levels a series of IWBTG death traps.
Moreover, today and even back then, risk and reward was a core pillar of game design and level design both. It's why you typically find better stuff the more difficult something is. It's why the good weapons or higher point items are hidden behind a more challenging part of the level. It all comes down to choice; to making the player have to
decide between playing it safe or
risking it for greater
reward.
Simply put, without a fear of death there really isn't risk besides losing time, for it can be repeated infinitely. And if a player chooses to use that ability then so be it. However, in terms of level design, it fails to make any sense to create risk/reward situations if you
intend the player to bypass the risk. It's why savescumming is discouraged in the modern era.
However it's because of that central component to almost all game/level design that I think it's perfectly reasonable for id to
not expect their players to abuse that power. Their own experience in making games blinded them, assuming everyone else would be on the same page as them. It's something we saw back then, and it's something we
still see developers wrestle with today. Sometimes emergent gameplay is a good thing; other, more common times players find a mechanic and learn to exploit it. A mechanic the developers put into the game for one purpose gets misused and destroys a game's challenge and/or pacing. It's not uncommon today, and it wasn't uncommon back then. Thus, believing id was a bit naive with the save system is hardly a stretch of logic.
Nonetheless, we're probably just going to have to agree to disagree on this one. I don't see either of us budging on this particular point. Short of one of id's original members dropping a post explaining it themselves, all we can really do is interpret. You have yours and I have mine.
I will be looking into those patches, so thank you for those.