Starglider wrote:'2001 feel' doesn't have to be a problem.
The problem is that playing DNF reminded me of why game designers abandoned many of the ideas of the early FPS genre; such as health packs, huge sprawly levels, and stupid gimmick puzzles to show that your game was somehow *special and unique*.
STRAK Sez:
For instance, near the start you have to 'interact' with a statue display to create a pathway forward, and then carefully walk up it without falling off. In the 90s this would have been an amazing piece of scripting and interactivity, these days it just brings the game to a screaming halt and forces the player into a lame platforming section.
The first 25 minutes or so is actually pretty decent -- the game has just the right feel of Duke self importance such as signing a copy of his book "Why I'm So Great" (which was mentioned in Duke Nukem 2), the over the top casino he owns; the Throne that takes you down to his Duke Cave, and the part where the door says "Red Keycard Required," to which Duke says: "Keycard? I don't need no fucking keycard." and forces the door open.
Sadly, at that point, the game went down hill and became increasingly an irritant with tower defense segments and the fucking shrink ray segments.
Ugh. Shrink ray.
The only way I was able to get through that stupid "walk through an engine" sequence was because I found a way to enable the cheats and slowed the game down to 25% of normal speed.
That's another thing I'd like to talk about.
Gearbox disabled the console, which meant no such thing as 'no-clip mode' to help us bypass lame platformer or puzzle sequences; and in a final insult, made it so that in order to get the "infinite health" "infinite ammo" cheats; you had to...have beat the game on normal mode.
Great Catch-22 there.
I'm no great shooter player, and even on the easiest difficulty level; the damn game was pretty hard; the designers preferring to spam enemies in huge hordes at once; and then doing dumb shit like making the Octabrains be capable of grabbing rockets fired at them, and then throwing them back at you.
That doesn't sound so bad, does it?
Well, see the game makes it so that only turrets or explosive weapons can damage bosses; and then inserts floating octabrain hordes in at least two boss battles.
FFFFFFFFF.
Then there's the stupid seesaw and physics puzzles, where you have to find blue barrels and put them into certain things; such as a shipping container in order to tip it over to give you a platform to jump onto.
Very very Half-Life 2, which was you know, ceasing to not be fun in 2004.
Then there's the dumb monster truck sequence through the ghost towns, which seems to be only there to make use of content that was already built, rather than for any coherent reason.
The monster truck sequence wasn't that bad...but it went on for far too fucking long, and required you to get out of the truck far too many fucking times to find gasoline containers to refuel the truck; similar to how HL 2's airboat sequences went on forever, and required you to dismount to do all sorts of lame shit.
Especially irritating is when you enter a room and find THREE gasoline containers, and Duke grabs only one....and you have to then stop and fill the truck up AGAIN later in the game. Ugh.
Oh, as a final fuck you -- they went with the checkpoint mechanic so common to games now for saving...which works great for linear shooters which don't have platformer puzzles, but becomes a big FUCK YOU when you encounter a platformer segment; as you can't save as you 'unlock' each segment of the platformer puzzle.
Oh, and the Load times. I don't mind load times when you first start the game or a level, but when you die in a level, it takes forever to reload, which is kind of stupid. Isn't all the content already in memory?
