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Mortal Monkey

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Everything posted by Mortal Monkey

  1. My favorite is a variation on layers, but with mental layers rather than physical. The mission builds up your understanding of it, and the climax comes when you have a revelation which spurs you to action. It's also one of the hardest types of storytelling to pull off, and not always appropriate. There's nothing wrong with chokepoints for linear storylines though. You just have to sneakily merge the player's previous choices (e.g. all roads lead to Rome Angelwatch). Naturally, more parallel chokepoints give choices more meaning, which in turn leads to more investment from the player. It also adds replay value to the mission. I played Lord Alan's Factory, and found it excellent up to a certain point. But the lack of a choice at that point just killed it for me. Objectives slavery is much worse than physical restaint; it disassociates you from your player character.
  2. I don't think that some players enjoy getting stuck while others don't. Some players just happened to find all the clues, while the rest didn't, and it's all rather random. One of the things that made Thief great, and I'm sure you'll agree, is the open-endedness and non-linearity. But what you have to realize is that this requires a little more from designers to make it an enjoyable experience for everyone. In a completely linear game you can force the player to do exactly what you want him to do, because you can trap him in a small area with only a handful of possibilities. This doesn't work nearly as well in a non-linear game, if you think about it. The solution is, obviously, to provide multiple answers to every mandatory problem. Difficulty does not come from less solutions, nor from less obvious solutions. Difficulty comes from making the process of solving harder. As for clues, a lot of designers seem to suffer from a delusion that all clues have to be formulated as a hidden message in a piece of text. There's nothing wrong with outright giving away the answer. A lot of the time you're not giving away half as much as you think you are anyway. You know the mission ten times better than anyone else ever will. P.S.: Nowadays I often find myself wondering what the designer intended with something, rather than what I can do with it. It kills a bit of the magic, you know. P.P.S.: I will never stop playing Thief FMs, so there's no need to try to replicate Thief exactly. But do steal all the good ideas.
  3. Unless you're running Windows 98 or earlier, I fail to see the problem. Incidentally, the minimum requirements for Doom 3 on Windows is Windows 2000. Wouldn't it be great if it didn't take any additional space to begin with? And wouldn't it be nice to be able to free up all the space once you're done with an FM?
  4. Why not use hard links? Make the latter two features operate on doom3/darkmod/fms/[missionname] instead.
  5. I don't think having "too bright" keys are a problem. It's not like spotting keys on guards' belts in the dark is a big game mechanic. On the other hand, don't forget that there should always be more than one "key" anyway; missing one or two shouldn't leave the player stuck.
  6. A lot of bugs you can do something about; namely, avoid situations in which they often occur. There will still be the rare glitch where the priest opens a door and falls over dead for no reason, and there's not much you can do about that. But I don't think anyone will mark your mission down for not having enough people sleeping in beds. That being said, only the FMs that are never released can ever be perfect. TDM is still relatively new to all of us, and you only had so much time to make this mission. Don't fret about the bugs, wether you made them or not (a lot of people didn't even notice, and by people I mean me). But if you can learn something from them, then you'll surely have an edge for the next competition.
  7. Assuming the same linear score scale for each category, I imagine it would boil down to something like B + F(3G + 2V + S), where G is gameplay score, V is visual score, and S is story score. As you can see, B and F (base, factor) are unimportant for determining the rank of an entry. I'm not an official spokesperson though.
  8. You mean you can't have people thinking you were a push bike rider?
  9. Dell Precision M90 (laptop): OS: Windows XP SP3. CPU: 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo, 2.33 GHz each. RAM: 2 GB. Video card: NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500M. Video drivers: From Dell. Performance: Looks great and plays great at 1920x1200. I've never been a big fan of AA though.
  10. I second everything the OP said. I've only played the training mission so far, but I've collected a few opinions along the way: The bad: I don't like blocking, neither auto or manual. With auto I keep blocking too early, and with manual I either block too early (before I move the mouse), or I start a block in the wrong direction. I would like to change the block direction mid-block, or block just by looking in the right direction.Keys clutter up the inventory a lot. I would like to be able to drop them. Perhaps having a keychain or a tool roll could also be an idea? The good: Lots of gameplay options. I would say that one of the most important things in a game is that the player gets to play the game in his/her own way.Attacking works great, looks cool, and thanks to the "invert attack" option, I find it very intuitive.Having a separate key for inventory and world frob is a good thing.Being able to turn junk I'm holding is an awesome feature. It would have made barrel stacking in HL2 such a lot easier. I predict great things to come from the crate climbing crew.Lockpicking is just awesome. It's not too simple and boring, not too hard, and it even carries more resemblance to actual lockpicking than to a pattern matching puzzle. I love the fact that you can pick by either visual- or aural clues. I picked the safe with my eyes closed, something I've never done in any other game ever. And being able to choose the difficulty is just icing on the cake.Jumping and mantling simply works. Climbing around is a joy, because I don't have to fear making a ruckus or falling to my death. Also, I can mantle into windows too small to stand upright in.Rope arrows kick ass. Swinging works nicely. Being able to stick them into movable objects is cool. Broadheads sticking in the rope is a nice touch, as is being able to slide down ropes, ladders and vines.Everything else. Seriously! From the look and feel of the NPCs and environment, to the sounds, the tools, the menu, the HUD, etc., etc. Right now I'm not playing TDM. Why? Because I'm patiently waiting for it to get dark outside.
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