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| Re: Crucial Distinction: We Are NOT Bungie | |
| Posted By: Loren Petrich <petrich@panix.com> | Date: 2/26/01 7:37 p.m. |
In Response To: Crucial Distinction: We Are NOT Bungie (Island Four Corporation) I think that Nathan Bitner's point is that Island Four's upcoming game will have a game world separate from any of Bungie's, though it will be introduced in much the same way, with lots of cryptic comments and puzzles. A classic example of such a puzzle is the identity of one's player character in the Marathon series. As part of that puzzle, we find that there had been 10 Mjolnir military Mark IV cyborgs. However, during the Battle of Tau Ceti, 9 of them had been on Tau Ceti IV. Which leaves one of them unaccounted for. But nevertheless, Cortana seems to live in a game world different from any of Bungie's. And Bungie has created at least 5 of them so far: Pathways into Darkness
(is Minotaur worth counting?) I do hope that Island Four has more success than Double Aught, which had sought to do a similar thing -- create a new game world with lots of cryptic hints and puzzles. I remember greatly anticipating Duality, and even putting in some special effort into my Marathon Map Exporter back in the middle of 1998 just to be able to get Marathon stuff ported to Duality. One thing that had slowed DA down was the development of a new engine, which may have been biting off more than DA could ultimately chew. IMO, Island Four ought to consider licensing some already-existing engine and building on that; that strategy is a known success at cutting down development time. I'm disappointed that DA's founders have not released or tried to sell what they've done of Duality; why let it go to waste? There were some interesting puzzles in that game, such as the emergence of the Factors and what those Builders were like. There were some Duality oddities, such as that aristocrat lady -- IMO, it's more likely that she would be wearing pants, at least judging from how many women have shifted to wearing pants in our society. I've found remarkably little comment on that subject, at least in the online searches I've done; I suspect that it may be because most of the shift in the US and western Europe is older than what might be called the Internet horizon. And the grrlopers having rear limbs being grasping limbs and front limbs being walking limbs -- that's not what natural evolution tends to produce. Using limbs for grasping has emerged several times, and in every case, the limbs used for that are in front of the limbs used for walking. The reason is that one of the most important items to be grasped is food, and it is desirable to avoid wasting limb length to grasp it; the grrlopers show such a waste of limb length. Supposedly, at least some of these oddities would be explained inside the game, but it seems that we will never know.
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