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Oh, I hate to make this post. I really hate to make this post. I swore to myself that I would wait until I had played Chapter 1 of Eternal through all the way before posting any comments, but I'm finding it so tedious to play that I'm not sure I even want to finish it. Forrest - please, don't get me wrong - Eternal has its moments, but it also repeats some serious errors of scenarios past, it still has quite a few bugs in it, it uses a muted color palette that makes Rubicon look positively vivid and much of it seems contrived. I'm near the start of level 6 now and I sincerely hope that blake37 wasn't playing it on TC - if so, I'm not nearly as skilled as I thought I was. Even switching back to Kindergarten, the level is still populated with very aggressive major fighters, compilers and hunters. Yes, I know I could clear them out and let the level repopulate itself with minor variants, but even that is difficult and tedious.
Forrest, you have a great story, but such an epic story deserves epic levels to match. By comparison, Goran's Yota Saga's story truly sucked - even he will agree with me there - but his levels are some of the most inovative and gameplay is always superb. Great gameplay can generally compensate for a weak story and there are plenty of examples of this, but a stupendous story can never make up for levels that just don't match the quality of what has already been done. I'm sorry to tell you this, man, but from what I've seen so far, the level design is, well, amiture. The last thing I want to do is have this thread degenerate into a gripe session, however, and I will now explain as best I can what I see as the more serious flaws in the most general sense:
- It doesn't feel like the Marathon. No one will fault you for making major changes in texture designs - Lord knows Bungie did this in their own games - but at the end of the day the game needs to give the player a feeling of nostalgia. Even with the texture changes between M2 and Infinity, the player still feels they are on good old Lh'owon. Eternal lacks any sense of connection with the old Marathon. The texture set you used is very dull and has a sandy, non-metallic feel that just doesn't seem to fit. The lighting level is way too high and the sense of foreboding is gone. I'm not saying Eternal should look like M1A1, but the connection to the past should be unmistakable.
- Everything is symmetric. Symmetry is good and it fits with the human sense of aesthetics, but it makes for boring gameplay. Some degree of assymetry is necessary to throw the player off just a bit - to make things seem off-kilter.
- Rooms should not be boxy. The hallmark of the beginning mapmaker is a room that looks like a plain box with a terminal in it. You have a lot of rooms like this. Yes, there are some truly amazing designs to be found in Eternal, but the environment doesn't feel real. You need to make much greater use of scenery objects. I'm not talking about lighting - your lighting is fairly good - but Eternal looks like a simple game - not like a colony ship under attack. There needs to be more crud - carefully placed dead bodies - both human and Pfhor. There needs to be more stuff laying around. The place needs to look lived in. And as much as I enjoy using the Pfhor weapons, I would really like to have some human weapons, too.
- The sequence of play should be logical. One major take-away point from the volunteers series on TI was that there was too much reliance on random searches to open doors. Eternal is much worse in this respect - there are many places where the player needs to visit a certain area or flip a switch to open a new area that is totally remote from that point. In many cases, the area opened is not even through a previously locked door, so that the player hasn't a clue as to where to go next. I found myself using map mode a lot in level 5, for example, to try to figure out what I had just opened. Although I'm always reminding players to use map mode to look for secrets, it shouldn't be necessary for ordinary gameplay.
- Play shouldn't be predictable. In PF's Switch/Which, which we have already discussed in the PF Volunteers Series, play did involve flipping switches and then looking for which door was opened, but it was still fun because the player never new what to expect. Each room opened was different and populated with different monsters. It made for variety. Although there is some variation in Eternal, it is fairly predictable and after a while, it becomes tedious to play. (I know - ouch!)
There are other, more minor gripes, and I probably should put together a bug list when I have a chance. Don't get me wrong - there are parts of Eternal that are really good, but large parts of most of the levels could use rethinking. I think I'll give Eternal a rest for a while and maybe come back to it after finishing the PF Volunteers Series or Red 1.1.
If any one feels as I do, please don't let this turn into a gripe session - Forrest needs constructive criticism that can help him to make Eternal one of the great scenarios. If I am however the only person who feels this way, I'll just retreat to the corner and shut up.
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