Boy, I have mixed feelings about all of this. There are two issues at stake, here. One is playability and the other is artistic intent. I think that everyone agrees that the existing 4-level sequence has a serious playability issue with two fatal flaws - 1) it's very easy to end up with an unplayable saved game and 2) on Deathwish it's impossible to finish the sequence and have time to read the end terminal, let alone to pick up all the ammo or further explore the end room. This issue absolutely has to be corrected, but we need to be careful not to alter Ian's original intent. In other words, we need to be careful not to over-correct and leave the player with less of an incentive to run.
: Now that does make sense, and the sides of the level are easier to get to
: than the interior of the airlock. Another place where Ian was able to send
: us an item is the 1x health canister that appears halfway though the
: second level; it would make sense if an oxygen canister accompanied it.
: This would also remove the need to make more extreme changes to the
: geometry to allow backtracking and optional areas as Steve is advocating.
OK, I can live with this, but it will make the level sequence a lot easier. This extra O2 would dramatically reduce the possibility of saving an unplayable game, but the sense of urgency will be somewhat reduced. In reality, the raptors that are constantly chasing us are probably an adequate incentive to run, and the extra O2 will still leave the player light on O2 by the end.
: However, I still think that the trick recharger needs to be changed. I feel
: it's one of the more important unwritten rules of Marathon that an
: interactive element communicates immediately to the player what its
: function will be (a switch alters the level, a recharger restores health,
: an oxygen charger restores oxygen, etc- and this information can be
: determined from the moment it comes into view), and is recognizable
: because of all the times a player has encountered them before and their
: description in the manual. This is only the second recharger in all the
: maps we've volunteered so far that does something other than what its
: texture indicates (the other is on Nuke and Pave, and not only does it do
: something *much better* than its texture indicates, which is arguably not
: the case here, but the area it's in is set up to make it look extra
: suspicious). I don't think comic relief is appropriate at this place in
: RED, either. If everyone is unified against me, I'll back down (the fact
: that we're alleviating the oxygen crisis by other means makes it a much
: smaller issue than it was before), but I just wanted one more last word :P
Hmm - my wife always has to have the last word, too. And as I read your explanation, I was about to remind everyone of the fake 1X recharger that is really a 3X in Nuke and Pave, but you beat me to it. I should have known better than to think you would forget this. My feeling is that the fake O2 recharger is a very cruel joke, but this was a matter of Ian's artistic license. It would really help if he would throw in his $.02 here (Crimson, where are you?), but in the absense of Ian admitting that he either made a mistake or that his joke was in poor taste, I'm inclined to leave this as is. There are other cruel jokes in Marathon. I just finished playing Infinity for the #@!th time and decided to see what the first terminal in the vidmasters challenge Try again level would say if I went to it instead of the end terminal. It rewarded me by sending me to the bottom of one of the lava pools - I just barely got out with zero shields. True, that was a vismaster level, but I think that Ian has the right to play a cruel joke if he wants to so long as it doesn't compromise playability. This is really not that important, however.
The bigger question to me is that if we do add an O2 canister half-way through, should we still have an extra at the end? Played on Deathwish, the player should enter the airlock with just about a half-full O2 supply, which is more than adequate to pick up all the ammo, read the terminals and explore the last room. I vote for no extra O2 canister at the end.
