: Ok, here's a question for you Steve.
: In an old version of "Let Sleeping Gods Die" in Eternal, the player
: had to unlock three gates "whose keys are 'seven', in your contruct's
: way of thinking, though one has been inverted." (To paraphrase
: S'bhuth from that old version of the level). The solution was to set the
: rows of eight switches next to each gate to read seven in binary (off is
: zero, on is one), except one of them had 0's swapped for 1's and vice
: versa. That level got corrupted while working on Ch3 and I had to scrap
: the puzzle in the process of salvaging it.
: But I've been thinking of reinserting a variant of it in Eternal X.
: You think that would be too hard a puzzle?
Definitely too hard. The thing is, Marathon is not a puzzle game. We're not talking Zelda here, and people play the levels so they can kill things. If there's a puzzle you just can't get around, and you aren't able to solve it, you're kind of ruining the experience (even if it's more of a thinking game).
My suggestion would be to have it so that if you got really frustrated you could grenade-hop past it, or something. There's a puzzle for The Gray Incident that, when I test-released it, both players (these are veteran Thoners too) got tripped up. One of them gave up, but the other simnply grenade-hopped and got past. It was a neat puzzle in its simplicity.
That's what I think makes a good Marathon puzzle: simplicity. Missed toed the line with the complexity of the puzzles - if you have to get any more complicated than the Missed VCR Tower, or something along those lines, then you might want to rethink your level a bit.
