Is it really THAT hard for croteam to just make a well designed open arena and spawn a bunch of enemies in it? The original games didn't exactly have the most complex of designs.
Is it really THAT hard for croteam to just make a well designed open arena and spawn a bunch of enemies in it?
believe it or not: yes
Proper encounter design/enemy mixture/placement is surprisingly difficult and you want to keep your combat environments as simple and visually clear as possible for this which is why actual, current day urban environments with tons of rubble, clutter, vegetation and mostly narrow corridors don't really work as well as the mostly plain levels of TFE and TSE and one of the reasons why the second half of BFE is so much better.
In one of their making of vids one of the devs said it best:
>I put two pyramids on a flat plane and knew: "this is it".
SS4 was a development nightmare mess, and all the skilled devs left soon after Talos Principle as a protest against the new, highly Western and Facebook / console-oriented business model. It's no wonder that Sam 4 ended up being not only significantly cut down, but also a broken technical mess.
SS3 and TP1 look and play so much better, and got way more features, gamemodes and options to tweak, out of the box.
The outsourced DLC was a lot better, but it's still tacked on a siht game.
They can't even do a main menu properly anymore.
That's the technological beauty of unreal engine for you.
Now say "Thank you Tim Sweeney for Unreal Engine and Epic Games Store".
>game is 70GB
>Croteam says that those aren't the final requirements and will definitely change
>the game is now 100GB
To put it into perspective:
that's 14 times the first game and about double the size of The Witcher 3 WITH expansions, Arkham Knight, Metro Exodus or Elden Ring
for a fricking puzzle game
game has way more enemies than those games... where else will they store them...
>Talos Principle
>enemies
>mfw Talos 2 has legion system puzzles for 1000s of bombs and turrets
SS4 is great, fite me.
I like it alot too, but I think headshots + dual wielding + alt fires messed with the classic formula too much. I could deal with one or even other, but the classic gun/enemy matchups and balance theory got completely nuked.
There's way more freedom to mess around, but I do feel like something was lost
I don't think balance is lost, it's best as ever. All additions to roster are welcome.
I do like alot of the new enemys, the pyros are great for instance. But alot of the new enemies are just "old enemies with heads", and otherwise kinda redundant. Certain older enemies got completely nerfed too, green reptiloids are a single medium headshot plus pistol tap now, and werebulls taken down with one sniper round or rocket headshot are just fat kleer that can't shoot you.
Most games with headshot mechanics have certain restrictions, like some types of auto weapons or explosives won't apply additional damage. Croteam decided to ignore this, and thanks to headshots: rockets are even more of a sniper role than TFE or 3, and the autoshotgun are basically a serious bomb/gadget on bosses.
Again, its still super fun to mess around with everything, and it all feels great to use, but some consistency was lost, something I valued alot in the encounters and 3.
dual wielding and alt fires are both great new additions
the only problem is its tied to the stupid ass level up system
The tree sucked. Fights honestly got less tight as the game went on because it never knew if the player could dual wield rockets+minigun, or if he wasted points on the werebull rodeos. As a result, From Russia With Love, despite having the goated Grand Corridor remix, is kind of a shit level with boring fights
>it never knew if the player could dual wield rockets+minigun, or if he wasted points on the werebull rodeos
I mean you could respec at any time for free to suit the situation but 1) it's a pain in the ass to do and 2) Croteam probably realized that there would be bullheaded players who refused to switch to a better build then complain about the game being bullshit, so they had to make the levels doable for anyone.
I blame same day Stadia release too. It's very telling that the game's best/hardest fights are almost all optional
>tfw the entire final level is optional since you can break it by simply jumping backwards over the Khnum corpse
>tfw when the entire game is optional since you can trigger the final boss in the level 1 flashback
God, I totally forgot about that.
Was it ever explained WHY all of this even worked in the first place, like shooting the staff to blow up Brand and being able to pick it up afterwards?
I'm too lazy to open the editor and check, but probably because lvl 1 is a copy pasta of FRWL, just with a special trigger to spawn you in the legion fight, and then kick you out after brand knocks you down. Skip the trigger, and the rest plays as normal. i guess, at least
That stuff I get but why would you put in a special and oddly specific kill-condition, complete with a unique particle effect and whatnot, if you (supposedly) never planned to have an actual fight with Brand in the game?
I mean, the game was stop and start dev for like a decade. Probably something from the cutting room floor. I don't know if "dev hell" is the right term when they worked on Talos and the VR games in that time, but loads of stuff was made and reworked between 2012-2021. I remember all the beta executions were cool as shit, then they redid that system, had to scrap them all, and we got stuck with the shitty knife ones.
Nah. The map design is bad, gunplay and enemy reactions somehow worse they've ever been, performance and visuals are literally a step back from the decade old previous installment, there's less game modes and other settings, and all those upgrade tree and perk shit do not belong in the Sam.
Croteam is dead.
They even abandoned Serious Engine and went for Chinkreal Engine instead, The Talos Principle 2 is made on it.
Goddamn Black personhomosexuals
>They even abandoned Serious Engine and went for Chinkreal Engine instead
think they had no choice after the 1 guy who understood serious engine left
They could've just rolled back to SE 3.5 and no one probably would've even cared.
Their rewriting of the engine from the ground up to support that fricking moronic terrain engine was perhaps their biggest mistake in their entire company history.
*SE 4
>Their rewriting of the engine from the ground up to support that fricking moronic terrain engine was perhaps their biggest mistake in their entire company history.
It's a neat concept that's useful for commercial applications as well as for certain genres like racing games and large-scale real-time tactics games but holy shit is it unsuited for FPS games, even those with the scope of serious sam.
>abandoned Serious Engine
I don't follow SS and didn't know this. That hurts to read.