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Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus - set in Nazi occupied America

Talby

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The main character died in the last one. He asked that a nuclear weapon be fired on his position, if I remember correctly. Why should I give a damn about his fate if he can get out of anything? They should have replaced him.

And, ANOTHER smug middle-aged Nazi woman with a scarred face? Really?

Seems uninspired.

Blazko takes grenades to the face on an hourly basis and survives, it's not a stretch to say he was rescued after calling in the nuke and recovered from his wounds. Also, it's obviously the same Nazi woman from TNO, not a new character.
 

Jick Magger

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The main character died in the last one. He asked that a nuclear weapon be fired on his position, if I remember correctly. Why should I give a damn about his fate if he can get out of anything? They should have replaced him.
I find it amusing that this is where you draw the line, seeing as the man was already depicted as being basically indestructible in both The New Order and The Old Blood. On several occasions the man is shot, stabbed, blown up, electrocuted, thrown from sheer heights, beaten up, mauled, and sworn at, and the most it ever seems to do to him is mildly piss him off. Yet him surviving a fate that was deliberately painted as ambiguous? Oh no, that's going too far.
 

Deleted member 7219

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Laughing my ass off at this thread. People criticising gameplay in TNO, saying it was repetitive, boring etc. Maybe that is fair. I probably look kindly on the game due to fondness for alternate history and story-driven campaigns. But don't bring in the Doom games as an example of how to do it right. Those were very much games of their time and hold up appallingly badly today. Those were very much about swarms of enemies, long slogs through maps doing nothing but killing with the odd keycard puzzle here and there. At least modern shooters try to find ways of breaking up the monotony.
 

Durandal

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Laughing my ass off at this thread. People criticising gameplay in TNO, saying it was repetitive, boring etc. Maybe that is fair. I probably look kindly on the game due to fondness for alternate history and story-driven campaigns. But don't bring in the Doom games as an example of how to do it right. Those were very much games of their time and hold up appallingly badly today. Those were very much about swarms of enemies, long slogs through maps doing nothing but killing with the odd keycard puzzle here and there. At least modern shooters try to find ways of breaking up the monotony.
wat

The amount of gameplay elements a Doom mapper has at his disposal allows for many more unique levels than TNO can. Like with puzzle games, just shuffling around things and adding just the little things can create entirely new challenges, whereas TNO relies on large crude changes in terms of setpieces and unique situations (something that in itself isn't bad) to mask the fact that the core idea of moving around in a small arena and shooting nazis isn't being as changed up as it could. Doom has a large variety of enemies which can be mixed and matched together, on top of placing them in certain positions to challenge you this and that way.

Considering most enemies in TNO are hitscan and are capable of moving around with a decent speed so they don't need to be placed around the levels by hand, one remaining approach for the level design is the F.E.A.R. approach where you and the enemies are placed in tight quarters and are engaged in some kind of game of cat and mouse, where you can hide behind cover and popamole with ironsights like a chump, or play aggressively by using grenades as a distraction and flanking them where possible with one in each hand to avoid damage entirely. The unfortunate part is that TNO only sometimes does this instead of always, as it places you in large open levels with no opportunity to outflank the enemies as damage is practically inevitable, and the only way to not die is to once again popamole.

Painkiller is more deserving of 'swarms of enemies, long slogs through maps doing nothing but killing' criticism, with its homogenous packs of enemies and drawn out levels with long stretches of nothing but walking, whereas most Doom levels can be beaten under 10 minutes, with clear build-up instead of always throwing shit at you right from the start as the OG Doom levels were built around pistol starts and thus required a sense of pacing. If you're complaining that all you do is killing (e.g. what the very fucking game is designed around), then that's a personal problem. Keycards existed to gate progression and preventing you from running past the entire level to the finish so you had to get yourself in some nasty situations before you could find a matching key, which is what also gave Doom levels their non-linear design considering a Doom level designer has to keep in mind how to make the progression of going from colored key to colored door as smooth as possible while reducing the feeling of having to backtrack while doing nothing as much as possible.

In essence the route to finishing a level is almost always linear in Doom, but it's a route you have to find on your own nonetheless, you usually don't feel railroaded. Making the player feel like levels are greatly varied is also quite effective. The simplest method of doing so is changing the aesthetics and looks of the levels. One example is F.E.A.R., which gets criticized for having repetitive level design, largely due the fact that the environments in which you fight are mostly the same, and because the enemies you fight are mostly the same. However, that's not taking in consideration how the encounters of F.E.A.R. actually work and why they do. If you were just to change up the locale and setpieces of the encounters, the reception towards the level design would be more positive, because most people don't really play with the mindset of learning how and why the game works without resorting to sudden genre changes which strongly deviate from the base gameplay formula for the sake of 'variety'.

Modern shooter campaigns often have this shit, first its just shooting, then it's a turret section, then it's a vehicle section, then it's shooting again, then it's a forced stealth section, then it's shooting with a gimmick, then it's a boss fight against a bulletsponge, and so on. Instead of building and expanding on a certain gameplay concept, it throws away coherence for the sake of 'variety'. It no longer becomes about learning and getting better at the game, but enduring the 'experience' the developers have lined up for me. At which point it becomes a case of 'why bother' since you might as well go full WarioWare and make the whole game a collection of mini-games and QTEs if you're not going to stick to anything. If you need to break up the monotony of the core gameplay with forced genre shifts, then the problem lies with the core gameplay itself.
 

Ash

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I think the more straightforward level design of Blood or Shadow Warrior was for the better than Doom's

Wut? Build Engine level design was basically the evolution of the Doom formula, still featured keyhunts and was certainly not more straightforward when you consider more involved interactivity, a fair amount of scripted event usage, swimming and Z axis gameplay. Levels could also be labyrinthine at times. While Doom level design is certainly good, level design of FPS was at its peak 1995-2000. Level design across all genres probably was. Just the right amount of engine capability to allow nice detail in three dimensions unlike the early 90s while still remaining abstract and gameplay-centric.
Then came the early-mid 2000s. Engines were starting to produce much higher levels of detail and level design took a nose dive due to focus on graphics fidelity, realism and detail, also with the side effect of smaller level design to house all the detail (e.g Doom 3 and its cramped, banal boring levels). Exceptions apply though. RTCW had decent level design, but that was 2002 if I recall. right before the first popamole rush and realism boundary-pushing by PC FPS devs.

I came into contact with FPS gaming first by playing Unreal, Half-Life 1, AvP, NOLF, UT99, Quake 3 etc.

Explains a lot. There isn't much notable in this list singleplayer-wise.

Never cared much about Medal of Honor, CoD etc as those were dumbed down console shooters made for lobotomized people. Neither do I like DOOM4 as I think it's a lazy piece of shit resting on the laurels of the classic Doom games.

CoD's roots is as a PC game. The original Medal of Honor games were console shooters, but weren't actually half bad. Some levels were pretty big, others very labyrinthine (there's even a level set in the Labyrinth of Crete), and the games placed interesting emphasis in educating the player about WW2 as opposed to being a shooting gallery. Overall they're nothing special, but as far as military shooters go they're noteworthy for a small handful of reasons.

Also, you don't get to rag on particular dumbed down games when you're a very big fan of many others.

Anyways, ITT: faggots that don't understand the history of the respective genre, but still like to think they know it all and give their opinion on how old game design conventions are so dated and streamlined cinematic linear banal shooters are the future. Same as all the other threads.
 
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Metro

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Laughing my ass off at this thread. People criticising gameplay in TNO, saying it was repetitive, boring etc. Maybe that is fair. I probably look kindly on the game due to fondness for alternate history and story-driven campaigns. But don't bring in the Doom games as an example of how to do it right. Those were very much games of their time and hold up appallingly badly today. Those were very much about swarms of enemies, long slogs through maps doing nothing but killing with the odd keycard puzzle here and there. At least modern shooters try to find ways of breaking up the monotony.
The actual gameplay/gunplay was fine. It's the excessive amount of cutscenes and walking parts that detract from the game.
 

Ash

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Not to mention the "stealth" segments, which were awful, just pointless. Even the notoriously bad stealth segments from RTCW were better.

And the gameplay was not great because levels were just too linear and devoid of anything enjoyable except the gunplay/encounters. The gunplay was the only solid thing, and even then the game had banal gunplay on occasion like numerous turret segments, and that bit where you commandeer the mech which was pretty much just a mindless shooting gallery. Plenty nonsense like that. Game was not very good overall. Core gunplay and some interesting story segments here and there, that's it. The devs should have been a movie production studio, they'd do a better job than most other game developer movie director wannabees. One of these days maybe we'll get a game that has cinematic quality WITHOUT tossing away good gameplay and game design conventions, and without going overboard on the movie part. Well, there's probably a small handful that can be listed, actually.
 
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Ezekiel

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May 3, 2017
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The main character died in the last one. He asked that a nuclear weapon be fired on his position, if I remember correctly. Why should I give a damn about his fate if he can get out of anything? They should have replaced him.

And, ANOTHER smug middle-aged Nazi woman with a scarred face? Really?

Seems uninspired.

Blazko takes grenades to the face on an hourly basis and survives, it's not a stretch to say he was rescued after calling in the nuke and recovered from his wounds. Also, it's obviously the same Nazi woman from TNO, not a new character.
You're right, he's invincible. Why should I give a damn about his fate?

Also, I thought The New Order was a sequel, following the character from a previous game or games. I felt like I was continuing his story. He spoke about the past in a nonspecific way. Why is this called Wolfenstein II? Stop doing this!
 

Ash

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Modern shooter campaigns often have this shit, first its just shooting, then it's a turret section, then it's a vehicle section, then it's shooting again, then it's a forced stealth section, then it's shooting with a gimmick, then it's a boss fight against a bulletsponge, and so on. Instead of building and expanding on a certain gameplay concept, it throws away coherence for the sake of 'variety'. It no longer becomes about learning and getting better at the game, but enduring the 'experience' the developers have lined up for me. At which point it becomes a case of 'why bother' since you might as well go full WarioWare and make the whole game a collection of mini-games and QTEs if you're not going to stick to anything. If you need to break up the monotony of the core gameplay with forced genre shifts, then the problem lies with the core gameplay itself.

Ah, but there is something modern cinematic shooters stick to, and that is telling their shitty story and maintaining their weak sense of "realism" and thematic consistency, both of which would be lost if taking the WarioWare approach.
They're games either designed by people that are a) unawares entirely how to create good gameplay, b) don't really care about gameplay in general and are just focused on telling their garbage story, or c) are being forced to make shit utterly retard compatible gameplay because that's what sells.
I think MachineGames/Starbreeze are a mix of a) and b). They've never made an actual good game, including Chronicles of Riddick. Pretty good storytelling and atmosphere, yes. But the gameplay is some of the dullest shit and borderline a complete waste of time.
 
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kalganoat

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Jun 5, 2017
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I like tno better than the new doom because it has a story. TBH I find doom boring and repeptive about 2/3 way in.
 

The Dutch Ghost

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Just a quick Marathon related question, wasn't there some talk a while back of remaking the original Marathon? Whatever came of that?
 

Durandal

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Just a quick Marathon related question, wasn't there some talk a while back of remaking the original Marathon? Whatever came of that?
There was a mention in the leak of a contract between Activision and Bungie that a certain amount of developers, depending on the financial success of Destiny, could be assigned to a team meant to design a prototype for a Marathon reboot/sequel/whatever. We have (thankfully) not heard anything about that anymore, so that project is most likely dead.
 

Luzur

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The main character died in the last one. He asked that a nuclear weapon be fired on his position, if I remember correctly. Why should I give a damn about his fate if he can get out of anything? They should have replaced him.
I find it amusing that this is where you draw the line, seeing as the man was already depicted as being basically indestructible in both The New Order and The Old Blood. On several occasions the man is shot, stabbed, blown up, electrocuted, thrown from sheer heights, beaten up, mauled, and sworn at, and the most it ever seems to do to him is mildly piss him off. Yet him surviving a fate that was deliberately painted as ambiguous? Oh no, that's going too far.

In b4 they claim he is some supernatural nazikiller fated to wake up every 300 years to fight immortal Hitler and his eternal reich, like they did with Doom marine in Nu-Doom.
 
Unwanted

Wehraboo

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Wolfenstein meets Man in the High Castle?
By the way, I liked The New Order and the change of location is promising, so I'll follow this one.

First thing I thought is "someone has netflix"

still better than any other thing they have worked on in some time though. I worry more about the shooter mechanics, they just don't make real PC shooters any more.
 

Lahey

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Grab the Codex by the pussy
MitHC is Amazon, not Netflix. I understand why you might think of Netflix based on the characters in the trailer though.
 

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014


A cheeseburger and milkshake at an all-American diner. A peppy parade down small-town Main Street. A sepia-toned sitcom or Technicolor TV gameshow. Few things capture the spirit of mid-century America like these do. But what happens when the Nazis win World War II and spread their evil regime across the globe, including America itself? That’s exactly the situation BJ Blazkowicz finds himself in when Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus begins. And while we’re shown a vision of 1960s America that’s being crushed under the heavy thumb of Nazi oppression, this is still America, which means we’ll see all of the above… but subtly (and sometimes grossly) subverted by Nazi totalitarianism.

As part of the world-building in The New Colossus, Bethesda Softworks partnered with MachineGames to produce a series of videos showcasing the type of TV programming you’d find in Wolfenstein’s version of America. These videos – many of which are riffs on popular TV shows from the ’50s and ’60s – appear in smaller snippets throughout the game. We’ll be releasing the full versions of these videos during the next few months to give you a taste of what could happen if the Nazis actually won the war and started to spread their propaganda through pop culture.

Watch Liesel, the first video right now, starring everyone’s favorite gargantuan flame-spewing robotic canine.
 

Wirdschowerdn

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Gute Peggy.
 

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