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Decline Abe's Exoddus is a downgrade compared to Odyssey

Which is better and why? Discuss!

  • Abe's Odyssey

  • Abe's Exoddus (kingcromrade)


Results are only viewable after voting.

catfood

AGAIN
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I've recently replayed these games and have come to the conclusion that the decline of the Oddworld franchise started with the second game.

While it does bring a few new things which I appreciate the sequel does a lot more bad than good.

For one, the quicksave function. Now I know that a lot of people loved this but I thought it brought decline.. The problem is that the game is built around it. Puzzles are much harder than they were in Odyssey, requiring a lot more precision and trial and error. On the one hand you could ignore the quicksave function but then I don't know many people with enough mental fortitude to beat the game without it. On the other hand if you use it as the devs intended you to, the game becomes too easy despite the increase in difficulty of the puzzles because quicksave trivializes them.

Another problem is that the game overstays its welcome, especially in its last third or so when you're in the brewery. There are simply too many samey levels with samey puzzles. They keep repeating the same puzzles throughout a section to the point where it becomes noticeable. Odyssey did not have this problem. Its progression made perfect sense, even from a story perspective. You escape Rupture Farms, travel to the outskirts to do a quest to obtain a special power, and then you return to Rupture Farms to rescue the rest of the mudokons. It made sense.

The secrets are no longer, well, secret. They are always signaled to the player with the use of those green bottles. There's no sense of discovery anymore. In Odyssey you had to explore the level and think out of the box to be able to find them. Not only that but the way that they were signaled was pure genius. Many of them you would find by listening to the background noise. For example hearing a slig move where there were none in the vicinity meant that somewhere there was a secret. There are very, very few games who use sound as an integral part of the gameplay; 99% of games can be played without sound but Odyssey is not one of them.

The tone was also changed from the predecessor. Odyssey had humour, sure, but it was dark humour, such as those messages that you could read on the notice boards, or the poems that you read in Monsaic Lines. At the end of the day the first game was mostly a serious afair. Exoddus on the other hand went too far with it I thought; it turned into a saturday morning cartoon, with toilet humour and all (yes, I will admit possessing farts was fun but like I said it changed the tone too much).

Not to say that the game is terrible. It's still one of the classic cinematic platformers but it could have been better if they had payed more attention to what made the first one special.
 
Last edited:

Falksi

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Agreed. I'm not really a massive fan of either tbh, but can see the appeal. Given the choice I'd play Odyssey every time.
 

Kitchen Utensil

Guest
[...] the decline of the Oddworld franchise started with the second game. [...]

Yes, that's almost always the case. And even if the secrond entry in a franchise reaches or surpasses the quality of the original, it's most of the time for different aspects than those that made the original great.
 

catfood

AGAIN
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requiring a lot more precision

It's been forever since I've played it, but I distinctly remember abandoning Exoddus because it repeatedly demanded a level of precision that the controls just weren't designed for.
In fact the controls are improved in Exoddus in that they are way more responsive. In Odyssey there was a weird input lag where the game did not register the keyboard key if you did not press it hard enough. It's one of the few things the sequel did better.
 

Gentle Player

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It's too difficult to make a decision one way or the other. Exoddus was indeed more challenging in its individual puzzles. Fleeches, Greeters, leading blind Mudokons through meat grinders and Slogs. Yet thanks to quicksave, I could always rescue all 300 Mudokons in Exoddus despite not having the fortitude to rescue the 99 in Oddysee. Yet the problem with Oddysee's checkpoint system was that secret areas weren't taken into account. It was dispiriting to find a secret area, beat it after a great deal of struggle, only to die in the next regular screen and have to beat the secret area all over again. It's not as if preservation of resources was an issue, it was purely to try the player's patience. I think a happy medium could have been found between the two saving systems.
 

AdamReith

Magister
Patron
Joined
Oct 21, 2019
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Enjoy the Revolution! Another revolution around the sun that is.
Exodus might be the only platformer I've actually finished. I didn't use the quicksave because I didn't realise it existed and it kept throwing new things at me. I'll never forget possessing a glukkon for the first time. Riding around in the rail car thing was also amazing.

Definitely lighter tone than first game which was frankly a piece of art but too dark for me to immerse myself into comfortably.
 

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