Serious Sam 4

[Israfael]

How fun is that this game as well as Doom Eternal outed shillman and civvie (and their followers) as people who can't aim for shit and have zero experience in multiplayer arena shooters

 

[Bad Sector]

Right, i see you are more interested in memes than actual discussion. Sorry for wasting your time.

So the game used some environments they had created for a different game, but oh wait, the alpha had different levels that played different that AREN'T the same as the Quake-clone-copied levels in the final game, but actually the final game is just an evolution of that Quake-clone [...etc...]

Is it really that hard to understand what i wrote? Here, let me try and summarize it:

• They started by making a Quake clone
  • They made environments for that game
• Then over time they went towards the egypt style
  • However they didn't recreate the environments from scratch, instead they converted their existing environments to the new style
• The alpha version has environments that are largely similar to those of the final game but were also based on those from the early Quake clone time
  
• The final version has environments which are stitched versions of those in the alpha version
• And so my original point: the environments in the final Serious Sam were originally made for another game, they weren't made from scratch specifically for Serious Sam

they confirmed that some models and enemies originated from that previous version of the game

FWIW if you play the alpha version you'll see that pretty much all enemy models have been replaced between the alpha and the final version of the game.

but there's nothing said about the level design

There have been some comparisons from old material, check this video as an example.

But even without that, Croteam is a small studio, it doesn't make sense for them to throw everything away - which is also exactly what they've been doing all these years with them reusing as much of their previous work as they can (TSE contains levels from SS alpha, SS3 contains monsters made for their failed Doom 4 proposal and their cancelled modern military shooter, SS4 contains assets from Talos, etc).

 

[Morenatsu.]

Is it really that hard to understand what i wrote? Here, let me try and summarize it:
They started by making a Quake clone
They made environments for that game
Then over time they went towards the egypt style
However they didn't recreate the environments from scratch, instead they converted their existing environments to the new style

Yeah, I bet they totally just totally took some random horror themed levels and turned them into Egypt, somehow. Hey retard, all the visuals would have to be completely remade to fit the new aesthetic, so most of the geometry would be replaced, leaving... what, some completely open spaces? Some generic corridors? I can see how you could convert some things, but when most of the geometry is just background detail entirely specific to the setting, there's little that could be retained. And all that could be is just something you could remake in five seconds anyway. Again, you're acting like they're incapable of making new things for some reason.

The alpha version has environments that are largely similar to those of the final game but were also based on those from the early Quake clone time
The final version has environments which are stitched versions of those in the alpha version
And so my original point: the environments in the final Serious Sam were originally made for another game, they weren't made from scratch specifically for Serious Sam

‘They copied the maps from a different game, actually it wasn't a separate game, it was the same game that evolved, by the way it was a separate game.’

That's what you've been saying. Liek, Baldurps Gayte is just a bunch of maps from some RTS turned into an RPG, Quake is just a bunch of random environments stitched together, derp derp derp. If it's not true of those games, why would it be true here?

they confirmed that some models and enemies originated from that previous version of the game

FWIW if you play the alpha version you'll see that pretty much all enemy models have been replaced between the alpha and the final version of the game.

Not the point, retard. The character designs/concepts were the same, and perhaps the actual models in the alpha were so too. But I don't know, I didn't see it myself (and neither did you), that's just what Croteam supposedly said. Actually, why is it that, according to you, the levels are just some Quake-clone shit, despite that being very unlikely for every reason possible, and yet when they themselves say certain designs came from said Quake-clone, you just go ‘omg the models are different bro herp derp i have autism, you didn't specifically say it exactly right so i win haha i shit my pants’?

but there's nothing said about the level design

There have been some comparisons from old material, check this video as an example.

Wow, an ancient screenshot of Serious Sam before they official renamed it to Serious Sam. Clearly evidence of level reuse from an entirely different game (which is still the same game!) and not just some extremely basic structures that could go anywhere. The level in that example isn't even in the final game, lol. Show me an actual screenshot of In the Flesh with its original setting and maybe I'll believe you.

But even without that, Croteam is a small studio, it doesn't make sense for them to throw everything away - which is also exactly what they've been doing all these years with them reusing as much of their previous work as they can (TSE contains levels from SS alpha, SS3 contains monsters made for their failed Doom 4 proposal and their cancelled modern military shooter, SS4 contains assets from Talos, etc).

You can reuse things when they fit your current design without much extra work. If you can, why not? But all you've been doing is assuming shit you actually don't know a single thing about. Perhaps they kept certain environments, to whatever extent that is even possible, but how can you tell? Why does that even bother you? You've still completely and utterly failed to understand my point: Whatever design they settled on is what the game is, and it's pointless to complain about it retaining some aspects of earlier concepts unless you actually have some contradictory expectations of it. In that I could understand it if it were about a sequel, but the original game? That's the very definition of what Serious Sam is. If TFE contains concepts from their ‘Quake-clone’... then that's just part of the game. It's not a foreign element. It's literally just what it is.

 

[Bad Sector]

Yeah, I bet they totally just totally took some random horror themed levels and turned them into Egypt, somehow.

"Somehow" being that they replaced the textures, it isn't like Serious Sam actually *looks* like Egypt, at most it has a pyramid here and there but largely when it comes to the geometry it is just....

so most of the geometry would be replaced, leaving... what, some completely open spaces? Some generic corridors?

...open spaces connected with generic corridors, with some columns here and there. The rest is texturework.

Again, you're acting like they're incapable of making new things for some reason.

No, i'm not, my point in the entire discussion is that their levels were based on existing levels they had, not that they copy/pasted their levels exactly as they were.

‘They copied the maps from a different game, actually it wasn't a separate game, it was the same game that evolved, by the way it was a separate game.’ That's what you've been saying.

If you do a bad faith reading of what i'm writing (which is what you seem to be doing so far), i can see how you might read what i write like that. However if you actually try to understand what i'm writing i hope you'll realize that when i wrote "different game" i meant the original game they started with which was, indeed, a different game they wanted to make. That they ended up transitioning to Serious Sam doesn't mean that the game they started with was Serious Sam, in the beginning their game was meant to be some dark horror game with environmental puzzles (they even mention portal puzzles in their home page, but in the alpha you can also see gravity-based puzzles in leftover levels that were removed in the final game).

perhaps the actual models in the alpha were so too. But I don't know, I didn't see it myself (and neither did you)

You can find it online, search for ss_alpha_cleaned.zip.

Actually, why is it that, according to you, the levels are just some Quake-clone shit, despite that being very unlikely for every reason possible, and yet when they themselves say certain designs came from said Quake-clone

The final levels are certainly not "Quake-clone shit" (which i never wrote), they are based on the alpha levels, themselves being based on the levels from their original Quake clone.

Wow, an ancient screenshot of Serious Sam before they official renamed it to Serious Sam. Clearly evidence of level reuse from an entirely different game (which is still the same game!) and not just some extremely basic structures that could go anywhere.

And that was exactly my point! But to make it more clear and to answer your next question...

Perhaps they kept certain environments, to whatever extent that is even possible, but how can you tell? Why does that even bother you? You've still completely and utterly failed to understand my point: Whatever design they settled on is what the game is, and it's pointless to complain about it retaining some aspects of earlier concepts unless you actually have some contradictory expectations of it. In that I could understand it if it were about a sequel, but the original game? That's the very definition of what Serious Sam is. If TFE contains concepts from their ‘Quake-clone’... then that's just part of the game. It's not a foreign element. It's literally just what it is.

...i never wrote that anything of that bothers me, this is your bad faith reading of the messages i wrote so far.

The entire discussion began with me writing that schru was overoptimistic about the effort Croteam put in their level design and as a reason for why, i wrote that their final game uses environments from their Quake clone (and again to be clear, i did not write that their levels are the same as those in their Quake clone - that would be an extrapolation of what i wrote that i did not imply nor would agree with). This was to show that their level designs are generic enough (ie. "basic structures that could go anywhere") to translate from their earlier work to the final game. Obviously there were changes made to it, it isn't like they copy/pasted the environments from one map to another.

Next time try to not take things out of context and end up with misunderstanding what others are writing, it is a waste of time for everyone involved.

 

[Tehdagah]

Croteam did nothing wrong

 

[Morenatsu.]

"Somehow" being that they replaced the textures, it isn't like Serious Sam actually *looks* like Egypt, at most it has a pyramid here and there but largely when it comes to the geometry it is just....

If you have to go through all the effort of retexturing, why not just make entirely new levels? No matter what you think, one can't just slap some textures on a hell dungeon and be done with it. It HAS to be remodelled. At that point, there's no harm in just making entirely new maps. The amount of extra work that would add is trivial compared to the amount it'd already take to adapt existing levels.

...open spaces connected with generic corridors, with some columns here and there. The rest is texturework.

Kind of like every game ever made. A truly profound statement.

No, i'm not, my point in the entire discussion is that their levels were based on existing levels they had, not that they copy/pasted their levels exactly as they were.

You don't know that.

perhaps the actual models in the alpha were so too. But I don't know, I didn't see it myself (and neither did you)

You can find it online, search for ss_alpha_cleaned.zip.

I meant neither of us has seen the game that existed before Serious Sam, so it's not possible to tell how much of it was actually retained into the alpha and the final game. I've fully played both. I don't need a download.

The final levels are certainly not "Quake-clone shit" (which i never wrote), they are based on the alpha levels, themselves being based on the levels from their original Quake clone.

So it's just back to you making pointless statements that aren't even necessarily true.

Wow, an ancient screenshot of Serious Sam before they official renamed it to Serious Sam. Clearly evidence of level reuse from an entirely different game (which is still the same game!) and not just some extremely basic structures that could go anywhere.

And that was exactly my point! But to make it more clear and to answer your next question...

...i never wrote that anything of that bothers me, this is your bad faith reading of the messages i wrote so far.

The entire discussion began with me writing that schru was overoptimistic about the effort Croteam put in their level design and as a reason for why, i wrote that their final game uses environments from their Quake clone (and again to be clear, i did not write that their levels are the same as those in their Quake clone - that would be an extrapolation of what i wrote that i did not imply nor would agree with). This was to show that their level designs are generic enough (ie. "basic structures that could go anywhere") to translate from their earlier work to the final game. Obviously there were changes made to it, it isn't like they copy/pasted the environments from one map to another.

The screenshot isn't evidence that they retextured anything from their previous concepts. It's just apparently an extremely basic version of what is a map that was ultimately cut. What is that supposed to prove? You have nothing to but assumptions. You can't argue against that unless you actually show something substantial instead of repeating yourself. If you think the level design is weak, you don't need to come up with some weird made-up reason for it. Even if it is true, it doesn't matter. So what if they perhaps reused things? What does that have to do with whether the final product is good? It doesn't.

Next time try to not take things out of context and end up with misunderstanding what others are writing, it is a waste of time for everyone involved.

 

[Bad Sector]

If you have to go through all the effort of retexturing, why not just make entirely new levels? No matter what you think, one can't just slap some textures on a hell dungeon and be done with it. It HAS to be remodelled.

Different people make the texture assets and the levels and it can be easier to adjust existing textures or even replace them with matching new ones than make the new levels, especially when to do the latter you need to be using an unfinished level editor. Also their levels were made using brushes which align textures mostly automatically, you do not need to remodel a level with brushes to replace the textures.

The amount of extra work that would add is trivial compared to the amount it'd already take to adapt existing levels.

You write all the time that i do not know and make assumptions, but here you are making assumptions about the triviality of adapting existing levels vs making new levels from scratch.

You don't know that. [..] I meant neither of us has seen the game that existed before Serious Sam, so it's not possible to tell how much of it was actually retained into the alpha and the final game.

I have seen the pre-alpha screenshots, the alpha levels and the final levels as well as their high reuse of assets in later games so i can make an educated guess. After all when you see smoke behind the mountain you do not assume that it is just an unusually high number of strong smokers having a party and wait until you see flames.

However note that i never wrote anything about how much of In The Flesh version was retained into the alpha version, this is your own assumption and you largely brought the discussion about In The Flesh while i was mainly writing about the alpha version, exactly because -as you write- i do not know much about In The Flesh itself. My reference to the latter was when i wrote that the final game used environments originally created (though obviously altered, see below about the "screenshot") for it.

The screenshot isn't evidence that they retextured anything from their previous concepts. It's just apparently an extremely basic version of what is a map that was ultimately cut. What is that supposed to prove?

First of all i have a feeling you are looking at something different. Check again the timestamp part of the video i linked at, it doesn't show a single screenshot, it overlaps an older screenshot with a newer screenshot which shows how the newer map was evolved from the older map. And that is exactly what is "supposed to prove": that they based their maps based on their earlier maps instead of making them from scratch. Which is also what i am writing repeatedly since the first message you replied to.

You can't argue against that unless you actually show something substantial instead of repeating yourself.

I am only repeating myself because you ignore what i wrote, but yeah you are right, it is pointless to repeat myself.

If you think the level design is weak, you don't need to come up with some weird made-up reason for it.

I'm not coming up with anything, what i wrote is that they used environments in their final game from an earlier game - which is a fact that can be seen both in the video i posted above and by playing the alpha.

Even if it is true, it doesn't matter. So what if they perhaps reused things? What does that have to do with whether the final product is good? It doesn't.

This is funny because when i wrote "Next time try to not take things out of context and end up with misunderstanding what others are writing" your reply was...

...but what else can i think when you write that?

Not only you took what i wrote out of context and misunderstood what i wrote but you also refuse to even acknowledge it, willfully retaining your misunderstanding.

I do not mind mind having arguments but i do mind having my time wasted by arguing with someone who doesn't even bother to read what i write, take into account the context of what i wrote and after i explicitly point that out they keep doing what they are doing. This isn't just a waste of time, it is also tiring because i have to point out both the issues with what you write and try to reply to them.

So let me make this clear. Quoting again, each part:

Even if it is true, it doesn't matter.

It does matter in the context of the discussion to show that their level designs were not made from scratch for the final game of Serious Sam specifically. Why does that matter? Because... well, you know what? Read the part you actually quoted but didn't bothered to read and understand. It is right there.

So what if they perhaps reused things?

Nothing. I have zero issue with developers reusing things, i'd reuse things if i could too. That doesn't mean that the reuse doesn't have implications though. For details, see above.

What does that have to do with whether the final product is good? It doesn't.

No it doesn't, i agree with this and i never claimed otherwise. None of my comments had anything to do with the final product being good or not. In fact i like the Serious Sam series, they're not among my favorite FPS games because i am not a big fan of the arena style of games (like the games i mentioned in a previous post) but i still have fun with them (and the games i mentioned in said previous post).

But look, if you are going to reply with something that is again based on ignoring what i wrote then i'm not going to bother replying. Repeating myself isn't interesting at all and honestly i do not think there is much left to write on this topic i haven't already written.

 

[Morenatsu.]

Different people make the texture assets and the levels and it can be easier to adjust existing textures or even replace them with matching new ones than make the new levels, especially when to do the latter you need to be using an unfinished level editor. Also their levels were made using brushes which align textures mostly automatically, you do not need to remodel a level with brushes to replace the textures.

You'd still have to use the unfinished level editor for retexturing anyway.

You write all the time that i do not know and make assumptions, but here you are making assumptions about the triviality of adapting existing levels vs making new levels from scratch.

I know how level editors work, I can make those kinds of assumptions. I don't know about unknown versions of games, so of that I can't assume. Obviously.

You don't know that. [..] I meant neither of us has seen the game that existed before Serious Sam, so it's not possible to tell how much of it was actually retained into the alpha and the final game.

I have seen the pre-alpha screenshots, the alpha levels and the final levels as well as their high reuse of assets in later games so i can make an educated guess. After all when you see smoke behind the mountain you do not assume that it is just an unusually high number of strong smokers having a party and wait until you see flames.

However note that i never wrote anything about how much of In The Flesh version was retained into the alpha version, this is your own assumption and you largely brought the discussion about In The Flesh while i was mainly writing about the alpha version, exactly because -as you write- i do not know much about In The Flesh itself. My reference to the latter was when i wrote that the final game used environments originally created (though obviously altered, see below about the "screenshot") for it.

More like you can't actually see any smoke, it's just a mountain. But since you say there's smoke, it must be true. Right...

Asset reuse in future games retroactively proves such in older games, interesting logic you have there.

So anyway, what you're saying is that... the Quake-clone in question was actually the Serious Sam alpha all along? That'd make sense given the things you've been saying, but that's beyond retarded. Yes, those environments made it into the final game, yes, they were retextured (with better textures of the same theme)... but that's not reusing levels from a different game. That's literally the same maps in the same game. Not only is that obvious, but that's... only the most idiotic would bother to make such statements. And when I start arguing with retards, I usually start by assuming that they have common sense (but of course they don't). Why would you be referring to the alpha in such a way? Of course I'm going to assume you mean In the Flesh, what else could you be referring to? What even makes the alpha seem like a Quake-clone? ‘um well they wuz keyz and shiet’ Cool story bro, the coolest one I've ever heard, in fact.

The screenshot isn't evidence that they retextured anything from their previous concepts. It's just apparently an extremely basic version of what is a map that was ultimately cut. What is that supposed to prove?

First of all i have a feeling you are looking at something different. Check again the timestamp part of the video i linked at, it doesn't show a single screenshot, it overlaps an older screenshot with a newer screenshot which shows how the newer map was evolved from the older map. And that is exactly what is "supposed to prove": that they based their maps based on their earlier maps instead of making them from scratch. Which is also what i am writing repeatedly since the first message you replied to.

Again, that's not basing something on an earlier map, it's the same map (or at least it seems to be, as that's not the only time such structures appear, hence my ‘apparently’). Making those early maps and reiterating on them IS the process of making something, ‘from scratch’ or otherwise. You keep repeating it and I keep ignoring it because it's too retarded to even recognize as a point someone would try to emphasize. Do you really think I'd assume they make things with instant perfection on the first try?

I am only repeating myself because you ignore what i wrote, but yeah you are right, it is pointless to repeat myself.

I am only repeating myself because you ignore what i wrote, but yeah you are right, it is pointless to repeat myself.

I'm not coming up with anything, what i wrote is that they used environments in their final game from an earlier game - which is a fact that can be seen both in the video i posted above and by playing the alpha.

Bad Sector never grew up, he was just replaced with separate versions of himself that reused parts of previous Bad Sectors (who are to be viewed as distinct entities). The only difference is his skin, which is why he is a African American.

Even if it is true, it doesn't matter. So what if they perhaps reused things? What does that have to do with whether the final product is good? It doesn't.

This is funny because when i wrote "Next time try to not take things out of context and end up with misunderstanding what others are writing" your reply was...

...but what else can i think when you write that?

Not only you took what i wrote out of context and misunderstood what i wrote but you also refuse to even acknowledge it, willfully retaining your misunderstanding.

I do not mind mind having arguments but i do mind having my time wasted by arguing with someone who doesn't even bother to read what i write, take into account the context of what i wrote and after i explicitly point that out they keep doing what they are doing. This isn't just a waste of time, it is also tiring because i have to point out both the issues with what you write and try to reply to them.

So let me make this clear. Quoting again, each part:

...

But look, if you are going to reply with something that is again based on ignoring what i wrote then i'm not going to bother replying. Repeating myself isn't interesting at all and honestly i do not think there is much left to write on this topic i haven't already written.

In the end, you admit that your comments are pointless and only have a meaning when viewed in the particularly autistic way that you see them. Well, thanks for participating, retard. Aaaaaaah yourself.

 

[Kitchen Utensil]

2020—when even something as simple and mediocre as Serious Sam is too much to ask of developers.

 

[Zlaja]

I've heard some bad things about the game but then you see footage like this (watch from 3:11:00 to 3:14:00) and go "hmmm.."

 

[JDR13]

I've heard some bad things about the game but then you see footage like this (watch from 3:11:00 to 3:14:00) and go "hmmm.."

Twas not but a mild skirmish.

 

[Zlaja]

Twas not but a mild skirmish.

Mixed well with the music. And the music itself reminded me of Dynasty Warriors.

 

[Tehdagah]

The final area of the game looks like art

 

[Verylittlefishes]

Didn't read the thread, is it THAT bad?

 

[udm]

No, game's really good. I cannot understand the "lawl it's too slow" complaints because right after the second major encounter of the first level, the pace picks up immediately. It's not like TFE and TSE also threw you into the heat of things immediately. There are weak spots for sure like the Popemobile segment in Rome, but it's still good old Serious Sam. The only thing I really miss so far are the indoor levels (the first few indoor levels in TFE with their play on lighting were really cool).

I am hesitant to post more until I finish the game (at Chapter 8 currently on Serious difficulty), but my thoughts so far are best summed up by this review:

 

[schru]

All the particular points aside, keep in mind that I've taken back my original comment where I said that SS2 is ‘very casual’ and modified it to ‘relatively casual compared to the other instalments’. It is still a Serious Sam game, but the console influence is apparent.

You can't just get rid of every enemy that comes at you easily with the same weapon, so in case of the kleers for instance you can counter them with the double-barrelled shot-gun, but you have to time it well and at the same time keep moving to avoid several others jumping at you.

Sure, but i personally found that more annoying than fun and i liked how SS2 behaved much more. This is a matter of personal preference, after all you wrote that "The ambushes around pick-ups are hilarious, I enjoyed them every time" which personally outside of a few cases (e.g. the 1hp pick up that runs laughing from you) i never found hilarious.

Personal preferences are fine, of course, but there's also the objective side of one version of the enemy requiring a bit more complicated response from the player and the other variant being simplified, in line with the over-all flow of combat in SS2. This fits into the general tendency of simplifying things for more casual players or ease of play with a controller.

About the ambushes around pick-ups, I mentioned it just to express my appreciation for them. It's nothing more, of course.

I won't say SS and Painkiller are entirely unlike, but they're further apart than that. [..] It has very diverse enemies in its own way, but it's a different kind of shooter.

I never wrote that they are the same either, but they are much more like than other FPS and to me they (together with the games i mentioned to JDR13 above) belong to the same "school" of arena-based FPS design. They are closer to each other than they are to something like -say- Half-Life, or Call of Duty or even to the original Doom, Blood and Duke Nukem 3D (which, btw, is why i wasn't a fan of Doom 2016's level design as it reminded me more of Serious Sam and Painkiller than the classic Doom games).

I'm fine with including them together in a broad subcategory of arena shooters, but I will insist that they're quite dissimilar in how they play. Shadow Warrior (2013) and Doom (2016) (perhaps the new Wolfensteins too, to some degree) actually seem like a development from Painkiller's formula, but they're related to Serious Sam only in the most superficial sense of possessing arenas. Serious Sam isn't even that strictly bound by the arenas, it's simply what some of its major playing areas are (and in that they're more elaborate than what the other games have), while a game like Painkiller or the new Shadow Warrior takes much more care to lock the player down in a small section while supplying a steady flow of enemies. You move forward in Serious Sam much more briskly and the obstacle to proceeding more often comes from the sheer danger of the enemies coming at you (which isn't it say that SS doesn't have a decent number of arenas that remain closed until you kill everything).

I haven't played Necrovision, but it looks like a much slower version of Painkiller when it's limited to smaller battles, so it's nothing like Serious Sam.

It still has the same core idea i mentioned previously, sure the details are different (and IMO Necrovision is much worse than Painkiller) but at their core they are very close games. Remember that the comparison isn't between just Necrovision and Serious Sam, but between all these FPS games - like if you created a map of all of these games, they'd be closer to each other than they'd be with games like CoD or Half-Life.

I know, I just thought it even less relevant to liken Serious Sam to that game. Sure, but that's only if we simplify them to the point of blurring away the contents and arrangements of the levels that affect the gameplay on top of the basic way in which the space is enclosed.

The level design in the Encounters is quite distinct, especially for the time when they were released, and it certainly couldn't support gameplay like in Quake

The final levels sure, but these levels were evolutions of their Quake clone. In the alpha version the maps weren't even that big overall, there were like 3-4 (large) rooms per map. I've played custom maps on Quake that feel closer to final Serious Sam than the levels in the alpha version do.

It's not just the final levels, but more than half of the game (TFE). The relatively enclosed maps also include diversions like large open valleys or big chambers.

With the "final levels" i mean the levels that ended up in the final game, not the last levels of the game.

It doesn't matter what different kinds of games Croteam was experimenting with before settling on the concept of Serious Sam, as it is not a Quake clone.

My point was that the maps that ended up in the final game (ie the final maps) were based on the maps that Croteam was making for their Quake clone and weren't made from scratch for Serious Sam's design - ie. they didn't put as much thought as you seem to be thinking in these maps.

So the final levels, despite being evolutions of the ‘Quake clone’, play unlike a Quake clone, but because the ‘Quake clone’ label can be attached to them in some way, it must mean that SS's maps were not actually intended for its gameplay concept, but were instead extrinsically affixed to it?

Either the maps in the final version of the Encounters are substantially different from the alpha version or the alpha maps were thoroughly redesigned with SS's gameplay concept in mind, and in either case Serious Sam has its own specific kind of level design. It's natural that certain map designs can be adapted and reworked, sometimes they contain possibilities for different kind of mechanics that can be drawn out from them.

I mean, consider that every Serious Sam game has people saying that they (Croteam) are missing the point of SS1 (note that the maps in TSE were also based on the maps in the alpha version of the game) and yet the people who make up Croteam are basically the same as they were back then. It isn't that far fetched that they were basically throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks without really knowing why it sticks.

This may be true, but it doesn't actually disprove that they ‘stumbled’ on a cohesive formula while developing The First Encounter and were inspired by it in turn to refine it for the final releases.

The reason Croteam (somewhat) missed the point of SS1 in SS2 was that they developed it for the Xbox with all the considerations attaching to it. SS3 was much closer to the original despite some misfired additions; it even ramped up the difficulty nicely. The realistic dressing of the maps limited the game to some degree perhaps, but they still made it abstract and fitted to the needs of the gameplay where it mattered.

I brought up the level design originally because you said that the SS games are repetitive and lumped them together with the other arena shooters. The way the levels (and enemy placement as well as horde composition) work in SS is substantially different from the other arena games which, while having their own peculiarities, rely much more on generic AI behaviour that isn't affected much by set piece design or the particular area you're fighting in.

I wasn't comparing how the games looked but explaining why SS2's map sizes weren't constrained by consoles but by them deciding to use a much more elaborate art style than the one they used in SS1.

+

My original point as regards the maps was that the SS games which were made for the PC all have very big levels, while the port of the Encounters to Xbox had to subdivide them into many smaller ones. It follows that the reason for SS2's comparatively smaller map size was that it was designed to work on Xbox.

No, nothing follows that, SS2 smaller map sizes can -and probably did- come from a variety of other reasons that would be true for PC too, like the rendering method they used and the more elaborate art style. Those wouldn't be magically fixed on PCs.

SS2's smaller map size is totally unrelated to the fact that the earlier SS port to Xbox couldn't handle the map size in TFE from 2001? Those problems would indeed be ‘magically’ fixed on PCs because their technology was five years ahead of that of the Xbox, with standards also being considerably higher on PCs, as popular games like Battlefield 2 required 2 GB of RAM for good performance on higher settings; also, the Xbox had a GeForce 3 series card, while the 7 series was already available for PCs.

The more elaborate style could have easily been supported by the more powerful hardware, while not leaving out players with weaker PCs as Croteam's Serious Engine 1 and 3 are very scalable, having a broad array of performance settings. If SS2 had a special rendering method that created intrinsic obstacles to having large maps, it was because that method was required for it to work on the Xbox.

It's also worth noting that major games from 2005 that were released on the PC and the next generation of consoles (Xbox 360, PS3) used very different lighting and shader technology, relatively sophisticated for the time, while SS2 has that ‘matt’ and diffused look (which I personally don't mind and in certain cases even like) that the Xbox and PS2-era games had. What other moderately popular games came out for the PC and the original Xbox (but not 360) that year? Psychonauts, Brothers in Arms, Project Snowblind, among others. They all happen to have that ‘matt’ look that doesn't make use of the newer shader technologies. What a coincidence.

As for the custom Quake maps, I suppose you might have Arcane Dimensions in mind?

No, actually i haven't played much of Arcane Dimensions. I do not remember the name of the map because it was from midlate 2000s (i thought it was The Marcher Fortress but from a quick video on youtube i just watched it doesn't seem like it, but it was something of that scale in terms of architecture anyway - this seemed to be common at the time in the Quake community).

Well, this is an aside, I just mentioned I also find it questionable how that map pack (AC) is seemingly regarded as a good development of Quake's formula.

I'm not sure if I understand. They didn't run into such rendering limitations on PC in 2001.

Yes, because they used a different rendering method and didn't had the detail in the environments and assets that SS2 had. If they used the exact rendering method and models as in SS1, they wouldn't have that issue (Xbox support or not) but then people (especially reviewers) would say that it looked dated.

I don't think they went to the effort of making an engine that could support, for the time, extraordinarily large maps just because they were poor artists and had nothing better to do with their programming skills (this also runs counter to the idea that the maps were intended for a Quake clone)

No they didn't made an engine that would support large maps because they were poor artists, however their assets were of low fidelity enough that their engine could use them in large maps.

This is mostly repeating the above, but regarding this more specifically, a game released four and a half years later could have easily had more detail while keeping the map size as the computing resources had proportionally increased in all areas.

This design choice [large maps] was motivated by the kind of game they were making and its absence in SS2 is conspicuous, all the while the latter could easily have had better visuals without discarding big levels.

If it was that easy, they would have it, after all they did boast about their large number of enemies on screen at the time.

However based on my own experience i doubt it'd be as easy as you think it is.

They would have had it if they had designed the game for the PC. The large numbers of enemies certainly strained the available resources and limited how much of them could be dedicated to the visual side, but there would have still been room for relative improvement.

‘Big ... rooms connected with a series of corridors that you move on from after you kill everything’ describes Painkiller much better.

It describes all of these games.

Ha ha, it actually describes all shooters that don't have free roaming in open maps. But that's a bit too general.

Yes, I meant the original version. Source ports don't enter into consideration as I was speaking of design trends in the nineties there.

Of course they enter into consideration since i brought up Quake a few posts before as an example of a game i played with a controller and the original version didn't have support for controllers at all, it was added -IIRC- on Quakespasm which also has auto aiming disabled.

I understand that, but I was also speaking about auto-aim in nineties shooters and how its being a default feature had potentially made some of those games more adaptable to consoles. I was also responding to this part: ‘The auto-aim in 3D PC shooters like Quake, etc is very minimal (it was the "2.5D" games like Doom that had more auto-aim but even that was only vertical)’.

I didn't formulate it right as indeed aiming with a controller is more difficult, hence the compensation. But this is the point, a PC shooter is harder to play with a controller, hence the player needs to be assisted in some way or the game needs to be made easier. The former option might not always be enough, in which case the whole design is affected.

But there is no such thing as a "PC shooter" especially when we're discussing about difficulty since there isn't really a "standard of difficulty" that you can compare games to - individual games, even those released only on PC, vary a lot in terms of difficulty when compared to each other and certainly more than any adjustments that would need to be made to make them playable with a controller (if they weren't already).

(and ignoring the whole part where you could always play shooters and other games on PC with a gamepad ever since Wolfenstein 3D had support for Gravis' gamepad)

Well, in a way that's true because first-person shooters are inherently a PC genre. Shooters, in their fast-paced, interactive, free-movement form, came into existence on the PC, within its specific ‘environment’. Shooters on consoles were a simplified and diminutive adaptation of this PC-specific genre and in certain ways it holds true to this day.

How about System Shock for consoles, Deus Ex for consoles (well, this happened), or Operation Flashpoint? Simpler shooters like Half-Life, Unreal, Counter-Strike, Blood, Quake, or Quake III can feasibly be transposed to consoles but not with all the player agility and level of action they allow for. It's evident in how the more extreme feats possible in those games, like snap precision aiming or fast movement with rocket-jumping, hopping, and taking advantage of cumulative momentum, have no place on consoles. This isn't to say that PC shooters are about these things, but it puts into sharp relief how much further their limits go.

What makes a ‘PC shooter’ isn't the difficulty specifically which naturally is something variable and game-dependent. The variation in difficulty between various PC games has to do with how their gameplay systems differ or what kind of challenge developers were aiming at on an individual basis. When a game or a set type of game is ported to consoles, in the first place its controls are adjusted for a single standard which is comparatively cumbersome, then there is a more generally-applicable (or rather, in effect, generally-applied) set of expectations of what kind of demographic it should cater to.

The gamepad support in certain games was an optional, accessory thing and Id Software always recommended trying to play with mouse and keyboard in the manuals. The ‘2.5-D’ games also do not present the same challenges when playing them with a controller.

Well, it is obvious that SS2 is made with Xbox in mind.

No, it isn't that obvious, i think you have that as a biased opinion where you see anything you dislike in SS2 as a sign that the reason was Xbox and not some design decision that Croteam would have made regardless. I've already explained in pretty much everything you brought up other reason why they'd be there that would have nothing to do with Xbox.

It is though. I don't have a bias against Serious Sam II as I in fact like the game and generally don't have a problem with setting aside problems that a shift to a console focus bring, so long as the game is enjoyable on its own merits (I enjoyed Deus Ex: Invisible War). I just point out how SS2 fits into the well-established at the time pattern of compromising once-PC-centric titles for the growing console market. You ‘explained’ things in a contrived manner, ignoring obvious qualitative differences between the games and typical signs of console design.

Largely depends on the game, i think most games are designed to be played on consoles instead of for consoles - ie. the games have to be playable on them but they're not the only platform that matters.

It's true that the PC share of the market for mainstream titles is growing again and the dynamics are changing as a result. Nevertheless, the relative predominance of consoles is immediately apparent in things like interfaces and the continued popularity of franchises that were pretty much wedded to Xbox 360 and PS3 and haven't changed much since.

Right, because these games still need to be played with a controller (on PC too) so it makes sense to have interfaces and control schemes that are usable with a controller, but as i wrote previously, a game made to playable on a console is not the same as a game made for a console.

If you want an example of the latter see no further than something like the first Dark Souls where it was explicitly designed for a console. This is a game that is made for a console, not any game that happens to also run (and hence be playable) on a console.

They don't need to be played with a controller if their design is PC-centric, in such a case controller support should be an option that doesn't affect anything for those who don't use it, such as the interface or key mappings that combine several actions in one key in a manner typical of consoles. It's fine for console games to retain that when ported to the PC, though the interface issues (sluggish, less responsive cursor, menus and other screens that consist of many pages displaying few things at a time, requiring to be cycled through) are still pretty annoying.

High-profile games made to be released on the PC and consoles at the same time are not merely made to be playable on consoles, their design is largely affected by requirements of the console market (here I mean both console hardware, controllers, and marketing decisions vis-à-vis that demographic) and those now prevalent console adjustments, stylistic trends, and compromises have been imposed on the PC platform as a general standard, which wouldn't have been the case if consoles hadn't come to carry so much weight. It's reasonable to say that multi-platform considerations have ‘consolized’ (and this includes much of the whole cinematic trend) genres which started out on the PC as part of what this web site terms ‘decline’.

FOV is the only thing that would be affected and that is from sitting further from the screen, however FOV is the easiest to fix (assuming the developer isn't incompetent) and many FPS games have FOV sliders nowadays (often because they take PCs into consideration too). Playing with a controller certainly doesn't mean that you need narrow FOV nor slow movement, if anything with the controller's analog left stick you have finer control over your movement speed as opposed to the two-step "run/walk" you get with a digital-only input device like the keyboard.

(FOV can also be affected by the visuals in that lower FOV allows more detailed visuals since there will be less drawn on screen, but as i wrote previous this is something that would affect PCs too)

I was mainly talking about those things relatively to the time of SS2's release, that is, towards the end of the Xbox/PS2 generation. These problems don't affect SS2 itself of course; I just brought them up as indicative of how different the approach to designing and tuning FPSes on consoles is.

The thing is, they aren't really that different - as i already wrote, you are overestimating the effect. In fact i'm sure that if someone adds in proper gamepad support on the original SS1 games now that the source code has been released (AFAIK the game already has support for gamepads but it seems to not work properly with xbox360/one gamepads) you'd figure out that they are perfectly playable (even if harder) with it.

I'm sure they are playable with a controller. You say they (PC-exclusive games and multi-platform games) are not that different, yet shooters made for the PC first used to be very different, faster, and involved manœuvring that would be awkward with a controller, etc. Shooters designed for the PS1, N64, the Xbox, and PS2 were a lot more static, slower, and ‘homogeneous’ in their gameplay, while the Xbox 360 and PS3 generation brought about the whole aberration of tediously-scripted cinematic shooters that substituted flashiness for involving action (that is, activity on player's part), while also standardized those typical mechanics and features such as regenerating health, screen turning red when hurt, very limited sprint, cover-based shooting, small number of carried weapons (this can have other reasons and be justified, but that's a different thing), etc.

This doesn't apply to every single game released since this trend started, and when it does, it does so in varying degrees, but it is a discernible trend.

Because Gears of War was popular so most developers and publishers tried to copy its popularity by following everything it did - pretty much like developers tried to copy Doom's popularity, Halo's popularity, WoW's popularity, COD's popularity and basically everything popular ever made. As i already wrote, the cover mechanics were already used years before Gears of War on a PS2 game but that PS2 game wasn't as popular as Gears of War so it wasn't copied.

And doesn't Gears of War's popularity have something to do with its suitability for consoles?

No? I do not know why Gears of War became popular since i never played it, but i'm 100% sure that it wasn't just its cover system.

Indeed, it wasn't just its cover system, it still had to be an appealing game in other respects, but it was the cover system that made its gameplay work so well on consoles and that is why it became a standard.

Naturally, it had to be an all-round appealing game for the trend to take off, but I don't think it's merely a case of other studios blindly copying a popular series. The cover-based system seems to have spread on consoles as a standard way of doing combat beyond any attempt to appeal to GoW fans.

In the case of the cover system it was indeed a case of other studios copying a popular series - it isn't without its merits, but it isn't something that is necessary for shooters either as it can often be as much of a hindrance (especially when the game decides to enter in cover automatically) as it is a help. There is nothing about a controller that requires the use of a cover system, especially on a third person perspective game where you can always see your character, since you can simply move your character in and out of cover manually.

I didn't say that the cover system is a necessity for console shooters. I brought it up to indicate how FPSes modelled more closely on PC standards weren't doing so well on consoles, but then came to cover system which took root on those platforms much better and became almost the standard form for console action games (there were first-person shooters which incorporated it too). It happened because consoles as a platform are different from the PC and different forms of gameplay handle better on them.

 

[Verylittlefishes]

Pretty sure its baby duck syndrome, but still...I've felt deep emotional connection, a sense of adventure when playing SS:SE fucking 18 years ago. Tried SS2 but was turned away by overall tasteless circus (yes, I know we are talking about Serious Sam series), tried SS3 and was turned away by this weird change of style into Spec Ops realism. Still think that Second Encounter is a tremendous game.

Should I even try this one? I like Jonas Kyratzes' writing, but this is Serious Sam, not Torment.

 

[Anthedon]

 

[Unkillable Cat]

I've heard some bad things about the game but then you see footage like this (watch from 3:11:00 to 3:14:00) and go "hmmm.."

LOL, there's five tons of minigun ammo lying around, and then he uses every other gun in his arsenal before finally catching on.

 

[Unkillable Cat]

Pretty sure its baby duck syndrome, but still...I've felt deep emotional connection, a sense of adventure when playing SS:SE fucking 18 years ago. Tried SS2 but was turned away by overall tasteless circus (yes, I know we are talking about Serious Sam series), tried SS3 and was turned away by this weird change of style into Spec Ops realism. Still think that Second Encounter is a tremendous game.

Should I even try this one? I like Jonas Kyratzes' writing, but this is Serious Sam, not Torment.

If it's been a while since you played Second Encounter, you might wanna check out some mods.

My "go-to"-mod for SE has been Serious Violence 3.0... however the version I'm seeing available for download doesn't match with mine.

Anyway, if the mod contains the black walkers (as shown early in this video) then you've got the right mod.

 

[Kitchen Utensil]

All the particular points aside, keep in mind that I've taken back my original comment where I said that SS2 is ‘very casual’ and modified it to ‘relatively casual compared to the other instalments’. It is still a Serious Sam game, but the console influence is apparent.

You can't just get rid of every enemy that comes at you easily with the same weapon, so in case of the kleers for instance you can counter them with the double-barrelled shot-gun, but you have to time it well and at the same time keep moving to avoid several others jumping at you.

Sure, but i personally found that more annoying than fun and i liked how SS2 behaved much more. This is a matter of personal preference, after all you wrote that "The ambushes around pick-ups are hilarious, I enjoyed them every time" which personally outside of a few cases (e.g. the 1hp pick up that runs laughing from you) i never found hilarious.

Personal preferences are fine, of course, but there's also the objective side of one version of the enemy requiring a bit more complicated response from the player and the other variant being simplified, in line with the over-all flow of combat in SS2. This fits into the general tendency of simplifying things for more casual players or ease of play with a controller.

About the ambushes around pick-ups, I mentioned it just to express my appreciation for them. It's nothing more, of course.

I won't say SS and Painkiller are entirely unlike, but they're further apart than that. [..] It has very diverse enemies in its own way, but it's a different kind of shooter.

I never wrote that they are the same either, but they are much more like than other FPS and to me they (together with the games i mentioned to JDR13 above) belong to the same "school" of arena-based FPS design. They are closer to each other than they are to something like -say- Half-Life, or Call of Duty or even to the original Doom, Blood and Duke Nukem 3D (which, btw, is why i wasn't a fan of Doom 2016's level design as it reminded me more of Serious Sam and Painkiller than the classic Doom games).

I'm fine with including them together in a broad subcategory of arena shooters, but I will insist that they're quite dissimilar in how they play. Shadow Warrior (2013) and Doom (2016) (perhaps the new Wolfensteins too, to some degree) actually seem like a development from Painkiller's formula, but they're related to Serious Sam only in the most superficial sense of possessing arenas. Serious Sam isn't even that strictly bound by the arenas, it's simply what some of its major playing areas are (and in that they're more elaborate than what the other games have), while a game like Painkiller or the new Shadow Warrior takes much more care to lock the player down in a small section while supplying a steady flow of enemies. You move forward in Serious Sam much more briskly and the obstacle to proceeding more often comes from the sheer danger of the enemies coming at you (which isn't it say that SS doesn't have a decent number of arenas that remain closed until you kill everything).

I haven't played Necrovision, but it looks like a much slower version of Painkiller when it's limited to smaller battles, so it's nothing like Serious Sam.

It still has the same core idea i mentioned previously, sure the details are different (and IMO Necrovision is much worse than Painkiller) but at their core they are very close games. Remember that the comparison isn't between just Necrovision and Serious Sam, but between all these FPS games - like if you created a map of all of these games, they'd be closer to each other than they'd be with games like CoD or Half-Life.

I know, I just thought it even less relevant to liken Serious Sam to that game. Sure, but that's only if we simplify them to the point of blurring away the contents and arrangements of the levels that affect the gameplay on top of the basic way in which the space is enclosed.

The level design in the Encounters is quite distinct, especially for the time when they were released, and it certainly couldn't support gameplay like in Quake

The final levels sure, but these levels were evolutions of their Quake clone. In the alpha version the maps weren't even that big overall, there were like 3-4 (large) rooms per map. I've played custom maps on Quake that feel closer to final Serious Sam than the levels in the alpha version do.

It's not just the final levels, but more than half of the game (TFE). The relatively enclosed maps also include diversions like large open valleys or big chambers.

With the "final levels" i mean the levels that ended up in the final game, not the last levels of the game.

It doesn't matter what different kinds of games Croteam was experimenting with before settling on the concept of Serious Sam, as it is not a Quake clone.

My point was that the maps that ended up in the final game (ie the final maps) were based on the maps that Croteam was making for their Quake clone and weren't made from scratch for Serious Sam's design - ie. they didn't put as much thought as you seem to be thinking in these maps.

So the final levels, despite being evolutions of the ‘Quake clone’, play unlike a Quake clone, but because the ‘Quake clone’ label can be attached to them in some way, it must mean that SS's maps were not actually intended for its gameplay concept, but were instead extrinsically affixed to it?

Either the maps in the final version of the Encounters are substantially different from the alpha version or the alpha maps were thoroughly redesigned with SS's gameplay concept in mind, and in either case Serious Sam has its own specific kind of level design. It's natural that certain map designs can be adapted and reworked, sometimes they contain possibilities for different kind of mechanics that can be drawn out from them.

I mean, consider that every Serious Sam game has people saying that they (Croteam) are missing the point of SS1 (note that the maps in TSE were also based on the maps in the alpha version of the game) and yet the people who make up Croteam are basically the same as they were back then. It isn't that far fetched that they were basically throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks without really knowing why it sticks.

This may be true, but it doesn't actually disprove that they ‘stumbled’ on a cohesive formula while developing The First Encounter and were inspired by it in turn to refine it for the final releases.

The reason Croteam (somewhat) missed the point of SS1 in SS2 was that they developed it for Xbox with all the considerations attaching to it. SS3 was much closer to the original despite some misfired additions; it even ramped up the difficulty nicely. The realistic dressing of the maps limited the game to some degree perhaps, but they still made it abstract and fitted to the needs of the gameplay where it mattered.

I brought up the level design originally because you said that the SS games are repetitive and lumped them together with the other arena shooters. The way the levels (and enemy placement as well as horde composition) work in SS is substantially different from the other arena games which, while having their own peculiarities, rely much more on generic AI behaviour that isn't affected much by set piece design or the particular area you're fighting in.

I wasn't comparing how the games looked but explaining why SS2's map sizes weren't constrained by consoles but by them deciding to use a much more elaborate art style than the one they used in SS1.

+

My original point as regards the maps was that the SS games which were made for the PC all have very big levels, while the port of the Encounters to Xbox had to subdivide them into many smaller ones. It follows that the reason for SS2's comparatively smaller map size was that it was designed to work on Xbox.

No, nothing follows that, SS2 smaller map sizes can -and probably did- come from a variety of other reasons that would be true for PC too, like the rendering method they used and the more elaborate art style. Those wouldn't be magically fixed on PCs.

SS2's smaller map size is totally unrelated to the fact that the earlier SS port to Xbox couldn't handle the map size in TFE from 2001? Those problems would indeed be ‘magically’ fixed on PCs because their technology was five years ahead of Xbox, with standards also being considerably higher on PCs, as popular games like Battlefield 2 required 2 GB of RAM for good performance on higher settings; also, Xbox had a GeForce 3 series card, while the 7 series was already available for PCs.

The more elaborate style could have easily been supported by the more powerful hardware, while not leaving out players with weaker PCs as Croteam's Serious Engine 1 and 3 are very scalable, having a broad array of performance settings. If SS2 had a special rendering method that created intrinsic obstacles to having large maps, it was because that method was required for it to work on Xbox.

It's also worth noting that major games from 2005 that were released on the PC and the next generation of consoles (Xbox 360, PS3) used very different lighting and shader technology, relatively sophisticated for the time, while SS2 has that ‘matt’ and diffused look (which I personally don't mind and in certain cases even like) that Xbox and PS2-era games had. What other moderately popular games came out for the PC and the original Xbox (but not 360) that year? Psychonauts, Brothers in Arms, Project Snowblind, among others. They all happen to have that ‘matt’ look that doesn't make use of the newer shader technologies. What a coincidence.

As for the custom Quake maps, I suppose you might have Arcane Dimensions in mind?

No, actually i haven't played much of Arcane Dimensions. I do not remember the name of the map because it was from midlate 2000s (i thought it was The Marcher Fortress but from a quick video on youtube i just watched it doesn't seem like it, but it was something of that scale in terms of architecture anyway - this seemed to be common at the time in the Quake community).

Well, this is an aside, I just mentioned I also find it questionable how that map pack (AC) is seemingly regarded as a good development of Quake's formula.

I'm not sure if I understand. They didn't run into such rendering limitations on PC in 2001.

Yes, because they used a different rendering method and didn't had the detail in the environments and assets that SS2 had. If they used the exact rendering method and models as in SS1, they wouldn't have that issue (Xbox support or not) but then people (especially reviewers) would say that it looked dated.

I don't think they went to the effort of making an engine that could support, for the time, extraordinarily large maps just because they were poor artists and had nothing better to do with their programming skills (this also runs counter to the idea that the maps were intended for a Quake clone)

No they didn't made an engine that would support large maps because they were poor artists, however their assets were of low fidelity enough that their engine could use them in large maps.

This is mostly repeating the above, but regarding this more specifically, a game released four and a half years later could have easily had more detail while keeping the map size as the computing resources had proportionally increased in all areas.

This design choice [large maps] was motivated by the kind of game they were making and its absence in SS2 is conspicuous, all the while the latter could easily have had better visuals without discarding big levels.

If it was that easy, they would have it, after all they did boast about their large number of enemies on screen at the time.

However based on my own experience i doubt it'd be as easy as you think it is.

They would have had it if they had designed the game for the PC. The large numbers of enemies certainly strained the available resources and limited how much of them could be dedicated to the visual side, but there would have still been room for relative improvement.

‘Big ... rooms connected with a series of corridors that you move on from after you kill everything’ describes Painkiller much better.

It describes all of these games.

Ha ha, it actually describes all shooters that don't have free roaming in open maps. But that's a bit too general.

Yes, I meant the original version. Source ports don't enter into consideration as I was speaking of design trends in the nineties there.

Of course they enter into consideration since i brought up Quake a few posts before as an example of a game i played with a controller and the original version didn't have support for controllers at all, it was added -IIRC- on Quakespasm which also has auto aiming disabled.

I understand that, but I was also speaking about auto-aim in nineties shooters and how its being a default feature had potentially made some of those games more adaptable to consoles. I was also responding to this part: ‘The auto-aim in 3D PC shooters like Quake, etc is very minimal (it was the "2.5D" games like Doom that had more auto-aim but even that was only vertical)’.

I didn't formulate it right as indeed aiming with a controller is more difficult, hence the compensation. But this is the point, a PC shooter is harder to play with a controller, hence the player needs to be assisted in some way or the game needs to be made easier. The former option might not always be enough, in which case the whole design is affected.

But there is no such thing as a "PC shooter" especially when we're discussing about difficulty since there isn't really a "standard of difficulty" that you can compare games to - individual games, even those released only on PC, vary a lot in terms of difficulty when compared to each other and certainly more than any adjustments that would need to be made to make them playable with a controller (if they weren't already).

(and ignoring the whole part where you could always play shooters and other games on PC with a gamepad ever since Wolfenstein 3D had support for Gravis' gamepad)

Well, in a way that's true because first-person shooters are inherently a PC genre. Shooters, in their fast-paced, interactive, free-movement form, came into existence on the PC, within its specific ‘environment’. Shooters on consoles were a simplified and diminutive adaptation of this PC-specific genre and in certain ways it holds true to this day.

How about System Shock for consoles, Deus Ex for consoles (well, this happened), or Operation Flashpoint? Simpler shooters like Half-Life, Unreal, Counter-Strike, Blood, Quake, or Quake III can feasibly be transposed to consoles but not with all the player agility and level of action they allow for. It's evident in how the more extreme feats possible in those games, like snap precision aiming or fast movement with rocket-jumping, hopping, and taking advantage of cumulative momentum, have no place on consoles. This isn't to say that PC shooters are about these things, but it puts into sharp relief how much further their limits go.

What makes a ‘PC shooter’ isn't the difficulty specifically which naturally is something variable and game-dependent. The variation in difficulty between various PC games has to do with how their gameplay systems differ or what kind of challenge developers were aiming at on an individual basis. When a game or a set type of game is ported to consoles, in the first place its controls are adjusted for a single standard which is comparatively cumbersome, then there is a more generally-applicable (or rather, in effect, generally-applied) set of expectations of what kind of demographic it should cater to.

The gamepad support in certain games was an optional, accessory thing and Id Software always recommended trying to play with mouse and keyboard in the manuals. The ‘2.5-D’ games also do not present the same challenges when playing them with a controller.

Well, it is obvious that SS2 is made with Xbox in mind.

No, it isn't that obvious, i think you have that as a biased opinion where you see anything you dislike in SS2 as a sign that the reason was Xbox and not some design decision that Croteam would have made regardless. I've already explained in pretty much everything you brought up other reason why they'd be there that would have nothing to do with Xbox.

It is though. I don't have a bias against Serious Sam II as I in fact like the game and generally don't have a problem with setting aside problems that a shift to a console focus bring, so long as the game is enjoyable on its own merits (I enjoyed Deus Ex: Invisible War). I just point out how SS2 fits into the well-established at the time pattern of compromising once-PC-centric titles for the growing console market. You ‘explained’ things in a contrived manner, ignoring obvious qualitative differences between the games and typical signs of console design.

Largely depends on the game, i think most games are designed to be played on consoles instead of for consoles - ie. the games have to be playable on them but they're not the only platform that matters.

It's true that the PC share of the market for mainstream titles is growing again and the dynamics are changing as a result. Nevertheless, the relative predominance of consoles is immediately apparent in things like interfaces and the continued popularity of franchises that were pretty much wedded to Xbox 360 and PS3 and haven't changed much since.

Right, because these games still need to be played with a controller (on PC too) so it makes sense to have interfaces and control schemes that are usable with a controller, but as i wrote previously, a game made to playable on a console is not the same as a game made for a console.

If you want an example of the latter see no further than something like the first Dark Souls where it was explicitly designed for a console. This is a game that is made for a console, not any game that happens to also run (and hence be playable) on a console.

They don't need to be played with a controller if their design is PC-centric, in such a case controller support should be an option that doesn't affect anything for those who don't use it, such as the interface or key mappings that combine several actions in one key in a manner typical of consoles. It's fine for console games to retain that when ported to the PC, though the interface issues (sluggish, less responsive cursor, menus and other screens that consist of many pages displaying few things at a time, requiring to be cycled through) are still pretty annoying.

High-profile games made to be released on the PC and consoles at the same time are not merely made to be playable on consoles, their design is largely affected by requirements of the console market (here I mean both console hardware, controllers, and marketing decisions vis-à-vis that demographic) and those now prevalent console adjustments, stylistic trends, and compromises have been imposed on the PC platform as a general standard, which wouldn't have been the case if consoles hadn't come to carry so much weight. It's reasonable to say that multi-platform considerations have ‘consolized’ (and this includes much of the whole cinematic trend) genres which started out on the PC as part of what this web site terms ‘decline’.

FOV is the only thing that would be affected and that is from sitting further from the screen, however FOV is the easiest to fix (assuming the developer isn't incompetent) and many FPS games have FOV sliders nowadays (often because they take PCs into consideration too). Playing with a controller certainly doesn't mean that you need narrow FOV nor slow movement, if anything with the controller's analog left stick you have finer control over your movement speed as opposed to the two-step "run/walk" you get with a digital-only input device like the keyboard.

(FOV can also be affected by the visuals in that lower FOV allows more detailed visuals since there will be less drawn on screen, but as i wrote previous this is something that would affect PCs too)

I was mainly talking about those things relatively to the time of SS2's release, that is, towards the end of the Xbox/PS2 generation. These problems don't affect SS2 itself of course; I just brought them up as indicative of how different the approach to designing and tuning FPSes on consoles is.

The thing is, they aren't really that different - as i already wrote, you are overestimating the effect. In fact i'm sure that if someone adds in proper gamepad support on the original SS1 games now that the source code has been released (AFAIK the game already has support for gamepads but it seems to not work properly with xbox360/one gamepads) you'd figure out that they are perfectly playable (even if harder) with it.

I'm sure they are playable with a controller. You say they (PC-exclusive games and multi-platform games) are not that different, yet shooters made for the PC first used to be very different, faster, and involved manœuvring that would be awkward with a controller, etc. Shooters designed for PS1, N64, Xbox, and PS2 were a lot more static, slower, and ‘homogeneous’ in their gameplay, while the Xbox 360 and PS3 generation brought about the whole aberration of tediously-scripted cinematic shooters that substituted flashiness for involving action (that is, activity on player's part), while also standardized those typical mechanics and features such as regenerating health, screen turning red when hurt, very limited sprint, cover-based shooting, small number of carried weapons (this can have other reasons and be justified, but that's a different thing), etc.

This doesn't apply to every single game released since this trend started, and when it does, it does so in varying degrees, but it is a discernible trend.

Because Gears of War was popular so most developers and publishers tried to copy its popularity by following everything it did - pretty much like developers tried to copy Doom's popularity, Halo's popularity, WoW's popularity, COD's popularity and basically everything popular ever made. As i already wrote, the cover mechanics were already used years before Gears of War on a PS2 game but that PS2 game wasn't as popular as Gears of War so it wasn't copied.

And doesn't Gears of War's popularity have something to do with its suitability for consoles?

No? I do not know why Gears of War became popular since i never played it, but i'm 100% sure that it wasn't just its cover system.

Indeed, it wasn't just its cover system, it still had to be an appealing game in other respects, but it was the cover system that made its gameplay work so well on consoles and that is why it became a standard.

Naturally, it had to be an all-round appealing game for the trend to take off, but I don't think it's merely a case of other studios blindly copying a popular series. The cover-based system seems to have spread on consoles as a standard way of doing combat beyond any attempt to appeal to GoW fans.

In the case of the cover system it was indeed a case of other studios copying a popular series - it isn't without its merits, but it isn't something that is necessary for shooters either as it can often be as much of a hindrance (especially when the game decides to enter in cover automatically) as it is a help. There is nothing about a controller that requires the use of a cover system, especially on a third person perspective game where you can always see your character, since you can simply move your character in and out of cover manually.

I didn't say that the cover system is a necessity for console shooters. I brought it up to indicate how FPSes modelled more closely on PC standards weren't doing so well on consoles, but then came to cover system which took root on those platforms much better and became almost the standard form for console action games (there were first-person shooters which incorporated it too). It happened because consoles as a platform are different from the PC and different forms of gameplay handle better on them.

Interesting points there.
Really.

 

[Israfael]

Finished the game on Serious a week ago or so, I'd say I liked it but it's very uneven. What is interesting the last level was a breeze (as compared to the canyon in SS3 (an endurance test, really, I've spent probably 2 hours to do that in clean time, not counting reloads and so on) or the pyramid in SS1. Still, I died many times, but it was not frustrating or hopeless, just one or two bad autosaves when I was too carried away with laser spamming), but the mid-game was brutal. I'd say it'd be the hardest SS game (apart from canyon in ss3), but the gadgets even out the odds and basically give you an option to skip hard fights of your choice.


I'd say black hole would have to be toned down (as it's basically 20 seconds long serious bomb), time warp should be buffed somewhat (it's mostly useless apart from fights with lots of firecracker guys and reptiloids). Some weapons (laser gun with addon mode) feel way too overpowered, I basically mowed down an entire battlefield with one press of a right mouse button (even without popping the serious damage) , others, like the normal shotgun, should probably be buffed (more damage from grenades, maybe?). Also, reload perk is also much more useful than most of the other "skills", it doubles the damage for some guns and makes assault rifle better than the minigun (which may be actually good as it brings some variety).

PS for all people who experience low fps / micro-stuttering and so on - try to disable streaming system in the serioussam4.ini, it really helps a lot.

 

[Gerrard]

I've heard some bad things about the game but then you see footage like this (watch from 3:11:00 to 3:14:00) and go "hmmm.."

Why does it all look so cheap? Those bullet trails, the trees just disappearing when blown up, the way the explosions just seem to pop-in as well...

 

[DalekFlay]

Why does a fucking Serious Sam game of all things inspire such lengthy diatribes.

 

[Tyranicon]

I've heard some bad things about the game but then you see footage like this (watch from 3:11:00 to 3:14:00) and go "hmmm.."

Why does it all look so cheap? Those bullet trails, the trees just disappearing when blown up, the way the explosions just seem to pop-in as well...

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Also, is that in-game music? It sounds like a Korean MMO.