Portal

[Brother None]

That they could have implemented it if they wanted to, without any great sacrifices.

This is patently untrue.

Think about the design of puzzle platformers for a bit. It works by presenting the player a puzzle with a preset solution. Whether it is Braid or Portal, it doesn't matter, there's a conceptual puzzle with a singular solution.

Because of the way the parts interact, this isn't too different from a tiling puzzle, though most aren't strict enough to compare them to jigsaws (some are. Braid definitely is). This means that when you're talking about adding an extra path, you are essentially talking about designing a puzzle parallel to the other puzzle. This is nearly twice the workload for obvious reasons.

It's not just "stop building walls" and things will fix themselves. If you just put a lot of roofs near each other it is no longer a puzzler, it becomes Assassin's Creed esque, just a rooftop runner. Assassin's Creed barely offers any platform puzzle-esque gameplay (the tower climbing might technically be considered puzzling), it's just platform running, not the same genre.

And if you start designing and placing puzzles parallel to each other, what are you doing except just taking levels that would normally follow on one another and instead putting them side by side, thus making it so that the player will miss a lot of your puzzles as he takes only one path?

This isn't an absolute conceptual problem, but it is a difficulty. It's different from RPGs (notice how people has often used similar arguments to explain linearity in RPGs) in that puzzlers often offer only one tool for resolving the problems (Portal certainly does, it only has the gun), so it's more comparable to a hack 'n slash faced with the choice of putting a lot of dungeons one after the other or side by side. It's quite a pickle, and I'm looking forward to seeing how it's to be resolved.

I was criticizing a specific application of this attitude.

Oh, right. I figured since your language was so general and since you didn't mention the word "Portal" or the fact that you were talking only about this case even once, you were talking in general. My bad, obviously.

And this is also irrelevant

I never said it's relevant, I'm just challenging your usage of the word supposedly.

It's funny how you think you can throw up these terms and when I challenge you on it you pretend as if I'm trying to make the argument about those terms. I'm not the one who keeps bringing them in.

If by reasonable you refer to the probability, it isn't reasonable.

No, reasonableness period. What a lot of people don't realise is that innovation isn't something gaming invented or just a gaming PR marketing phrase. It's a part of economic theory, and in every industry it is considered sound practice to innovate. The gaming industry is no different. Right now the focus for innovation is on graphics, and it works in the sense that it does keep people interested, but eventually you reach a ceiling there, and have to innovate horizontally.

Regardless, there is no industry in the world that finds it reasonable to expect every new product to be innovative, yet major innovations happen in a vast number of these industries. Because they're necessary, natural, efficient and economically sound, not because people clamour every time a car still insists on having wheels.

Also, Mirror's Edge could have easily been made more open (hell, you're walking in open spaces), so from a technical point of view, it's not unreasonable at all to expect it.

Technical? Who cares about technical? It's the development side that offers the near impossibility.

 

[forumvisitor#451]

Can you still play Portal Prelude? I have never finished it and wanted some extra levels before Reloaded comes out. How can you make it work? Installer from Moddb just says "This file contains invalid data".