No, he's right actually, and the games you mention are not exactly like Serious Sam in the way enemies attack you.
I didn't write that the games are exactly like Serious Sam but what he described with "Failing to prioritize targets doesn't merely result in the annoyance of having some ranged enemy take occasional shots at you, but again, can determine early on if the battle is going to be manageable at all" is exactly what happens in the games i mentioned (ie. if you do not prioritize targets, it can end up with the battle not even being manageable). Keep the quote i made there in mind because it provides context.
In fact, Necrovision isn't much like it at all. Have you actually played it?
Yes, i can't say i had much fun with it. I liked some of the environments but the whiny protagonist and the environments having smoke and fog all the time in my face, especially in the deep underground areas made me lose interest.
Also, what is this "bunch" of games that are so similar? Can you name them?
From the top of my head, all the Serious Sam FPS games, Painkiller series, Necrovision series, Dreamkiller, Will Rock, KISS: Psycho Circus: The Nightmare Child, Hard Reset, Shadow Warrior 2013, Doom 2016 and basically any of the "enter an area and have a ton of enemies spawn all around, often without you being able to move forward -or backward- until all the enemies are killed" games that follow this core idea (i am certain i forget some). AFAIK Serious Sam popularized this, though i think KISS was the first *released* game to have this sort of gameplay (though IMO its level design was much better than most of the games i mention here).
No one cares how many polygons the games had. The early SS games looked great for their time, and they've aged a lot better than Quake without mods imo.
Sure (though i disagree about the Quake comparison, but that is subjective), but you took that part out of the discussion context which was that SS1 had very few polygons which made it easier to have large maps in memory despite the weaker hardware whereas SS2 had much more detailed assets that made it harder to have maps as large in memory and also that the rendering technique that SS2 used to be able to render those assets wouldn't work well with large maps either - which was the case with both PC and console hardware at the time,
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
‘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.
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 meant that as mouse and keyboard became the standard for PC games aim assist was dropped while consoles had to retain it because it's harder to play FPSes on them.
Ah i see.
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, 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
Hey buddy, didn't you know Quake itself was just pieced together from random maps for some RPG they never made? Therefore Serious Sam is an RPG, and so are Painkiller and Doomy Turdhole.
Way to misread what i wrote.
EDIT: also while Quake did indeed start as an RPG with online persistent worlds, none of the environments that were made for it ended up in the final game (however the textures and some of the models did, though modified) as they were largely test maps for the engine.
, but it fits perfectly into the run-and-gun loop of the game since you're firing each gun autonomously (LMB for left gun, RMB for right), meaning it doubles the gun's rate of fire with controlled shots, not just for damage.
