It may also have been a reaction to people disliking that part since it does break the flow. But i guess more people disliked the changes in SS2 so Croteam backpedalled on that too. Still, for me the changes in SS2 were an improvement there.
It may have been, but it went against the original game's defining character in that it simplified the flow of the combat and made weapon choice less important. The way kleers worked originally didn't break the flow if the player was up to the challenge, which is the point.
TBH to me that describes all the games in the Serious Sam series... and the other arena shooters like Painkiller, Hard Reset, etc.
Like I said, in Serious Sam II you can just pull out the minigun and keep the left-mouse button depressed to successfully hold back a horde of enemies for a lengthy space of time due to its large ammunition capacity and increased effectiveness or reduced resilience of the enemies. Painkiller and Hard Reset aren't that similar to Serious Sam despite the superficial similarity. The scale is different, they are more about sending a continuous and even stream of enemies that tends to be composed of two basic types (ranged and
mêlée) that you can comfortably keep blasting away with one weapon, and the way Painkiller in particular is compartmentalized into small fighting zones makes its flow quite different. I didn't like Hard Reset much, but from what I recall it emphasized tougher and excessively harassing enemy design too much, making it kind of tedious.
The early stages of SS games are indeed similar. However, the size of the hordes and intensity of the onslaught are much greater in Serious Sam, there are many more enemy types at a time that complement one another in interesting ways, the way they enter the stage and move towards Sam is also much more elaborate, which forces the player to adapt his tactics often. 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. The games are rather like grand gladiatorial battles of sorts. Not that this helps us determine if Serious Sam II was simplified for Xbox.
I think you are somewhat overoptimistic about the effort Croteam put in their level design - there isn't much of it, really. The first game used environments they had created for a Quake clone and even later if you find and download the alpha version you can see the maps play very differently than the final game. The second game also had some maps cut from the alpha version. The fourth game (SS3) is mostly environments they reused from their cancelled COD clone. Only the third game (SS2) had maps designed for it from scratch. But all games are really just arenas - in many cases in all games you're just enclosed in a huge squareish corridor with waves of enemies coming from the other side. There isn't really much level design going on here.
It doesn't matter much what designs Croteam experimented with during development if the concept they ultimately decided on is quite different. Certainly, the early, more enclosed levels in The First Encounter are the least interesting. 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, while it would be quite useless if it were used in combination with monsters from Painkiller.
Temple corridors and chambers with fun traps; large open areas where you have to deal with ranged troops, enemies that try to run up to you and blow you up, and big, towering enemies that shoot rockets which you have to dodge—however simplistic such open areas might seem, nothing else would work for large, drawn-out battles like that; then we have long narrow corridors with a horde of enemies that's hard to keep back; open areas with lots of buildings that make for a sort of hide-and-seek gameplay, with the additional danger of being unable to determine where the headless
kamikaze are; open areas with special spots for the enemies that attack you with the homing projectiles and some cover as protection; chambers with lots of columns; barrel-shaped chambers that revolve with you and enemies inside; chambers with special darkness tricks; interiors with gravity tricks; arenas where you're in the bottom of a pit and enemies descend from all around; etc.
schru said:
The thing with the small, compartmentalized levels is not that it limited the exploration (though it did that too, to the extent it was part of the earlier games), but that it's a rather recognizable sign of certain hardware limitations. The levels in the Encounters are sprawling and feature long series of interiors together with large open areas in the same units. It was a distinctive feature of those games and it didn't feel right for the sequel to cut down on that. The First Encounter has thirteen levels, The Second Encounter has twelve levels. Serious Sam II has forty-two levels. The Xbox version of Serious Sam, which is made up of The First Encounter and The Second Encounter, has forty-six levels and it's glaringly obvious that the game is subdivided so due to Xbox's hardware limitations—The Grand Cathedral from The Second Encounter is subdivided into three levels for example.
It was also rendering limitations as i wrote above, they'd most likely have the same limitations on PC too. But in practice having more smaller levels it doesn't make much of a difference beyond seeing a loading screen more often since after you clear an area you rarely need to go back to it - Serious Sam isn't an exploration game. You kill stuff and move on. And TBH from what i remember the levels weren't really that small, they were still large, just not as large as SS1 (but SS1 had very visually barren levels compared to SS2 so it wasn't hard to have them be large - it is like taking a cube and scaling it 10x its original size, sure you have a cube ten times larger than the other one, but it still just four polygons).
Yes, rendering limitations of
Xbox, a console from 2001, while SS2 came out in late 2005. PC hardware at the time was much more advanced and there are notable examples like Deus Ex: Invisible War and Thief: Deadly Shadows which have tiny maps and simplistic gameplay in comparison to the originals because they were designed for Xbox. Also, somehow Croteam wasn't bound by the much less capable hardware for which they designed the first two games and didn't feel the need to sacrifice the map size for slightly better visuals. Having more frequent loading screens is a minor annoyance in itself, but it also breaks up the flow of the game as the Sams designed for the PC have levels that develop in much more interesting and elaborate ways.
I'll give you that at the time some developers thought that playing with controllers is much harder, however this is on the developers, not on the consoles themselves. As an example and to be on topic, check Serious Sam Next Encounter. I've only played it for a couple of hours (so i don't know if it ramps up later), but the game has been much easier than even the first level of the PC Serious Sam.
This is sufficient to indicate that games designed for consoles, especially at the time, are easier in comparison to PC games, as consoles are aimed at a broader, therefore more casual audience.
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) and modern source ports like Quakespasm -which AFAIK is the only source port to be both bug free and have controller support- have it disabled (`sv_aim` is by default 1, which counterintuitively means 'no auto aim').
The auto-aim in Quake is
significant. Not sure about Unreal and SiN, but Half-Life also has a generous auto-aim on by default.
Though truth be told, having no aim assist with a FPS/TPS game played with a controller is a PITA and just bad design.
Seeing as aim assist has largely been dropped as mouse and keyboard became the standard, it seems to indicate that consoles do require their games to be easier.
The console ports of these older games had their scope toned down largely because of the very limited hardware resources of the consoles of the time. However you do not see ports to newer consoles change much, if anything, from the original games because those limitations aren't valid anymore.
Well, I don't mean to argue that the situation is the same today, even though consoles necessarily will remain less capable than PCs. While what you say is mostly true, a considerable part of the reason for it is that most of the big titles are designed primarily for consoles nowadays (which isn't to say that the designs aren't less restrained now).
Console FPSes tend to have slower movement, narrower field of view which goes hand in hand with more static action, more enemies on one level with the player, they rely more of the time on automatic weapons like rifles that are good in all situations, etc.
Again i do not think this has much to do with the consoles - aside of performance limitations but after the gross limitations of PS1/N64, the performance limitations imposed on a game by a console could be alleviated by simply having less demanding graphics. But this is just the developers prioritizing graphics over performance - it'd be the same issue with PCs with similar performance characteristics as the consoles (remember that with the exception of PS4/XB1, when other consoles were introduced they were comparable to high end PCs at their time) and more powerful PCs can turn up the graphics.
The other design considerations you mention might be true for some games but i think it was always the "casualest" of the most casual games to have such designs. Even in N64 days (with its awful controller) you can find many games that use height variations for enemies, require constant movement from you and use projectiles.
I think it has rather to do with the way playing with a controller and sitting further away from the screen feels. I was thinking there of games like Halo 2, the various Medal of Honor instalments (which could be pretty unforgiving in different ways), Project Snowblind, Black, etc. As for N64, I'm familiar with Turok and while it's a faster and all in all a fun game, the way it works as a shooter is still more straightforward.
I think it has more to do with developers copying other successful developers. AFAIK the first game to feature cover mechanics like we know them today was Kill Switch but pretty much nobody noticed that until much later when Gears of War was released and then everyone tried to copy it because of its success. It wasn't that cover-based shooters were obviously a good idea for controller use (which btw is different to console use - PCs can also use controllers and had them for literal decades with even the first IBM PC coming with a joystick and it has only been in recent years with the whole "pc master race" that stupid people took seriously that you see KBM elitism), it was that some very successful game used them so everything else also copied it.
Consoles had fun shooters before that which I do value, but why is it that it was the cover-based shooters that became so popular? Might it not have to do with the casual tendency inherent in the consoles, at least starting with Xbox and PC
genres that were ported to PS2?