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I am under impression we've played different remakes. What merits does NNT have that isn't straight up taken from the original game?
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See this is exactly what I'm trying to point out - people get so hung up on NNT being a remake that they have to constantly compare it back to the original game. Anything NNT has that's good gets attributed to AO and doesn't count; everything it does wrong is a damning indictment and shows that it's a bad game and AO is better. It lives or dies purely on how it measures up to the original.
NNT is a remake, so of course it's going to take a lot from the original game! The point of judging it on its own merits is not to say "the game is bad because all its good qualities come from AO", it's to say that taken as a complete gaming experience by itself, it's a decent game. It's an engaging 2D puzzle-platformer with interesting level design, simple mechanics that are easy to pick up but difficult to master, and an interesting aesthetic that in places* is gorgeous.
Does most of that come from AO? Sure. Does NNT do them better than AO? For the most part, no, but it doesn't do them
badly.
You seem to think that NNT is worse than AO. I honestly don't disagree! But my point is that you (and many other Oddworld fans) write off NNT as bad because it doesn't meet or surpass AO's bar of quality. That may be dissatisfying, sure, but being worse than AO doesn't mean a game is automatically bad - there's plenty of good games that are worse than AO out there.
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Each thing they added on top of that is always tied with some nasty downside that stands out enough not to be ignored. Every single addition is like that, with no exceptions.
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- Having the camera free-flowing and utilizing perspective and angles adds depth and makes the environments feel more connected.
- Mapping the throwing mechanic to a controller thumbstick makes aiming rocks and grenades far easier and takes out the guesswork in landing a shot.
- Being able to throw bottle caps to get the attention of sligs and scrabs means you don't have to wait around on enemy patrol cycles as often.
- Including the gamespeak option to talk to multiple mudokons simultaneously removes tedium some of the original puzzles had.
- Quicksave!
- Adding difficulty options makes the game more accessible to newcomers while still allowing people to have a challenge if they choose to.
- The level select system makes going back to replay levels and try for better endings much easier. I personally enjoy loading up the game and playing a level or two, without having to go through the whole game again.
I'm not trying to argue that the game is perfect, because it isn't. I am perfectly aware that the game has issues, and plenty of them stand out to me as things that bring down the experience. I'm not even trying to convince anyone that the game is better than AO.
But it's not a
terrible game, far from it. You might not like it, you might consider it worse than AO, and to you that probably means it's not worth your time. That's fine. But games shouldn't be judged in black-and-white good-or-bad. NNT is a mixed bag - it does some things well, and some things poorly. But I think it's a mistake to write it off entirely - because as we've seen, things can get
so much worse.
*I've voiced my criticisms of the game's aesthetic choices before, but I personally think NNT really does the native environments of the game justice. The Scrabanian Temple in particular stands out in my mind as an area that looks straight up better than the original.