Agreed. As for the story, I usually view it in close conjunction with the overall atmosphere and lore. For a visual medium such as a videogame atmosphere set up by graphic design is an integral part of storytelling. AO's story was fairly simple by itself but it was well enaugh to keep one engaged.

To be fair, I begin to doubt that they are going to pull off the dark atmosphere they promise. While the established Oddworld lore presents really good turf for a dark story, it's not enaugh. AO and MO are good examples. In AO everything was a potential threat and the game didn't care too much to openly inform you. This made you pay more attention to inspecting the world before taking action. When Abe got shot or gored by the creatures it looked brutal. I'm not saying that in Soulstorm they should animate a slog eating Abe's guts out in full detail but if you look at the way Abe's deaths were animated in AO they looked disturbing and painful enaugh to make one feel that vicious deaths and violence are not all that abstract in that world. This adds weight to the overal hostile atmosphere set up by the story and the environment.

In MO they completely lost that, adding all the goofy effects and making the animation cartoony. The action became too abstract. The story itself might have had a serious tone but it was not enaugh. There was a very steep contrast in overall tone comparing to the previous games, at least for me.

What has become of you, Abe, the double-jumping, bullet-sponging Sonic the Hedgehog of Oddworld? :fuzsad: :D

All in all I'm worried that they're drifting towards the more casual, 'user-friendly' style which natually comes in opposition with having a darker, more serious atmosphere in line with the original game they keep promising. When OWI announced Soulstorm it was this promise that caught me. I was actually quite ready to accept major techical changes such as doing away with platforming genre in favor of something else and leaving out all the old locations from AE as long as that promise was kept.

For me the annoying thing is that OWI are seemingly aware of the drawbacks MO and N'n'T had since they are promising darker atmosphere and return to the old ways but yet there are symptoms indicating that we might not be getting it after all. I just hope I'm being too fearful about that and they keep the promise.

It's a difficult balance here. Nobody wants to jump to conclusions, but it's perfectly reasonable to form opinions on what we have seen, and to say what we prefer. We know a clip isn't necessarily reflective of the whole experience (though, gameplay effects like visual cues for gamespeak would presumably appear throughout. I hope there is an option to disable them in settings).

Any game will have pros and cons. I'll no doubt enjoy Soulstorm on release regardless, despite some design choices I might personally disagree with. I don't like the double jump, I don't like the visual effects too much, and I'm not sold on the speed/animations. But these things aren't a deal-breaker overall, and might change with further marketing. Abe was a bullet-sponge in NNT until we learnt that Hard Mode would have the classic 1-hit-kills, and that's probably the same with SS. Probably.

For game marketing, even film marketing, things usually gear towards the mainstream. The thinking is that the hardcore fans are on board regardless, so why waste time/resources preaching to the choir. That money is better spent trying to attract new customers and build an audience. And that's not to say that the companies view new customers as more important. It's a strategy, nothing more. The difficulty I expect is not leaving those true fans in the lurch.

As a long time fan, I too want the marketing to be geared to my tastes. Because even though I'm on board, I still have some doubts like have been expressed by others. After seeing more footage, perhaps I'll change my mind on the things I'm not currently keen on. And that's the marketing's job. It's not about someone's opinion being valid or not. I want OWI to convince me that the game will be what I'm looking for. For that, I need (and want) to see more.

Of course, there's a risk of letting one's expectations dictate our opinions. You see it a lot with movie reviews nowadays - people rate the movie according to what they wanted, and not what they actually got. There are elements of SoulStorm so far that I'm not keen on. However, I can't deny that objectively it does look like a very good game.

People say this happens a lot but I've literally never seen anyone do this. The problem in the case of SS is that, yet again, they lied to us, promising something that they never had any intention of delivering.

Nice to read some comprehensive stuff from Admiral, there.

Also did anyone play PlayStation games in the 1990s? The cinematics of Oddworld Abe's Oddysee and Exoddus were almost Pixar quality films compared to every other game out there at the time. I mean the cutcenes in Exoddus put me off Real Time cutscenes until games like The Last of Us began matching that similar visual quality and level of cinematic storytelling.

It was a big part of drawing you into that world and characterising all these unique little creatures.

Mate the books be where it be at, mate. Then you can argue about A Feast for Crows and A Dance with Dragons instead of Season 8.

Here Admiral, I made you a custom avatar since you don't have one.
https://i.imgur.com/xGs1oVs.jpg
Enjoy.

Ha-ha :D The scars from those animations in MO and N'n'T... they never heal!

Wow, when OWF is actually active there is so much emotion in just one thread. Hate, love, now charity in the form of a profile pic.

The OWF came back from the dead. Enjoy it while you can.

What is Odd may never die. We just hibernate in between games.

What is odd may never die is depressingly poignant since OW and Got both went the same way.

I've missed you all.

At first glance, I thought Molluck was wearing sunglasses.

Cause, you know: Molluck was cool. :fuzcool:

Here is a larger version to clear that up.

That's fair enough, but it's kind of hard to explore, say, the oceans and underwater environments around Mudos without Munch as a character, not to mention the other unique lore elements and gameplay mechanics he brings to the table. I'd imagine the other three Quintology heroes would be equally unique in terms of expanding upon both the world and gameplay of the series. I realize MO was not the most successful game in the original series, but that has far more to do with production schedules and missed potential than it does with Munch himself.
plus i really wanna see and play as Squeek after all these years :C

Thing is, it's really hard to introduce a new protagonist to an already niche series. Abe has a great nostalgia factor behind him, which is immediately lost when he's only a secondary character - or Odd forbid, not even present.

Or completely overtook the main protagonist's spotlight. In MO, it felt more of Abe's game than Munch's (at least to me) since you were most likely to use Abe instead of Munch due to how slow and lacking in mobility/defense the latter was, the enemies were mainly sligs/glukkons with the vykkers/interns only appearing in about 4 levels in the entire game.

Which again was mainly an issue with production schedules drastically cutting the amount of content the game was meant to have. Had OWI had more time to develop for the Xbox, not only would we have gotten more Munch gameplay in the form of actual underwater areas, but likely a more focus on Vykkers, Interns, etc as well.
I realize that Lorne is trying to play safe, considering how long it's been since Oddworld was really in the picture, but IMO at least, there is such a thing as playing it too safe, and I just don't feel like his original vision for the Quintology should be altered by something as superficial as nostalgia.

I don't personally see it as playing it safe, any more than Exoddus was doing so being a 'bonus game' back in the day. We've heard bits and pieces about the original Quintology plans regarding the different heroes of Oddworld, with the endgame to team them up somehow. Without Exoddus, sticking to the original vision, we'd have had only one game per protagonist.

Abe as a character became so popular that (perhaps unintentionally) he became synonymous with Oddworld. And what was to be a quick build to an ensemble cast with a single overarching story suddenly had reason to take its time, to do a more personal dive into Abe and his story, specifically. And I welcome that :)

While the heroes of Oddworld would all contribute to a larger tale, they still had their own arcs and personal journeys. Abe sets out to liberate his people, Munch's was to save his species from extinction. Even Stranger, while not a Quintology hero, had his own arc regarding the Steef. These other stories can still happen and be explored in detail once Abe's saga is complete, and can still count toward the Oddworld lore as a whole. It'll just be in more depth.

Soulstorm is a reimagining of Exoddus, which itself was never Quintology part 2. Maybe I'm wrong, but the new plans seem to me that we'll get an Abe saga, then maybe a new series of games for other heroes moving forward.

I really hope you're right that we'll see other heroes get explored once Abe's story is over.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more Abe games, I'm just worried about the other four characters getting shafted out of the series canon entirely, especially when we haven't even seen three of them.

It's only when you people start actually talking about Oddworld that I remember that I hate you all.

Join the discord server then :D

I seriously can't for the life of me understand why people are so invested in seeing new characters, as if the characters are what drew people to these games to begin with. Oddworld doesn't make characters, it makes promises of characters.
You just hate anyone with any kind of passion for anything.

After the quintology's complete, we'll hopefully maybe see the originally-planned other heroes. For now, it's better to focus on Abe given that he's the face of Oddworld.

Given how much merch Munch has gotten, it's safe to assume that Munch will eventually have a role in the rebooted continuity.

Well to be frank, OWI also said it multiple times, that they have no current intentions with Munch.

Well....

...Crap. :fuzsad:

That's a shame...

Maybe they just need to think about introducing characters like Munch yet. Unless they want to make us see only Mudos for the whole quintology (which would be really a bummer tbh :fuzsad:)

Given that it was mentioned that in an interview for Soulstorm that the glukkons didn't want the mudokons escaping to the "first-world" to blow the whistle on them; I think we'll eventually see some of the other areas of Oddworld.

The quintology is only set in the continent of Mudos. But it's a huge continent, and the 'first world' areas are located there too.

Do we know how big Mudos actually is? The only thing I could find alluding to its size is this post from 2001.

I think Oddworld is meant to be the same size as Earth, but effectively hollowed out so that you have seven times the surface area. If we take this to be true, then on the surface, Mudos is gonna looks something like this:

https://i.gyazo.com/6298658939d603ba...fc7f5249d1.png

e: actually that's not a great comparison tbh since I'm assuming the OW map is a mercator projection, in which case I'm fucking dumb for sticking it on the equator.

I'm sure I remember reading something that Oddworld is like 17x the size of Earth? Perhaps that was in the art book.

If anyone hasn't been following the Abe's Origins Kickstarter, there's a new official Oddworld map been commissioned for that book, which will be included as a fold-out section. Aside from the design posted above, it's supposed to be the first canon map.

Long ago, the claim was that the planet Oddworld was 10 times the size of planet Earth, while Mudos was a territory (something between a country and a continent in Earth terms) the size of Nicaragua. (Oddworld History, GameFan, both circa 2000)

It's not clear if that's 10 times the size in terms of radius, surface area or volume, but I think the first of those is implied by the talk of speed of technological spread. It's also apparent to me now, unless there's some other source I can't find back right now, that Lorne was talking more about Mudos economically than in terms of size.

Eleven years later, when Nate interviewed Lorne a second time (Nathan Interviews Lorne Lanning Again), Lorne clarified that Oddworld isn't necessarily ten times the size in radius or volume, because either way that would cause gravity to be terrible, but in "surface" area: the planet's surface is inhabited, but is actually a shell suspended over a lower layer, itself a shell over an even deeper layer. These layers account for the extra large areas and distances without making the planet implausibly massive.

None of this has been referenced in a game or other in-universe source, so it's liable to change in the future. In fact, even if it is ever confirmed on-screen or in-game, it could be different in another telling of the story.

I always considered the huge cavernous spaces we see, like Monsaic Lines and Necrum to be some kind of proof for this. A lot of areas in AO/AE do at least appear to be subsurface to some degree.