The next day JAW posts a video where they're trying to imitate scrab/paramite sounds

Genuinely not trying to be rude, (prepare for rudeness) but this game was an abomination from the start, and the tweaks you've made certainly aren't going to save it from slating reviews, which leads me to ask, what really was the point? Purely for monetary gain for the production of Abe HD? If that is the answer I have no objections to that, but I'm just very curious why.

A similar reason as to why Sega includes such 'classics' as Sonic R and Sonic 3D Blast in their anthology collections - its to keep the name out there (and it also highlights the quality of AO/AE and SW...)

Munch isn't a bad game by any stretch of the imagination - it just isn't a good Oddworld game. They tried something new, it didn't work out. At least Stranger was great (excluding voice quality that is worse than an SNES game) and with the release of these titles on the Vita and PS3 you can finally play all four games on a single platform without having to stomach the cramp-inducing controls of the AO and AE PC ports.

It also means that I can finally stop using my PS Vita to prop up my desk and actually play a good game on it that isn't a launch title.

I'd really like to see some more graphical rendering effects added such as bump mapping so things don't look so plain and flat. Those trees are really bugging me due to how much they look like cardboard cut outs :(

Probably limitations of the engine, it isn't the best when it comes to foliage - only recently with Skyrim did Gamebryo actually look decent there.

Subsurface scattering.

Most graphics cards in the XXX nvidia series' can do it now. Still very expensive to render though.

Well, you've set out do put the game in HD, and you've done that, so immediately you've done what it says on the tin. There are also a few tweaks that have probably come as small respite for old fans of the series. So in that sense, well done JAW.

MO got good reviews when it came out. Not great, but good.

It's only fans that really dislike it. There's a certain Zen quality to that fact.

What about the 'boing' sounds? It would be interesting to see (hear) if they have changed! I mentioned before how I think Abe's jump in the video sounds a little less high-pitched, but I could well be wrong having not actually played MO yet :p

Shadows in MO were done using Vertex colours. I can't describe to you how bad it is to look at a simple rectangular room full of shadows, only to realise that every single shadow is a static, manual colouring of addition vertexes that have been cut in simply for said shadows.

Oh shiat. They really wanted nobody to edit it later

So... basically the shadows are painted on. Oh dear.

Well... I can se-... I mea-... It makes sense from a busin-...


Fuck it, I'm sorry, I want to be nice... but REALLY? Which genius at OWI decided to do it like that? Oh yeah probably the same one who had never heard of lightmaps and radiosity simulators. Even Half-Life had a better lighting solution than that, hell Doom had a better lighting solution than that. Super Metroid had a better lighting solution than that. Ugh, no wonder you were having trouble editing anything, its pretty likely that they had a single copy of the dev kit running off a CD or something and played Frisbee with it once MO went gold.

Not just painted on. Painted on using geometry.

So did MO have any lighting engine at all? For models and stuff? Or was it just this idiocy?

Xbox version features dynamic character shadows. PC version doesn't have any

I don't mean character shadows, I mean lighting (as in lights mapped on to the characters themselves)

So you can't change those either?

I think we can change vertex colouring, just not the positions of the vertices. We found some lovely rainbow rocks and wooden structures where the vertex colours had gone haywire. I think we corrected them.

Isn't it nice to be able to log onto the forums nowadays and find that things are actually definitely happening? :) I know nothing of visuals and graphics and suchlike, but for what it's worth I always thought the original game always looked very good aesthetically considering its generation- in fact, I daresay there are HD games floating around now that don't look as good. So, anything at all that can be done to improve it is a nice little bonus, to my mind!

Never had an Xbox so I never got a chance to play MO, reading all these opinions of it so suddenly is a little disheartening as I absolutely loved SWHD. I watched some E3 gameplay of it though and it looked decent to me, only thing that irked me was Abe's odd bounce jumping and the comical sound effect that came with it.

Guess I'll find out when it comes out...

MO and SW are now on PC too

The dynamic shadows and such are something different entirely. There are omni lights in the game scenes, but they're simple for npc lighting.

At least thats something, though I really would have thought it'd have been simpler to just use lightmaps.

Probably. I don't think the engine supports multiple UVW sets.

I'm still baffled about this 'Vertex Lighting'. It almost seems like they were set in their ways from AO/AE where they had to manually draw shadow zones.

I think that's stupid.

The probably decided on that because it would be faster than dynamic lighting, especially in larger areas. It would have allowed them to have a finer control over the shadows without requiring lots of light sources. I haven't played the game much, but I never noticed the lighting looking off.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXjnDdQchfw So umm... JAW, anyway you could "leak" this version for the fans? It would kick butt. In fact, it would kick so much butt, that it would kick ass!

I think I read somewhere saying that these are actually pre-rendered and not in game (I know that the Paramite Herd one looks like an FMV, but I'm not sure about the others)

Yeah, those are per-rendered concept movies. If a game in those stages ever existed we wouldn't be with the MO we have today.

I wish those concepts didn't exist and then people wouldn't bash the game so much!

You have to realise that they did something VERY wrong if people are bitching hard about MO not being anywhere as good as what their concept FMVs portrayed the game as being... I wish MO was more like those concepts. The story of OWI may have been a bit different if it was.

That was a ridiculously ambitious project, even by today's standards. It would never have been quite what they originally planned it to be.

Don't misunderstand me, I wasn't bashing the game. I was just saying that it would have been different if it had ever existed in those stages.

I couldn't bash the game, anyway. I've never really played it.

The point of a concept is to have a game that is similar to them >.>

While I agree that it could never be like those concepts (because how the hell would the controls have worked?) they could have at least tried to have some of that cool shit in the game, especially the Recyclers having some kind of function.

What? If they could have they would have made the exact game they envisioned. It is very unlikely that even without the platform swap/time constraints they would have produced something close to what they planned because it was so ambitious.

Your posts seems to imply that they looked at things and said "Hey, this is a cool feature. Let's cut it." inb4 OANST with a mock Lanning quote

I never said they didn't have a reason for cutting it, I just said that they shouldn't have cut it.

It was never in the game, though. That was a movie.

e: Actually, I don't know that it was never in the game. If it was added and removed they did it for a reason. See my previous post.

It is cut concepts, not cut content :3

And I said that they very well could have had a reason, but not removing some of those concepts would have made Munch a better game overall.

You're right. I wish you'd developed MO.

Pfft, no. I couldn't have made that game when I was 4.

Anyway, you are missing my point here - had they been able to include some of those cut concepts Munch would have been a better game, however they were almost certainly left on the cutting room floor due to time constraints because the game was rushed out the door.