I liked Oddysee better for one reason in particular,during the many many playthroughs when I died it had a punishing almost Dark Souls esque feel, and by that I mean when you die, it's your fault no bones about it, it's brutal and quick, and you are sent back a decent distance in the game. When I died in NnT several times it was by things not of my own doing at all, plus they added quicksave which allows you to cheese your way through puzzles, IMO.

^ This.

But Lanning needed to sleep:

http://www.loonygames.com/content/1.9/feat/ (1998).

I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to make a game easier.

In New N' Tasty, I think the quicksave feature was a welcome addition for a modern audience. It just didn't always work (sometimes the puzzles would reset so your save wouldn't help you complete the puzzle at all, or you'd get put back in the wrong place, or the game would inch forward a few ticks before your save completed, rendering your quicksave useless, or it would quickload instead...) which, for me, made the game a little difficult, but for the wrong reasons.

I don't think Abe's Oddysee, needs a quicksave function, but I don't think it would destroy the game to have it. I know I'd probably have enjoyed the game a lot more when I was first starting to play it if there had been a quicksave. It certainly made Exoddus more approachable.

I'd certainly enjoy it less.

How much, come to think of it? I get your reasons, I think, but how big a deal-breaker would it really be?

There's a general rule that, within a difficulty level, when a player encounters an easier route to progress, he's most likely to take it. After all, it's the easier one.

An ability to quicksave at any moment removes the tension the player gets when faced with a challenge, as there's no punishment for it. If you fail, you press a button and you can try again, literally just before e.g. pressed the wrong button. That's the thrill of playing games, if you don't focus, you can lose. If you instantly try again with no consequences, do you really lose? It's like playing chess with another player and being able to rewind that one fatal move that has possibly made you fail the game. It removes any meaning from the game.

There's one particular secret area that I absolutely love in AO, and it's not an easy one: The first one in Stockyards, with a scrab. Not only it's very atmospheric (sillhouettes, the music, the everything), but it requires perfect precision. I have a vivid memory of trying it over and over as a 6-7 year old, eating peanut butter sandwiches, and never getting it perfectly done. At the time, I got my dad to help me, he liked the game but he didn't play it as long as I do so he didn't do much better. But hell, it was tons of fun, and one of the very rare cases where we actually played games together. You had to do it perfectly at least four times in a row to finish it, there's no chance that you do this just being lucky. It's hard to even describe my satisfaction when I finally did it. I think it's one of the best memories I had with the game.

In NnT not only you don't have to be precise while running, as the platforming section is much easier, not only you take all muds at one (there's a zapper in front of them as a cheap replacement), but you can just save each time you go one side to the other. If you fail, you can just rewind it a few steps back. You skip through this and won't ever remember it.

You skip through entire NnT and won't ever remember it. Maybe the broken parts, like saws and mines. What's even the point of playing it, if you're not going to remember this?

For me it's a really big deal.

Tbh I don't remember much of NnT and I played the shit out of it.

What were you feelings on AE?

I understand your reasoning, but I'd say that quicksaving isn't quite as "game-skipping" as you say. Myself, I have extremely vivid memories from AE of fleeches, scrabs, paramites, sligs and slogs chasing Abe. And I'd say those were plenty tense. Being able to quicksave doesn't remove all elements of tension, I'd say. It does help to ease frustration though. So I see exactly why it was that Lorne implemented it; it was a good way to try to keep people from totally abandoning the game. Because for every person who plays the game because it's hard and requires a lot of practice and retries to get just right, there's probably a person who hates that they have to play that section all over again because they mistimed that one jump.

I think OWI tried their best to minimize the issues that come from Quicksaving, and for the most part they succeded. I'm talking mostly about the chase sequences you mentioned before. They were so intense that you couldn't really Quicksave in the middle of some of them, and they were fairly long. I'm definitely not surprised you have fond memories of them, I do, too. Unfortunately, some of them have enough "breathing" moments for you to Quicksave during the chase, which takes away from the experience.

Quicksaving was the intented way of playing AE from the very start, that makes the game stand out more among others with the Quicksave feature; it's more of an exception, rather than a rule. The good example is AE's last level, which would be way too hard without saving after each segment. It was designed around the idea.

Even with the feature, you can easily cheese some puzzles, and that is a bad thing. It's really not that hard to abuse Quicksave. And the player doesn't even consider it cheating, because, hey, the game allows that, it even encourages you to use it.

That said, all of the issues with Quicksaving, and I don't mean just some, I mean literally all of them, can be solved with well-placed checkpoints, and this is not an easy task to a developer. Most of AO's checkpoint placements aren't that bad, actually. AE has literally zero checkpoints (except for the start of a level), OWI gave the choice to the player when to save, instead. It's partially taking the easy way.

I don't think that is a good idea. The way I see it, it's a game compromising its own mechanics just to allow you to finish it with as little effort as possible. Imagine this happening in sports: Doing a 100-metre dash and being able to stop in the middle, go get some food, a good sleep, wake up the next day and continue from this part, no strings attached. Or worse, redrawing the finish line 10 meters before, because you got tired after 90. Or racing, except the other drivers slow down if they get ahead of your car. Damn you, Need for Speed games, I do not need your pity, I know I'm losing! There's no sense of achievement, actually earning the victory with your efforts.

I've never finished AO as a kid. I revisited it after few years and beat it then (well, I still was a child, but not a child child), and I'm glad I did. The thing is, you don't have to complete every game you play. You don't even have to complete the game to say you think it's amazing. I loved AO despite the fact I've never completed it. I completed it later because I was loving it. If it was the same but with an ability to save anywhere, it'd break some puzzles' difficulty. I'd probably beat it as a child. Maybe I would even forget the game afterwards and never join OWF in the first place.

The more I talk about it, the more I realise *why* I'm loving AO and just like AE.

As with what TotalBiscuit said on a video recently, some games have a high skill floor - for example RTS games where you have to know exactly what you're doing and are generally really hard to learn.

Other games such as Clash Royale and Hearthstone have a low skill floor, i.e. they are really easy to pick up and play. Even games like this can be competitive enough so that there is a lot of room for skillful play.

I'm in favour of New N Tasty's features that make it less frustrating, since it has it's own way of making things difficult (such as Alf's DLC)

There's a couple of sequences in AO with "breathing" room in them, mostly in the trials. But I'll grant you, it's more of a moment to collect your thoughts, as opposed to a quicksave area. Surely though, these sections in AE are basically just optional checkpoints?

I'll agree with that right away and it seems a shame to me that some of the puzzles in New n' Tasty weren't redesigned to account for quicksaving.

Can't really argue with that, though I'd say that there is a point where the player may feel like they're "cheesing" the game. It's rather like in Age of Empires 2, where the AI can be confused by certain strategies and is incapable of dealing with them, where a human player could easily work around it. Or like playing Roller Coaster Tycoon and just building nothing but motion simulators because they're the most cost-efficient ride.

This is always the flipside of quicksaving. It's great if you're having a hard time with a specific section, for whatever reason. It lets you see the rest of the game, enjoy the story, visuals and the rest of the game. But then there's that other aspect where it can let you breeze through even the smallest difficulty. So either the game has to be hard enough to require quicksaving, which isn't always a bad tactic, or the game has to be extremely well-designed enough to avoid needing a quick-save. I think AO makes the cut quite well, but New n' Tasty, because of its finicky saws and some other strange inconsistencies, probably benefited from it.

I'd say that I'm in a similar boat, but when I was a kid, I loved AO when I wasn't playing it, if that makes sense. Everything about AO appealed to me, except the actual act of trying to beat the game, because it felt like such a futile exercise. I don't think I finished Exoddus before it, but I definitely played for longer. AE I thought was funner to play, because it wasn't as hard. The quicksave was almost the only reason for that.

I don't know if the quicksave was the best way to solve the difficulty issues, but it was effective at making the game easier, that's for sure. Making the game easier was definitely a positive for me when I was first starting to play the game. If it hadn't been for Exoddus where I could make snail's pace progress as opposed to trying the same puzzle over and over and failing every time in Oddysee, I think I might not have remembered Oddworld the way I did.

Not to say I don't like the difficulty of Oddysee. In hindsight, especially, it was a big part of the game's atmosphere and overall feeling. Probably part of what drew me to it, knowing that it was hard and feeling some accomplishment when I made the least bit of progress. But whether or not it was best to introduce such an awesome world with such a seemingly sharp difficulty, I'm not sure.

I'm reminded of how I used to play Oddysee. It was a mix of me, my mother and my father all playing different parts. I did as much as I could myself, my mother took over when I wasn't sure what to do or had to memorize some kind of pattern and my father played exclusively to diffuse UXB mines, since he was the only one with that sense of timing. If I'd been playing alone, I would have lost patience after maybe three UXB bombs and a few complicated paramite puzzles. I suppose that's something else to thank my parents for.

Well, all AE checkpoints are optional. Those don't seem more optional than that :D

I can say breaking the game's rules may be very fun at times. I killed the Royal Griffin boss in Witcher 3 with a crossbow, that deals very little damage to him but has unlimited bolts and the bird can't really deal you any damage from the distance. It took 15 minutes of just spamming the button to completely drain its life, after which the guy in the cutscene tells me I should improve my vertical strikes, because they're too obvious. I didn't even draw my sword.

Still, it's a shame the developers didn't think of that.


I understand that. I think we differ in what we expect from games. I actually like my games to be a good challenge, an fun obstacle that I can overcome if I try hard enough. I mean, besides just being a cool experience. In cases like AO, it's not enough.

EDIT: In my experience, AO's learning curve wasn't that unforgiving. The secret areas were tough as nails but they were optional. If you take them out, I don't remember any difficulty spikes in the "main game". RF was always quite easy, Stockyards required some reflexes to run jump from that one scrab at the beginning, but besides that it was mostly puzzles, the game went progressively harder later, but for me it felt like a natural pace.

Is that actually true, though? LittleLamb was a troll.

NnT is superior to AO.







Y'all are nostalgic, which is cool, but AO is trash. Back then it was cool maybe, but comparing the 2 now AO is jank af. Both arent perfect, but NnT is better.

Shade is the master of sarcasm

NnT is better with bugs i had recently. Sligs can shoot Abe even when he is middle way with lift. PS4 port seems broken too. In Zulag 3 I can't use grenades to superior moving mines. Then there was bug that getting Slog on Elevator crashed game. PC port seems more patched but i need play more... :p

NnT came out (as i know) very buggy original didn't have. My favorite thing from original was not there too: If you jump straight to Elum bell in Paramonia it makes Bonggg!

Siriusly though i enjoyed NnTs visuals while i felt these bugs and gameplay style little familiar.

AO is good old trash for me. :p

He said argue, not emotionally ejaculate.

OMG dont bring up the PS4 version. Probably the worst version of the game id say. I cant complete a run without the game crashing.

Ive already argued why NnT is better before. My opinions havnt changed.

Shade doesn't really care about Oddworld (he has never played AE) to begin with. Anyway, it has nothing to do with "nostalgia": Nepsotic wasn't even born when AO was released.

Vita seems the most broken version. You can fall to nowhere from gaps with following camera showing emptyness at times...
Odd fibe from original in NnT appeared some what for me. Btw my opinions about speedrunners did change recently but that's another story.

From "Best NNT version" to "Worst NNT version" (for me):

PC>PS4>XONE>PS3>WIIU>VITA

You don't have to be born when something came out to feel nostalgia about it. I have nostalgia about watching Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory as a kid in the 90's, and that film was release in the 70's.

Also, you don't need to have played every game in a franchise to "really care" about it. An example would be I'm sure there's lots of people who have only seen The Force Awakens that would say they cared about Star Wars.

Exactly, and if those same people said TFA was better than ANH, they'd be laughed out of the McDonald's.

As a matter of fact, new people keep discovering AO (even after the release of NnT) and they are enjoying it too. AO isn't outdated. It has aged well because that was Lanning's intent. Moreover, I can't be the only one who, thanks to NnT, is now enjoying AO even more!

He really cares about speedrunning (which is why he prefers NnT over AO). Nobody could genuinely argue that "NnT is superior to AO".

There's only one instance of this happening that I'm aware of. Could you highlight where this happens outside of Zulag 1 Path 2, please? Thanks.

I remember seeing one video of these about in Monsaic Lines. In the nearby area of returning from Nest trial. :p

I was not able to find this same video but i came up with similar:



I don't know which version this is and seems happening in Paramonian Nests too... Afterall it's funny bug and not disturbing gaming at all. Just wait or quickload to continue game just like normally. Even though the chances for this one to happen are rare or hard to find... :D

It's okay, NnT's falling damage is more gentle than AO's.

That's not Vita.

Just the way you phrased it, it made it sound like it was happening all the time. As I said, it's only happened (that I know of) with one elevator in one level, so I'm curious if there are others you know about that we don't.

Thanks.

Another kind of bug (it happened one time to one friend of mine):
https://scontent-mxp1-1.xx.fbcdn.net...d3&oe=591663F2

Yep, that one's known.

I don't understand how that point is relevant to what I said. I said you don't have to be born exactly when something came out to feel nostalgic about it; I'm not sure what that's got to do with N'n'T ageing well and new people discovering it which is what you responded with.

Again, I'm unsure as to what your response had to do with what I said. I said you don't necessarily have to have played every game in a franchise to "really care" about it. Nothing to do with speedrunning or arguing which games are better than each other.

1. AO still holds up, it has nothing to do with nostalgia.

2. Shade isn't a fan of Oddworld.

Nostalgia is a personal, subjective affection that people feel. You can't feel nostalgic about something you first discovered 2 days ago. I think you're misinterpreting the definition of nostalgia completely. Your original point is that Nepsotic can't feel nostalgic about AO because he wasn't born when it was released. That simply isn't true. (See my Wonka example) Of course AO still holds up, I think it's a brilliant game; I still play it today, and I am also nostalgic when I think about playing it as a kid.

You're reason for him not caring about Oddworld was because he hasn't played Exoddus. My counter argument was that you don't need to have played every game in a franchise to be care about it. I care about GTA but I've never played the PS1 games or the PSP versions.

This is verging on going off topic anyway. AO is cool, N'n'T not as good.

Well, you're arguing for the sake of arguing.

Why did I say that "Nepsotic wasn't even born when AO was released"? Answer:
"Back then" = 1997.

Shade doesn't care about the franchise. That's why I mentioned that he has never played AE. So far, he's only interested in NnT (which is kind of unique on OWF).

Well... not just Vita and not all the time. Sometimes couple variables happen.

The things that bugs me more than falling bug are that I can't destroy moving mines in Zulag 3 [PS4] with grenade and Slig that can shoot Abe while he looks like unreachable on lift. Bullets go over or under but still hits. (Though it could make sense if the Slig aimed & fired up/down to Abe.)

I'm having a discussion, not arguing to argue. I disagreed with the points you were making so I presented a counter argument. And I still do, but you've just made them again so I'm not sure what else to say. We'll agree to disagree. :)

Except that I agree with you about "nostalgia".

I can't disagree.

Ironically, Willy Wonka didn't achieve ubiquitous popularity until the late-80's/early-90's when it started to appear on home television and subsequently made a successful return to theatres. Upon initial release, the film was not regarded as a big success, nor was it propelled by nostalgia during its ressurection. It was just a well-made film that didn't receive the attention it deserved until after the fact.

Now that I think about it, this actually draws some interesting parrallels with Oddworld, with the chrome-polished, Johnny Depp remake attempting to capture the spirit of the original. I think everyone can agree that the Wonka films are far removed from nostalgia when discussing which is superior.