One thing I would suggest is that OWI needs to know when to involve fans in the creative process, and when to step forward and say, "no, actually, you guys are great but there are some things that we need control over." A couple of examples are the voice acting of the mudokons; don't open that up to the community again. It's quite jarring to hear a German and South Asian mudokon, especially when there seems to be a consensus that the mudokons are drones and largely indistinguishable from one another physically, at least to the player, which kind of creates that atmosphere of cultural erasure and uniformity within the labour force. Another example is the music at the end of the game. Whilst I genuinely thought it was touching to include a fan composition in the game, and whilst I thought that it was actually a good track, it was ill-fitting for the end credits. Perhaps it should have been relegated to the trailer backing track.

There are things that OWI could include the fans in however, and it would be interesting to see some well thought out, non-invasive easter eggs that fans would 'get' without necessarily upsetting the overall feel of the game.

Ultimately, Oddworld thrives on atmosphere, and AO and--perhaps to a lesser extent--AE, really capitalised on that. It seems that actually, that could have been an accident though, as we've seen with every other game released that the atmosphere was far detached from what fans expect. Soulstorm seems, at least right now, to be a massive return to a dark and oppressive atmosphere, and that's a good thing because it's Oddworld's primary asset.

^^Yes to all of that^^

Also, one thing that I feel as though was neglected in New 'n' Tasty was the sound work. The originals had brilliant sound design, I mean the fact that Abe's Exoddus was beaten by a blind guy using nothing but the sounds is a testament to just how well thought out they were. This is something that had less impact in NnT, with some sound files just straight up not even playing at all at certain times. I imagine if Terry Garrett tried to play NnT the same way he played through Exoddus, he'd probably have a very hard time in comparison.

AO & AE were amazing on so many levels in terms of combining great visuals and great sound work, so it was sad to see them prioritise visuals and almost forget that the sound design needed to be just as good.

By the way, who was behind this idea? Lanning or JAW?

What I would like to see in terms of fan submitted easter eggs are messages for the LED displays. The funny and witty messages that appear there from time to time could include some fan made ones. But yeah, the voices really need to go and never return.

That is ridiculous. I love it.

Great programming

I don't want to play devil's advocate to NnT, the in game advertisements were garish, the credits theme ill-fitting, and the mudokon voices were distracting at best. But I feel like while they could have definitely not been included and made the game more immersive, they were atleast somewhat necessary to create the kind of hype and revenue that a dead franchise like Oddworld needed to sucessfully reboot, or atleast do so more easily. The quality of Soulstorm is looking to be considerably better than NnT and I may be biased towards AE being my first and favourite Oddworld game, but I'd rather see this one done properly.

Anyway,

I don't want fan mudokon voices
I don't want in game advertisements
I don't want fan composed credits themes

I'm hoping for Mudombies, I've always been really interested in them and feel like they'd make a great mechanic done correctly. I REALLY want to see the exterior of Bonewerkz, the fact we never saw it bugged me in AE since the game's main factories were always presented with such an imposing exterior, and Bonewerkz being so different with all the bricks and mortar is just something I want to see.

Is this a hope, or a reaction?

Couldn't agree more with these statements. These were probably my 3 biggest problems with the game. They get brought up a lot and it seems like moaning, but it's probably a good thing that such easily fixable things are people's big problems. I'd also like to add the speed of the animations onto it.

I don't mind fan composed credit themes if they're actually good and fit the tone. (ME, I'LL DO IT)

Meh, I still think the song worked great as a credit song. It has that 'epic end of the journey' feel to it that good credit songs have. In the beginning the nostalgia I had for the original Oddworld games rejected the idea of a song in the credits as well, but looking back now I actually think it's not that bad.

Having said that; Soulstorm is looking to be a much, MUCH darker game. Maybe the darkest we've seen so far, so any vocal song probably won't fit. NnT was the complete opposite, which might be why it kind of got away with it.

It didn't at all get away with it.

Well, just submit your song to OWI, that's your best bet.

I can't really do that when I don't know what the tone of the game's like, though.

There was an overall sense of sloppiness in New 'N' Tasty that I'm hoping gets taken care of this time. Compare these two clips:
http://i.imgur.com/XQ4zozx.gif
http://i.imgur.com/6wJX3XS.gif
OG Abe's Oddysee feels more fluid and natural. Abe controlled well, but in NnT he just felt really sluggish and stiff. Extra polish and care is the main thing I want this time around.

Those two broken image links look really swell.

yeah that was an accident :/

We have opposite opinions on this.

Man, you sound almost like you didn't want the gig...

Really? That's interesting and I'd love to hear why. To me personally the bad physics and animations of New 'N' Tasty just added up to something that was really underwhelming to control and felt really lifeless. When a character runs off of a ledge it's just an immediate drop that feels so horrible whereas in the originals there was a very natural and noticeable arch to a character's fall that varied depending on whether they were running or not. In New 'N' Tasty, no matter whether Abe was running or not he'd drop like a rock which felt so unnatural. It's all about nailing the game feel/kinesthetics and I can't say New 'N' Tasty really did this.

Of course I want the gig, I just would prefer to work with them rather than just submit it as a fan and hope it fits.

I like how we're talking about this as if OWI have actually offered me the opportunity.

URGH YES I HATE THIS, IT KILLS ALL THE FLOW OF YOUR MOVEMENTS

Its especially annoying when you're at a part of the game where you need to fall of the ledge quickly, but if you just try to walk off, Abe fumbles around for a little bit. I WOULD REALLY LIKE THIS TO BE FIXED ;_;

ikr it made the Paramite/Scrab run so much harder; not because of their redesign but because Abe just controlled worse. Completely kills all forwards momentum!

If you run off a ledge you will fall flat on your face/drop straight down. U dont run down a magical staircase. If you wanna talk about bad physics there is your example.

I have zero nostalgia for the originals. I hate how they control, theyre stiff and awkward. But those were probably due to tech limits.


I think New n Tasty is superior to the original Abes oddysey in every way except tone and atmosphere, which doesnt matter to me anyway. Me looking at those gifs and I cant understand whats wrong with the NnT one. It looks how it should. But I have a dated perspective on Abes oddysey. Having not played it until 2011.


But im in the minority on this forum.

Its really not that bad. Ive not had trouble getting down a ledge quickly, but im not the best example I guess. If I want to do something quickly, its done quickly.

http://i.imgur.com/tGXRZ2t.png

Superior in every way huh? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Well I certainly don't have a PhD in physics, but the assumption that New 'n' Tasty is more realistic really isn't even true. If one day you decided to run off of a cliff, you wouldn't just cancel out all of your forwards momentum and instantly drop at a 90 degree angle from the cliff. There would be an arch to your fall (aka the magical staircase) that would vary depending on how fast you ran at the cliff-end. Equal and opposite reactions or some BS like that.

In Abe's Oddysee, Abe falls in a way that makes it seem like he either didn't prepare for the fall, or intentionally wanted to maximize his forward falling speed.

Meanwhile, in New n' Tasty, if you look at him, he does stuff like readying his hands. This looks more like he readied himself for the fall AND/OR is trying to reduce his forward momentum. For all we know, the speed reduction happened at the ledge, not over it.

You're a speedrunner, not a physicist. Don't act like one.

When Abe drops done one level from a walk in AO/AE he goes forward one or two grid spaces - I'm pretty sure most platforms are high enough that you go two but someone please correct me if I'm wrong. From a run you usually - if not always - go three.

Now imagine that in NNT movement. How far forward do you go? I'm guessing it was too frustrating and "loose" without the grid, so they had him go straight down. It kills your momentum, I agree, but I think it was a deliberate decision.

So now let's get to the real problem with the NNT fall - Abe's over the top panic hands falling stance. In AO/AE he kind of naturally lifts his arms as he drops. From a run he hardly gets them up unless you fall more than a screen. In NNT they instantly snap up. It's talked about again and again how the fast animations hurt NNT, but this is a really fantastic example.

I think the awkward feel of the drop comes from a combination of the loss of horizontal momentum combined with a sudden animation change, really. But a better animation could better convey to the player what is going on, and that would go a long way to smoothing it out.

And Shade AO and AE aren't designed to be fluid and smooth. There are no technical limitations - I don't get why everyone jumps to this. This is PS1 era, slick and fast platformers were everywhere really. AO/AE was a grid based game. At it's core you have to stand in the right grid space at the right time, to make the right interaction. The game deliberately has weight and pause. These animation-bound cinematic platformers is actually a genre, albeit one that's fallen out of favor. If anything it's built to be some kind of anti-game for the time, even down to the design of Abe as the weak scrawny protagonist without a weapon.

The staircase example is weird. I mean in most games you have some kind of momentum when you fall off of things. I'm pretty sure AO/AE falls make a nice curve too. So I guess it's more like going down an imaginary slide? But that's how things actually fall. If you roll a ball off of your desk it doesn't just jank to a stop horizontally to fall straight down.

I too always wonder why this is often given as an excuse for various aspects of AO and AE's design. Technical limitations on a 2D Sidescroller? I know they talk about memory being an issue for certain things, but other than that I doubt the PS1 had too much trouble running games like these.

Running off of a ledge at high speed resulting in you continuing your momentum as you fall off of it is wrong

But running off a ledge, instantly killing all your momentum and falling straight down, before running off a ledge, again instantly killing all your momentum and falling straight down is fine?

Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure they had some big technical hurdles. I mean the entire game runs upscaled, and the assets are stored at half the vertical resolution so that they would fit on a CD. But people were making fast and slick games at the time of AO, there is no technical reason why they didn't do that.

If you had forwards falling momentum in NnT then you could be even faster, Shade.

Chalk up "falling-physics" onto the list.


Anyway, something tells me that the areas are going to look amazing in 3D. Imagine running past the gigantic bonemeal piles in Bonewerkz, except they're gradually shifting based on perspective. Or the labyrinthine Brewery. Heck, even the Mudomo/Mudanchee vault entrance chambers will look all the more barren.

That's something to look forward to.

You're right. Im convinced.

I miss the good old days when falling from too high killed Abe. I think the lack of that made New 'n' Tasty too easy, even on hard mode. I pretty much skipped a lot of the temples by not dying from falling

Theres not even that many instances where u can even fall from a height that looks like you can die.

i can think of like 5 places. Besides running off the top of an elevator (or whatever theyre called in the game).

Yeah death from falling was always a great thing. It made me want to reassess and take things carefully. Also the fizzle after death. I cant be the only one who loved that?

Violence in Oddworld
 

Well, call me a sicko all you want but I really want the overall sense of gore to have more of an impact in Soulstorm. In New 'n' Tasty when you die it always just feels like such a non-event, the classics just had more of a punch to them when you got killed. I don't think this is a case of me being a desensitised freak either because I still get a sense of shock from the classics to this day. I mean, the blood was barely visible in New 'n' Tasty too which leads me to believe that they purposely toned things down for a safer age-rating.

Matt Glanville talked about the player being like Abe's "Guardian Angel" at that EGX talk and I think that was a pretty good description. There should be more of an impact to deaths to actively make the player feel bad for messing up. I want to see Abe's bloody head fly off into the screen after stepping into a bone-drill. I want to see Abe get impaled by a Scrab - they can finally make good use of modern technology to properly show this in ways that weren't quite possible in the PS1 days. I want to be disgusted by this game. Is that a bit weird?

(And I totally get that not everyone has the same tastes so we won't find the same things to be "violent"; maybe to you New 'n' Tasty was too much of a gore-fest. It's a really iffy subject)

^^ This.

Nicki Ali, you are obviously correct.