cant get into first oddworld
 

i played abe's exodus and loved it, so i tried to play the first one. but it just feels so stiff and simple compared to the first one that i cant get into it. is there something im missing here?

You know, sequels tend to have more gameplay mechanics, basically because they're sequels.

I'd say you should try to enjoy the better, darker atmosphere. The gameplay gets a bit more complicated later.

I think there's a general consensus that Abe's Exoddus is the better game between the two for a number of reasons. Story, gameplay, music, length, locations. I can play Exoddus time and time again while cringing at the idea of playing Oddysee.

Story and atmosphere were better in AO. Gameplay-wise AE was more complex, in a good way.

I replay AO more. Also, hated Quiksave.

funnykoala, you should try AO's remake.

No!

AO's remake has all the same problems Exoddus does. Better, smoother gameplay, but sucks at the tone department.

I would NOT say that's any general consensus at all. Are we on the same forum? It's a constant battle. I almost never play AE, but I play AO on occasion.

If you like AE man that's cool, you don't have to play AO to get a lot of the experiance, I reccomend watching an LP on it, it's nice hearing someone else talk about it and you still get the stellar atmosphere.

After AO's remake, funnykoala should try MO. SW may be a little too dark for him.

I'd call the gameplay anything but smooth

How do you call it, then, compare to the others ?

Not smooth. Chunky.

New 'N' Tasty has Chunky Controls. Abe feels really fat.

Fuck you. Quicksaving is my life.

What happened to you ?:p

Maybe chunky wasn't the best word.

You seem to have a poor life.

lol you suck

Idk where I stand on quicksave. It's a massive difficulty drop.

I preferred Oddworld Adventures.






One.

Exactly!

To be honest. Oddworld was the only game I quicksaved the death out of. It's a habit now. Even games like Skyrim I don't save as often.

It's a habit, but not a good habit.

I never said it was a good habit. :)
I've quicksaved so many times just before I die putting me in a unwinnable loop.

Yeah I agree about the difficulty. It makes a game sometimes waaay to easy. So it's a good thing quicksaving is completely optional.

it's only optional if you have self control

Yeah, when being shown an easier way, a player will most likely choose it. And it's not his fault. It's the developer's fault

It doesn't really make the game easier, it just makes it less frustrating and negates any sort of penalty for dying.

That's what difficulty is, in a nutshell. If the game does not punish your for your mistakes, it's an easy game.

The game wouldve been far less enjoyable (for me) without a quiksave option. NnT that is.

Quicksave does not completely remove punishment, it just removes the unnecessary punishment.

Failure to complete a task means you don’t get to progress and must retry the task until you do it correctly. Without Quicksave you have to first progress from the last checkpoint back to where you were when you failed, adding in the challenge and frustration of traversing any obstacles you have already successfully navigated. With Quicksave it’s possible for the player to avoid redoing what they’ve already done and just focus on the task they’re currently trying to overcome.

In both scenarios there is challenge, but one scenario adds unnecessary challenge while the other focuses on a single challenge. The difficulty has not been changed, it is just spread out into smaller areas.

There's no challenge if you quickload after each meat saw you went by. And AE is not THAT difficult

I agree with this, but you're forgetting that starting over from a checkpoint is a hefty penalty for death which increased the tension in the atmosphere by a tonne, something that was obviously lacking in AE.
Imagine if survival horror games had quicksave, that pretty much would negate the whole point of them.

I guess what I'm saying is you need to find an equilibrium. Something which, as an aspiring games developer, is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. I've noticed that a lot of developers don't put much thought into it and even give you the 'checkpoint' system or the 'quicksave' system.

If you all weren't suckas you'd try to finish AE without Quiksave and leave it for n00bs.

But seriously perhaps they could tie Quiksave into difficulty somehow. Oddworld shouldn't completely alienate a part of its audience because it's too difficult. Particularly since it's a story driven series you want players of all skill levels to enjoy the game and have a chance at making it to the end. But perhaps they could give you a limited number of Quiksaves per stage depending on difficulty - similarly to how Quiksaves work in Hitman: Blood Money.

The hardest difficulty can completely disable Quiksaves altogether.

And AE has a great tone. AO has a novelty and atmosphere that's lacking in the sequel but AE still has a great balance of scare and humour for what Oddword seems to be - a dark/comedic allegorical tale. Since it's plot was just a rehash of the first it fails on that front but it actually had a script and some morsel of character depth. AO really feels like the bare minimum for the purpose of giving a videogame some general direction in comparison.

AE sided to much on the comedic side. AO felt far more lonely and isolated, and I think the lack of character depth actually works in the game's favour for this reason.

That aside, my point was not that AE lacks tone, but that it lacks tension, and I put that down completely to Quicksave.

I gotta disagree there but I suppose it's all relative to personal experience. I get where you're coming from but in my personal experience, like Manco said, I feel Quiksave takes away unnecessary frustration.

I remember finding many sections of AE tense whenI first played it. The fleeches especially. Scrabs, too.

Quiksave took away a lot of the endurance difficulty to me. As said before, you could save after rolling over each meat saw, and I did in the later stages of the game. The hard parts of AE to me were the things like Fleeches, where you just couldn't pause long enough to save safely. All the parts where danger was shown slowly though were ridiculously easy.

After thought thought thought I think I did like the quicksave, it let me focus more on the atmosphere 'n' sich.

The lack of quiksave is a "trick" to hide the fact that the game AO, unlike AE, is very short. It's the same thing for games like Another World and Heart of Darkness.

Yeah, difficulties are just a way of making the game longer.

I mean it's not like it's the *only thing* that differs games from any other forms of media.

I don't know, QuikSave definitely balanced out for me. When I was younger, I definitely got myself stuck into more than a few of those deathloops, or I'd accidentally save, then realise I fucked something up and need to reset the path. Or worse yet, I'd get so used to QuikSaving that I'd forget to ACTUALLY save and end up losing an hour of progress when I turned the system off.

Some of you guys are way too hipster.

I barely ever got into the deathloop thing, and I've never experienced that last thing. That's dumb.
I do remember though, that the first time I ever played through AE I rinsed through disc 1 in only a couple of hours without saving, and then when the game told me to put disc 2 in I switched off my PS1 and inserted it. It was upsetting.

I've only got in the loop a few times, mostly when i was younger playing the game. I remember the very first playthrough we did. It was in Bonewerkz in the first part of the finale bit. Where you have to roll whilst being chased by slogs. I quiksaved just before I had to roll and it was a loop of me being killed. We could not figure out how to do it.

All that time. I didn't know you could roll whilst running. when I discovered that, it was like we've just won the lottery.

That same thing happened to me whilst playing AO for the first time, when I discovered it in Scrabanian Nests.

I wonder why so few people mention this, but the biggest difference between Exoddus and Oddysee is the input delay. In Oddysee you had quite a large amount of input delay in the original PSX version (that was completely absent in the PC version) which mader the game much harder, obviously. With Exoddus however, the PSX version is pretty much on par with the PC version, as far as input responsivity is concerned.