Interesting response in outube video
 

Hi everybody! I want to quote some interesting "point of view" (from youtube video):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvHLWJG2WQc

"The problem with abe was that the creators never understood what people liked on the the first two games, they thought that it was humor, but it was the mistery of the story, this game could have been as big as Resident Evil today, but they chosed the wrong path, some still await for a return.."

Why I've created new thread? Beacause I want to know what you guys think about this opinion and share with others your own. Do you think OWI choose in the past the wrong path?

I just wish that they keep path as Oddtastic in future like it is now... http://www.oddworldforums.net/images.../icon1_odd.gif

I'm still trying to get around that statement.

I think it's a mistaken opinion by someone who doesn't understand what happened to Oddworld after the first two games were made. Most of the regulars here know the difference between what Munch was meant to be, what it turned out to be, and what happened in between to cause that to happen. Not an ounce of it has to do with underestimating the importance of story.

they definetely chosed the wrong path... but they are going to return to the fantastic begin of the series and hopefully retain the unique feeling of the first games for the later upcoming ones.

I've created thread in some forum about New 'n' Tasty and there are people who never played original Abe's Oddysee and - what's important - want to try the fresh one which is great I think.

As Wil pointed out, the direction OWI went after Abe's Exoddus was the result of scrounging together what they could from the doomed production that was MO. I applaud them for managing to pull together and make a decent game in lieu of the production hell Munch endured. They could have just given up completely.

Stranger's Wrath deviated even further from the original formula, which was a big risk, but I think it was one well worth taking. Stranger's Wrath wasn't perfect, but it acted as a good band-aid for MO, and expanded the universe significantly. I'm especially happy that they did that. I'd rather it keep expanding than for Lorne to go all George Lucas and continually do damage control on the old stories. This is also part of why I originally had disdain for remaking the originals, but those concerns have been (mostly) assuaged and I know that Oddworld is in capable new hands.

There was certainly a dark and gritty aspect in AO that was missing in later instalments. Even AE was a little short.

Though that might just be a psychological issue. Living up to the first love, or something. I'm sure there's a term for it, but I can't think what it is. Not nostalgia.

I always found munch fun as a kid it has aged awfully though ... However it was fun at the time and I suppose that's the main thing!

As opposed to being a good game?

I know exactly what you mean, I think maybe it was the humor added to AE that took away the dark feeling. Plus none of the environments even came close to the AO ones, except maybe Necrum and Bonewerkz, and maybe the Slig Barracks.

Fleeches were pretty gritty too, those things are nightmares!

Boneworks was amazingly dark , more so than rupture farms in many respects especially with the blind mudokens and bones. I always wish munch had at least one memorable area I just always think what could have been with vykers labs

I would have liked munch more if it was in the style of abe's oddysee.

Atmosphere is tricky. AO had dark, solitary subtlety. Comedy relief was minimal, the environments were moody and grim, you had no allies. While this is a great tone to give a one-off story, it doesn't really work for a series of games. You have to develop the characters and the world. The more you add, the more you chip away at that bleak, mysterious charm of the first.

This is why as much as I like AO, it isn't perfect. Abe was a flat, bland kind of character, and was consequently difficult to relate to. Same goes for the industrialists, who were unintelligible villain archetypes devoid of personality. In AE we were introduced to a clumsier and more reluctant Abe which, given the peril he's thrust into against his will, was a realistic trait.
Glukkons were given distinct personalities and accents, which tells us so much about them without spelling it out for us. We see Sligs out of their element, pantsless and lazy, which gave them more depth as well. These things were what distanced AE's atmosphere from AO, but if they didn't make the changes, AE would have just been a longer version of AO, and I think that would have bored most gamers. AO has atmosphere, but AE has the heart.

I fell in love with AO, it was the one game among a few that stood out for me. I really liked how it looked, considering I was 4 or 5 at the time, you'd think I'd be interested in something more cartoonish like Crash Bandicoot or Spyro. Anyway, I was ensnared by AO, it's music, atmosphere, story, characters, and more fascinated me. When I saw AE on the shelves, I bought it on the spot.

AE improved on the story and the universe which I already loved. The characters were fleshed out and another chapter is added to this amazing story. It was real fun.

Everything after that was lacking slightly, but I only ever really cared about the story behind Oddworld.

Same here. Despite the difficulty being well beyond my gaming ability at the age of 6, I still played both games to death until I went from needing mum's help with the Temples, to getting through the game by myself to getting 100% on both.
AO and AE were so unique to anything else beyond point and click, and they were in a league of their own... so I can see why the follow up of MO, a game which many would've preferred to have been "properly finished" instead of being pushed for a release title on the Xbox, but that same feeling I got from the first two games I felt when playing it. Yes, it was dimmer, and yes a lot of things needed to be made different because of the dimensional change, but hey for what it was I don't think it was all that bad. Heck, I'm even enjoying playing SW, and I suck at FPSeseses.

So in regards to the opinion of the maker of that video, he's totally entitled to what he says, but from what I can see OWI have taken the most note of what their fans and audience enjoy compared to other companies, especially now more than ever... honestly, quality takes time, they know this and they aren't setting themselves unrealistic deadlines at the risk of chopping the quality of the content they produce, as they've seen what response that got. The path OWI took was a path they'd look down eventually, and honestly better sooner than later, especially with the direction games were going in at the time and the way they're going now. I think they made the right choice, it's just a question of whether the better choice for the future is to stay in this new 2.5D perspective and another part is hoping for something 3D like MO but less combat heavy and more strategy-driven.

Humor was never really Oddworld's strongest point. They came up with some pretty great shit (exploding farts you can possess? genius.), but overall I feel like a lot of the humor was forced and it took way too much from the games. Also most of it ends up just being toilet humor. I'd like just a tad bit more of the dark atmosphere. Something that'll let you feel the severity of the situations the heroes are in. They can still be light and goofy characters. They can be incredibly optimistic through the entire game. It would be a nice contrast, with such a dark and dangerous for lack of a better word atmosphere the characters still being able to find something to laugh about, or get into ridiculous situations that they might not find so funny but the audience could.

I think one of the main things that gave it that atmosphere in AO and AE though, wasn't the characters or the art. I'm pretty certain it was the sound. The background music mixed with the sounds that were made by whatever happened to be nearby: Sligs walking in the next screen or sleeping, the way the music would change when a slog/scrab/paramite/fleech was nearby, the chord that was played after walking through a door or entering a dangerous screen, the sound the meatgrinders and saws made, etc...

In the games after AO, there was not nearly as much attention to detail regarding the sound. I'm pretty sure that's what took away a lot of the atmosphere, and why AE feels significantly more lighthearted. Then, when MO came around, you lost nearly all of the original atmosphere. The only part that even came close was probably the bad ending, but even then that might have been too dark for Oddworld. It was the whole: "Shit, you're in serious trouble" feeling in the pit of your stomach that I got the first few times I ever played AO.

I think it depends on what the story is. If it's entirely from the perspective of the weak, downtrodden character attempting to resist the oppression, then the oppressive forces should probably appear to us as evil and faceless as they appear to the protagonist.

But if we are getting a closer look at the operations of that oppressor entity, either from the perspective of a component of it or the previous protagonist who has become more savvy, that's when they get a face. and that's where some more humour can come in, when we see the sheer incompetence, laziness and failure that plagues the machine. The advertisements all have what I call "honest dishonesty," they're lying, but so blatantly so, and when they do reveal the truth they try to spin it (badly) into a feature. That's satirical and amusing done well, but doesn't work for all stories. We only got a brief glimpse of it in AO which worked for it. Abe was only meant to get the propaganda but not the distracting comforts.

But it can go too far. And as stupid and mislead as the glukkons and sligs are, they need to have at least some degree of competence and ruthlessness to be a believable threat. They're the bad guys but not villains. Or is it the other way around?

Let's just say they're antagonistic, not evil.

Well, they are keeping slaves, I think that could be considered evil.

Millions of people throughout history have kept slaves and I suspect the vast majority were perfectly nice. Slavery was simply accepted by society; those keeping them didn't necessarily have malign intents.

I have never play Munch's Oddysee and Stranger's Wrath and I will never play them.

I'm gonna look beyond the enormous short sightedness of that statement and put it down to bad wording, which I sincerely hope is the case.

One must remember however, that good and evil are subjective. Throughout the early 1900s, the IRA was a terrorist organisation (I'm talking before they lost the moral high ground and started bombing England), to the Irish, to me, to my family who were in the IRA, the pre-1920 IRA were freedom fighters. To the industrialists it is similar. Abe is simply a terrorist, to the mudokons, he's a freedom fighter. It'd be good to get a land-mugger's perspective.

So when you think about it, Abe's a bit of a bell end.

An interesting quote I remember was from George Lucas when he was discussing the original Star Wars movies.

To paraphrase, his thoughts were that to make a really good, effective, believable villain character, you can’t just make them a cackling cardboard cutout – you have to give them depth, motives, show that they’re people too. That as bad as their actions are, they believe that what they are doing is good.

I always found that thought an interesting one.

I agree that nothing really captured the same atmosphere after AO, due to the more comical tone. Some of the natives' spirituality and the industrialists' sinister appearance were lost when every character started wise-cracking in the exact same way.

When I look at the Mudokons (in cutscenes) or Grubbs when they're speaking, they just seemed like wise-cracking aliens, not tribal cultures who's very way of life was being endangered. I'm not saying that the humour is bad, only that it ended up shifting the focus away from the story/atmosphere a bit too much for my liking.

I've always liked that the industrialists and natives share each other's mannerisms. One could take that as an indication that they're all "cut from the same cloth-" that they're similar in mannerism to illustrate a connection between them. It also gives the Oddworld series et al its own unique tone.

If the Mudokons and other natives went around spouting faux-wisdom in an elderly tone, the writing would end up sounding hackneyed or stilted. The Raisin, I think, was the only exception they had. I feel like the tone is how Oddworld distinguishes itself from other franchises, especially considering these wiseass mannerisms are coming out of the mouths/beaks/fangs of things that look hideously alien.

The humor is Oddworld's brand.

The problem I've always had with the series' humor is that they spend so much time with the jokes that a lot of the characters are rendered as little more than jokes themselves. Very few characters seem like fleshed-out, fully realized people, and this is especially problematic with the industrialists. The scripts are written in such a way that you never have a chance to get to know the industrialists, even if their world is just as vile and greed-driven as one might imagine.

It's been stated several times that Abe is essentially a terrorist to them, but we never get to see how that impacts them (aside from Glukkons being worried and facilities being destroyed), and I think it's because Lorne doesn't really care, nor does he want us to care. It's not hard to see Oddworld as his revenge fantasy against people and groups that he's resentful towards- which is fine, you can do that (I'd be remissed if I didn't admit to falling back on that exact same muse once and a while)- but the really tough thing to do would be to show the impact Abe's terrorism is having on the industrialists, and even if it illustrates them exactly as he wants them to look (vile/greed-driven), it would still feel like a more complete story.

Maybe it's an issue with how little time is spent on them? Although that's probably because it's really Abe's story... I'm really only thinking back to Exoddus, here. Haven't even considered Munch.

Anyway, summary: It's always seemed like, rather than having detailed, interesting villains, Oddworld's idea of introducing an antagonist is to hold up a piece of paper with a crudely drawn Gluk and Slig on it with the words "Bad Gize" scribbled above it, with Lorn basically telling you to hate them. Maybe the humor is supposed to make that pill easier to swallow, but it really doesn't. It's funny dialogue given to characters we don't really know. Really interesting, realistic-looking characters who at least LOOK like they should be given more consideration than this.

I guess this is just the nature of Oddworld- bad guys bad, good guys perpetually beset, which is a shame, given the origins of the Glukkons. The Clakkers were the really the first time we've ever encountered a neutral/gray-area industrialist.

This is why I'm still crossing my fingers for Sligstorm- a more personal view of the world that the industrialists live in might be the best fleshing-out Oddworld could get since Stranger's Wrath.

In retrospect, this had far less to do with the humor of Oddworld and became my own personal gripes with the series so I guess I just took the opportunity to GO ON A FUCKING TANGENT BECAUSE WHY THE FUCK NOT MAN

I suspect that MO was meant to go in to the Industrialists' perspective in a bit more detail, given that we'd have seen the repercussions of Abe shutting down Rupturefarms and Molluck's trial in particular.

I agree with your wider point, though.

Yours is probably a fairer criticism than mine Dipstikk, maybe it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game between story and humour. But like you say, more focus on character developement and the wider context of what's going on could add more depth to Oddworld. I was blown away when Lorne talked about the wider Glukkon family and how massive the consequences of Abe's actions really were.

If there was a way to integrate that epic scale of things into the future games without ruining the pacing then I'd be ecstatic, but maybe it just isn't possible for a game (without obscenely long cut scenes.)