[Havoc]

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.

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.