Forum Overview :: Sigil :: I don't recall liking Hexen very much, either.

[quote name="Dream Cast"][quote name="Ice Cream Jonsey"]I missed anything relating to anime completely. I think Shogo was the first anything I ever experienced that was even remotely anime. I think I was also automatically looking forward to every Monolith release at that point. But yes, the reason I hate Hexen is because of the hub based level design: There is a good friend of mine that makes text games and in a few of them one of the gameplay elements is learning by dying. I have struggled to play those games of his. I don't have the mindset to play the same thing over and over again. I could have what I am about to say totally wrong and if so, I apologize to Hexen - I seem to recall that you had to keep going over areas you had been to before in order to progress. And I don't want to say that this is "lazy" - that term gets misused. But I do think it's bullshit. I don't want to see the same level ever again once I'm finished with it. A 90s shooter level should be like a Tinder date. I get that it was probably a stroke of genius on the part of the guys that made it but I'd rather have a 5 hour game with no repeats than a 10 hour game where I have to go back over stuff. I really disliked Hexen. (But back then even when you hated a game you still played it for hours. Now there are games I love, games I genuinely enjoy(ed) playing like the new Shadow Warrior and the Shadowrun games and I look at my gameplay stats and it's like 1.9 hours.)[/quote] I finished every Raven shooter last generation - Quake 4, Wolfenstein, Singularity - just because they were one of the few developers left making Half-Life clones after the majority switched to making Call of Duty clones. I can confirm they are still masters of padding. Raven Software never met a maze of twisty passages, all alike they didn't like. The working title for their next FPS might as well be Passable Content on a Carmack Engine. In fact, the hub city from Wolfenstein (talk about working titles!) was pretty much exactly as you describe. Don't get me wrong: I love backtracking, when it's part of the gameplay. Super Metroid, Resident Evil, NHL '94, Pac-Man - all great games about retreading old ground. Backtracking only becomes soulcrushing when it's obviously only there because they didn't have enough linear stages to go around. I'm thinking of the open world racer that makes you commute between closed circuits (the first Forza Horizon had an option to fast travel to the starting line of your next race, provided you didn't mind paying real money from your real-life bank account every time you used it; I never played the second Forza Horizon), or any given 3D Sonic game (they're each badly padded in their own special way).[/quote]