Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20161116194210/@comment-3547390-20161219200845

Depends on what title you are talking about. Hexen? I would say Maulotaurs are more painful. System Shock? Another story entirely...

Indeed, that is what makes it so hard to describe, because there is so much I like but so much I dislike, so I become conflicted on what I am saying. I definitely like the darkness, it plays to my liking of the gritty 90s style. The removal of the stats screen is possibly one of the best things I have seen about Hexen, you don't know how stressful in-game stats are, the more the worse the stress. Oh, I absolutely love the melee combat, I love fast paced combat and take punching things that can kill me in a few shots as a challenge. As I have said, it is a great system, doing what is challenging about punching Barons but getting rid of all the tedium. This is what I wanted melee combat to be like in games. Environmental puzzles are fine by me, they definitely are better than relying on tedium such as spamming every wall or requiring guessing some sequence, or finding that one random red lever hidden behind something with no clues whatsoever. Exactly, you talk about System Shock, but the game never really had a sense of anything occurring and so the entire thing felt boring. It was more "I have seen this 5 times already and dealt with all these enemies before, just get me to the switch" than "I just caused a door to open in another part of the world, time to find out what I did".

Eh, as I keep saying, Ettins aren't challenging, so having them spawn a bunch isn't really my idea of fun. It just is repetition and punching the same guys over and over. Think of it like Skinner's Rat, I am flicking a switch and not getting any pellets, so I am questioning why I am flicking the switch. I am killing enemies, but they come back, so it feels pointless that I am not just rushing through the game as fast as possible. That is what respawning does to me. It isn't as crazy as Doom, especially since it is just weak mooks instead of hitscan opponents, and there is no limited ammo supply. Still, it just is boring. I would rather have ghost towns.

Maybe I wouldn't be moving so erratically if I wasn't hastened by the constantly respawning enemies. Say what you will, but I have yet to manage to make a Hexen map entirely quiet and free of monsters for even a minute's worth of time.

Yeah, a big part of the thing about these games was that they were trying hard to show what the game could do versus previous games, sometimes at the expense of things actually playing well. It was an experimental period. The problem with experiments is that a lot can go wrong, but when it goes right it is amazing.