If you're going to copy something from a mess of a game like Daikatana... at least copy the cool stuff like some of the weapon designs or the multiple time periods with a good amount of enemy variety.

@@DWTerminator At least we didn't get a grimdark Superfly with broken pathfinding to contend with.

You can use quicksaves in this game

@@user-we1ri Last I was aware there was at least one instance where they used a save item as a trigger so you actually hit a soft lock if you have it turned off. This was in the game for a long time after release and is probably still there. It was a bad design decision since it adds nothing to the game while also sucking up a huge amount of dev time to get working properly in their chosen engine when they had such a small team of essentially modders working on a project of this scope. There is already a save system hard coded in the engine they even tried to lock players out of in earlier builds but it was always accessible through console commands. They just chose to code an entirely separate system from the ground up. Lack of good prioritization imo.

Thing is... Quake is about 4-6 hours long and Quake 2 is 6-8 hours long. Wrath is about twice as long as Quake 2. It far more than outstays its welcome.

Marathon's maps are large and labyrinthine. The level design is the main problem with all 3 of those games.

@@DWTerminator This is why I have no idea why people liked Hedon so much. The gunplay and setting were cool, but dear lord they were some of the biggest most unintutitve mazes I've ever seen. For reasons I cannot comprehend boomer shooter devs often just make these absolutely massive levels that are impossible to navigate in a reasonable amount of time without looking up walkthroughs. Like massive levels are not inherently bad, but you need to be really good at level design to make them flow properly and most just aren't.

Levels in Hedon have pretty well signposted areas with landmarks, many with distinct style. large maps are not the issue , but uninspired encounter design definitely is. Wrath's Combat just feels samy after a bit.

The console version broke my spirit. $38.99cad for an incomplete, crappier version of a $32.50 PC boomer shooter... I'm done with 3DR and Fulqrum after this.

As long as they spawn far away and not in close range yeah, that'd be more enjoyable.

@@Garcia1995 I have to say that Prodeus had fair spawn points, but it's still predictable. Especially Doom 3 got on my nerves as they always made imps spawn right behind you.

That sort of monster closet design as it's called has been around since the original doom. Doom 3 just over does it to an annoying degree. And the fact that doom 3's levels are very cramped really doesn't help.

@@saisameer8771 Monster closets have been there since the original Doom, but spawning enemies is newer. I think Doom 3 started this trend, because before that enemies had fixed positions in the game.

I picked up a copy of it but haven't gotten around to it yet.

Tim's game dev stories are interesting and some of his takes on the design process are certainly interesting, but as you said he seems not to want to "rock the boat" and avoids criticizing things beyond a "lip service" approach. To be fair, he's more or less retired now, but still.

Having to earn a save just to exit a game without losing progress honestly sounds god awful to me. Save scumming never broke Doom, Quake, Blood, Duke3D etc. All of which will outlive games like Wrath.

I'd argue that limiting saves is generally a bad idea to begin with, and simply anathema to retro FPS design. It's always been annoying that people think save scumming is a problem that needs to be "solved" by imposing limitations on the player rather than fixing the game design aspects that drive people to save scum in the first place.

@@StodgyAyatollah Depends on how often you can earn one. If it's once every 10 minutes of gameplay it isn't that much progress to lose.

@@DWTerminator Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game. "Just don't do it." Not quite that simple: a lot of people are a bit compulsive about that: "I lost too much health/wasted too much ammo" and they load to do it better, breaking the flow of the game. Others quicksave after every enemy killed. I can see why game developers have been trying to come up with an in-between solution.

@@Ghost_Of_SAS Why even have an arbitrary restriction instead of just letting the player save whenever they want then? It just seams like trying to re-invent the wheel to me.

Damn what a truth bomb

Even ashes 2063 was medicore compared to blade of agony which was even longer, more diverse, and just as free.

Load times weren't a problem for me, and I wasn't even running it on an SSD. Your hard drive might be dying on you.

"This is also why I never finished the Quake 1 and 2 remaster campaigns - they had the exact same problem with cranking the action to eleven right from the start and having no room to increase the intensity anymore, which made the game feel stagnant after a while." I been noticing that levels in mods and remasters have been getting too big and complex lately.

Sounds like a skill issue

@@user-we1ri no, because I could totally make it, I just got bored.

@@randomdaveguy I get it. Dying on repeat would be pretty boring

Ion Fury, Amid Evil, and Dusk all immediately come to mind. Prodeus is solid too. I can only speak for stuff I've messed around with myself, though.

@@DWTerminator Thanks a lot brother.

Yeah, going downhill in the quality department. Especially when the lable 3DRealms is somewhere on it! Utter trash company! They are the new LJN.

It's more that the trend started off with a few unusually strong titles, so it just seems like everything else is downhill from there.

The video starts at 0:00.

Not unless you had a better editor 😅

The solution to damage sponges in FPS games is usually to provide the player with a hard-hitting weapon with a limited amount of ammo - enough to deal with the spongy enemies but not so much that you can just liberally annihilate the lesser enemies with it. Problem is Wrath isn't structured in a linear way so you won't necessarily have one of those by the time they introduce the spongy enemies.

@@DWTerminator That would certainly work for shooters in limited use cases, but there's a case to be made for variety in enemy design, and not just reskins and bullet sponging, for longer games.

The big problem with the boomer shooter resurgence is that it started out incredibly strong with stuff like Dusk and Amid Evil, so everything else aside from real standouts (such as Ion Fury and Cultic) seems a lot worse by comparison. Phantom Fury seems to be something of a mess in general, so from what I can tell, texture filtering is the least of its issues. Certainly was when I played the demo, anyway.

People forget that back then for every Doom we had about 10 "Corridor 7"s and "dr. Radiaki"s lost to the rose tinted glasses. Exact same thing happens now where for 1 good game we get a bunch of bad or "meh" games. It's normal.

I see that the console version is also noticeably less bloody than the PC version, which probably explains why the console store pages for it show the T rating instead of the M it really should be. $25 US on PC vs $30 US for a clearly inferior console version... that's just depressing. Hell I picked it up during early access before they bumped the price up to what it is now and even that still doesn't really feel like it was worth it. I'd feel downright insulted paying $30 for the console version.

@DWTerminator Yeah, I picked it up years ago on steam and feel completely burned by the console version. I'm sick of these greasy business practices. The 3DR and Fulqrum discords have been a bit of a mess lately too. 3DR keeps passing the buck to Fulqrum, and Fulqrum just seems to be ignoring most of the complaints. As for the blood, it seems to disappear within seconds, which makes me wonder if it's a performance issue and they just tossed the switch port onto the more powerful consoles? Or are they chasing a "T" rating on a boomer shooter where you can use teeth as ammunition? It's also funny to keep in mind that Fulqrum advertises the game as a "blood-drenched journey". While we're on the topic of advertising, would using PC footage in the console release trailer not constitute false advertisement? Considering the game we received is not the same as what was advertised. Sorry, I know I'm ranting, but I'm just sick of these greasy publishers. I was a fan of 3DR for a long time since the Duke days, but I'm not willing to give them any more of my money after this crap.