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Will these features also come to the Xbox version?
I also am pleased to hear about the DLC, and will be quite interested to purchase that when it releases.
It's kind of weird that something that quick-saving is being put forward as a complicated feature. Speaking of the base game and features, I'm close to halfway done with the campaign and having a lot of fun with it despite being disappointed with several things:
1. Secrets don't seem to add anything of value
There are a fair bit of secrets and, while it can be neat to find them, it's something that messes with the pacing and objective of the level. The pace is supposed to be relatively quick, with dips in between, and the objective is to get out of the level. Secrets seem to rarely give the player a meaningful advantage or reprieve.
That said, the addition of double-jump and dash, like Doom 2016, doesn't seem to add much of anything to core gameplay. It facilitates finding secrets, sure, but that's about it.
Related and more importantly, there don't seem to be any secret levels and, honestly, that's a wasted opportunity and one to make collecting runes feel important. As it stands, runes are just required to open another level, where the player needs X runes to proceed. If, instead, the player found secret exits to secret levels and had to spend runes to unlock access, that would be both a neat narrative and gameplay feature.
2. Nexus Points are weird
There is likely a narrative point that I'm missing and, since I can't go back to the intro level and call boxes are sparse, I'm not picking up on why they're relevant. That's a missed opportunity to highlight why I'm doing what I'm doing. With Wolfenstein 3-D I was Terror Billy shooting very bad people and in Doom I was told what I was doing in the game manual, then at the end of each episode. Right now I don't know why, narratively, I'm doing what I'm doing -other then the only thing left to do when you're out of gum.
Nexus Points also work as a Zero Risk checkpoint. I'm totally down with greater accessibility in gaming because people of all ability levels deserve to play cool games. Period. Accessibility needs to be an option, whether dynamic like changing difficulty on the fly or static and enabled from the main menu, otherwise it will remove challenge from the game for other players by default. As it stands, Prodeus is not a challenging game for its apparent target audience, FPS veterans looking for something new, due to the Nexus Points.
3. Weapon Bloat a la Unreal 2 Updated
Unreal 2 was quite different from Unreal and I enjoyed the narrative flow and combat, however I didn't like 3 or more weapons bound to one keybind. It felt like a mix of wasting development resources and a superfluous need to add more cool weapons when there were already plenty of effective weapons, especially when weapons have secondary effects. There were already plenty of effective weapons.
Prodeus has an absolute workhorse of a pistol and shotgun (charged doubles its damage and even puts a DoT on the target, it's fantastic!), leaving little room for anything beyond an aimed explosive and plasma rifle. I mean, it's really cool that the pistol in a FPS game of this style is actually not just effective but a workhorse, but I doubt I'm the only player that says to themselves, 'well, I may as well try this weapon for a change'. It doesn't feel bad, but it does feel weird and bloated.
Taking just the Pistol, Shredders, and Chaingun as an example.
The Pistol does more damage per shot and is incredibly accurate. It can be used to snipe enemies at a distance and has a tight triple-tap secondary fire at close- and medium-range. Shredders do less damage and are less accurate than the Pistol, as well as outclassed by the Chaingun for shredding with bullets due to not needing to reload -and the Chaingun is picked up in the second level. Add in a higher difficulty than Medium, where enemies take more damage to kill, and the need to reload with Shredders pushes them completely out of a valuable proposition for a bullet weapon. But both the Shredders and Chaingun are pushed out by the Plasma Rifle. This means that the Pistol and Plasma Rifle push out the need for Shredders and Chaingun, even though, if there was a need to have an upgraded bullet weapon, the Chaingun can still find a place if pushed.
It's just...weird. But, on the plus side, clicking the mouse wheel actually stops time and the player can very, very quickly switch to a new weapon.
4. Shop and World Map Aren't Necessary
Given the way that double-jump and dash facilitate secret finding and buyable weapons being superfluous, there isn't a need for the shop. Oddly enough, expending ammo in the shop isn't refunded -but after purchasing the Bandoleer the player can buy ammo for ore, even though they can simply replay a level to collect more ammo. It's really, really weird and, ultimately, neither the Shop nor Ore are necessary.
The world map, while neat, isn't needed and take time to navigate. It may seem a petty gripe that the player can't simply click an old level and go to it, that they have to keep tapping the directional keys, but it takes 7 key presses to get from the photo-sensitivity warning into playing the game. It's really weird and tedious.
5. Sequence breaking and trigger use feels weird Updated
The use of triggers to permanently change levels is weird. For example, in Hazard the green liquid 'o death is used to raise platforms and this necessarily makes lower levels inaccessible. This makes sense. Yet in other earlier levels it arbitrarily locks off ares through doors no longer being an interactable or, like in Sacrum, forcefields. This does not make sense.
Another weird example is Descent, where it's even possible to skip the 4th lock, the very first one encountered, by simply entering the first secret area with double-jump and dash. This locks off the door to that lock and several enemies. This makes less sense, since either the trigger isn't needed and exists or that was a known issue and the 4th lock is tied to any or all other locks below, otherwise the level would be broken.
The only old school FPS that I can think of from id that was breakable was in the expansion pack of Wolfenstein 3-D, where Romero designed a level that had movable blocks tied to switches. If the player hit the switches in the wrong order, then they would permanently block progress in the level due to making a necessary switch inaccessible. Descent has the opposite problem: you can sequence break, ignoring a trigger, and it doesn't matter.
Despite the disappointment in these things, I still enjoy the hell out of Prodeus. The core level design is solid, the enemies feel both different and familiar, enemy placement is solid, and the shooting is good.
When you don't design for it from the start it can be hard to track down all the bits of state scattered around the game engine. That said, they should have designed for it from the start. The current resurrection system is insane. I played the open beta and people were telling them back in those days it was a bad design and they chose to ignore it.
You're definitely right on both counts, that it can be hard to track down relevant state points and that it should've been designed for out the gate. It's not necessarily weird to eschew a quick-save system over a checkpoint system, but it's definitely weird to have this sort of checkpoint system as a default state in this sort of game. I don't understand it.