Warren Spector Starts His Own Shop 41
Gamespot has the word that designer Warrren Spector has gone ahead and formed his own development shop. The company, Junction Point, is titled after a MMOG that Warren designed but never got off the ground. From the article: "The company has started preliminary development on a "fantasy" title created by Spector, who worked at Dungeons and Dragons creator TSR in the 1980s. Although Spector said the title was rapidly evolving, he did not give any indication about what specific subgenre the game would fall under or what platforms it would be released for."
Re:Oh happy day! (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Oh happy day! (Score:2, Insightful)
The game was too compressed and felt trivial, from the scripting all the way down to the engine. It was still a good game but all these "little" things screwed with the fantastic atmosphere of the original.
For example, the first game had BIG, magnificent, significant places to explore. But when you finally reach Liberty Island in the second game, it's split into two pieces, shrunk down to mini-size, and you stay at ground level the whole time. It wasn't THAT bad, but there is an anti-climax in having to acknowledge that they sacrificed something key to the original's feel.
Similar with the interface and character streamlining - I liked the choices of mods and weapon upgrades that were there, but there should have been more of them because by the end I had already tinkered and tweaked enough to be satisfied. The first game was overly stingy about giving you stuff, and that made it a bit too hard but when all was said and done it was satisfying; the second game, OTOH, hands out multitools and canisters and ammo in every single nook and cranny. I only ever ran into an area where I died over and over during the final parts of the game when the rocket soldiers became common, which was more a mod-choice issue than a real challenge.
I'm covering the same ground as you now so I'll leave it at that; the micro-size of IW is what really hurts it. You don't even get areas in the game where you can just navigate silently past random challenges - it's all plot and subplot in every single room.