How can a "roguelike" FPS be fun? Half of the fun of FPSs, to me, is learning the levels...

Looks fun, and clearly is referencing Strife, right down to the release year. The video sucks though, with the constant interruptions by the usual useless fanboy press quotes. Would rather see the game, ya know?

Might want to change that to a lowercase h in holocaust. The uppercase H specifically refers to the mass murder of Jews by Nazis in World War 2. While I generally don't care about proper capitalization in most cases - taken with the phrase above some people might get the impression that Strafe may be about something it is not.

Been following strafe for years and been playing his builds that was released, and I have to say I like how the game is. I just hope he fixed the lag issues with the engine and crashes that is all.

but so far this is looking like a day one for me ^_^

Not really my thing either, I just recently watched a video of the Penny Arcade guys playing Tower of Guns (another roguelike FPS) and well.. they didn't love that.
It's an extremely niche genre.

Even as lowercase it wouldn't make much sense in reference to this game, because independent of the specific use of the term in the context of the "Final Solution" perpetrated by Nazi Germany; means whole [url=https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/burnt_offering#English]burnt (offering).

Yeah, not a fan of that part.

And while the idea is interesting, I don't know. Maybe it'll need some testing.

The AD is quite peculiar indeed, not entirely well done despite knowing the 1996 vibe they wanted to give this.

We'll see, still 6 weeks to go to get opinions and reviews...

I'm not sold on the idea of procedural levels for this kind of game. A big part of what made Doom and Heretic so great was the level design, where elements were cleverly placed and really creative things done with the design. I suspect this game is going to feel very generic after a couple run-throughs, with every level quickly feeling like more of the same.

Attnention FPS designers:

Procedurally-generated levels are not a good thing. The reason why games like Doom and Duke Nukem are as great as they are is because they were carefully designed.

Letting the RNG do it results in samey, boring, lousy level design.

And that makes for a samey, boring, lousy FPS.



[EDIT]

lmao oh hai

In fact, I'd argue that what made a lot of the old school action FPS games what they were was their level design. Procedural generation means that they're missing the point entirely. The cynic in me just says that it smacks of laziness (and at worst, a lack of the ability to create good levels).

Quite so. I fear this will ultimately be a loosely confederated collection of anonymous halls and setpiece rooms that never gels into a consistent whole. Similar to other procedural FPS games like Paranautical Activity.

In principal procedural design should mean "infinite replayability", but without the human touch of creative design it more often means "bland repetition".

Doom, sure (and Quake / Duke / Blood / Shadow Warrior). But the level design in Heretic (and Hexen) I would call bad. It proudly displays its sadistic tendencies towards the player at every step, and I was never sure if it was because the Raven level designers enjoyed torturing people or just couldn't remove themselves from their perspective of all-knowing designers to actually realize that obfuscation isn't all that good a technique when it comes to player enjoyment.

So procedurally generating them would have probably made the games better. Incidentally, that's Ziggurat in a nutshell.

Having said that, "better" still doesn't equal "great", and considering how many roguelite FP shooters there are currently on the market, they should have just went with hand-made levels - this way the only standout feature is the aggressive nostalgia marketing (the KS trailer was awesome). Personally, I'm looking forward to Dusk much more (it has grown so much since that testing level, aww).

Roguelike is an immediate turn-off for me...

Remember deliberate, well crafted levels? I remember those...

wishlisted