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+--- Thread: technical suggestions (/thread-6536.html)
technical suggestions - Mexxi - 02-11-2011
just finished the game. congrats frictional games. you created another masterpiece. however, everything comes with a grain of salt and this title is no different. here are some suggestions of what could be improved:
sound propagation
this was broken beyond believe. i had to turn away 90 degrees from the sound source to hear it from the front. also, when turning away even more there were sudden drops in the volume, even though in reality the ear's perception is nothing like that. you can experience this behavior the most when talking to agrippa or when facing the pipe in the sewer that floods the stone basin.
alt-tabbing
seconds after alt-tabbing into windows the game locks the mouse cursor in one of the desktop's corners, making it impossible to navigate unless you use your keyboard. if you want to take notes during gameplay or want to consult a walkthrough or just want to take a look what programs in the background might be doing this is highly annoying and just not what could be expected from a game in this day and age.
auto-saving
i can see that you tried to keep tension high by not giving players the option to quicksave, but you should reconsider the save-option in its current form. during the first level loads i experienced constant crashes. upon restart i was not just forced to run through the already finished level i was trying to leave, but had to start from the very beginning, because no progress was saved at all. my suggestion: save after every item the player obtains, or at least after every progress he makes. i'd also pledge for more accurate save points, for example if you get killed by a monster, then the player might spawn in a location he hasn't even visited before. the spawning location should be right before the player encountered the monster. that's sometimes the case already, but it's not done consistently throughout the game.
ambience
the level architecture as well as the gameplay itself does little for the horror atmosphere. the castle design practically never changes, so the redundancy kills the tension that could otherwise be created through the level design. that leaves the job to the ambience and amnesia does in fact try to compensate through it. however, while the ambient sounds themselves are great in their own right, they are used far too often. hearing the same footsteps over and over again from all kinds of directions that don't make sense identify the sound as being ambient and therefore it becomes useless to keep the player on his toes to expect an enemy to cause these sounds. this is milked so much in the first few levels where actually nothing is happening, that i just phased those sounds out. it also didn't help hearing them in what seemed like a loop that was repeated every 10 seconds.
ambient sounds should either be created by real enemies and surroundings, or should be coming from a vast selection to make it harder to identify them as meaningless background noises. it would also help if certain levels had their own distinct ambient sounds. only a handful of sections actually offered that (the escape run from "cells" to name a positive example). as a veteran thief player i was not just bored by most of the background sounds, but also put off. other people here moaned about the constant teeth grinding sound which hints at the same problem: the over-usage of the same sounds to the point where they become a nuisance and do nothing for the atmosphere.
launcher
each and every time the player starts the game he is pestered with the options launcher. why? i can see the point in starting it when the game starts for the first time, but after that it's just a nuisance. no one changes options that frequently. even worse: its native resolution (800x600) is bigger than the game's supported minimal resolution (640x480). now, if someone actually runs the game on a desktop with that native vga res, then he couldn't even start it, because the buttons wouldn't fit on the desktop any more.
sounds unlikely? i experienced quite a few crashes while playing the game and more than often my desktop would run in 640x480 after the crash, even though it usually runs at 1680x1050. no biggie. usually, i just restart the game and be done with it. in this case i had to re-set my desktop res to start the game, because i couldn't access the necessary button on the launcher...and that every single time. needless to say how annoying that is, especially if you consider that two thirds of the launcher's space is used for a mere image that has no functionality whatsoever. i also can't recall any game that ever used such a huge options manager. even settings programs of recent games like mass effect 2 that offer a lot more options than that of amnesia use windows that don't exceed vga-resolution.
object selection accuracy
grabbing small objects like tinderboxes requires the player to aim exactly. i'd wish for a more tolerant setting. there's no point why the mouse should always be dead center. it's not like all useful objects are grouped so tightly together for the player to need such a tight control. this makes it especially difficult to grab objects placed on high locations while jumping.
on the other hand, the game has pretty lax requirements when it comes to make objects interact with each other, e.g. fitting the pipes onto the wall in the sewer control station. it would have been great if picking up objects was just as comfortable.
light sources
the player should have the option to extinguish light sources. at least candles could be pinched out with a finger. once you're in monster territory, easily scared players might find themselves in - by them - well lit places during a monster spawn with little possibilities to hide.
also, some of the chandeliers can be seen set alight, but the player himself can't actually light them up. would have been nice if that would have been possible.
anyway, great game and it's even more superb that you enabled people to make their own mods for amnesia. keep it up!