I’m still on an adrenaline rush, as I managed to vid “Kill Your Sons” on more or less my second attempt after nerfing the beginning a little bit. My reasoning for doing this was that it’s a
really long level, and it was almost a matter of luck whether a player would survive the opening on TC when scratch starting. As a result I gave the player three 1x recharge canisters. I also provide an alien weapon and three magazines for it (since there are so many Enforcers on this level – which drop ammo rather than weapons in
Chronicles – and the player doesn’t get any other weapon [the shotgun] until 3/4 of the way through the level [and only a middling amount of ammo for it], it would’ve been brutally unfair not to give the player
something).
It’s probably easier on a moment-by-moment basis than either “Hang Brain” or “Begging for Mercy Makes Me Angry!” (I haven’t attempted either level on TC yet, though after this, I may give it a try), but I feel that’s probably only fair given the fact that it’s more or less
both levels combined. Difficulty of a particular level scales with length, perhaps exponentially – that is, if a level has one segment that’s likely to cause a player of a particular skill to die, that’s a much easier level than a level that has
ten such segments, and moreover, the latter level is probably much more than ten times harder. As a result, “Hang Brain” mashed up with “Begging for Mercy” without changes to the difficulty of either would probably be more than twice as difficult to vid as either individual level would. The main concessions, apart from the opening, are that the rechargers in the Hang Brain segment give you 2x and 3x shields respectively, and the weapons.
Chronicles’ staff is probably overpowered, and the alien weapon is
definitely overpowered. I’m still not sure if I should change either of them, apart from the “staff starts out kind of weak, but gets better the more it’s used” idea I mentioned in the M1R thread.
This was, as I mentioned, my second attempt at vidding this level today. On my first (which I saved, but probably won’t upload because who cares), I made it to the eighth and final room of “Begging for Mercy” before dying. I got confused about the direction the player should face going into the teleporter, and I think that was what killed me. Honestly, though, I’m kind of glad I died the first time, because my second attempt was better in pretty much every way. Way fewer sequences where I nearly died the second time around; I think there were around five the first time and I only really remember one the second.
There are several aspects of this level that I find genuinely terrifying on TC. One of them is the invisible S’pht. There’s one room (the only architecture original to the level) where they rise out of the goo (they’re marked as immune to it in the physics to this level) after the player is halfway in, and there are plenty of opportunities for them to knock the player out. And because the segment is set down a couple of WU from the rest of the level, the player has no choice but to continue moving forward. The only strategy I’ve ever found that works on TC is to move forward as quickly as possible until you reach the high point, then retreat back to an earlier part of the level with better footing and wait for the S’pht to follow you. (To be fair, something similar to this is usually the best strategy for most parts of this level.) As it turns out, they don’t always even follow the player, and I haven’t figured out why. I had to try a few times in this film and had to fire the alien weapon at that.
Another is the respawning enemies. There aren’t that many of them, thankfully – mostly the Troopers on the second floor, as in “Hang Brain”. One of them respawns next to the most convenient 3x recharger on the second floor, meaning that backtracking to that point is always something of a risk. There are good places for the player to take cover outside the view of the Trooper, but if you’re coming up from the first floor, that’s not possible.
The third is that – and this is a new aspect of this version of the level – when you finish destroying all the wires in a given section of the level, it goes dark. This scares the shit out of me every time, particularly since Troopers from the second floor will wander down occasionally whenever the door is open. (It’s closed from the first through the fifth sets of wires of “Begging for Mercy”. I’m not sure I’m going to leave it this way, because it would make the level impossible to complete on co-op if everyone died, which I wasn’t thinking of when I designed it. I didn’t design this scenario with co-op in mind, and I’ll definitely have to overhaul a couple of levels to make them work with it; the other really notable example I can think of offhand is “Another One in the Dark”.) I kind of minimised the fear factor this time around because I went through and cleared out all the hostile S’pht on the third floor pretty early on (I did
not want this to be a potential failure point after around an hour of gameplay). Even with that, though, it still gives me the creeps. It’s one of the facets of the level I’m proudest of. (I also didn’t show this off, but Durandal’s map in the terminals gets hazier and hazier the more of him you’ve destroyed.)
There is a fridge logic aspect to this level – the segments from “Hang Brain” actually create
massive amounts of 5D space with the “Begging for Mercy” segments, but I’d argue that you’d have to take that up with Jason and Greg, since they’re pretty clearly intended to represent the same part of the same ship. And in any case, you have to journey so far from one overlapping segment to get to another that it’s unlikely to break anyone’s suspension of disbelief.
There’s also a quirk in the monster physics in that Enforcers don’t die flame deaths if killed by Pfhor goo, meaning that they still drop ammo if knocked into it (or teleported into it, as happens with five Enforcers in the seventh room of “Begging for Mercy”). I don’t understand why. I don’t remember changing it, so it may have been a quirk of the “Hang Brain” physics (the other Pfhor were also set to regard Enforcers as enemies, a change I
really don’t understand – this may have been copied from “Rise Robot Rise”). I didn’t even know it was
possible to set an alien to die flame deaths to some kinds of flame damage and not to others – they still die flame deaths to their own weapon, for example. And I don’t think it’s an issue with the physics for goo in the level, either – the Troopers, IIRC, still die flame deaths to it. I’m not sure whether I’ll leave it, if I ever figure out why it happens; thanks to the gigantic number of Enforcers, there’s already way more alien weapon ammo on this one level than you’d possibly need to complete it, unless you just flat-out fry all of them. But, on the other hand, it’s a fun easter egg to be able to wander down into the goo and loot their corpses.
One oddity with this particular play-through is that the uplink chip at the end didn’t teleport in. I don’t understand why, and it’s the first time I can ever recall that happening. It doesn’t actually matter from a gameplay standpoint – there are no uplink insert slots after that point in the scenario, apart from the hidden levels at the end, which start you off with a rebellion level, so you’ll already have lost it – but it definitely matters from a story perspective. Maybe I’ll just set it so the uplink chip doesn’t teleport in; I could move it to the polygon containing the last set of wires, which only opens up after the player reads Durandal’s “What to save and throw away?” terminal in this version.
Overall, I love this level; it may be my best remix of a Bungie level, even topping my “Come and Take Your Medicine” remix, and I’m
still thrilled that I finally have a vid film of it.
I have a couple other videos I’ll encode and upload after I’m done with this one, mostly dealing with odd monster behaviour. There’s a “Transport Is Arranged” (“Charon Doesn’t Make Change”) video where I walk straight in front of a number of Fighters and they flat-out fail to notice me. In fact, they literally walk past me as though I weren’t there. It isn’t a monster freeze thing; Previous AI is enabled, and you’ll see a much larger number of monsters activate later. There may be some aspect of Marathon’s AI that simply gives them a monomaniacal focus on one particular foe. I’d somewhat noticed it before, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it demonstrated this clearly. My latest “Kill Your Television” run demonstrates the same tendency. I’m going to have to give the monster placement of the latter a major rethink; I may simply be unable to use Pfhor and monsters that can be provoked to attack Pfhor in the same place, given the geometry of this level. It’s possible that altering the monster physics will help as well (I haven’t tried altering their intelligence; maybe if I raise it to some ridiculous number like 50, they won’t stop regarding the player as a hostile).
Anyway, these will be awhile; “Kill Your Sons” is a very long level. I wouldn’t be surprised if my film were 50+ minutes long. (I also played “Motherfucker=Redeemer” at the end, because why the fuck not; it’s probably 90 seconds or so. I didn’t try completing “Star’s End”, though, for a number of reasons.) Check this space in a couple of hours. I’ll also push the latest revision of the map file to master once I’ve done encoding the “Kill Your Sons” film (I should’ve done it first, but it didn’t occur to me, and I’m already halfway done with the encode).
ETA: New version pushed to master. Uploading “Kill Your Sons” video to YT now. Will encode “Kill Your Television” (I’m really going to have to come up with a new name for that; the level names are similar enough to be potentially confusing) and “Transport Is Arranged” videos now as well.
Edit 2: Kill Your Sons
Kill Your Television (still processing – 83% finished)
“Transport” is still uploading. Comcast’s upload speed is even worse than usual today.
Edit 3:
Transport Is Arranged
Edit 4:
Thanatos, Beneath the Dust, a remake of "The Slings & Arrows of Outrageous Fortune" with the idea "You think the original secret was ridiculous? I'll show you ridiculous!"