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bones58

Honest opinions on Strife

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I noticed a mixed reaction on this forum to strife, which somewhat surprised me slightly because as far as atmosphere, immersion and story go I think it's one of the best games to ever use the doom engine.

Your thoughts?

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I really enjoyed Strife. But a mixed reaction is to be expected, since people on this forum have a wide variance of tastes.

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I rather liked it. I liked the RPG elements, and for the Doom Engine it was a damn good show with everything it showed. I felt some weapons and enemies were kinda meh, like the machine gun I thought was kinda not great. Ate ammo way to quick and the ammo pickups didn't give you much, or something I dunno.

Anyways, I thought some of the VA work was over the top, but I liked all the game's artwork, the comic book stuff, that was all pretty neat and cool. The music was... EH, not great, but not terrible either.

But overall I thought it was pretty solid.

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I thought it was a good game BUT I didn't like it enough to get very far. It was my kind of game but I think the story, setting, visuals, pacing, weapons and enemies just didn't have that special kick that other games of its time provided. It was sort of a jack of all trades and master of none of the video game world. By that I mean that it was good at everything it did but wasn't superb at any one thing.

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Strife's very special for me. The music, atmosphere and weapons are all great and the level design is imo the strongest of all IWADs. I wish there was one or two more projectile opponents, but outside of that it's a pleasure to work with too.

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To me, it's a terrible game. Built around a generic sci-fi story not told in a particulary interesting way, you can feel how often it is banging its head against the limitations of an engine designed for combat. Everything about it is clunky and forgettable.

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Khorus said:

Strife's very special for me. The music, atmosphere and weapons are all great and the level design is imo the strongest of all IWADs. I wish there was one or two more projectile opponents, but outside of that it's a pleasure to work with too.


Agreed wholeheartedly.

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Khorus said:

Strife's very special for me. The music, atmosphere and weapons are all great and the level design is imo the strongest of all IWADs. I wish there was one or two more projectile opponents, but outside of that it's a pleasure to work with too.

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Khorus said:

Strife's very special for me. The music, atmosphere and weapons are all great and the level design is imo the strongest of all IWADs. I wish there was one or two more projectile opponents, but outside of that it's a pleasure to work with too.

I very much agree, except for the latter. Everything in strife is hardcoded, including quest stuff. That makes it difficult to use in a vanilla mod and probably a turnoff to others.

But yeah, the game itself is a lot of fun, and I love the atmosphere too! Its a shame there aren't more mods for it out now.

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Strife is a good game which was hampered by its developers' poor grasp of the engine. If they had a better understanding of how the Doom engine worked, they could have modified it better to make their game more robust and easier to design for. See how coop multiplayer is basically impossible.

In fact it probably would have been a lot better if they had licensed not the Doom engine, but the Hexen engine. They'd have had a ton of things they wanted (such as hubs and inventory system), including what they didn't manage to implement themselves (moving walls), and they'd have had the basis to make it less hardcody (MAPINFO, SNDINFO, ANIMDEFS, etc.).

As far as the non-engine side of the game goes (setting, textures, sounds, level design, etc.) it's quite good. Not the best action-adventure game ever, but still memorable, and the voice acting was surprisingly good.

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It was alright, but as Gez says, it could have been much better if it was built on Hexen's extended engine.

Wasn't a fan of the combat either, to be honest. The weapon variety was a bit shit to me, although this is probably because I expected/wanted it to be closer to Doom's fast-paced, action-centered "shoot everything" gameplay.

Worth having, but it's not one I've properly played through since the first time, all those years ago.

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rf` said:

I very much agree, except for the latter. Everything in strife is hardcoded, including quest stuff. That makes it difficult to use in a vanilla mod and probably a turnoff to others.


What about SeHackEd, that can't handle custom quests? I don't know anything about it, except that it looks very similar to DeHackEd.

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hex11 said:

What about SeHackEd, that can't handle custom quests? I don't know anything about it, except that it looks very similar to DeHackEd.

It can't change codepointers unless someone decides to do some heavy trial-and-error on all Strife executables to implement the feature. But it's still usable to replace certain objects that should act similar to the originals, or allow some gimmicks exemplified in the Sehacked documentation.

Custom quests? Maybe no in Sehacked. But who the hell said they're hard coded? They are controlled by dialogues and "token" items, which can be edited by using a program written by Kaiser or Blzut!3.

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Totally not my kind of game, but seems well done and caters to a different fan base.

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Strife is probably my favorite game aside from Doom to use the doom engine. Talking to NPCs and sneaking around and stabbing guards to death was fun to me.

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Strife is super-great. What Khorus said, then bonus points for being a game that you can do insane stuff in and even break to hilarious results. :D

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I think Strife is a good game, but I feel it's bad guys and weapons (i.e the bad guys and weapons by themselves as much as against each other) are not as balanced as Doom, Heretic and HeXen.

For instance, there is a fine line with regards to making a powerful bad guy, where it feels fair when you take damage from it versus making a bad guy powerful through there being near no way to avoid taking damage from it.

Sometimes, a bad guy can be one or the other simply because of a couple of numerical stats (i.e attack speed, pain chance, health etc).

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The biggest problem with the game is that both FPS and RPG parts are pretty mediocre, which means that the whole game is mediocre, just doesn't shine. Plus, there are some annoying things like extremely accurate ceiling turrets or those spiders.

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