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Impie

The Demo Was Better (than the Full Version)

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GoatLord said:

Huh. I found episode 2 to be really boring and same-y, and actually thought episode 3 was much better. Episode 4 has some of the game's best moments.

I wasn't really a huge fan of the space episode either, DN3D to me felt like the kind of game more suited to Earth city levels and other Earth places along with the occasional alien infested places.

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I've got full Doom 1 game only years after playing Shareware E1, and immediately noticed and became disappointed that E2-E4 were not as rad as E1 was, IMO. Still, the shareware was "better than the full version" only in the sense that I would have preferred if the rest of the full game followed the design style of E1 (with thematic tweaks and gameplay improvements) instead of declining into less of an "elegance" and more of a "roughness".

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GoatLord said:

Shadow Warrior was incredibly disappointing. The sheer diversity of weapons, enemies and locations from the demo gave way to some 20+ additional levels, nearly all of which were mediocre. Not only that, but all the new stuff (enemies, bosses, weapons, locales) were underwhelming. The demo was like four massive worlds that were clearly part of an epic story, while the rest felt like generic FPS environments.


I thought SW was solid in level design, minus its two secret levels that aren't anything special. The expansions were very disappointing though.

Don't know why they didn't merge the 4 demo levels with the registered 18 either.

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Hell 2 Pay had a great 15 map demo...

Playing past MAP15 on the full version rapidly declined in enjoyment however because of some really fucking terrible maps in the later half.

Also: Destiny, nuff said.

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I'm hearing some horror stories about the full releases of Battlefront and R6 Siege, which bothers me because the closed betas for both were almost perfect.

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Da Werecat said:

Strife counts, I guess. I haven't actually played the demo, but I've heard that it was slightly more elegant in its approach to non-linearity. In the full game "the right person to work for" is being shoved in your face, while "the wrong person" is tucked away in some basement. I guess they wanted to reduce the chance of the player meeting the bad guy first and getting stuck while thinking it was the right way to go. Should've just make the screw up non-permanent instead.

The change of the first quest in the retail version seems like a last-minute decision. They took parts of the original quest and carved from it another one for the "good guys". The character whom the player is needed to silence in the retail game is a plot device in the demo, hinting the player that the questgiver was not to be trusted. He also does that in the retail game, but in the demo this encounter was optional, and presumably could be missed by players, resulting in a bad ending.

The demo also includes a different sequence after the player gets the comm unit and is contacted by Blackbird. The player gets a quest to sneak into the Governor's mansion's basement and retrieve a flamethrower. After that the player has to fend off lots of guards and Crusader robots. The entrance into the rebel base is also different: it's a teleporter found in some kind of warehouse instead of a hidden passage in the town hall, as in the retail version.

In short, the demo quest is more complex, but its successful completion depends on the player knowing the right sequence of things to do. Perhaps the developers wanted to minimize the amount of trial and error for the players at the beginning of the game and simplified the starting quest for this purpose.

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Doom.

Honestly, I keep Ultimate Doom around just to play the Shareware levels every now and then for nostalgia's sake, but I don't really like the rest of the maps. I usually use Freedoom with OBLIGE/mods/PWADs these days.

OK, maybe that was more brutally honest than it had to be, but it's true, at least for me.

Kontra Kommando said:

Alien Vs. Predator (2010)

I remember they let people check out the multiplayer death match prior to its release. I did have a lot of fun with that. But once the full game came out, it turned out to be pretty sub-par. Though in retrospect, it was not such a bad game. Nevertheless, I was quite disappointed, because I was expecting a lot from that game leading up to its release.

Performing fatalities on people was too much of a risk in death match; it became a conga-line of death, because you could just sneak up on someone in the middle of performing a fatality. You didn't even have to sneak, because they were stuck in an animation. Or you could just be shot to pieces while you're in the middle of ripping out a xenomorph's tongue as the predator, because you're stuck. I think once, there were 5 fatalities in a row when i was playing, which is pretty absurd.

EDIT:

Hmmmm, if Doom 4 will allow people to perform fatalities on one another in Death Match, I wonder how it will work around these "Conga-lines of Death". If you're able to just break away from the animation, than all should be fine I think.


I'm the sort of person that would literally pay money to see morons participate in "Conga-lines of Death" in Doom 4, especially if I could listen to their screams of frustration. A Deathmatch theme that revolved around performing fatalities on other players, and minimal weaponry would be awesome.

Actually, that would a fairly cool idea for a Brutal Doom deathmatch: bring back the 5-6 second fatality animations, make it impossible for everyone to do anything EXCEPT perform fatalities, and make it possible for people to interrupt someone else's fatality in order to perform a fatality on them. Common sense says that nobody would join that server, but you know it would probably be full at least 60% of the time. A "co-op" game with only friendly fire fatalities (the rest of the game functions like normal, but the only type of "friendly fire" allowed would be fatalities) would also be pretty entertaining.

EDIT: 2015 Cacowards!

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MrFlibble said:

Perhaps the developers wanted to minimize the amount of trial and error for the players at the beginning of the game and simplified the starting quest for this purpose.

I also think it could be an echo of the game's troubled development.

The team wasted a lot of time on the transition from one publisher to another. Most likely they had to abandon a lot of their ideas and rush the completion of the game. Simplification of the opening part makes sense when the rest of the game is relatively simple.

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Tekken 3 demo which only allowed you to play as Jin Kazama or Ling Xiaoyu, while the AI would use either only Paul Phoenix or Lei Wulong.

Of course then the full game rolled around and every fucker played as that button-mashing cunt extraordinaire Eddy Gordo, ruining everything for everyone.

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The demo for Redneck Rampage, which was actually an alpha, had working blood puddles ala Duke3D that for some reason don't display their graphic in the full release.

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BaronOfStuff said:

Tekken 3 demo which only allowed you to play as Jin Kazama or Ling Xiaoyu, while the AI would use either only Paul Phoenix or Lei Wulong.

Of course then the full game rolled around and every fucker played as that button-mashing cunt extraordinaire Eddy Gordo, ruining everything for everyone.

Oh god, fuck Eddy to death with a spoon! I hate that guy!

I always played as Hwoarang because he had some of the best combos, it was so much more fun than pounding the buttons randomly.

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Battlefield 1942 comes to mind... Again, for the same reason a lot of other FPS games have been mentioned. Wake Island was, in my opinion, one of the best maps in the game, with most of the vehicles available and thus a multitude of options for how you want to play. Again, not that the full game was bad by any means, but the demo showcased the best of what the game had to offer, and so even after getting the full game, I found myself still going back to Wake Island again and again. You had aerial dogfights, tanks, even ship combat, all while offering up a somewhat linear level with different options so you could charge head-on or sneak around from behind, depending on your playstyle.

A lot of the retail levels were either incredibly drab compared to Wake, limited vehicles, were linear meatgrinders with limited vehicle access, or a combination of all of those. Not saying it was the only good level in the game, but it was definitely one of the best.

There's also the Half-Life demo, which was a completely new episode. While Half-Life was good, there were long sections that just didn't feature the variety of encounters you saw in the demo. There were too many sections in the final game that were just boring corridors with the same types of enemies, while the demo featured a larger variety of enemies in one area with a bunch of unique set-pieces thrown in.

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geekmarine said:

There's also the Half-Life demo, which was a completely new episode. While Half-Life was good, there were long sections that just didn't feature the variety of encounters you saw in the demo. There were too many sections in the final game that were just boring corridors with the same types of enemies, while the demo featured a larger variety of enemies in one area with a bunch of unique set-pieces thrown in.

I only played the demo of Half-Life and I should say that it is indeed well executed. This is probably a major dilemma with demo versions in general: a good demo/shareware often showcases the best the game can offer, and in a very concentrated way, whereas the full version has all the same elements stretched across a much greater length of gameplay. Conversely, if the demo is limited it may not be the best advertisement to motivate potential players to buy the retail version.

I suppose that the most proper approach to demo versions is to put extra content into them that is not included with the full game. That should ensure the novelty factor still stays when the player gets the full release. However, this also means extra efforts spent on the new demo levels. I've heard that Half-Life actually recycled cut content for the Uplink demo.

BTW, I've also read somewhere (Wikipedia?) that the demo version of Gunman Chronicles actually includes extra levels that were specifically created for it, although they were later incorporated into subsequent releases of the full version. All playthroughs of the full game on YouTube that I checked have these demo levels. Can anyone confirm that earlier retail releases did not include demo levels?

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