Jaime_Wolf said:
Also, most of the people talking about how "easy" the puzzles were need to (a) go back and play Portal and (b) realize how the puzzle design has shifted focus.
From easy to easier, but with a bag of tricks, which means that it is even worse than in Portal 1 because you barely get past the tutorials for any of them and this spreads right through to the end of the game. At least the first game got past that stage, even if only slightly. Considering how the only majors complaints about Portal 1 seemed to be how short and how easy it was, it seems pretty brain-dead of Valve to ignore 50% of that.
People are not remembering how easy the overwhelming majority of puzzles were in Portal.
Wait, so which is it? The puzzle design has "shifted focus" but is easy just like the first game? Talk about invalid complaints...
Most of the "hard" puzzles in Portal were reflex tests, forcing you to fly through and quickly place a number of portals while carefully controlling your falls.
First of all here, this is untrue. Maybe you should (a) go back and play Portal.
The puzzles were simply different then: more complex and open ended. They cheaped out in 2 by making everything shiny-textured, meaning no portals. 1 had more freedom and often multiple ways to solve puzzles, which even though was sometimes unintentional it meant that you were doing what the game was teaching you: thinking with portals.
The other change was getting rid of energy balls. The lasers were boring. Targeting from point A to point B is far more simple. They completely eliminated a layer of complexity from the game: timing. No more moving platforms or requiring multiple switches. The only puzzle I remember that imposed a small window of time was the chamber with the blue gel and the water constantly falling on the square. And unfortunately they put an invisible ceiling that prevented me from simply bouncing up to the roof, which would have been a nice personal achievement.
Actually, that upper area was one of the extremely few times that the game didn't completely point to where you needed to go or shoot and it deviated from the path a bit, if only slightly, by making you backtrack 20 feet, in lieu of absolutely linearity. Such a thing was welcome, and I think both games could have benefited from more of this, but especially 2.
They were difficult from a platforming perspective rather than a puzzle perspective.
And to hammer in the point some more, you demonstrate how they removed something that people may have actually liked. Do you not even see that platforming elements are integral both Portal 1 and 2? In fact, I'd say there are even more platforming segments in Portal 2, but unfortunately they are limited in both form and to being outside of puzzle chamber areas. Once again, less complexity.
Portal 2 did away with most of the reflex-testing and actually added some complexity to the puzzles.
And you demonstrated this point so well.
Also, you have to consider that you had no prior training with the gameplay mechanics going into Portal whereas you have potentially an entire game's background going into Portal 2.
Yet they made the game for beginners.
As for the linearity of the puzzles, I don't even know what to say. You went through a NUMBERED SEQUENCE in Portal. Portal 2 isn't any less linear, but I don't really see how it is (or really could be) more linear.
Another invalid complaint. Try reading your own phrase again:
linearity of the puzzles. The puzzles. They themselves were linear. Most of them were just fixing each individual area in the chamber to be able to do something in the other part of the chamber. This isn't wanted "complexity", this sounds more like Wheatley jamming two test chambers into one. And he wasn't the smartest sphere around.
And I flat-out do not understand some of his complaints in the video. There are too many sequences where you have to try to find portal surfaces and where the path forward is difficult to find, yet the game is too hand-holdy by giving you directions? These things cannot both be true.
Okay, you're right and wrong, but still wrong on both parts. Maybe those parts aren't so much holding your hand as it is slapping your hand when you go where the designers don't intend for to go, making it just a process of elimination.
As for actual hand holding: remember all the markers? All over the place there were circles with Xs in them, deliberately solving half the puzzle for you. Then the other half was often just finding the white patch of panels between your current location and the exit.
Also, he never actually said it was difficult to find the next path. He just said you have to hunt for the patch on the wall. Yeah.
And given the story, wouldn't you expect the game to point you in the right directions since it's part of a controlled laboratory test?
Except large parts of the game were not part of any test. So which is it? These things cannot both be true.
It would have been nice to see him stress more how great a game it is and also mention how it can't quite live up to the predecessor rather than the opposite stressing. This feels vaguely dishonest - if you realise that your review is being biased by comparison to the predecessor, you should try to avoid that bias, not embrace it.
Well the reality is that Portal 1 exists, and that Portal 2 is a sequel. Remember the Fallout: New Vegas video? Remember the Mario Galaxy 2 video? If the games are similar enough, then the focus is different, rather than rehashing all the points that already exist from the first game. Comparing the sequel to the first game is the easiest out, and it seems that was done here specifically to do justice to the game. Instead of going on a rant about it being a sequel or the same game with a marketable numeral grafted on to the title, he gave his overall opinion and explained the differences and what he thought was better or worse this time around. The lack of anachronistic placement of subjects is of little import; he still got the necessary words out.
