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Game with best Level design this generation?
- Thread starter SantaC
- Start date
um... how could you possibly say Super Mario Sunshinre or Shenmue?
Super Mario Sunshine had a bunch of levels that required some stupid trick that you hadn't been taught to get anywhere, or it was terribly straight forward, yet obnoxious to get where you needed to be. The last few levels were an utter pain to get around, even knowing what you were doing, not that the other 4-5 were terribly exciting or challenging.
And Shenmue? What??? Wherever you needed to be in the game, you were always an obnoxious run away from it. There weren't really any shortcuts worth using, it was a bunch of walking through similar looking city streets. Shenmue 2 was even worse. A bunch of long runs through similar looking city streets. Even the cities you spent 15 minutes in had terrible layouts in terms of game design.
PoP:SoT and Psychonauts had excellent level design. Outside of a few hiccups (the area where you had to push boxes and jump around on rafters in PoP... that was just bad. There was no way to do it quickly, and the mailman & actress stages in Psychonauts, same thing, there wasn't really a way to do them quickly, it was a bunch of wasted time running from area to area. Haters of the last level be damned, I like my platformers to have challenging final stages).
Castlevania: Minuet of Dawn or whatever the US name was had good stage design, also. Not too much wasted time, once you were stronger than enemies, you could just run past them. Or fly past them, depending on how far you were.
Super Mario Sunshine had a bunch of levels that required some stupid trick that you hadn't been taught to get anywhere, or it was terribly straight forward, yet obnoxious to get where you needed to be. The last few levels were an utter pain to get around, even knowing what you were doing, not that the other 4-5 were terribly exciting or challenging.
And Shenmue? What??? Wherever you needed to be in the game, you were always an obnoxious run away from it. There weren't really any shortcuts worth using, it was a bunch of walking through similar looking city streets. Shenmue 2 was even worse. A bunch of long runs through similar looking city streets. Even the cities you spent 15 minutes in had terrible layouts in terms of game design.
PoP:SoT and Psychonauts had excellent level design. Outside of a few hiccups (the area where you had to push boxes and jump around on rafters in PoP... that was just bad. There was no way to do it quickly, and the mailman & actress stages in Psychonauts, same thing, there wasn't really a way to do them quickly, it was a bunch of wasted time running from area to area. Haters of the last level be damned, I like my platformers to have challenging final stages).
Castlevania: Minuet of Dawn or whatever the US name was had good stage design, also. Not too much wasted time, once you were stronger than enemies, you could just run past them. Or fly past them, depending on how far you were.
gollumsluvslave
Member
I'd have to say that Prince of Persia : Sands of Time stands out as having great, and consistently great level design.
I was constantly amazed by the immersiveness of the palace, and the fact that it felt like one whole level, as opposed to many different levels.
I was constantly amazed by the immersiveness of the palace, and the fact that it felt like one whole level, as opposed to many different levels.
Speevy said:
I doubt it. It's one thing to read something that seems obvious... but it's another to articulate or to think it through from scratch.
Not saying most aren't considerate of the idea of good level design... but I doubt everyone comes up with the same things... and I'd wager more than a few are muddying the idea of good level design with the idea of good game design (they kinda go hand in hand in many instances; but good game design can divert attention from average level design; similarly, poor game design might dull a legitimately well designed level).
The people answering Halo without qualifying it can be automatically ignored as well.
robertsan21
Member
First place:
MGS3
runner up
metroid prime
RE4
MGS3
runner up
metroid prime
RE4
Version 3.0
Member
Y2Kevbug11 said:
I blame the FPS genre for that strange complaint. Like it or not, Prime gets lumped in with FPS games. And the FPS genre has become so linear that I think players are now having a hard time coping with open world design. I can't think of any console FPS games that don't have linear level design--no choices to be made whatsoever about which way to go. And the only PC FPS I can think of in recent years with open levels is Far Cry. None of these games even use the free-roaming but key-based system of Doom--they're just straight corridor shooters. Even the vaunted Half-Life 2 has choice-free level design. And Doom 3, which was supposedly a spiritual remake, never made you figure out where to go like Doom did.
Contrast that with Metroid Prime, which allows you to go anywhere you can get to, and lets you earn abilities to get to new places. Now these people who are used to going straight ahead through the whole game, never allowed to get lost, have to figure out where to go--and how to get there as well. Oh no!