smaller clumps of portal-friendly panels and more detailing. There's less redundancy, and certainly less wondering which panels to use, but there's also far more powerful puzzle tools in play here. Whereas Portal 1 could reasonably expect to pen in 99% of all players by sticking a ledge or a catwalk beyond reach of basic momentum (such as in the big turret showdown, one couldn't get up in a single fling), Portal 2's tools can break a room in dozens of different novel ways. Players can walk up sheer walls with light bridges, make new portal surfaces with paint, give themselves momentum and height boosts with other paints, and on and on.
Portal 2 had several magnitudes more effort thrown into the art design, especially in terms of atmosphere and variation. Portal 1 was a series of austere and simplistic boxes, which then gave way to clutter and some minor decay. Valve consciously wanted to avoid retreading in Portal 1's steps, and that informed their decisions from story to the chamber design. Not just aping the first game's style and pushing the gameplay into vastly different spaces, that's what they poured a lot of energy into.
Portal 2 has
far more organic and cluttered spaces than Portal 1 did. Most of the "looking for white panels" complaints refer specifically to the
, and they form an entire meaty act within the game's structure (whereas Portal 1's escape sections were over in no more than an hour for most). Spotting friendly panels was definitely a central part of Portal 1, it just happened to be brief (like everything else in the game).
Anyway, miscellaneous shtuff:
- P1-13: Cubes and buttons. Note how the inert panelling gobbles up an entire wall to prevent the player from shortcutting to the 2nd cube improperly. The door is linked to the buttons, so there's no need to wallpaper it and the floor to forbade flinging (and for reasons of monotony, tying all your doors to buttons is
not a good solution for freeing up more portal space).
- P1-15: Flings. Again, open floorspace follows from the tools at the player's disposal and the intended way to complete the puzzle. The walls are almost entirely useless (save for the second fling, as that's the base) to prevent skipping.
- P2-16: Act I, early, the game is still essentially tutoring the player on lasers. Ensuring the same outcome will ensure that most players see exactly what sorts of things the lasers are useful for.
- P2-17: Act I, tutoring, yadda yadda. Not only that, lots of portal-friendly panels probably would have allowed people to skip the entire puzzle by bridge-climbing up a wall.
- Wheatley chambers: Light bridges, funnels, and ample space in some places to fling. Know why there's inert panels everywhere? Because these rooms combined with these tools are a recipe for breaking it all to hell and leaving everyone involved unsatisfied. In all likelihood, that's exactly what happened in testing. If there's a usable light bridge or
especially a funnel anywhere in a chamber, it has to go hand in hand with hard obstacles of some sort (glass, emancipation grids, inert panels).
What I'm getting at is that Portal 1 wasn't scarce with its inert panels, it threw them in at the slightest hint of a player skipping ahead in a puzzle. It's tools were far more basic, and the game could thus afford to have uninterrupted patches of usable panels without the player breaking chambers. Portal 2 must, by necessity of chamber integrity, break up panel blocks because its tools get the player around in far more ways. But as I said before, in most cases this is merely less redundancy of usable surfaces. One sees the path forward sooner, but it has no detriment to the puzzle itself. Nor is knowing what your tools are, because the golden moment remains putting all the pieces together in your mind (the "aha!" moment). I still spent plenty of time contemplating the elements of the puzzle, which way I should try, and so on, the experience of discovery and experimentation was no worse for me than in Portal 1. It certainly had bigger blocks of usable panels, but everything you needed to know was still staring you in the face.
