How can you say that the game was good but the level design was the worst you've ever seen?

I haven't played FEAR but that sentence reminded me of Painkiller, which was fun despite having lackluster level design.

It's just unfortunate because (in the case of Painkiller at least) it could have been a great game with better level design, rather than merely "good". 

what he meant was the visual side of things, its just room corridor room and they all look the same.

As a gameplay space, each area is actually setup very well, and usually there are multiple entry points and routes for the AI to take which makes each fight different.

I actually really enjoyed fear, I never quite understood why it gets such a bad rap. 

sorry I should have clarified that, I was speaking plainly from a visual sense. Hence my comment about the d2 like level generator. But I do not agree that just because the level design was meant to be realistic that it had to be that repetitive and boring. Splinter Cell games have better looking maps and they are all about realism.

What made the game fun was the intensity of the combats, the usefulness of the weapons and the AI. And as daz said most the fights were setup well for utilising the AI. 

I only played the demo though but there certainly is a difference between realistic and boring/weak. 

the layout of FEAR's levels was 100% designed to work with the AI. The distribution of cover points, multiple entry and exit routes, corridor loops, size and shape of the spaces etc. etc. was purely made to create the combat experience that the gameplay designers intended.

The art direction is another thing, and yes it was fucking boring as hell. I wish people would stop confusing the two things. 

sucks. 

i'd say painkiller and fear are total opposites.

fear had shit visual design but good gameplay. painkiller and incredible visuals and boring gameplay. :P 

get those Painkiller maps to load into Fear, woo-hoo, win win.

I did love playing Fear exponentially more than I enjoyed Painkiller. Fear could get your heart beating with simple AI flank maneuvers, and those plain looking areas, in particular, I recall a basement near the start, could be creepy as hell. 

I noticed just then that in more than one place simnultaneously but also by pure coincidence two or more threads were "bigging up" AVP1.

Well I loved AVP1. The monster AI is pretty much the best I've seen, and not bad gameplay to boot.
Level design? (I liked it)

Shame AVP2 was so wank. 

i liked the office environments in fear. they had something going with that nice brownish plain style. The industry environments sucked a bit, though; too generic random pipe/grate systems? 

Both the gameplay and art in Painkiller were good (in my opinion), but the level design was poor to nonexistent.

You had good solid weapons and powerups, a good range of enemies with interesting behaviours... and an endless series of box rooms which did absolutely nothing to compliment or enhance the gameplay. Fail.

I don't actually know the details of the dev team, but if I had to guess I'd say the levels were made by artists from very basic plans provided by the game designer. They probably didn't have "level designers" at all. 

Some cool levels. Or was that the expansion? Or both? 

I didn't play all the way through it, but most PK levels I saw were literally like this:

1. Enter large box room. "Door" (ugly, out of place stone block that is) closes behind you.
2. Spawn 7 thousand waves of monsters, all of which charge directly at the player in aforementioned box room because there's no interesting combat terrain or any kind of AI scripting.
3. Defeat horde, "door" opens and you may exit the area.
4. Enter next area, go to step 1... 

that's how I remember PK too.

And personally I didn't think the monster design was all that great either. Like the endless boxrooms, they just seemed to be endless variations on the same monster design but with a slightly different model/skin to complement the aesthetic of the particular level. Sure there were some interesting ideas in there like the HP-sapping scythe thing, but without any decent AI it's reduced to 'just another basic melee weapon'.

Deathmatch was a blast. It also had bloody brilliant netcode. I never ever ever had lag in Painkiller. Once again the level design let that side of the game down a little bit though. 

AvP2 was heaps better than avp1. Better levels, better AI and better immersion. 

more cartoony, less moody

maybe its just me... 

I found AvP2 to better in pretty much all departments as well. 

Did have some well-designed levels - the 'venice' (made by someone who's never been there) level was excellent - manouvere through the city taking various routes with the sun dawning as you complete the level, changing the lighting. The bigger enemy's can pick up the smaller ones to use as human shields.

Levels like that did tend to be exceptions though.

I wouldn't say they had artists designing the levels, just inexperienced level designers who allowed themselves to be pushed around by the art team. 

I prefered AvP2 too, but AvP1 was scarier somehow. 

Avp2 was a great game, but was let down by the poor graphics engine :(

The models did look very cartoony and the animation was very jerky and generally very poor :(

I did prefer the graphics and atmosphere in avp1, though avp2 had a much better narrative and better gameplay scenarios in most places 

what avp1 did so well was the dark claustraphobia. The use of the vision modes - for all species - was masterful. Once they got that right, it didn't matter that the textures were hideous photosources and the level design bland and utilitarian.



And personally I didn't think the monster design was all that great either...they just seemed to be endless variations on the same monster design but with a slightly different model/skin to complement the aesthetic of the particular level.

Indeed.

The problem with PK was that it's designers clearly had a hard-on for oldskool FPS ( which was a good thing ) but they were under the sad delusion that DooM and Quake were great games because of two and only two things:

1. hordes
2. bunnyhopping

the rest of the experience seems to have completely passed them by.

This is a problem you get when the understanding of a type of game design is throttled by obsession with leetness; there's almost no diferentiation between players and designers, and expertise is reduced to an almost neurotic concentration on only a tiny area of gameplay. 

http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/17594

kind of a cross between Cave Story and Echochrome 

Yeah, been waiting for this one to come out, looks nice. 

"Indeed.

The problem with PK was that it's designers clearly had a hard-on for oldskool FPS ( which was a good thing ) but they were under the sad delusion that DooM and Quake were great games because of two and only two things:

1. hordes
2. bunnyhopping
"

I agree 100% with you. I hated painkiller, it was just a mindless slaughter of hordes of identical monsters(with different skins). The pacing, the quality of the design of the monster, the setting\atmosphere, the level design were nothing like the classics of id software.


I hope some day a proper successor to quake\doom will be released. 

http://www.gametap.com/grimm/episode_05.html