I nearly wasn't going to play Enclave. I got it anyway, but upon installation get a blank screen when loading the game. A month later I decided to come back to it and check some forums for a solution. Turns out if your monitor is 60hertz it won't work. A rediculous problem, but easily fixable as I pumped my monitor up to 75hertz.

Having played through the entire game in two days, the second half in one sitting, I really struggle to think of a game, at least action game, that looks this good up until 2002. The level design is top notch all the way through - to the point of absolutely inspiring me to make my own levels. The levels are fairly small and cramped, with a theme last scene in Wheel Of Time. Only WOT was rather bland throughout most of the game, whereas Enclave is brilliant the entire way through. There are many different design styles from villages, castles and citadels to more creative islands, mines, hell-like outlands, woods and even a haunted house. The game engine is good, but doesn't allow the visuals to depend on fancy engine features for its looks. Instead what we have in Enclave is great architecture and design matched with wonderfully intricate textures. There appear to be only two level designers for the game - one of which was JF Gustafsson, creater of two of Quake 2's best custom releases, Age Of Panic and 1964. So it's no wonder we've got a visual feast from Starbreeze.

Only nitpicks with design would be that there are a few levels used twice in game. The reason why they're repeated is because you play this game in two halves. The first half of the game your playing the good guys, while the second half you return to the beginning of the story and repeat it as the bad guys. It was an interesting way to play through the game, but ultimately lead to a short and uninspired story.

Also one major glitch was the final two levels in the first half were harder than any of the levels in the second half. In fact the finale at the end of part two was dead easy.

While much of the game play was great fun, it was very unbalanced. As you progress through the game you get the choice of different characters to play, with different weapons. I attempted to play most of them and found that the Druid/Sorceress was easily the most dominant character with her long range spell attacks. Any close-range melee combat with many of the other characters was poor and very difficult. Even on easy, I'd die in no time trying melee combat with the large strong characters. While as the Druid/Sorceress it was breeze as enemies usually couldn't even get to me in time. So playing Enclave as any melee based characters is likely to be far too frustrating.

The other problem is no quicksave. If you die, you start the level again unless you've found a checkpoint. In that case, whenever you die you respawn at the checkpoint. It doesn't restart the game at the checkpoint, it simply respawns you. Which basically means you can just keep respawning until all enemies are dead, which makes it even easier than a quicksave. Frustratingly, sometimes checkpoints don't come soon enough, and some levels don't have them at all. The penultimate level in the first half was badly needing a checkpoint and I think some people may give up on that level.

If you only play first-person-perspective, you can switch from third to first very easily in Enclave. I couldn't figure out what the key was, but I accidentally pressed it at some stage. I'm a FPS fan, but for Enclave it actually seemed better as third person, especially when you get to play as the scantily clad Druid. More third-person-perspective games need the option of allowing first-person.

Enclave isn't perfect; the checkpoint feature and lack of quicksave is frustrating and the characters are not well balanced. But with gorgeous level design, its not a game you want to miss. Sadly, I think many players have skipped it. 

Yo Tronyn you should play Enclave, you'd appreciate it I reckon - it reminds me a lot of Heretic 2 and Rune. Just make sure you play as the Druid/Sorceress. 

is definitely awesome. 

I made 4 levels for breakthrough.

Kasserine Pass II was the second desert level. This had the mine detector segments in it. I would like to hear your opinion of the section where you escort the minesweeper tank while sniping at rocket launcher guys.

I also made the third level, Bizerte Canal. This had the canal crossing, and the section where an NPC has to pick a lock while you fight off guys on neighboring rooftops. I'd love to hear if you liked that section too.

Then i made two multiplayer maps, Anzio Beach (foggy bombed-out beach town) and Tunisia (narrow canyon connecting two desert towns.)

Some screenshots here in case you forgot:
http://www.celephais.net/cv/portfolio.htm

Also about the level design, we had a lot of community mappers on that project. Of the five or six main level designers, we had Yogi, Amethyst7, Unitool, and myself, all from the quake 1/2/3 mapping scene. Probably the only reason we could ship a decent game in the ridiculous short schedule we had is everyone knew the quake3 tech really well. 

Your 2 levels actually had quite difficult parts to them. The second desert level was overall pretty difficult from memory, especially escorting the minesweeper tank. And that lock picking scene was pretty hard too - you have to make every shot count. The idiot NPC got blown up a couple of times haha. No ammo problems on your maps though.

BTW what maps did Yogi make? I loved his Q3A maps, he's got a real talent for detail. You can't really do that sort of detail in realistic shooters though. 

thanks for the generous comments but they should be directed at metl :) 

my memory is a bit fuzzy, but...

I know Yogi did the very first level and I'm pretty sure he also did the very last level or last two levels. Beyond that, i'm not really sure but I think he made one more somewhere in there. 

lol yeah metl, that's what i meant :P 

http://www.ausgamers.com/games/duke-nukem-forever/screenshots/

I take it the game isn't optimised yet - not even any anti-aliasing here.... 

Which doesn't antialias, since it uses deferred rendering.

Looks underwhelming. 

Who transported me to LAST WEEK's NEWS?? Timewarp makes me dizzy yo...

Looks fine to me. 

It's not UE3.

And it looks great. Not awesome, but I suspect if it still has the Duke way of over the top crazy firepower and enemies, it'll look amazing in action. 

Top 10: http://tigsource.com/articles/2008/10/05/demake-compo-results

Full gallery: http://tigsource.com/features/demakes/ 

that strippers ass is hot. i'm sure it will be great when it finally comes out, but nothing we haven't seen before. 

Just beat CoD4. Pretty good. The icing on the cake was the after-credits level. Totally unexpected and just a fun joyride. Good ending too. 5/5 I would think, maybe 4/5 because it was so short. 

It certainly _looks_ like they did. Anyway, we'll see.

Eventually. 

yeah they did. they decided to scrap everything and move over to unreal engine 2, but i think since then they scrapped it all again to move up to unreal engine 3. which is fair enough because 2 is getting on now. hell, before long 4 will be available for licensing. 

Like they used in Prey. 

I am an informed gamer and I know what I'm talking about 

it's a bespoke engine, specially optimised to provide a fast path towards rendering characters that happen to look exactly like grown-up, homosexual versions of Bart Simpson. 

...you've pre-ordered then Kinn ;) 

Bleh.

Played the Velaya mod for Gothic 2 (an English version is in the works) which used the original world excluding the mine valley and tells the story of a female hero some time after the events of G2. Nicely done for an amateur mod, good quests, well tied-in with the Gothic story, good voice-acting for the most part. Very enjoyable.

Crawling for more, I soon had to find out that this kind of RPG must be fairly unpopular, at least measured by the amount of games available.

I then tried Neverwinter Nights of which I played the first chapter a couple of years ago. And what a boring game it was. I wonder why I even bothered to finish it. The first chapter is okay, but it gets so repetitive and tedious afterwards (during too), because the levels aren't particularly well designed and there isn't much variation, especially regarding the dungeons and caves. What made it worse was the gameplay. I dislike this kind of top-down horde combat Diablo games. Everything felt so shallow: average story, text-based dialogue with close to no variation (as in hardly any unique NPCs), mostly stupid and useless henchmen, xp and levelling system that seemed utterly ineffective, and hordes of monsters everywhere. The monster design was somewhat nice and varied, though.

Then Fable, ostensibly "the best RPG in the last few years." Well, fuck it. This isn't an RPG, it's just some mediocre consolized action game. Calling the missions quests, using a rudimentary skill increase function and adding an awkward inventory menu doesn't bridge the gap. The game consists of small and confined (yes, sometimes you can't leave the path even if there is no visible obstacle) levels in which the enemy hordes respawn every time you return. At least there are teleporters. Again a dull story and both story and regular quests exclusively focus on getting through the levels by killing everything, and if just to ensure the survival of the dumb-ass NPCs. Speaking of which, this game felt as lifeless as NWN with its unresponsive NPCs and whatever it was the developers and press creamed about concerning the choice of good and evil, I must have missed it since none of my actions seemed to have any considerable impact. Everybody liked me regardless of how many times I farted/threatened/killed them. After defeating some boss. Jack of Blades, in an annoying fight which took me around 50 (!) health potions, I quit and uninstalled. Again, I should have done that a lot earlier.

Then tried Oblivion only to realize that it indeed mainly focuses on first person view (third person being awkward at best) and how poorly the NPC models look. Uninstalled it again after ten minutes.

So yeah, I guess games suck more than I expected. Total Speedyism atm. An impatient search for RPGs similar to the Gothic series/Morrowind/Ultima 9 even/etc turned out there are hardly any. Pretty dismal, though I guess I should have known.
I don't really care for the upcoming G3 addon as it doesn't seem to offer anything too special (using the old world, albeit modified), so it's G4 then or the new PB game? Who knows. Until then, I keep on hating a bit :) 

For programmers:

http://www.gameroo.nl/games/light-bot

For negke:

http://rephial.org/

I couldn't really get into it, but I haven't had time to give it a decent go yet. 

cooool ! 

i had a lot of trouble enjoying the NWN 1/2 games. i never played the dungeons and dragons game when i was a kid, but i don't think the gameplay from the dice game works at all in a computer game.

some of the shit in there is downright retarded, ie: getting instantly killed from a spell? o.0
trying to slog through the NWN2 addon, mask of the betrayer, and it's just even more annoying.
the fights are downright impossible unless you spend 30 seconds before every fight using every possible buff you have. buffs should only help tip the odds in your favour, not be required to even be able to have a chance at winning.

also, what is the deal with wizards only being able to cast a certain number of spells before they have to 'rest' again? especially in MotB where you'll fight maybe a group of 5 guys and they all have maybe 400hp. a wizard type character needs to rest every other fight because even the most powerful spells only do maybe 25% damage. this is all on easy skill to, btw.