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Drath

Why So Serious Sam 3?

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I wanted to make a witty post title. Welp, that's out of my system. Checky:

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/02/28/serious-sam-3-announced/

These screenshots look amazingly beautiful. Seeing these classic enemies re-imagined in the "cutting edge" without the polygon-ness looks weird, but cool. So far we know it's a prequel, has lots of the Egyptian stuff that made the original game unique, and has 16-player co-op (that is going to be god-like).

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16-player co-op

Good luck, Croteam! That sounds like an insane goal to get right without a performance hit.

Unlike cover based co-op games, players will not be hunkered down in one section. Serious Sam players will be in every corner of the map, presumably with dozens of enemies in each location.

Ow, my framerate!

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Good luck, Croteam! That sounds like an insane goal to get right without a performance hit.

Unlike cover based co-op games, players will not be hunkered down in one section. Serious Sam players will be in every corner of the map, presumably with dozens of enemies in each location.

Ow, my framerate!

Dedicated servers or a system like Donnybrook could deal with it happily.

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I don't think it will be too much of an issue, provided the host has a good enough resources. We have seen 32-64 player co-op before in games like Half-Life (Sven Co-op) and Half-Life 2 (Garry's Mod, Synergy, Obsidian Conflict, etc.) and those aren't even first-party, working with pre-existing netcode with no native co-op support.

There will be frame-rate issues, but no more than rendering 100 Beheaded Rocketeers and other massive hordes this game will send your way. Also for the fact that this game looks insanely graphically intense.

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Those screenshots look terrible.

Serious Sam used to be colorful. :hmph:

I really hope that's not the overall tone of the game. And I also hope they don't pull a Serious Sam 2.

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Hmm, I think you're right. Splash some bloom and saturation shaders on there and you got yourself a deal!

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Kind of surprised they went with this desaturated looking route. If you removed the monsters from the shot, put in some soldiers... Wouldn't look all that out of place, I reckon.

Still!! Totally curious to see how that will look in motion.

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Huuuuuh.

I was just searching to see if there was already a conversation about Double D, and here i am looking at a bunch of SS3 screenshots i've never seen before.

Man, i think it looks phenomenal.

Those screenshots look terrible.

Serious Sam used to be colorful. :hmph:

I really hope that's not the overall tone of the game. And I also hope they don't pull a Serious Sam 2.

Are you too focused on the ruins to notice all the lush green vegetation and the bright blue sky? Or perhaps your memories of the original two games are foggy. (First Encounter is nothing but desert environments, dude.)

This game looks much more in line with the originals, i would say "pulling a Serious Sam 2" is exactly what they're trying to avoid.

That game had a very off-putting glossy, toy-like aesthetic to everything. Giant wind-up toys instead of goofy doom-inspired monsters. (Nnnngh, and all the small arenas frustratingly constrained by countless invisible walls.)

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I don't have much to say about Serious Sam only having ever played the demo of 2, but that is definitely not lush green vegetation or a bright blue sky. The existence of color doesn't necessarily mean the game is saturated or vivid if the color is so drab.

To me, viewing as an outsider to the series, these screenshots seem to be showing the current uninspired art direction choice of desaturating everything and mixing browns without creating sepia tone. It's definitely far removed from Serious Sam 1 and 2 in terms of colors though just looking at screenshots comparisons.

But honestly, I also find Serious Sam 1 and 2 to look incredibly gaudy as well.

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I don't have much to say about Serious Sam only having ever played the demo of 2, but that is definitely not lush green vegetation or a bright blue sky. The existence of color doesn't necessarily mean the game is saturated or vivid if the color is so drab.

Fair enough, point taken.

To me, viewing as an outsider to the series, these screenshots seem to be showing the current uninspired art direction choice of desaturating everything and mixing browns without creating sepia tone. It's definitely far removed from Serious Sam 1 and 2 in terms of colors though just looking at screenshots comparisons.

But honestly, I also find Serious Sam 1 and 2 to look incredibly gaudy as well.

Well first off, i just want to make absolutely sure we're clear on this, there's three games. The First Encounter, The Second Encounter, and Serious Sam 2. I'm just laying that out like that since you're saying you're an outsider to the series. I know a lot of people refer to Second Encounter as Serious Sam 2, when it's more accurately the second half of the first game. (Also, Serious Sam 2 is really quite disappointing.)

But the point i'm making -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT3xPQbMJd4

Serious Sam is not exactly drowning in color.

At all.

So maybe somebody wants to go "Well Second Encounter has all those awesome jungle levels and stuff" and yes, it does. It also still has a lot of desert environments.

So hey, you know what? I bet Serious Sam 3 will probably be the same way.

More than anything else though, i think i'm just reacting to the "needs moar color" argument, which always kind of makes me want to pull out my hair.

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Ah see, I never even knew there was three games. I think the only one I played was Second Encounter some then.

On that Youtube video though, I think there is a lot of color, it's just a saturated yellow. It still all seems overly saturated to me, like a Sonic the Hedgehog game. The color palette is very similar to Sandopolis in Sonic and Knuckles.

The textures or shaders in Serious Sam 3 seem to have a lot of brown or grey overlaid on top, but it's also sort of the style everyone shoots for right now. To me it always seems kind of strange because real life doesn't look like that to me and I feel like if people are going to use a drab color scheme, there should at least be some kind of saturated swatch somewhere in there offset it. It's just somewhat of a jarring difference to the older Serious Sams but I realize those were coming from a time when people just kind of defaulted to extremely bright or basic textures and colors.

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^ This is what Serious Sam 2 was, and a lot of people hated it. Everything was so garishly bright and colorful, and the dumb doom-inspired monsters were replaced with like... giant wind-up mechanical bulls and all these weird toy-like creatures. It kind of went from being a loving parody of old-school FPS's to being a parody of itself. I've read a few interviews with the Croteam guys where they express as much, and that's where the new look is coming from.

More doom, less nerf.

(Since i'm bitching about Serious Sam 2, It also showed very obvious signs of having been concurrently developed for the first X-box, with narrow and linear levels that were entirely too small for what they were trying to do. Really disappointing follow-up to the original games, which are still among my favorite FPS's.)

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As i understand it, it's supposed to replace the snipe, which is a fairly important bit of context that makes it seem much less horrible.

Also, watching those guys play was just painful, ducking in and out of cover like it's CoD instead of backpedal/strafe.

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I got this in the Steam sale, i'm really liking it.


Being completely honest, the game doesn't make a great first impression. It feels like it's trying to poke at how linear and narrow shooters have become, but it does so by being exactly that kind of thing, and even when it finally starts opening up, it immediately throws you back into an extended, darkly-lit corridor sequence. The game really doesn't get going until you're about three hours in, at which point it just gradually keeps ramping things up until the end, and it's a long game, so it still gets a lot of time to be the thing it's good at being.

 

All of the little things people were freaking out about, like ironsights, executions, reloading, and sprinting, none of them really change anything.

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That's the thing with SS as a series. It's NOT just a Doom clone. It WAS a Doom clone when the first one came out because it aped different things from the most popular FPS games at the time but without the super serious aesthetics. In BFE those things you mention are just there without the game pointing it out every 10 mins, because self-awareness! *cough* DNF and Matt Hazard *cough*. That is why I believe BFE is one of the best examples of satire in games. To the point that even people I thought were pretty smart (Certain unnamed Giantbomb staffers) having the point COMPLETELY fly over their heads.

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I think you might be giving the game a bit too much credit.

 

Even so, I definitely think the game is trying to poke at modern shooters with the way the game starts out so narrow, very gradually and quite impressively pulling back the curtains on what it actually is. The thing is, you just get into this really foggy territory with stuff like that. Emulating bad design to make a point doesn't make it enjoyable to play through, the facade goes on too long.

Still, i really actually do like SS3 a whole lot. I'd maybe even put it about par with the original game, because once it finds itself, it's pretty fantastic. (Though, to just put it out there, i'd say that Second Encounter is probably the best game in the series.)

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I did some 3-player co-op with this one. I was honestly hoping it was poking fun at it, but I put a good hour into it and that moment there was no indication it was actually going to change for the better, so we gave up on it and started up Second Encounter instead. I guess I'll give it another shot now. Still, imagine my complete disappointment; thinking relatively highly of the first 2 games and then getting, well, THAT.

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It is, at the very least, better than Serious Sam 2.

 

The first few levels of BFE are brutal though, it's not good. I honestly don't hold it against anybody for giving up on the game, feeling like they gave it an honest shot.

Still, it gets better, i do like it a lot. There's some really great levels in the second half of the game. (Don't expect really wacky scenarios of the sort that you'd see in Second Encounter, BFE is closest to the original game in style.)

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I still haven't finished SS3, I guess I haven't reached the part where it become like SS again.

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Some friends started playing SS3 in 6 player co-op, so I bought it and downloaded it. By the time it finished downloading and I joined in, they were already in the second to last level. We beat it in about an hour, got a very unsatisfying ending (at least for someone who had never played a Serious Sam game before) and it's sat forlornly on my Steam list ever since.

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