Shadowcat on 7/11/2012 at 08:06
Thanks Xenith. It all seems a bit weird, frankly. Perhaps they ran out of budget (or it was cut out from under them), and they had to tidy up and release what they had so far?
One thing I remember about Painkiller was the large number of unique enemies. Most other games will re-use each enemy throughout the remainder of the levels, once it's been introduced. By contrast, Painkiller seemed to use a given enemy type in a small set of levels, and never again. I liked that -- it helped to keep things interesting -- but maybe the task of recreating them all in high detail was a factor in the loss of content?
Xenith on 7/11/2012 at 10:19
Oh no the levels are there pretty much the same. The number of enemies is more or less the same. The difference is that because they have less than half the levels there are enemies which you would normally see in later levels, make an appearance in the first few levels (for example Crusaders from the Palace level spawning in the Cathedral). The problem with this is that more or less every level plays the same because you tend to kill the same enemies over and over again. 5 crusaders in this level, 5 in the next, few skeleton now few in the next. The theme and uniqueness of the levels is thus, hate to use it again, more or less the same (less levels, not enough time to make monster introductions, so they crammed everything up).
Add to that the fact that there's someone else there to kill monsters and you kind of now have even less to do monster killing and while it might sound like something good, because it's not as monotone as single player, all it does is make it seem like you're playing an even more watered down version of the original. Not that it isn't fun for the whole novelty of it, but by the time you're on the 3 map you're gonna get tired. The bosses are somewhat more engaging but they usually focus on one or the other player so again, it's like playing half of the halved single player (it's like an experiment to see how little of the game you can play for the same amount of time you'd play half of the original).
Again, if the maps wouldn't have had their uniqueness stripped away because people thought "moar monsterz typez gunna be awezome!" it probably wouldn't have been like this. Or maybe it would have, maybe they really needed to actually work on a coop mode instead of just opening another player slot on the maps.
As for the budget... from what I gathered Nordic Games = previously JoWood. Which ties to Painkiller Resurrection, Redemption and Recurring Evil. Which were basically mods of the original game made by, I think, one guy.
