Rock, Paper, Shotgun

01/02/2008 at 13:55 sana says:

I expect a greater length from a new Portal game, because the first one felt like one big demo version/tutorial to me.

01/02/2008 at 14:05 sana says:

Well, I guess that’s a matter of opinion. Personally I like to enjoy games I bought for quite a while and not finish them in 2-3 hours.

But then again the length of Portal is justified by Team Fortress 2 and Episode Two.

01/02/2008 at 14:14 Chris Evans says:

Interesting about EA releasing the Orange Box titles separately at retail…and that surely is great news about getting more Portal. I loved the length of the game and the learning curve seemed just right to me.

01/02/2008 at 14:23 Nallen says:

Portal’s length may have been perfect, but the learning curve was a tad on the slow side. Took too long to teach us the concepts, and then too little time spent on the really tricky puzzles.

I agree, but I think this may be a problem related to the way Valve design. By holding up focus groups as a key driver of the design process they leave them selves open to becoming too generic, being driven by the lowest common denominator.

Personally I think by making portal more rapidly complex they would have lost a few (not many) people before the end but in doing so created an even more fevered and vocal core following.

These things are hard to judge in the scheme of it all though, perhaps new portal content in whatever guise will be tougher and less inclusive and they decided that excluding anyone, at any level, from the first version would only hurt the ‘main event’.

I also think part of what makes portal so popular is that it makes the player feel so clever. It doesn’t matter that the puzzles are not that complex because everyone is doing something new and that alone gives a greater sense of achievement than any fiendish or dastardly puzzle of a conventional manner.

01/02/2008 at 14:59 rob says:

I did not receive My Horse and Me with my purchase of The Orange Box which is just as well because it should be My Horse and I.

01/02/2008 at 15:06 Stick says:

@Nallen:

“[they would have] created an even more fevered and vocal core following.”

… but that would probably have broken the cosmos. Or spawned another Fallout fandom. Neither of which option seems desirable.

I do share your concern about design-by-focus-group. Except I think my objections are mostly on principle. (Games aren’t movies. What is the bane of one medium might be healthy for another. I dunno.)

As for more Portal, I’d like… hm. An entirely new game following the first and expanding on it? GladOS, cake, cube and Coulton not strictly required, but certainly welcome. Tie the narrative into the HL2 ‘verse even more?

Oh, and the Gordon/Alyx/Chell/d0g-running-GladOS 4-player crossover co-op mode. Of course.

01/02/2008 at 15:11 Lunaran says:

I also demand that all of my games be exactly the same length, and price. I value rigorous consistency in my entertainment above all else!

01/02/2008 at 15:15 Butler` says:

Portal’s length may have been perfect, but the learning curve was a tad on the slow side. Took too long to teach us the concepts, and then too little time spent on the really tricky puzzles.

So, yeah, it’s too short then? :D

01/02/2008 at 15:39 Hieremias says:

Butler: Not necessarily. If they’d reduced the tutorial and stretched the tricky part of the game, the overall length could have stayed the same and been quite satisfying.

I’m not complaining about the lack of content in the Orange Box. It was a fantastic deal, and I’m all about bundling multiple “short” yet incredibly deep games into one package. Just that Portal itself seemed like too much appetizer and not enough meat. But at least there was desert at the end.

01/02/2008 at 15:50 Flint says:

Portal 2 needs a Weighted Nemesis Orb to counter the Cubemania.

01/02/2008 at 17:11 Dracko says:

I want a new short title based around an entirely new concept.

Or at the least hope this doesn’t mean a sequel.

01/02/2008 at 17:16 terry says:

Portalable (is that a word?) liquids would be fun.

01/02/2008 at 19:03 Daniel says:

C’mon… worse than Ted Bundy?

01/02/2008 at 20:51 ryan in exile says:

one portal contiguous walls/floors/ceilings
-i xp this on advanced 18 on the last flat floor, i was kinda being weak and shooting double portals on each platform to keep momentum and make sure i didnt miss the shot. so you shoot a portal and all surface thats touching is no unportable shootable. uh need a new vocab.

Xen: zero gravity
-its in the hl universe. im not actually sure if differant gravities would be that big a deal. maybe instead of low gravity, a really high gravity world

another player AI (but flesh) taking yr orange frequency, working together or compet to get out sharing portals
-it was cool when th guns where shooting the orange portals, but imagine another person hijacking yr frequency (or whatever) and having to work together, but then of course shooting a portal at the last second so they walk into an acid pit.

folding portals
-we want tesseracts and we want them now. but in 19 with the iron pillars that push you into the ceiling. just be a cool visual effect, not really much for gameplay

portable portals, dragable segments
-prolly only be cute once, but shoot a portal on a wall segment and then drag it around for whatever reason.

g-man must have a portal gun
-could be a hilarious situation, running into him. “oh, you must be from ap. science. i thought you were taken care of…” then shoots his next portal and leaves

minimal destructable environs
-once in awhile you have a grenade or dynamite. what happens to wall that is destroyed by a portal?

3 chain portal?
-orange always goes to blue, blue always goes to red, red always goes to orange?

a mirror!
-reflect the shot or just some weird visuals

portaling sound/retina scan
-sound comes through portals. could be a cute puzzle, and everyone loves retina scan puzzles… sending xrays or radiation maybe? shoot a portal near toxic sludge…

walls/floors/ceiling that can only take a certain color. weak but eh
-i dont like this idea, artificial difficulty

splitting caches with a portal
-certain items are not expelled from portal, so they split. OH! maybe you shoot the portal between magnets and its held in stasis so it cant be expelled, so it splits.

a weird effect for making a portal a door, ie a portal on both sides of the same wall, portal spooning?
- portals that spoon…. yeah, maybe this is how you get to Xen…. co-occupation of spacetime has to be weird

bringing cake through a portal does something weird, m ake cake an anti-rosebud
-id love it if cake was a mcguffin

a dog sees its reflection in the water holding a bone…
-i think the greeks wrote about this

exposed portal exposure leads to hallucinations
-obvious fun

02/02/2008 at 10:16 Optimaximal says:

In case the RPS guys don’t get to post it, someone from 4chan has made a brlliant piece of Portal Art more info.

Lies – Nobody from 4chan made that… There aren’t enough porn, furries or women with penises in it.

Can Peggle Extreme be obtained seperately? Inquiring minds must know!

It’s called Peggle Deluxe.

02/02/2008 at 12:24 sana says:

One thing: I like short too. If we can sit down for an evening with a movie, why does every game require a week? The memories aren’t as strong, or as good.

Maybe because you don’t pay 40 € for a movie like you do for a standard PC game?

02/02/2008 at 13:10 Crispy says:

Portal is too short to be worth $20. Get it as part of the Orange Box while you still can.

I want a long, challenging experience from a Puzzle game, something that Portal alone cannot deliver. Portal was a brief, largely unchallenging experience that was partially but not completely offset by a good twist (the behind the scenes levels) and good humour. I wouldn’t say there was enough of a story to praise that part of it. It was almost completely enigmatic (Who is Chell? Who is GladOS?). You might say that some of the greatest stories ever presented have no ending and are enigmatic (Blade Runner, the director’s cut, for example), but at least you know who the characters are, what their motivation is, their hopes, fears dreams, etc. Portal only begins a story, it doesn’t offer any ending or any beginning, it’s simply the middle. Chell suffers from attempting to walk in the same footsteps as non-speaking, sparse-backstory Mr. Gordon Freeman, but fails to deliver through a lack of supporting cast. Gordon has Alex, Barney, Kleiner, Eli and others to slowly unwrap his character, He is able to live through them. Chell can only come to life through GladOS, and Portal is too short to throw up anything meaningful within the game experience (yes I know the website attempts to address this, but I don’t buy a game to find out what happens via a website).

As for the production value, its levels are actually quite basic, visually speaking (not just the fact that there are few textures -I know this is an intended design point- but the fact that the textures themselves are very simplistic). The geometry -and I’m talking more about the ‘behind the scenes’ stuff than the stages, which are done in basic geometry by design- is also very basic. The amount of times I snuck into a backroom to be greeted with what in level design circles is generally termed a ‘box room’ was the opposite of rewarding. Portal is a very slim package that includes less custom textures and models than you might imagine, and instead reuses a lot of HL2 content.

But my main gripe is that it had a baby-steps tutorial that seemed to span 12 levels, and only 8 ‘proper’ levels the final sequence. For me, this is a bit of a cop-out for something purporting to be a puzzle game. As much as I LOVED the ending, it needed to be about 50% longer to reach ‘epic’ game status, even if it is an instant ‘classic’ of our age because of its well-timed humour that coincides with a general public state of dissatisfaction and malaise for an increasingly Orwellian present.

Someone in these comments mentioned that ‘every step, the player felt clever’. For me this simply wasn’t true. I was far too aware of Valve’s attempts to dumb down in this respect. I felt more like I was being patronised. I don’t tend to buy many games these days, so when I do I want the money and time I spend to be worthwhile. As an addon, a freebie, a divertissement, Portal is a satisfying game. But it simply doesn’t have the depth and longterm satisfaction that I’d expect from a $20 game (well, maybe it does considering that’s just £10 plus tax, but you get my meaning). I completed Portal in under 3 hours, that’s less time than Valve’s HL2 Episodes, which although almost completely lacking in humour (save the odd drab Alyx joke), have a better story (or is it just better story telling?), more varied and generally more challenging gameplay, even with a token puzzle element that rivals most of Portal’s extended tutorial section in terms of complexity.

But, then again, Half-Life 2 doesn’t have a companion cube now, does it? (he says with not a note but a full symphony of sarcasm)

02/02/2008 at 16:16 Nick says:

As long as the writing is as entertaining, I don’t really care where it goes next.

02/02/2008 at 22:52 MaW says:

I want to have Portal plus gravity munging like in Super Mario Galaxy.

That would be really mind-bending.

Other than that, I’d like to see some sort of story about what happens to the player after they get out of the enrichment centre.

04/02/2008 at 20:52 KingMob says:

Didn’t Prey have portal and gravity mechanics? If that’s what you’re looking for… I believe you can play it on Gametap these days, as long as you’re not inexplicably unable to use the Gametap service (sorry UK).

PS. Portal’s length was perfect for me. But I agree it’s hard to stomach playing $20 for it alone.