Portal Prelude has been released. The uber-mod that everyone seems jolly excited about is officially out tomorrow, but is already ready for download. Hurrah! Except it’s one of those 24 hour preview deals with FilePlanet. So if you want it today, you’ll have to crawl through their tunnel of blades, spikes and fire, ending in a half hour wait for the download to start. Man! Anyway, rise above it: good news. We’ll offer thoughts on it soon.
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Personally I’m rather enjoying it. Nowhere near Valve’s quality of course, but it’s worth enduring the annoying voices for some challenging puzzles.
Another step in their world domination plan would be including any element of coherent design or anything worth playing.
Sorry to be ‘that negative guy’ but this mod has so much wrong with it I don’t know where to start.
I’m surprised no one’s mentioned “Rock You Like a Hurricane” yet. I’m all for measured criticism on mods, but this was an incredibly sour note to enter the game on, an awful blurring of contexts that was, if you’ll forgive the phrase, really unprofessional.
But yeah, the level design. Barely any reeducation of the basic concepts, which would be forgivable if, y’know, the puzzles were at all intuitive. I’m through the first eight rooms, and at nearly all of them, I feel like the design is preventing me from executing what I know to be the right action. I haven’t finished it, but so far, it’s made Portal into a “game of inches” to use a sports phrase — relying on crouches, very specific portal positioning, and minor turns to advance in some puzzles.
Anyway, I wager I’ll have the chance to rant on it on our podcast tomorrow. Including the voice acting (yikes).
But yeah, in short: it’s (so far) completely absent of the zenny subtlety in story and level design that Portal promoted.
Yeah, my girlfriend loved Portal, but had a lot of difficulty with the ‘timed’ FPS style areas. She got the puzzles quickly, however.
That said, I don’t want jumping puzzles. They aren’t fun, and there are far better ways to do it.
In other words, my skepticism was justified? I liked the Flash Portal Map pack, but in the end it, like this, was just one part of Portal, and not nearly as well executed as Valve’s try. Portal’s brilliance isn’t just about the puzzles.
It’s interesting – they’ve put up a post discussing the difficulty of their mod, as a kind of reaction to a player’s e-mail.
I enjoyed this bit in their answer:
Nicolas didn’t read the e-mail he’s responding to thoroughly enough, it would seem, as it seems it’s sent by exactly the kind of player he talks about – from the original e-mail:
This is all fine and dandy, it’s a free mod, it’s all about ramping up the difficulty for the makers, apparently, it just means that I won’t be playing it.
While I was playing Portal I just never found myself thinking “these puzzles aren’t hard enough”, simply because the puzzles were only one element in an extraordinary mix, I guess.
Can anyone tell me how to do the second part of puzzle 10, with the red fields? what do they even do?
Why did the editing option disappear? Nevermind, I got it.
Some of the later chambers are very clever and require logical thought to get through – which are the type of levels I enjoy most.
Chamber 10, as mentioned by Colinmarc above, is just one example – they introduced a clever “altered-gravity” puzzle. It’s at times like this that Portal: Prelude offers a glimmer of genius. It’s just a pity there are a couple of “WTF?” levels that you have to go through to get to the good stuff.
“Some of the later chambers are very clever and require logical thought to get through – which are the type of levels I enjoy most.”
Shame I’m never going to get there.
The first room I was sat for AAAGES going “hmm, I suppose I can create a portal on the obvious wall and then _really quickly_ disable / run behind those guns, but surely that’s not the clever way to do it?”
No, it’s not. But it’s the only way.
On level 2 I was thinking “hmm, I’m missing this jump by only a little bit, consistently – surely that’s a sign that this isn’t just a _very hard_ standard momentum jump, but that there’s a more elegant solution?”
Nope, there isn’t
:/
@frymaster: That’s the tragedy – the opening 3 levels create an immediate bad impression.
I’m glad I persevered as quite a few of the later levels are genuinely rewarding, puzzle-based fun. I can totally understand, though, that many people won’t bother. The devs kinda shot themselves in the foot by being so obtuse so early on. A great pity.
In all fairness, Portal is just too good on too many levels. Replicating that experience is something only Valve can do (maybe: it’s possible that even they might have difficulty making a sequel with all the charm of the original).
I admire anyone who takes on that task, but it seems to me that tossing that “u need better skillz” nut shot around suggests that the modders might not have realized what a good many people loved about Portal.
And as MacBeth said early in this thread, there is no Portal without GlaDOS.
The makers of this mod come across as patronising elitists in all the quoted correspondence and forum posts.
Portal Prelude: Sorts The Men From The Boys… mwuhahahaha.
I’m loving this mod. It has moments when you really do just have to sit back, have a couple of tokes on your ciggie and ponder for a moment.
To be perhaps a little to honest, I think the whole lightning/precision timing argument’s a bit of a cop out (adorns flame retardant clothing) – as ever, I’m playing on my 360 pad.
The problem with Prelude is that I know exactly what I have to do 15 seconds into the room, but due to the unforgiving design, I have to spend 15 minutes trying to execute.
There a is great game in there somewhere with a few more months of design and a ton more play testing. But in its current incarnation? No.
“I know exactly what I have to do 15 seconds into the room, but due to the unforgiving design, I have to spend 15 minutes trying to execute ”
bah, so its not a puzzle but a timing/prescision test? thats a shitty design
Wow. This mod. CLEARLY I’ve been spoiled from the Portal Flash Map Pack.
The problem is exactly what Y3k-Bug said– it’s really hard to execute plans properly.
But since this mod was supposed to be about things prior to Portal, I figured there had to be some interesting story or outcome, like the Flash Pack.
No.
I wasn’t really feeling the dialogue. The game was, spoilers, “hey, we’re blatantly trying to kill you, miss test subject!” to “hi, hang out with us in our lab. we’re coo’.” No, I would not be cool with a bunch of sadistic scientists who tried to kill me several times. Why are my chair tosses not hurting you? When Erik(Hey! I’m sadistic!) meets Peter(Hey! I hate my job and this is terrible!) he drops the f-bomb every sentence. Okay, mature. I did, however, laugh when Mike’s friend gave you the directions. It was absurd.
The two cutscenes in the game lasted too long…. Yes, pan left and right through the room before showing me the item! That’s a better idea than just zooming into the gun. They later even flashbacked to it. Okay, I guess… The second cutscene pointed out that the GlaDOS-shaped construct in front of me was GlaDOS, and make me look at a guy waving his arms so we wouldn’t see how they didn’t know how to animate attaching cores.
The after-credits ending felt like badly written fanfiction. I saw him during the tests but jeez…
Downloading as we speak!
Sounds crap to me, but I will try it later.
Totally agree with all the previous comments on the bad level design and pin point precision needed early on. The Flash Portal Map pack was far far easier/ less infuriatingly than this. I’m thinking that the makers of PP are either inhumanely good or just sadistic, because this mod is just torture to play though, hardcore or not.
I laughed at Thermite’s review three posts back.
If you want a good laugh, try reading in the “Feedback & Criticisms” forum. There are some very well written, articulate negative reviews that calmly states what is wrong with this mod. And the Fanboys descend on it with righteous fury. Try to think of all the cliche responses you’d imagine a fanboy would give. Yes, all of those.
“Make a better mod”
“You’re a noob”
“YOU MADE EXAGGERATION THUS YOU LIES THUS ALL POST WRONG”
“This isn’t mean to be Portal” <- “Portal Prelude“? Right.
“Go play an FPS” <- Wait, isn’t that the main criticism of this mod, that it plays like a reflex-heavy FPS rather than a puzzle game?
Go ahead.
I tried it for the first 5 tests or so, but quit shortly after that.
Overall I liked the puzzly parts, but the experience was kind of ruined by the difficulty itself. The solution was almost always clear if you gave it a little thought, but executing it usually required a perfect timing, performance and sometimes just plain luck. The lack on alternative, tricky solutions was kind of annoying. Like Y3k-Bug said above, 15 seconds of thinking, 15 minutes trying to do it just right.
The mod has potential, but I just found it too frustrating to be enjoyable.
“On level 2 I was thinking “hmm, I’m missing this jump by only a little bit, consistently – surely that’s a sign that this isn’t just a _very hard_ standard momentum jump, but that there’s a more elegant solution?”
Nope, there isn’t”
But there is. First jump: put portal on the backwall, then doublefling. Second jump: put orange portal on ceiling, jump into blue portal. As you fall out of the orange portal, shoot another orange portal at your feet, then hold forward.
As long as you don’t fuck them up, they always work. Also, the reason you were missing the jumps is friction against the ceiling/wall on first/second jumps, switch up your portal placement to avoid that. Or crouch.
Same with level 1, you CAN disable the turrets, but it’s easier to just rush your way to the elevator. :D
Basically, this game DOES have alternative, tricky solutions, and if you take your time to think, their amount is staggering, certainly no less than the original Portal.