Portal: Prelude

    I'm hearing horrible things about this mod from all over the internet. The humans in the mod are all voiced by text to speech synthesizers working with misspelled and automatically translated english from french, the level design requires off the wall techniques such as abusing physics glitches, there are a number of level design errors such as overlapping brushes, misaligned gemoetry, nodraw textures visible, and obvious leak patchwork, over the top and unnecessary swearing throughout, etc...

    Apparently the Portal Prelude forums have been shut down from all the complaints and negative responses.

    I talked to Moroes directly to voice my concerns, and only made it to Chamber 5 before my patience ran out. I haven't experienced all the bad things you mentioned above, but the unintuitive level design was one that was glaringly obvious. I'm told Nyk018 wanted to cater to the hardcore Portal players, something I clearly am NOT, only playing the game occasionally. Overall I think it's a mistake to design the mod for this very precise and knowledgeable target group by artificially increasing the difficulty (playing with glitches, not making clear paths in the levels) instead of doing what Valve did, which is build the main game for anyone to enjoy and give additional challenges that are just copies of the maps with less ingredients for the hardcore masses.

    Wow, even if the mod didn't live up to expectations (I've no idea I didn't play it) It just goes to show as conclusive proof how dumb the half-life community still is by having to close the forums from all the flamewars. I looked at it the other day before it was closed, and my god - people not an inch of sense about them.

    Quote from dux

    Wow, even if the mod didn't live up to expectations (I've no idea I didn't play it) It just goes to show as conclusive proof how dumb the half-life community still is by having to close the forums from all the flamewars. I looked at it the other day before it was closed, and my god - people not an inch of sense about them.

    It's all part of the fun of doing a mod lol. We've had a few genius' come into the HaJ spouting nonsense without even seemingly looking at photos or the site. I remember one asked "Where are the Americans? You know they won WW2 and the Brits did sod all?".

    :ssj:

    I completely agree with Furyo. I liked the voices actually, they did talk a bit much sometimes, but I liked the idea of these people doing stuff in the background, fits well.

    I got until room 15 or so, but I noclipped through half of them... It is too hardcore, and too plain frustrating at times. There are also several moments when you die from something you had no clue was there (turret behind a door in a dark corner?...).

    Nonetheless it is still a big achievement and it looks quite ok. I can imagine that many people do overreact, and a lot of normal players are just plain stupid... Its a shame that it is received like this.

    Yes it's frustrating and hardcore sometimes, but - you got it for free, it has some nice story (I like the voice-acting) and for what I've seen I didn't see any weakness with the Brushwork (sometimes I wondered if a model would have fit better but well that's not a problem).

    Perhaps I'm the only one really liking this (hardcore chambers, frustrating surprises, difficult puzzles).

    I played it twice (to the end) and well, actually I'm not playing Portal like every week or so but still It wasn't really hard (It took some time to get through though (6h)). I just think that most of the players (who now complain) did not read that this is meant for people who want something really hard challenging.

    why do people always have to bitch about stuff? this is a free mod ffs, if you dont like it your free to fuck off to wherever you want.

    i find these types of intolerant consumers hard to stand.. honest feedback? fine. but whining and bitching like this on such a massive scale.. wtf man? :-|

    when i opened this thread i expected to hear nothing but "songs of praise" and that i would be the only one who would give a less glamorous review (but still good ) ... but seeing that the target audience who are really in for a free treat here are daring to bitch about it makes me really sad

    so here is my opinion on the matter

    -instant death surprises left and right.

    -insane difficulty on some of the jumps ... couldnt you have made those edges 10 units lower D: ?

    -need to abuse glitches to solve some of the puzzles ... and it seams thats the official way of doing it ...

    -got stuck 4-5 times on moving objects and physics stuff (sources fault really)

    -chamber 18 with the fire below had horrible frame rate on my machine i could barely play it

    -morality sphere often falls out of the world when glados does the tornado thing

    +length: longer than most mods (a good thing) shorter than most games (also a good thing), similar to the original portal ... the length really hit the sweet spot

    +graphics: i didnt see any overlapping brushes holes zfighting or what ever artefacts others talk about ! to me this look as tight as any official valve product !

    +voice overs: id take good texttospeech over bad human voiceacting any day http://www.audioatrocities.com/ also it seamed fitting that the people who designed glados sound like that.

    +story: ties seamlessly into the portal universe .... flawless

    bottomline: far above average single player mod with very high difficulty

    I didn't really follow the mod prior to release and I don't really consider myself a hardcore Portal player (never got through the challenge rooms after the main game) but I got to chamber 10 without too much fuss. Really enjoying it so far. I don't understand the criticism of it being too hard. The first Portal already taught you the basics, why not push it a little further? Also, I'm not sure where it's using exploits just yet, maybe that's in the later chambers but I'm half way through and yet to make use of any glitch or technique that the original hadn't already incorporated.

    Though there are a few strange areas that play with your expectations a bit, like those shifting walls in the 3rd or 4th chamber that aren't actually used in solving the puzzle, but are presented as if they are.

    Quote from Erratic

    Though there are a few strange areas that play with your expectations a bit, like those shifting walls in the 3rd or 4th chamber that aren't actually used in solving the puzzle, but are presented as if they are.

    You should have listened to the Aperture Science Guy, he mentioned that the wall he toggled was actually senseless.

    Quote from Deathy

    You should have listened to the Aperture Science Guy, he mentioned that the wall he toggled was actually senseless.

    +1 for Portal Prelude

    Quote from n8braker

    why do people always have to bitch about stuff? this is a free mod ffs, if you dont like it your free to fuck off to wherever you want. i find these types of intolerant consumers hard to stand.. honest feedback? fine. but whining and bitching like this on such a massive scale.. wtf man? :-|

    If you can't tolerate criticism and negative response you probably shouldn't be putting anything online for public consumption.

    Or, be perfect.

    Whining about people who whine is just as annoying.

    So I gave it another go, because I'm equally as convinced that there are some great designs in there as there are some very dubious ones. In a nutshell, I had to noclip my way through certain key chambers that I found were borderline insane, only to find the next one was ingeniously conceived.

    Any room that has time based death traps is a place where I felt terribly frustrated, and all of the others where I was given time to think things through gave me the feeling this mod was thoroughly thought out. Some of the chambers with the turrets are awesome fun, and very close to something Valve would release, if only for the somewhat meticulous use of portals, where you can still fail what you were trying to do because of a few centimeters here and there. Not forgiving to say the least.

    I'll probably finish the mod, but it's going to take me time, because as much as I was and am able to play through Portal on a single run, this mod has me needing to take a break after a couple chambers.

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