Portal 2

    Quote from Taylor

    I always assumed it was called the orange box because that was their apparent level design process with orange boxes. Blue box sounds like severe vaginitis.

    I've got no idea what the actual origin of the name is, but I suspect it isn't related to their level design habits due to there also being a (cancelled) 'Black Box' which was meant to come out at the same time.

    Scans of the ~12 page Game Informer article on Portal 2 are online. Here's the gist:

    Lengthy SP campaign, plus separate coop campaign where the players are robots

    Coop campaign will be harder, as you have someone else to think up solutions with

    Game's set "hundreds of years" post Portal

    SP protagonist is Chell again

    3x the staff working on the game (though no Kim Swift, she left Valve last year)

    Big upgrade to the graphics/level detail, with foliage in some parts of the lab that have been overgrown, and more dynamic lights etc.

    From the ending of Portal, when all those AI balls lit up, with a cake in front of them? Those will be "characters" in Portal 2, there will now be NPCs besides just turrets hanging around.

    Game starts with one such AI ball waking Chell up from stasis to help him move to another part of the complex (They can only get around normally on rails on the ceiling, what with just being a sphere with a handle)

    Textures changed from just "Usable" or "Not usable" for portals, different designs have different effects on portals and you as you pass through them

    Physics effects like suction are also transferred through portals, the article gives an example of putting one portal at the end of a vacuum tube and the other over a turret to remove it

    Players will by able to dynamically paint surfaces/objects with colored paint which alters behaviors, article mentions orange paint (speeds you up when you run on it) and blue paint (bouncy)

    I thought portal was a cheery little game with a lot of fun touches, but I was somewhat taken aback by the praise lavished on it. I thought it was good (if a little short / sparse), but I didn't fall in love with it or anything .

    It'll be interesting to see how Portal scales up now that they're throwing a lot more resources at it. Looks really nice so far, though!

    i'm not really sure why they want to go back to aperture science with portal 2. it doesn't seem like a step forward. although i'm looking forward to it, i can't help my frustration for it not being outside of the labs...

    also, what happened to entwining of portal's story into the half-life universe? apart from that borealis ship, has there been anything else suggesting a connection so far?

    I could care less about graphics most of the time (I played Stalker cop in static rendering lol), but I hope they get around to upgrading their physics system. I replayed Portal for the radio achievement and carrying those things around sucked ass, they kept managing to get stuck under my invisible feet or pulled from my hands, or stuck on portals, or otherwise just a big pain in the ass to manipulate.

    Pretty much confirms that all that is left of mapcore is EOT.

    Sure this thread went off-topic but whats the point of having a level design forum where level designers can't debatte about level design tools?

Participate now!

Don’t have an account yet? Register yourself now and be a part of our community!

Register Yourself Login