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Re: Eclipse Released
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Zacker
Project Leader, Lead Level Designer, Waypointer
 
Status: Offline
Posts: 337
Join Date: Mar 2004
Location: Denmark
Default Re: Eclipse Released - 06-07-2005

I just tried Eclipse today. I wanted to do it earlier, but the download links were down in some days after the release.

The game is indeed short, it only took me arund 30 minutes to get to the beginning of the last level. If you have tried the game before, then the playtime is probably less than 10 minutes.
The length does not bother me though, they never promised a long game. The game just had to be long enough for them to show off their skills, which it is.

The general gameplay idea with telekinesis is cool enough, I don't think I have tried anything like that before. Sometimes I lacked items to throw at the monsters though. They should also do something about the limit of things you can have flowing at the same time, e.g. display a message like "you can not handle anymore".

Technically it is not that well made. The fps was generally 30-40% lower than the general fps in HL2. They should have cut down on the detail props, as Source sucks at rendering those efficiently.

There were also a good bunch of issues in the game. The camera often screwed up and displayed some very wierd things, usually when you were standing too close to a wall or so.

There were also several places where they had just clipped off the level. I know that just placing a clip brush is an easy way to end a map, but it is not really good game design.

Several places in the game there were also some serious visual problems with the ground texture. Some places it was scaled way too much down, other places it ligned up like shit.

Overall it is ok, but I had expected a little more from a bunch of students where everyone work on it several hours per day for half a year.


Michael 'Zacker' Schmidt
Level Designer | IO Interactive
Former Game Director | Sands of War
  
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