hi everyone,

i just played Jedi Knight II once again (in hardest difficulty :P), it's a neat game based on the q3a game engine. q3a couldn't handle terrains well, afaik there was no real terrain support as we'd call it today, all terrain has been made out of bsp geometry.

i want to compare JK2's level design with, say, stalker.

JK2 is a fairly untraditional fps, as you have a melee weapon (lightsaber) that you use almost all the time, a handful of "real" guns, and the mid-range force powers. during the game, the jedi gains power and learns to contol the force better, so he can f.i. jump further and move quicker.
many lifts exist in the levels, it's a constant up and down, you revisit placer over and over from different angles and floors, which saves a bunch of pollies and work, but doesnt feel like repetition.
in one level, you start in a hangar. over your head is an unreachable walkway with enemies, over that is a vent pipe. you fight your way through the hangar, get in some kind of supervising office, and open the hangar gates, which means that you have a grand view from the top of it all. then you can access the formerly unreachable walkway, and in the end, you move through that vent pipe.

then came the terrain. let's take stalker. eternal walks in the landscape. some houses here and there with 3, 4 rooms at max. military barracks that look the same on every floor. the indoor areas of the labs may look nice, but can't be compared to anything seen in JK2, leveldesign-wise.

many people consider this a great degree of freedom and an achievement. i call it downtime.

what do you think. did the terrain kill the old school level design?