After a long year of procrastinating and engineering, I have finally reached that point where everything starts to slow down again, so I can put out more work. Something which I have wanted to do for a while is update Winter's Fury, because there were still a few bugs here and there along with weirdly designed areas and hard gameplay in random places. So this patch is designed to 'polish the hell out of it'. I intended to release it on the anniversary of its original release, but I finished early.
For the TL;DR's, the download is right here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/vopkdkwl8ymnk ... 5.zip?dl=0
About a month ago, I went back and played through the entire thing. My ability to properly design doom mods has grown significantly over the previous year, and hence my eye for quality sharpened somewhat. I ended up finding a lot of things I didn't like, and hence decided to change them. There were a few things which I felt I would discuss with you guys as well, as I believe they were discussed quite a bit during the development of Winter's Fury.
In particular:
Bosses:
While I still really enjoy fighting the bosses again and again and again, regardless of how long it takes to kill them, a lot of people disliked the grind style of the later bosses. Most notably of course, the triple threat boss fight at the end. I don't particularly want to change too much about the actual design of the fights, so I figured the best idea would be to simply scale their health by difficulty level.
If anyone has any superior ideas, or any comments to make on the current state of the bosses in Winter's Fury 1.2, please do so.
Ammo:
The way that I constructed ammo balance throughout the mod led to problems with some players. I believe this is because through my many years of playing Winter's Fury, I adapted to using the weapons incredibly cost-efficiently; I would shoot demons once with the SSG before finishing them with the machine gun, I would deliberately line up enemies knowing that they would all die from one SSG blast, I would use single well-placed rockets wherever possible, etc.
I have rebalanced it slightly by trying to be, uh, stupider, while testing. Or in other words, I try not to apply these strategies and re-balance the ammo accordingly. If anyone has any opinions on the ammo balance in Winter's Fury 1.2, please feel free to comment.
Story:
Yeah, the story was written by a 13 year old. Literally. 5 years ago I had the 'AMAZING' plan for the story that was kind of presented in Winter's Fury, but it pretty much involved so many clichés that players simply drowned in them. Even after release, I wasn't really happy with the way I made the story, but due to not caring I just left it as it was.
After working on S.U.P.E.R Natural for a year, and listening to an enlightening radio piece on Tango.tv, I simply couldn't stand it anymore. When I went back and played through Winter's Fury, I decided that it was a MUST that the presentation of the story be raised in quality, so for those who care it is bearable, and for those who don't it is ignorable.
Turned out that it’s really hard to make any kind of significant story, but at least it’s a bit less cliché.
However, as an added bonus, the story is much more 'continual' than before, and lets the player come to their own conclusions about things.
VA:
I originally decided against voice acting because I felt the mod was already large enough in file size and didn't need to waste anymore of people's download. Also, it would be troublesome if I decided to keep those voices and then re-use the character later in another mod if the original VA wasn't around anymore.
However, I came up with the idea of adding an extra optional download for the sound files, which would just run with Winter's Fury and give voice overs. I haven't done it yet, and I haven't really put any thought into how I would make it work with the current way the dialogue is presented, but if enough people wanted it (and if I had some volunteers!) I would figure it out.
(Yes, that includes pre-volunteers.)
Feel free to voice your opinion on this too, of course.
So, if you haven't played through Winter's Fury before, or you've been looking for an excuse to replay it, now is a better time than ever. Please leave comments about your experience playing through, and have fun. Again.
Screenshots (outdated):
Spoiler: