Apocalyptic Factor single player

[kakhome1]

Has anyone played this mission under single player and got at least a fair way into it? If so, is it worth playing under that mode (of course I can turn the difficulty down one notch from my normal)? I don't have a friend who plays Descent to co-op this thing with.

EDIT: Added a poll for this as well.

[Alter-Fox]

Never got to the end of the second level on any difficulty.
This is one of the hardest sets out there, if not *the* hardest... they really should have given you more extra lives near the start, at least.

[kakhome1]

Try Trainee...it's almost impossible to make something that can't be beat on that skill in D2.

[LightWolf]

Almost impossible and impossible are two different concepts...
...and I got too bored to tell with Apocalyptic Factor.

[kakhome1]

Were you playing Trainee? You can get bored on that skill fairly easily.

What about it made you get bored personally in solo?

[LightWolf]

It was more of an idea overload than a problem with Apocalyptic Factor

[Alter-Fox]

Would rather not try Trainee... Trainee and rookie are not fun.

[kakhome1]

What's an 'idea overload'?

[LightWolf]

Too many ideas for this and that - usually at least a few of which are not related to what's happening

[kakhome1]

Like too many ideas of how to handle a fight? Or is it the author cramming too many ideas into a level that you mean?

[Xfing]

Like too many ideas of how to handle a fight? Or is it the author cramming too many ideas into a level that you mean?

Probably he just thinks these levels don't quite cut it by the standards of LightWolf's School of Level Design

just stop asking already and play the freaking mission, the levels are excellent goddammit

[Kaizerwolf]

Too many ideas for this and that - usually at least a few of which are not related to what's happening

I 100% have no idea what you're getting at here. I haven't had the pleasure of trying Apocalyptic Factor, but you've been so horrendously vague in your answers that I'm not sure you have either.

[LightWolf]

Like too many ideas of how to handle a fight? Or is it the author cramming too many ideas into a level that you mean?

I was getting too many ideas for my own levels/non-Descent things

I haven't had the pleasure of trying Apocalyptic Factor, but you've been so horrendously vague in your answers that I'm not sure you have either.

I've gotten part-way through level 2 on my initial real attempt and tried a few levels here and there, however the majority of my play time was using a cheat code to skip the levels and read the included novel

[Sirius]

LOL! Some of that I'm not particularly proud of in retrospect, but I've never had anyone call anything out, so maybe I'm just too self-conscious about it

Plutonian Shores is reminding me an awful lot of AF in terms of narrative design, except that "now what is this level for?" is a much bigger problem for 30 levels than 15.

[LightWolf]

You probably are being too self-conscious about it. Convert the levels to narrative format as well as change some things to avoid copyright infringement and you could probably sell the thing

[kakhome1]

@Sirius What are you trying to say about Plutonium? First of all, only 11 levels are publicly available, not 30. Secondly, there are no pre-level briefings. And thirdly, the levels aren't nearly as large as AF's levels are.

What do you think of that mission?

[Sirius]

Oh, yeah that's the demo, which doesn't have any briefings. But briefings are planned, and a lot of the work on that falls to me. It's also essentially the same situation as AF, where we have a bunch of levels already made and the story has to work with them - as opposed to the approach where you build levels to fit a story which I suspect is what KaK did. Due to its graphical limitations D2 isn't very conducive to that though - Kruel just did it anyway because he's Kruel.

[kakhome1]

What do you think of the level quality?

[Sirius]

Looks pretty good so far. Some of it I've played to death in the name of testing, which tends to bias one's views, but taking a step back I don't think there's anything wrong with it.