Reviews - Arx - End of Sun mod for Doom III

Excellent level design, cool missions, nice models and textures, nice puzzles. So far I'm having a blast. Good work pays off and this is a big payoff. RPG on idtech 4 works so well. I hope you guys continue to polish and add to this.

Score: 7/10

Arx End Of Sun is about 8-12 hours long.

I can't see why everyone else before me rated this a 10/10. Even a 8/10 might be a bit generous, it's way too dumbed down from Fatalis, and has too many bugs and other problems. Here are the good & bad cliffnotes for EoS:

+ Melee combat is more fun, snappy, and far less sluggish

+ Enemy health bars

+ Enemies are generally fun to fight, and the end boss is neat.

- Spells can't be precast (although an offensive spell is permanently equipped until another one is cast) and you can't even have a rune preview in the upper right screen like in the first game.

- Spell casting system is worse than in Fatalis, requires your gestures to be EVEN MORE SPECIFIC. If your mouse moves one nanometer north east while trying to move up, it registers it as north east, or a diagnal movement. I don't know about you guys, but I don't have laser precision hand movement.

- The game lacks a lot of spells, there isn't even a heal spell, where your health won't replenish slowly over time without a regen ring.

- Can we get rid of the stamina bar please? I was constantly out of stamina, and "sprinting" isn't that much faster than walking.

- No automap, although there are some Thief 1 style static maps, but they aren't very helpful. I spent some hours wandering around where to go next cause some of the levels were so huge and there wasn't an automap to help me.

- A glitch happened in the goblin portal area, I got stuck in the water and couldn't get out, then I quickloaded and I started walking back, and a black wall was in my way (the level LOD failed, the half of the map I came from was forever unloaded), had to load an earlier save to escape, because I didn't want to use my last Control Object scroll to activate the portal (I didn't have the runes needed to cast control object, an didn't know when I would get it, and didn't know if there were more portals after this.)

- Load times are ABSOLUTELY ATROCIOUS! There is no excuse for the game to take this long to load a map, especially if the map is super small, like the tavern, or the captain's room. I'm on an SSD, and it's like the game isn't even trying to load as fast as it could. It seems most of the game's content is in one .pk4 file, that's most likely part of the problem. I'm not sure how IdTech4's file system is structured, but maybe splitting the content into more .pk4 files might help load times, even Valve's vpks were seen doing this in recent years.

- Game doesn't run exceptionally well, even with antialiasing off (if you put AA on, you get VERY low framerate in some places). Probably because this is running off what seems to be older Doom 3/IdTech4 engine, which doesn't have proper multicore support (I think), that and/or EoS just isn't very optimized.

- Quick save and quick load aren't even bound, you can't even bind them in the menu. You have to edit ArxEOS_Config and put this in it:

bind "F5" "savegame quick"
bind "F9" "loadgame quick"

Also, a quicksave text or icon upon quicksave would be nice, as the only way to know it actually quicksaved is splitsecond lag.

- Stats have no description, ethereal link doesn't even enable mana regen, health and mana do NOT regen slowly over time unless you wear health and mana regen rings, don't worry there is plenty of those, and some stats are either underpowered, or seem to do nothing.

- Armor is incredibly dumbed down, there is no equippable armor, but it's treated like FPS armor (Like Doom 3), where you somehow stack multiple breastplates and helmets on you to increase your armor bar. There is also armor regen rings, much more efficient then buying pieces
consumable armor.

- Can't drop quest items. This is fine, until you get a duplicate quest item you don't need (like troll idol) and can never drop it or turn it in.

- Can't bind weapons/items, can't organize inventory, torchs don't stack, and you can't put them out, they're basically disposable one use flashlights (Like in Turok 2).

- Cooking food is an awkward and cruel joke, first of all, you can't even drag items out of your inventory, there is just a drop button that
sends items flying a few feet. Most fireplaces have stubborn collision, and the food ends up flying either past it, or doing a physics dance on the campfire, and bouncing off. Also food items cook literally one at a time, even if there are multiple items on there, this makes no sense, and wastes time. Food also takes WAY longer to took than it did in Fatalis.

- The location of the Dwarven Power Cell is a BIT obscure. (Central mine w/ portal, use telekinesis, look up for a lift, jump-grab it)

- Fire sword's fire graphic effect glitches out if you drop it.

- Lack of a proper ending cutscene (Time for a holiday)

- Other negatives I forgot to mention, or didn't come across.

This is decent for a beta despite all the problems, could use improvement overall, quality of life changes, improve those load times,
more spells, etc.

You learn a new spell, and then you realize that now you can use it to help a character you couldn't help earlier, reach a place that was previously inaccessible. You know exactly where to go to reach them thanks to landmarks you remember. And it all is your own thoughts, your own memory, not some waypoint in front of you. You are the hero. You are the one who solves the problems.

Level design is memorable. Each location is very interesting to explore, each part of each level has a lot of unique features to make it stand out from other parts, making you remember it.

Exploration is very rewarding. There are plenty of secrets containing valuable items that will aid you in your journey. Walking everywhere and learning the locations will also help completing the quests, as you can see above. And finally, the beauty and variety of the places you visit are the reward, too - you enjoy looking at them and wonder what awaits around the corner.

Often even in expensive commercial games you can see levels which are composed of many very beautiful assets, but actually playing them is not fun, because you just cannot find your way around and have to wander until you stubmle into your destination - they are mazes, not levels. The developers fix that with a quick and dirty hack - give you a minimap with waypoint that constantly tells where to go. And there are puzzles where you receive the answer together with the problem.

These things prevent you from getting immersed in the world and becoming the hero of the game, because hero is the one who makes the decisions, finds the way and solves the puzzles and you just follow the instructions from the onscreen GUI.

And this is why Arx: EoS is a breath of fresh air. Not yet another something between a movie and a game, but pure, 100% game where you do everything yourself. Very engaging and rewarding experience. And very accessible, too - it's completely free and uses IdTech4 - an engine which has the best graphics quality-system requirements balance.

A great passion project, a shame it sits idle

It is a masterpeace from a small team. Catches all the aspects of Arx! Magnificent!

amazing mod

It's an Arx game through and through!

Fantastic work for a idtech4 mod, i never thought this mod would be so similar to the real Arx, everything is there, the mouse gesture magic casting, the Arx inventory system and journal, everything, the level design is also very faithful to the Arx world, but obviously with real time lighting and normal mapping. I can only give praises to anyone that worked on this and hope you guys keep on improving it.

the best game

So excited! I'm glad people are still thinking and playing Arx!