Civvie 11 - Retro FPS Boomer

wtfNeedSignUp said:
That sewer level was beyond atrocious, can't understand how it passed playtesting, maybe some sunk cost bullshit.
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"Was this place built on an Indian burial ground?!"

Civvie's inspired me to play through Thief 1 since I never got past the 3rd level, but that sewer level's giving me second thoughts. On the other hand, he does tell you how to skip it and it wasn't in the original release to begin with so I won't feel too bad.
 
Out of curiosity I looked up the game and found that, predictably, it received extremely low scores on GameSpot (1.5 out of 10) and IGN (2.1 out of 10). Like it doesn't look like a good game by any stretch of the imagination (honestly those scores are probably justified), but I can't imagine not being utterly fascinated with how strange the game is. The reviewers were dismissive about it, with IGN's review stating that people should just pretend games like You Are Empty don't exist. At least Civvie didn't deny that the game has a hypnotic quality to it.
 
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Oh hey, You are Empty! I actually played this game, I can actually share some funny story about this game. So, this game wasn't supposed to be like Half Life 2 despite what Civvie thinks, it actually wanted to be a Soviet version of Bioshock before Bioshock. The whole plot was about this scientist who possessed psychic powers and managed to brainwash Stalin to allow him to do these various projects, which created these superhumans to make USSR a super nation. His last project involved this tower where his own body and mind would be connected, but the experiment went wrong and thus everyone was driven mad and transformed into these super mutants, except the main hero who was in a comma. So, the game actually was supposed to have a lot more levels, weapons (like a Machinegun and flamethrower), two branching endings, among various types of enemies each representing a sort of model of a soviet citizen that went mad (Like you would have Butchers, Pioneers a so forth) but what happened is one of the lead developers died. So, it set the whole process way back, and to meet their deadline, the devs essentially had to remove entire levels, enemies, and weapons from the game along with huge chunks of the story.
 
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It looks like an okay budget horror game. I laughed when Cancer Mouse appeared.
 
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Smaug's Smokey Hole said:
Weird, I posted about You Are Empty in a thread last month. It's sloooowly getting a remake of sorts where the shooting is completely removed and instead it focuses on the story and exploring the setting.
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Huh, is it now? Because I recall that remake popping on steam greenlight a couple of times and then going away.
 
The tired cat said:
Oh hey, You are Empty! I actually played this game, I can actually share some funny story about this game. So, this game wasn't supposed to be like Half Life 2 despite what Civvie thinks, it actually wanted to be a Soviet version of Bioshock before Bioshock. The whole plot was about this scientist who possessed psychic powers and managed to brainwash Stalin to allow him to do these various projects, which created these superhumans to make USSR a super nation. His last project involved this tower where his own body and mind would be connected, but the experiment went wrong and thus everyone was driven mad and transformed into these super mutants, except the main hero who was in a comma. So, the game actually was supposed to have a lot more levels, weapons (like a Machinegun and flamethrower), two branching endings, among various types of enemies each representing a sort of model of a soviet citizen that went mad (Like you would have Butchers, Pioneers a so forth) but what happened is one of the lead developers died. So, it set the whole process way back, and to meet their deadline, the devs essentially had to remove entire levels, enemies, and weapons from the game along with huge chunks of the story.
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Problem wasn't just in the death of the developer, the project turned out to be too ambitious and costly for their studio, so a lot of things they had in plans got scrapped, some were removed for gameplay and design reasons.
 
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GaddafyTheLooneyDuck said:
Problem wasn't just in the death of the developer, the project turned out to be too ambitious and costly for their studio, so a lot of things they had in plans got scrapped, some were removed for gameplay and design reasons.
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The game also suffered some delays along with STALKER and other slav-FPSs of that time, You Are Empty was announced with a trailer in 2002 or 2003 if my memory is correct.
I don't think it even uses any pixel or vertex shaders which is straight up weird for a 2005/2006 game but makes sense for a 2002/2003 game. Engine wise that puts them pre Xbox/Geforce 3 and on the level of Quake 3, Unreal Tournament and Half-Life 1 when graphics card were still fixed function. That's pretty cool in a way because the game doesn't look bad.
 
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