I don't dispute that! My point was a list of other games I consider to be shooters, but which weren't linear (in response to someone else's comment). Nothing much to do with Strafe really.

Holy shit, thanks for linking DUSK. It basically has everything I think Strafe is missing: impactful guns, cool enemy design, interesting levels. At least that's one old-school shooter I'm gonna be looking forward to.

I voted for it on the GOG Wishlist.

Haven't you heard, crap is King? o.O

I think I'll strafe around this one's [Buy] button rather than hitting it. It looks like a mob simulator and not a good one at that. I can only justify pre-ordering something when the devs are struggling to make a game because of financial issues and the concept they present blows my mind in a good way. This is not one of them.
Not all shooters that are generated procedurally are bad, Heavy Bullets is an example of how it can be done in a right way. Another game that has some shooter elements and has procedurally generated worlds is Terraria. Now that is a game I love :-)

Ouch, that's like finding the Zion Generator weapon toward the end of Jets'n'Guns. The weapon's taglines are Zion Inside and The Final Solution. It's not funny and makes you wonder what the creators intended.

STRAFE's promotional copy is full of over the top claims, part of the style they're calling out to. Saying the weapons are Holocaust machines is in character. It's also tasteless.

I assume it’s rather like Unity isn’t optimized all too well.

A whole lot (if not most) of modern games use procedural generation of some sort without anyone noticing it. Does anyone really think all the grass blades and trees in your 100 km² open sandbox game world are placed by hand?

Procedural generation is a tool like anything else. It’s the way how you use that tool, and to what effect, that matters.

Strafe levels aren’t 100% procedurally generated but to a certain extent. The base layouts of the the rooms are certainly hand-crafted. The procedural part will be more about the algorithm that picks rooms from a pool of hand-crafted rooms that maybe have some procedural variants, and the way how levels are put together. If they manage to pull it off properly then it certainly can be a good feature and help replayability.

We’ll see very soon...

Edit:

About the procedural generation in Strafe: <span class="bold">In this video</span> one of the developers gives some information about how the procedural part works. For each of the 3 or 4 zones per playthrough they hand-crafted around 50 rooms with playability in mind. And these rooms that are procedurally combined to levels of around 4 to 6 minutes of length.
So, we get a lot of hand-crafted rooms, but you never know which room might be around next corner.

The main developer responded on the steam forums saying the game could be beaten within two hours especially if you knew the shortcuts. Makes me think its a 4-6 hour game. It had better have some pretty stellar procedural generation for me to justify the price, after all, Ziggurat and Immortal Redneck are the competing Rogue-FPS-things it needs to beat.

I'm ... doubtful.

If thats the case why have blizzard used it for heartstone then?
[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearthstone_(video_game]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearthstone_(video_game[/url])
This is a proffesional studio, and they have more than enough money to not use Unity
They canceled Titan but they didnt stop making heartstone with unity. really weird.
As of May 2017, Blizzard has reported more than 70 million Hearthstone players.

Are they ameturs since they used unity?
Or did they use unity not knowing better?
Or perhaps, this Argument is the best (sarcasm)
They used it to spend less money and to earn more? (Unity costs less/pocket change)

It’s kind of funny of you to compare a 2d collectible card game with a 3d shooter.

And what does the amount of players have to do with anything? Following your argument the Transformers movie franchise must consist of the some of the best movies in human history.

Unity is the easiest way to go for 2d, and smaller studios usually tend to use Unity instead of UE because scripting seems to be more easily accessible in Unity. E.g. I heard some people don’t like UE’s blueprint system.
Additionally, smaller teams apparently tend to use Unity instead as well, probably for that reason.

On top of that, Unity is also intended to work on mobile platforms like iOS and android, which is pretty much the reason why Blizzard used it for Hearthstone.

This link gives an idea about why Blizzard went for Unity to develop a rather small game.

“The team was small by Blizzard’s standards: about 15 people for a number of years. In terms of the folks tasked with bringing the game to mobile, that sits at around four or five. “One of the things that really made Unity a great solution for us, is that we really like to iterate here at Blizzard,” says Chayes. “That’s one of the things that’s been core to our game development process in the past: we spend a lot of time going over the mechanics, multiple times, and working on them to make sure they’re as polished and as awesome as they can be.”

Because Hearthstone was a smaller game and had a shorter development timeframe than some of its other titles, the Blizzard team didn’t have as much time to go through its traditional iteration cycles. “One of the great things about using Unity is the speed with which you can iterate allows us to learn things that are working and not working, very fast,” says Chayes. “The fact that you can run the editor and it shows the same thing players are going to see in the game – and then stop it and go and identify bugs or polish things you want to tweak – really helped us learn faster about some of the things we thought we could be improved.

“Another thing that was really great about Unity was that it had native support for a lot of the tools that our artists like to use – Photoshop and Maya – and can read in their base file formats, without having to go through some conversion process, which also sped up our process.” He says that one of the tools the team got out of the Unity Asset Store was PlayMaker. “That’s something we’ve used in the game to create scripted events alongside our animation system. It was actually a big help in enabling our art team to independently make cool events in-game.””

Your argument about costs doesn’t really apply because using UE is free. Epic “just” gets 5% of the profit the developer makes with the game. Unity Pro licenses aren’t free, though.

I would assume that the development team was already familiar with Unity (e.g. working on mobile games or so), so switching to UE for a game that pretty much looks like a 90’s shooter would be rather nonsensical for them.

Whats the best movies around is a matter of oppinion and tastes.
Its true that best movies are generally treated as such among the majority but you woudnt get the same reaction from all people, nor woud you get the same reaction from people when it comes to art.

This is not about 2D vs 3D
Your argument was that its the engine itself thats badly optimized
that woud reflect on both 3d and 2d games, not just one of them.
And i also think you missed my whole point about blizzard canceliing Titan.
Its not like they missing resources , people or money to build an engine or chose another engine and they used to spend alot of time when they are making something thats why your argument is flawed.

Team 5 are the team behind the development of Hearthstone. Until near the end of the closed beta, the team comprised only 15 members, the smallest team at Blizzard. This allowed them to work much more quickly and in different ways.
Team 5 was created specifically for the development of Hearthstone, with the intention of taking a different approach to game creation than that previously taken by Blizzard in developing its games, with 50+ person teams and multi-year development cycles. Team 5 was created with the intention of working on a smaller scale but at the same level of quality.

Notice the word quality here.

My question is why woud blizzard use unity if the engine is badly optimised, if they wanted quality?
it doesnt make sense if we are to take youre argument into account.
Even more so since they coud have just modified an existing engine other than unity for use on mobile, they dont lack money to do so, and the people at blizzard arent amaturs either so its just as easy for them to use another engine.

Also
Hearthstone development began in 2008, along with the assembling of Team 5. However, for a long time Team 5 was a very small group mostly focusing on prototyping. Ben Brode states that his first records are from June 2008, but that "full-on development didn't start for a while after that". Development by the whole team appears to have started in earnest in spring 2012.Hearthstone was first announced at PAX East in March 2013, reached beta in August 2013, and was fully released in March 2014, roughly 6 years after development began.

Not really short time making a game.

The cost argument was made because thats what im seeing people hating unity and rpg maker using elsewere and i was thinking you migth use this argument also. (Its a trend to hate certian game engines).
Unity is used by people because its easy, and a few other reasons.
Since its easy to use you woud naturally get people that are not so good at making games for it and also people that doesnt care so much about optimizing their game.

Hartsone is also a
2D game, with some 3D elements.


You can read the whole thing here
if you want :
http://hearthstone.gamepedia.com/Design_and_development_of_Hearthstone

No interest in the game but Oh Em Gee that soundtrack.

So, who's getting that money of mine, GOG or bandcamp? :)

So it sounds like the way it was done in Tower of Guns: pre-made rooms strung together in a semi-randomized fashion. Since I enjoyed Tower of Guns, procedural gen - in this case - won't be a thing that automatically turns me away from the product. Now just waiting to see how the final product turns out.