Munch's Oddysee: A Collection of Thoughts and Musings

Munch's Oddysee is a curious case study. Some might see a miniature Daikatana in it; a troubled
development, overambition and entrusting far too much faith in a supposed "visionary".

Let's begin with laying out a key fact. The switch from Sony to Microsoft was not the chink in MO's
armor that brought it the ridicule it would face years after its release. Microsoft, by most
accounts I've seen, was more generous, lenient and less demanding than Sony was. The Xbox, by all
accounts I've read, was easier to develop for, had far more powerful hardware and generally would
support far more of the ideas that Lorne suggested and tried to showcase early on than even two
PS2's coupled together could do. If you're going to attribute anything to this switch, you can
attribute reduced profits on Lorne's end to this switch; far fewer copies of MO would have been sold
given the comparative rarity of the Xbox. But to say that MO was compromised for the sake of the
Xbox is not just a convenient lie, it's one that doesn't make sense.

Why do I stress this? Because a lot of the talk of MO comes out blaming Microsoft for its faults and
praising Lanning for its good aspects, a position that is simply not tenable, even if you refer to
Lanning himself. MO's flaws come from other areas.

First, overambition. If you take a moment to hunt for "cut" content for MO (most of which amounts to
little more than cheap 3D renders and concept art) everything from the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
aspect of Munch's character and the dynamic emotional system required for it to the storm circle
that would dynamically affect and alter the environment dramatically, you may feel as though you've
heard this story before when it comes to the development of other games. Promises of untried and new
ideas with sweeping and far-reaching effects that would permeate in the whole game world that then
pan out into an extremely flat version of them (in the case of the storm circle) or are ignored
altogether (such as Roid). And when you disprove the notion of MO's development cycle being
disrupted by Microsoft's decisions, you are left with little recourse but to accept that these ideas
were too large.

And, of course, they are. Seriously sit down and consider these ideas and whether you've heard of
any games that actually do these. A game where based on how you interact with one object on a level,
you radically and meaningfully change the rest of the level. A game where the emotional state of
your character can cause him to change over into a completely different character. These are not
feasible and neither were the vast majority of ideas left on the cutting room floor at
Oddworld. MO's reach exceeded its grasp, as is not unusual; most games have ideas more sweeping than
allowed within the confines of hardware, software and development constraints. But many games that
have these still work, because these overambitious ideas are trimmed into a workable core, rather
than how most of MO's advanced ideas were removed or only fill the periphery of the game's
content. This come down to MO's second flaw; its lack of direction in gameplay.

MO wanted to be many things. It had Abe's Oddysee and Abe's Exoddus to tap into; stealthy puzzle
cinematic platformers. It had to contend with being the first 3D Oddworld game. It wanted to create
a larger and dynamic world, one that could react to you, rather than be fixed in place. It wanted to
push for more open environments with NPCs interacting with one another in ways that the prior games
could only imitate in a 2D screen system. And it wanted to be visually outstanding and
unique. Balancing this is an almost Herculean task, demanding more than most could deliver and
finding a common ground and thread in all of this that would be fun, rewarding and not get old, a
primary gameplay loop, while still showing off the peripheral would have taken some thought. But
this, as is so often the case when you get entrenched in vision, is overlooked in favor of how you
can add in this or that cool extra thing. As Lanning himself later say, though I have to paraphrase,
it's better to do one thing well than to try to do everything. MO doesn't do anything well; it has
no focus, nothing it wanted to do really well, only things it wanted to have.

Throwing and carrying your pals around gets old fast and even GameSpeak, a term invented by OWI, is
reduced to basically "follow", "work" and most worryingly "attack". Attack represents a dramatic
departure in conflict resolution for Oddworld games in MO. Prior to MO, conflict was resolved
indirectly, via dropping stones, possession, tricking enemies off cliffs or into mines, all of which
requires active consideration of the level and forces more thinking and puzzle solving. MO
introduced not only direct conflict via the Zap machine but also placing mudokons against sligs,
something prior to unheard of. It's worth considering the thematically problematic aspects of this:
prior to MO, one understood sligs as threats that could not be faced head-on, whereas MO pushes for
a vision of Oddworld where any industrialist threat can and should be faced in direct combat,
undermining them as dangerous enemies and instead turning them into tedious obstacles to overcome by
simply waiting for combat you more or less can't participate in to be over. This becomes
particularly apparent with level design that almost exclusively encourages this approach, since an
indirect approach like possessing one slig to kill another is simply so much slower (though some
levels encourage this to the extreme tedium of the player). There are further extensions on this
such as the infinite respawns without the world resetting (eggs, resurrection totems, spooce,
explosive barrels, slig dispensers…) none of which are good gameplay decisions since they encourage
and sometimes even demand grinding. But to return to the original point, Munch's lack of a defining
gameplay feature, the only other gameplay that comes to mind as something that could actively be
enjoyable and fun is the movement system. However, movement is its own slog of boredom.