What do you hate about "All New World Of Lemmings"?

[lemfan101]

I've noticed that people don't talk much about ANWOL, and they are usually prolix about the other lemming games. So there must be something the matter about ANWOL, but I don't know what.

So please tell me what's so wrong with the game. Why did it fail so much that they dropped the project of making more of the same?

[Flopsy]

I assume you're referring to the game more commonly known as Lemmings 3 or Lemmings Chronicles.

To be honest, I've never played the game fully myself, just played it for 15 mins but I found it majorly departed from the original formula provided by Lemmings/Oh No/Lemmings 2 Tribes and it immediately turned me off to the game.

Maybe if the game made the effort to teach you the game since it is drastically different in my opinion, I noticed this game lacked tutorial levels or maybe they were there and were not obvious to the new player.

I'm not saying that the game is a commercial failure, I understand some people like the alternate puzzle element presented in the format, however it has something new to learn to fully enjoy in my opinion and when I played the game, it was not immediately obvious what you had to do or any tutorials to teach you this.

This, Lomax and Lemmings Revolution are the only official Lemmings games which I don't play and have no intention to.

Does this answer your questions?

[LemSteven]

I'm probably one of the few here that really liked Lemmings 3.  Even though it strayed a bit from the traditional Lemmings formula, it still featured some fun levels and challenging puzzles.  I wish Psygnosis had released the other nine tribes as promised, because I would have liked to see what more they could do with the new gameplay mechanics.

With that said, there were a number of weaknesses in the game that likely turned many traditional Lemmings fans off:

• clunky skill assignment mechanics: Skill assignments did not always take effect immediately.  One of the more egregious examples is the Jumper.  If a jumper is assigned past the middle of a block, the assignment won't take place until he reaches the next block, which may be too late.
• Too many backroutes: Several levels are so littered with backroutes that I'm even sure what the designers intended.  I'm looking at you, Egyptian 14.
• Poor learing curve: The Egyptian tribe was far too easy, in my opinion, while the Classic tribe got up to Taxing difficulty by the third level. 
• The monsters: The bad guys often had strange, counter-intuitive behavior, and seem as if they had been sloppily added into the game at the last minute.
• Crowd control: Not a weakness per se, but controlling the crowd was a major part of the puzzle in the traditional Lemmings games.  In Lemmings 3, you had unlimited blockers, walkers, and jumpers, which made crowd control trivial.
• Compatibility Issues: This may be the biggest weakness of all.  Prior to the development of DOSBox, it was virtually impossible to run the game on any computer running an operating system newer than Windows 3.1.  The game was released in 1994, and Windows 95 took off the following year, so there was indeed a very small window of opportunity for people to get the game to run.

There, I just spent 3/4 of a post criticizing a game I really enjoyed.

[Nessy]

There, I just spent 3/4 of a post criticizing a game I really enjoyed.

Nothing wrong with that. Criticizing a game you like doesn't mean you dislike it. I think it just means you care enough about it to openly talk about things like that in greater detail.

For me personally I don't remember Lemmings 3 that much but from what I can remember I didn't hate it. It had some interesting mechanics and ideas that I think made the game feel different while having the "Lemmings" feel to it.

Flopsy brings up a good point about the lack of tutorial levels, but here are my thoughts on that: the original Lemmings had tutorial levels in the first difficulty, which is the difficulty that new players naturally play. What I loved about them was how they didn't give you lots of text to read in order to figure out how all the skills worked, but instead they gave you an environment where you had to use one or two skills and then experiment with them a little bit. Your reward was completing a level, which would almost always give newer players the motivation to continue. Levels like the "Only Floaters Can Survive This" took this a step further. You are allowed to save only one lemming, which means that new players had the chance to see a few lemmings splat before figuring out the skill. This would then allow players to connect everything together and realize that, "Okay so lemmings cannot survive heights so I need to use this floater skill here".

Now, in a game where you are encouraged to save everyone and you have unlimited skills (the ones that aren't pickups) then this is trickier to implement. If the first level in the Classic Tribe was a tutorial level of any kind (which is possible because of its simplicity and the "safe-ish environment") you could have blocked or jumped or made everyone a walker. You can count that the player tried all this, or not. Then you have to consider that it is less likely that someone will choose the Classic Tribe as their first tribe than a first difficulty. Another problem I see with having tutorial levels is if there are easy levels to introduce things and mechanics in each tribe then you run the risk of someone learning it all in one tribe but being forced to learn everything again when they head to their second or third tribe. Perhaps this comes down to good level design? I honestly don't know how I would have handled this if I were making this game I think making simple, but easy, levels as the first couple or few levels in a tribe would allow new players to get a handle on things but since it's still a puzzle more experienced players wouldn't get bored since they are still puzzles to figure out. kieranmiller's Lemmings 2 pack did something like this where all the skills a certain tribe was going to use was introduced in the first level, but they were still interesting puzzle levels that weren't over the top in difficulty but you still had to think about it.

On another note the unlimited skills was the thing I had mixed reviews about. I didn't mind the pickups, but honestly I would have preferred limited walkers, blockers, and jumpers. The problem with this is that now you run into a one, worker lemming heavy game (or "Worker Lemming Deluxe" as kieranmillar puts it). From a player's perspective you just use almost the same (or similar) containment process in almost every level (or maybe not. Someone can probably correct me on this ). From a level designer's perspective it basically becomes harder to create certain puzzles. In Lemmings 3 you have certain skills that are forced on you (the walkers, jumpers, and blockers). If you want to make, let's say, a containment puzzle without blockers you can't remove the blockers from the skill panel.

As for the monsters, the game didn't need them. They were just glorified traps that sometimes didn't work and I hated that female lemming-attracting monster in the Classic tribe. Traps are always dark but that... well sorry it's a touchy subject for me.

By the way kieranmiller is creating custom content for Lemmings 3 so you should definitely check it out if you love this game, and no he is not paying me to advertise it

[Flopsy]

LemSteven brings up a great point about compatibility issues. I actually owned a copy of Lemmings Chronicles for my Windows 95 PC back in the day and despite using MS-DOS mode to the best of my ability, I could never get the game to work.

The only thing I could do with the disc was play the soundtrack on it.

[grams88]

Hi everyone

I really liked lemmings chronicles and it was a game I tried very recently for the first time. I thought the levels looked really nice, I like the green grass levels they had on the classic tribe levels. The puzzles are well thought out and some levels are not that simple and does test your puzzle solving skills. Nessy does have a good point with a lot of the levels did seem to have the containment puzzle or ones where one of the lemming does most of the work. There was a level, love it or hate where you had to use grenades to blow up some of the walls

This was one of the games I've added to list of games I might try and complete one day. The shadow tribe looks a lot different to the one in lemmings tribes.

A very nice game that I would recommend to anyone.

A little psychological trick would be to think of this as a totally different game to lemmings instead of comparing this to the other lemmings games. Sort of like lemmings paintball which I thought was a really good game but I tried not to compare it to the other lemmings games.

[kieranmillar]

I have always had a soft spot for Lemmings 3, but cannot deny that it's a bad game. It has a number of issues.

1. Poor UI. Lemmings 3 is frustrating to play. It cares more about smooth animations than ease of play. Lemmings can frequently miss their assignment because it looked like they were in the middle of the grid square but in reality you were one frame too late. Performing actions next to a wall is even harder because the lemming turns early. The cost of this is often a complete restart. Now L3 did have the great idea of introducing replays, but paired it with the idiotic idea of having solutions that use them not count. This leaves me with one conclusion: fighting the controls is intentional, and that stinks.

2. Bad level design. L3 has some good levels, but they are not the norm. It is easy with the one-tool-at-a-time mechanic to make levels where the only option is spelled out for you: pick up tool, use it in the obvious place, pick up next tool, repeat. There are a lot of levels like this, and it's not all that interesting to play most of the official levels, they feel like rushed and trivial filler content.

3. It shouldn't be a Lemmings game. I'm not a Lemmings purist and am happy to see new things tried. I think under the surface of L3 the mechanics of lemmings gathering the tools to use works as a puzzle game, but the primary gimmick of lemmings is having all these little guys walk to their death and you have to save them, but in L3 the lemmings walking on their own makes the game so much worse. In most levels you just instantly block off the crowd and have one guy do everything, but making him do everything is annoying because he just wants to walk off ledges all the time. If this was a spin-off along the lines of Trine or The Lost Vikings where they all stand still by default you could have a solid puzzle game with the same core puzzle mechanics, just much much easier to play.

Good things about L3:
1. Great music except for the shadow tribe.
2. Grid structure works well. The game is heavily grid based and I think they did it well.
3. More boobs. L3 is the only Lemmings game to have a non-zero amount of boobs.

[ccexplore]

I'm a bit confused by bad point #3 above, how is the lemmings walking on their own different from previous games like Lemmings 1 and 2?  There are no Lemmings games (Lomax doesn't count) where lemmings stand still by default.  If anything, L3 with its unlimited blockers and walkers give you far more opportunities to get a lemming to stand still.

[kieranmillar]

The auto-walking is annoying in Lemmings 3 because the infinite walkers and blockers renders it pointless and so it only adds execution difficulty. In Lemmings 1 and 2 it is often part of the puzzle, but in L3 it essentially never is, its only effect is to make it harder to use tools in the right place. I find myself having to always hover over the pause key so I can rapid fire swap skills and assign them quickly a lot, whereas when I made my L2 pack I rarely had to do this. By giving you such precise control over your lemmings and also adding complexity to the skills like 7-directional building and digging, L3 ramps up the execution requirements significantly.

[Shrung]

There are no Lemmings games (Lomax doesn't count) where lemmings stand still by default.

And Lemmings Paintball, that one counts right?