What a great question. I'm speaking as someone who avidly played SMBX 1.3 and tried to make episodes (but didn't share them) in 2010-2012, then largely forgot about it until 2020 when I began working on TheXTech and playing some X2 content.
My personal opinion is that SMBX 1.3 was a masterpiece of game design. I don't think that there's anything truly missing from the SMBX 1.3 content standard. There is still a lot of room for pushing the limits of SMBX within that standard (as you and others have been proving). That's why I've focused almost entirely on quality-of-life improvements in TheXTech instead of expanding the content standard too much -- why fix something that isn't broken?
That said, I don't think that SMBX was ever exclusively about the kind of design virtuosity you've been exploring over the past few years. As I remember it, a lot of the excitement in the early days was from the shock factor of "you can DO that!?". I think that there's a bit of a treadmill effect where getting that same shock factor now requires much more technically-demanding features (like the 3D-perspective Minecraft battle field MrDoubleA shared yesterday). So in that sense, I'd actually say that X2 is in large part trying to create the same *feeling* that SMBX 1.3 created for me, at least, when I was much younger.
As a side note, the many X2 developers have different interests and a different sense of humor than Redigit, and that's naturally resulted in X2 having a different "feel" from SMBX 1.3 (in the added characters and NPCs, for instance). I was really happy to see The Conquest recently, and I think that (more than anything else I've seen from X2-land) that episode captures some of the feel of SMBX 1.3.
My personal opinion is that SMBX 1.3 was a masterpiece of game design. I don't think that there's anything truly missing from the SMBX 1.3 content standard. There is still a lot of room for pushing the limits of SMBX within that standard (as you and others have been proving). That's why I've focused almost entirely on quality-of-life improvements in TheXTech instead of expanding the content standard too much -- why fix something that isn't broken?
That said, I don't think that SMBX was ever exclusively about the kind of design virtuosity you've been exploring over the past few years. As I remember it, a lot of the excitement in the early days was from the shock factor of "you can DO that!?". I think that there's a bit of a treadmill effect where getting that same shock factor now requires much more technically-demanding features (like the 3D-perspective Minecraft battle field MrDoubleA shared yesterday). So in that sense, I'd actually say that X2 is in large part trying to create the same *feeling* that SMBX 1.3 created for me, at least, when I was much younger.
As a side note, the many X2 developers have different interests and a different sense of humor than Redigit, and that's naturally resulted in X2 having a different "feel" from SMBX 1.3 (in the added characters and NPCs, for instance). I was really happy to see The Conquest recently, and I think that (more than anything else I've seen from X2-land) that episode captures some of the feel of SMBX 1.3.
Statistics: Posted by ds-sloth — Mon Jul 08, 2024 5:58 pm