08-03-2011, 07:21 PM
Let me just chime in as the designer for NM. 
There are lots of key issues with NM, but most of them are in favor of you having too many keys. NM was the first mansion designed, and it grew as the original game grew. That's why it's designed a little weird and very open. We honestly hadn't built a set of standards for Mansion development while NM was being built.
You are *supposed* to stick to either the left path or the right path, and I had the original intention to make it very difficult or non-obvious as to how to jump between paths, but since we are all veterans, these Therefore, you'll end up with really weird key combos by jumping between paths, since this was only intended for expert players at the time.
It is an extremely open mansion, as opposed to Spider Palace which is very neatly closed. It's a great mansion for speed running in this case since there are so many paths to take.
Because this mansion and another one (Falcon Manor? Don't remember) have branching paths that don't allow for backtracking, Vern decided to make it so that you wouldn't need to get all secrets to get 100%. It's up to the designer to specify how many secrets are needed for 100%, so that way if it's impossible to get all secrets in one playthrough of a mansion, you can still get 100% completion.
If I had all the free time in the world I'd love to sit down and delete all the doors and keys in NM and just start over and make it more balanced. We've all learned a lot about Mansion Design in the last 6 years (and in my case, about 9 years)
There are lots of key issues with NM, but most of them are in favor of you having too many keys. NM was the first mansion designed, and it grew as the original game grew. That's why it's designed a little weird and very open. We honestly hadn't built a set of standards for Mansion development while NM was being built.
You are *supposed* to stick to either the left path or the right path, and I had the original intention to make it very difficult or non-obvious as to how to jump between paths, but since we are all veterans, these
secretpaths are very easy to find by normal standards.
Therefore, you'll end up with really weird key combos by jumping between paths, since this was only intended for expert players at the time.It is an extremely open mansion, as opposed to Spider Palace which is very neatly closed. It's a great mansion for speed running in this case since there are so many paths to take.
Because this mansion and another one (Falcon Manor? Don't remember) have branching paths that don't allow for backtracking, Vern decided to make it so that you wouldn't need to get all secrets to get 100%. It's up to the designer to specify how many secrets are needed for 100%, so that way if it's impossible to get all secrets in one playthrough of a mansion, you can still get 100% completion.
If I had all the free time in the world I'd love to sit down and delete all the doors and keys in NM and just start over and make it more balanced. We've all learned a lot about Mansion Design in the last 6 years (and in my case, about 9 years)