How many "secret areas" are too many?

Hi all!

I'm new to the boards, and recently re-discovered Doom. And the modding with it.

Now, everybody loves secret areas, right? Well, do you people think that there can be too many secret areas?

If all sectors on a map are tagged "secret", well, that's not cool, that's stupid (unless you want the player to visit pay a visit on all sectors, but this is not the issue here). What I'm talking about those normal, a bit more difficult to reach -secret areas. How many are too many? 5? 10? 20? Or is it based on the number of rooms or areas (just call them spaces) in a level - like 1 secret / 3 spaces?

What are your thoughts?

Cheers,
aaglo

Has more to do with space/length of map than number of rooms/areas imo. If a map is 5-10 minutes long and kinda medium, I'd expect 2-6 secrets, but theme and gameplay style can make a big difference, as slaughter maps rarely have secrets, nor need them if you get the bfg and a few soulspheres/megaspheres, but something like a 1024 map could make out with even 7-10 secrets if done well. Really it's up to how much the mapper's tastes and good sense affect it, with gameplay and theme giving a rough idea. Which is not a numeric answer, so here's one of my own ;P

map type and size:     S      M     L     XL     XXL     too big
detailed tech/gothic   0-3    2-6   4-9    5-13   6-18     0-99
      detailed hell    0-2    0-3   2-6    3-9    4-12     0-99
      any slaughter    0      0-1   0-2    0-3    0-5      0

Can't really think of any other broad genres that I'd give specific numbers too ...

"Seven"

"Daaaad, it's a rhetorical queestion."

"Rhetorical eh? Eight."

"Do you even know what rhetorical means???"

"Do I know what rhetorical means???"




[edit]I suppose I should say something actually useful, so all i will say is this. I don't think people care how many secrets you have in a level, I think they care far more about how those secrets are placed/used in the design of a level.

Refer to this recent thread for details, if you haven't already. :) [/edit]

I love the Blake Stone levels with secrets inside secrets inside secrets inside secrets. There's no such thing as too many secrets as long as the reward is proportional to the difficulty of the secret.

@ArmouredBlood:
True, the type of level affects on the reasonable number of secret areas. And that's a nice reference code there. Just to clarify to myself: size S something like MAP01 in vanilla Doom2 and XXL is something that you seem to like to make for Area42? :)

@Kyka:
Thanks, I noticed that thread - and that's the reason I made this one (didn't want to derail that thread).

@Coopersville:
I think that there can be too many secrets! If - let's assume - that you had a level that has 101 secrets, and you found 100 of those... would the percentage in the endscreen of the level be rounded up to a 100%, eventhough you didn't find all of them? I don't know, I haven't tested it, and I'm not going to test it.

Cheers, aaglo

aaglo said:

I think that there can be too many secrets! If - let's assume - that you had a level that has 101 secrets, and you found 100 of those... would the percentage in the endscreen of the level be rounded up to a 100%, eventhough you didn't find all of them? I don't know, I haven't tested it, and I'm not going to test it.

If you had 10617 monsters and you killed 10616 of them would the percentage in the endscreen of the level be rounded up to a 100%, eventhough you didn't kill all of them?

Coopersville said:
There's no such thing as too many secrets as long as the reward is proportional to the difficulty of the secret.

If these secrets are very hard to find and very rewarding, the game will probably suck once you know where they are. If not, it might be frustrating to play initially, demanding that you find a good number of obscure secrets to progress with enough ease.

I don't care how many secrets are in a map, or how easy/hard they are to find, or what kind of reward they offer. I say, do whatever you want!

What actually is the map with the highest secret count? (Not including obvious mapping errors or mockeries)

From the WADs I can recall, it's Requiem's MAP12 with 23 secrets (some of them inaccessible). E4M3 has 22 sectors marked as secret. Deus Vult MAP05 has 30, but again it is kind of problematic: is it 4 levels or one level?

I know that Heretic's maps each seem to have like 15 useless secrets. Sometimes just walking into an obvious room would be counted as a secret! Now that's too many secret areas.

Coopersville said:

I love the Blake Stone levels with secrets inside secrets inside secrets inside secrets.

Yes, this is awesome. Wolfenstein has some of these as well.

jute said:

Yes, this is awesome. Wolfenstein has some of these as well.

Doom has some of these too.

Deus Ex had this secret within secret thing better than any other game I have seen.