Cynical
Warming Up
Posts: 10
Registered: 06-05 |
Joshy said:
Don't feel what I said was targeted at you. If you left a comment that didn't involve derogatory comments and you explained in a respectful manner, than you've done nothing wrong. And the 'make up for something they lack' was to imply they downvote popular WADs as a means to feel 'important', or going against the grain, or rage-complaining about a wad that's hard when they don't utilise the difficulty settings. Initially, it can be irritating when you really did put in the effort to make something, but it's something I don't take on board now; I just look at it as comedic material, heh. Honesty is what I respect though (The kind of honesty that attempts to be dispassionate, but that's probably asking a lot).
To compare a troll comment to a decent comment (even though I'd disagree with the comments, obviously I am not in the position to do so)-
A decent comment would say this (copied-pasted from the comments field): "Eh, feels like too much monster-spam is present and it becomes way too predictable and unforgiving very fast. Although the detail and some of the gameplay is fun, it doesn't have much strategy to the monster spam."
Obvious troll comments are such as these: "Jesus christ, this wad sucks. Overuse of hitscanners (especially in open areas, where the only recourse is to pray that the RNG favors you) and ridiculous traps that are literally a binary "do you know about it in advance? If so, run out of it and don't take any damage; if not, you die" make it play like a turd, and the overuse of brown makes it look like one, too."
"ugly colors and design, slaughter gameplay, nothing in common with alien vendetta, pure shit. 0/5"
The only thing I would've suggested to you is to either keep on going past those levels (I am not sure why the arach didn't turn up, no-one's brought that issue up), or play on 'I am too young to die'; the difficulty is there for a reason after all; otherwise it's just not your cup of tea as you've said initially. Personally, I'm not sure what the difference there is between DVII, AV, Scythe 2 and Speed of Doom, and there aren't exactly many cramped areas (it was designed as to not to be cramped, especially with the hordes you face later on) so forgive me if I am baffled a little bit. Still, thank you for your honesty. :-)
One of those comments was mine, so, I guess it is targeted at me?
Anyways, I actually wasn't playing it on UV. Even so, the chaingunner usage and popup traps were still intensely aggravating. Compare, for instance, that chaingunner placement in the hallway right of the start point in map 5 with the chaingunner placement in the library in map 21 of DVII. In "Cliffside Siege", those chaingunners are placed on a ledge behind the direction the player wants to move through that hallway, and, on HMP, there's a few HKs on the other end hurling plasma down the corridor. The player now has a few really shitty options: he can either pop in and out of the doorway, slowly picking away at any chaingunners that walk on to the right-most part of the ledge, or he can go out into the hallway, turn his back to the HKs (risking hits from them), and kill the chaingunners ASAP, absorbing hits from them and the distant spider that he has no cover from. Either way, the flow is awkward, and the player has the option of boredom with the first option, or taking a ton of damage- partially luck based- and hoping that the spider and chaingunners roll badly on the pseudo-RNG. Compare this with the DVII21 library: the player grabs the chaingun, the door closes behind him. There's two paths; one has hitscanners in front of it, the other acts as obvious cover. If the player chooses to go for the cover, there's three more enemies down that hallway after the curve, but they're all in front of the player, so the flow is unbroken, and there's no tedious "poke in and out" crap. There's a lot of this sort of stuff in SoD (another example that comes to mind instantly- the first room of the "jail" area in map 07, where the bars pop up behind the player), and this style of play seems really out of place in a wad called "Speed of Doom".
As far as traps go, again, lets compare DVII map 21 vs. Cliffside Siege. In Cliffside Siege, after you grab the key on the central island, a bunch of chaingunners teleport in on your right side, with no cover anywhere nearby. If you don't know about this trap in advance and have the appropriate weapon out, and aren't ready to face the appropriate direction immediately, you will die. Compare this to DVII21's "Hitler chapel" trap- the chaingunners spawn right in front of you, and there's large pillar for cover about three feet behind you. Even if you don't know it's coming, you're basically guaranteed to have 50 health/100 armor, bare minimum, when you trigger it, so you easily have enough time to duck back behind the pillar.
Finally, as far as cramped areas, the stuff that comes to mind most quickly is map02 (which nearly feels like a Congestion 1024 entry), and those tiny halls around the first "jail" room in map07. Particularly in the latter case, there wasn't even enough room to strafe around a revenant missile, so I had to constantly run up and down the staircases, which was annoying as hell.
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01-12-13 23:18 
