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Phobus

Maps With Unusual Weapon Progression

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Now, most people familiar with my work know that I tend to eschew the usual shotgun-based gameplay in favour of starting the player off with a chaingun, rocket launcher or plasma rifle and then expanding the weapon base afterwards, if at all. What I'm wondering is if there's any other mappers or map sets that do this sort of thing. I'm quite interested to see how they handle it and what kind of set ups they use.

So, any examples? Do you like this sort of thing, or does working your way up the weapon ranking, with the shotguns serving as the workhorses for most encounters work best for you?

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I like maps that start me off with a rocket launcher because of the danger when using it, but unusual weapon progressions are difficult in megawads so you don't get to see it utilized very often.

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Most maps render the original shotgun obsolete by way of the introduction of the chaingun and heavier weapons. However I like using the shotgun as a sort of long-distance rifle. I think it would be interesting if the player is encouraged to switch between the normal shotgun and SSG depending on the situation, and perhaps only later on introduce the other weapons.

I don't care much about the pistol. :)

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I often apply limitations weapon-wise (actually I often force various limitations upon myself in general while struggling myself in the editor, something that affects aesthetics or gameplay, or both), like giving only two weapons to finish the whole map with. Kind of entertaining. Who cares though, my maps are shit, thankfully they're rare enough so that people don't stumble upon them all the time.

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Nowadays I don't buy the "unusual weapon progression" feature and I don't think it's cool at all. The reason: all weapon progressions have been used before.

The ones that caught my attention in the past were a Marswar map with RL (MAP21?) and Abyssion with RL + Plasma.

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If I'm allowed to pull the NEIS chain (which I'll now blatantly assume I can), E3 starts you with no weapons at all except Berserk and possibly the Rocket Launcher if you're lucky, and E4 is a chaingun-only map. Couple o' bucked trends there, if it counts.

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Unusual progressions can be interesting, the problem I tend to encounter is that I simply have more fun playing with the mindset: plentiful bullets/shells, limited rockets/cells. When an upper-tier weapon takes center stage the whole stress over ammo conservation (ie. making tradeoffs between safety / ammo) gets lost, or at best muddied. And if the map is shotty or cg-only, then you pretty much lose the ability to throw higher-tier monsters at the player --> *yawn*.

That's not to say areas revolving around a single weapon aren't fun, but if I'm playing a map like that I usually hope the area doesn't go on too long.

I still think it would be interesting to see some more levels that showcase slightly rebalanced weapons (disturbia is an example, or something using those dehacky things that get posted occasionally (e.g. phml's or scifista's))

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i personally just use the weapons that i personally prefer. that is the shotgun 99% of the time.

recently i'm experimenting with random weapon/monster spawns. so, when i spawn a shotgun, i also spawn shotgun dudes. when i spawn a minigun, i spawn zombieman or chaingun dudes. i didn't develop this very far though. it's just an idea or a concept that i think is interesting to create more diversity for a map that you play multiple times.

you can take this a few steps further and experiment with random secret doors, random trap doors etc... you get the idea.

with this method, i just wanted to get the most out of a map without making it too repetitive on multiple playthroughs.

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