Difficulty Spikes

I have had this on my mind for multiple years and talked about it extensively on stream but was interested to see what the doomworld forums thought about the same topic. Everyone has heard about the big wad's before, Alien Vendetta, Scythe 2, Speed of Doom etc.... they constantly pop up as suggestions for people to play and they all contain one thing I don't necessarily like all that much, a seemingly weird difficulty spike towards the end.

Don't get me wrong, variety is essential to keeping a player interested throughout 32 maps but is it possible to overdo this to an extent. Each of the megawad's I mentioned above obviously have many strong qualities, otherwise I think they would be shunned over time due to lackluster play (Ex: Aliens TC from 1994). What I have noticed with AV, S2 and SoD is that there is a specific map you can point to where you get this e3 transition that almost acts as an exponential difficulty spike.

Alien Vendetta: Map 25
Scythe 2: Map 23
Speed of Doom: Map 24

Now I don't mind a little bit of difficulty from time to time, I thoroughly enjoyed Sunder and Sunlust but I loathe the ending portions of AV, S2 and SoD for some reason. It's hard for me to pinpoint but I suspect it's because I know exactly what im getting into if I load up Sunder or Sunlust.

My question to doomworld.

Do you have any issues with exponential difficulty spikes in a mapset?
Would you rate AV, S2 and SoD etc higher if the endmaps had a more uniform
ending to the rest of the set (linear difficulty increase)?

All I will say is that I love unexpected difficulty spikes.

Maybe it's because I have played so much AV and know it very well, but I really like late AV.. yet objectively linear progression I think is better.

On the other hand.. I lose my will to live when I reach late Scythe 2.. and Speed of Doom gets to me long before map24.

But much like you said with Sunder or Sunlust.. when I played Hell Revealed II I went in expecting it to just be obscene and made it through the whole thing.

I often have similar experiences with "challenge oriented" wads. At the start it's all fun and games, then it gets a bit tricky but still on the enjoyable side, and finally the maps go even further with the difficulty and just scare me away. So I never completed Plutonia 2, Resurgence, Scythe 2, Sunlust, Unholy Realms, etc. It's kind of a heartbreaking experience when the wad you enjoy so much suddenly becomes too stressful for you to continue playing. Like, "the fun is over now kid". So yeah, I don't like progression like that. I think it's much better when the first few maps give you a good enough idea of what the rest of the wad is going to be like, so you know what to expect overall and you can decide whether that sort of difficulty is comfortable for you or if it's time to look for some other wad to play. Otherwise you get groups of people where some say that Scythe 2 becomes shitty after map22, while others say that map23 is where Scythe 2 really begins.

I honestly thought the transition in Speed of doom occurred at the start of episode 3 with that insane tyson map. I have to agree on Scythe though, map23 pretty much breaks most casual players.
Personally I don't mind, even more extreme examples could probably be found within individual maps where you can go through a map fairly easily but then get to a trap which will destroy you 50 times over.

eh. megawads have a lot of maps, and extensive mapping requires variation to keep authors interested. sometimes it's refreshing to explore designing around lower difficulty, sometimes it's nice to stop coddling and hand-holding and just make something raucously badass, and everything in between. If every map >=N is unenjoyable, I see no problems lowering difficulty or just stopping altogether, you've seen enough BOSSBACKs already, what's one more..

to answer the OP I don't mind spikes at all. then again I'm on team "s2 begins at m23" :p

speaking of s2_23: does no one play with difficulty settings anymore?

Maybe it's just a stupid pride thing but I always hate lowering the difficulty. It's why I try to never complain to an author about difficulty on UV.. it's meant to be top tier. Your screenshot perfectly illustrates that.

I remember many years ago telling a friend to play AV and hyping him up a bit that it gets difficult in later levels. He came back to me after finishing it all and said I over-hyped the difficulty.. but then I found out he was playing on HMP, and he said to me "Why would I play on a higher one? isn't the default supposed to be the most balanced for a casual player?"

Selecting difficulty below UV feels like getting "untrue" experience. Just doesn't feel right.

HMP and lower isn't "untrue" though, just easier. Where did the idea that UV should be the default come from? I want to say pride, like having to drop down from UV after beating the game feels wrong or something.

IMO HMP should be the default, and UV should be harder for people who want to replay a WAD with added challenge.

I like them. It adds a lot of variety to megawads. If all 32 maps were to be about equally difficult, the whole thing would just get most likely repetitive.

In my mind UV is the only true difficulty because that's what is always used in speedruns with very very few exceptions (like Anima Zero or vdgg do HMP maxes for really hard levels sometimes).

Marcaek said:

HMP and lower isn't "untrue" though, just easier. Where did the idea that UV should be the default come from? I want to say pride, like having to drop down from UV after beating the game feels wrong or something.

IMO HMP should be the default, and UV should be harder for people who want to replay a WAD with added challenge.

Definitely agree with this.

To answer the original question, I don't mind them per se, but as an average player I will usually quit when difficulty increases to beyond frustration and lowering difficulty levels either doesn't help or turns it into a chore - so if the difficulty spikes back down again that would be a shame for me.

It fucking pisses me off when a WAD gets the balance of exploration and combat right all the way to the last segment (with an appropriately increasing difficulty), only to immediately fuck it all up for the final stretch with a supposed 'difficulty' spike made of tedious gameplay consisting almost exclusively of hordes of the same goddamned fucking thing over and over and over again.

I like challenge -- some of my favourite games of all time are objectively hard games to beat -- but when the challenge just revolves around placing a meatwall of monsters in a large room which requires a particular series of movements on the player's part to proceed ad nauseum, map after map, then fuck it. I'd rather play all of RE4's QTE events in a row. And I hate QTE's!

I agree with Memfis here. For me UV is the real and "true" difficulty level. I mean even when I started playing the original IWADs, I never played them on HMP or ITYTD, only Ultra violent.
For me UV is the default since it's suppose to feature the maximum number of enemies in a level and I consider a level done when I kill every possible enemy(and of course secrets and items). What can I say? I like my score perfect.

I don't mind difficulty spikes, but I'd rather them be more gradual (over time).

On what mode I like to play, that's a relative question. This is because the iWads are built differently. On the iWads, UV is the one, true difficulty. I literally never play anything else. Also, the iWads are extremely easy and unless your doing pistol starts, no map is much of a challenge on UV (if you disagree then just look at how fast people can run through them, even in Tyson mode).

PWads are a different story; you never know what to expect. It the author is the type to design different difficulty levels and states that either UV is extremely difficult or flat-out not intended for newcomers to the pWad, then I have no problems starting on HMP, or HNTR, for that matter.

Of course, my views are a little skewed because I'm the type to make maps completely different on each difficulty level (I love replay value). I find it to be a nice touch to make more than just monsters and items different on each difficulty setting. Hell, even just changing the gun progression and timing of it makes each difficulty level more interesting for me to play.

I'm not a fan of massive difficulty spikes, but I do like moderate ones that act as a gate to a new tier of difficulty, such as Dead Simple, that create a staircase of difficulty progression.

I think difficulty is one of the harder things to get right in a mapset. At the moment I'm trying using the keyboard or using the mouse left handed to get a feel for HNTR.

In the official games, there is a reasonable difficulty spike. Though there's a (sort of) difficulty spike between E3 and E4 of Ultimate Doom, it's quite progressive since Doom 2 is harder than Doom, then we get Final Doom. Evilution is a bit more challenging, but has a nice steady pace in the difficulty. Plutonia, on the other hand, is where we get the big difficulty spike in the official wads as it starts kicking your ass in the very first level and never lets up.

Now in megawads, some have difficulty spikes. Hell Revealed is a good example. Some would consider Map09 to be one, but really, that map is more about conserving ammo through using berserk packs for a lot of parts that is required. Map11, in my opinion, is HR's first true difficulty spike as it throws everything at you, setting the tone for what we'll be facing throughout the rest of the megawad. While onwards we get intense challenge that rivals Plutonia, the maps are still accessible, then we get Map18, which is the second difficulty spike as we're faced with greater and formidable opposition that puts Map11 to shame, then we get a few breather maps (save for the tough Maps 22 and 23). Finally, the last difficulty spike is the infamous Map24, and then the rest is smooth sailing, at least for HR's standards.

If by difficulty spikes there were sudden slaughter closests in a non-slaughter wad then I pretty much dislike them.

Alien Vendetta was one of the first custom mapsets i've played but i never legitimately got passed Map26; it might be my favorite mapset though. I've recently went back to some of the earlier levels in the set, and they are as good as I remember. It's still probably the first i'd recommend if someone asked me to recommend a mapset.

Atleast they put the hard maps at the end. If i ever stop playing a mapset, it's usually because i die at some point and say "whelp, i'm getting bored for today; maybe i'll pick this back up tomorrow". Basically, instead of recognizing that a map's too hard and skip forward, i just feel like i'm getting bored for that session. After all, I'm a masochist and with enough grinding any map is beatable, so skipping ahead feels weird and breaks the continuity.

In the case of AV, difficulty spikes don't subtract from the mapset in my eyes because all the maps i played up to that point were fun, and i never left the mapset on a frustrated note.

No trouble with Afterlife, T-Rex ? I find it nastier than Post-Mortem. What about the final map for that matter ? It's horrible on UV.

Also, I don't think this problem applies to Resurgence, I'd say that one makes its intentions clear enough from the get-go. The only real breather is MAP07, and even then I don't think it's on purpose. I'd say the biggest example of this problem is the first Scythe, the difference in expectations between MAP20 and MAP23 is ludicrous.

As for the question itself, I like being thrown into challenges that are currently above my level, be it in Doom or elsewhere. Nevertheless, I suppose it says something when my favorite WAD is Vanguard, which remains medium difficulty throughout but switches gameplay styles constantly.

Fonze said:

I don't mind difficulty spikes, but I'd rather them be more gradual (over time).

The definition of "spike" is that it's the opposite of being "gradual over time". Unless you mean that you want to experience "spikes" (sudden step-ups in difficulty) multiple times within a wad, in roughly regular intervals, and each next one would be comparably steep to the previous one, or only slightly steeper. If so, I would sympathetize with that. I don't enjoy surprisingly huge difficulty step-ups, I feel betrayed after deciding to play this wad for its difficulty that's comfortable to me. Although "small spikes" might be so unclear and unrecognizable from the player's perspective that they could be considered no spikes at all, but an actually "gradual" difficulty curve. I'm OK with that one too.

AV gets easier later on honestly.

Budoka said:

No trouble with Afterlife, T-Rex ? I find it nastier than Post-Mortem. What about the final map for that matter ? It's horrible on UV.

Yeah, Afterlife is a pretty nasty map, but I don't think it's worse than Post Mortem. One, the monster count is not as high as the map, or even Hard Attack. Second, you can at least run around the terrain, while in Post Mortem you have to be careful not to fall into the pool of damaging blood which takes up the majority of the map. Even Map26 of Alien Vendetta is a bit more lenient despite having more monsters than Post Mortem.

The final map, okay, I can agree that it's a bit of a doozy on UV and requires to be very fast and precise. To be fair, it's quite a climactic battle and an appropriate way to finish HR. In full honesty, I play the megawad on HMP, since UV is really tough. Even Plutonia is just as merciless on that difficulty.

I've only played the early levels on UV though. I played the wad on ITYTD a long time ago, and more recently on HNTR/pistol start, although I'm not done yet, precisely because of Post-Mortem. I saw what UV is like thanks to other people's demos, though.

Yeah, Hell Revealed on ITYTD and HNTR felt a look like Doom 2 and TNT on UV, while HMP gives a pretty tight but fair challenge. As far as I know with UV, there's not much difference to HMP until Map13, in which UV really caters to the Doomgods.

"Spikes" (sharp increase followed by an equally sharp decrease/return to the mean) don't bother me, since it's really just an extension of the normal variance of difficulty within a map to a slightly larger scale. "Steps" (sharp increase in difficulty which is then maintained) on the other hand I'm less of a fan of.

I like to be surprised by a bitingly-hard level or two thrown in amongst a more gradual progression. On the other hand, I grow bored or fatigued with most megawads long before I hit the third episode.

Lately I've been starting megawads around map25 instead of map01, since I've noticed the pattern that most of my favorite megawad maps are around there.

I don't notice difficulty spikes in Doom. It could be a personal failure; but I've always felt many doomers see large monster counts as inherently challenging due to unfamiliarity with the situation, rather than true difficulty. Even on the slaughter hater side, there is a recurring argument that "it's not hard, just tedious".

One recent difficulty spike I remember occurred in Doom II Reloaded, where MAP29 (roving Cyberdemons ahoy) and MAP30 are suddenly completely darn impossible. Hate that sort of thing. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth and doesn't let me part ways with the mapset on good terms.
And then there's Scythe's MAP21 and onwards... You're playing this well-balanced mod, suddenly SURPRISE! It's slaughter city. (And it's you being slaughtered)

Memfis said:

Selecting difficulty below UV feels like getting "untrue" experience. Just doesn't feel right.

I used to think like that, then I gradually realized that playing on HMP doesn't actually make me a wussy baby kid and tends to provide a smoother and more fun experience. I don't really see the hardest difficulties as the "default" anymore.

Feeling required to play a WAD on UV is silly and counterproductive. Yeah, so speedrunners play on UV... they have also played the map over and over and know what they are supposed to do, so the difficulty level is more fair.