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baja blast rd.

Post Your Opinions About Doom (Whether Controversial or Not)

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okay here's some controversy:

 

I liked dannebubinga's maps more than ribbiks' in sunlust.

 

I liked darkwave's maps more than joshy's in speed of doom.

 

I don't know why, I just liked their styles more I guess.

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I think that there’s nothing wrong with slaughtermaps centered around BFG spam. The weapon doesn’t inherently make slaughter “easy” or “mindless” imo. The actual map design is a much more important factor to creating challenging and/or interesting encounters. The BFG is an incredibly fun weapon. It’s not automatically an “easy” weapon. CAN the BFG be a room clearing weapon? Yes. Can it also be just another tool to help you deal with a swarm of enemies? Also yes. 

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7 hours ago, LowGcifer said:

there’s nothing wrong with slaughtermaps centered around BFG spam.

The thing that is wrong with this type of slaughtermap is its repetitiveness imho. I've played and seen some slaughtermaps where circle strafing and holding the fire BFG key is necessary to progress 90% of the time.

 

Also

Plasma gun > BFG > Chaingun.

Once you got the BFG, the plasma gun is basically redundant if you are good at crowd controlling. 

Spoiler

I'm aware of other players that use plasma gun pretty regularly too. (E.g xvertigox)

 

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1 hour ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

The thing that is wrong with this type of slaughtermap is its repetitiveness imho. I've played and seen some slaughtermaps where circle strafing and holding the fire BFG key is necessary to progress 90% of the time.

 

Good BFG spam maps don't make you do one thing: hold the BFG and circle. They throw a lot of distinct looks at you. 

 

One fight you might be melting a horde of revs while figure eight-ing and having to avoid rockets from turret cybs that intercept your path...

In another you might fizzle down a fleet of pinkies with viles in their midst that require dips into cover and awareness of where the viles are (because you might not see them through pinkies)...

In another you might hold off a wall of HKs that try to block your cell cache pickups while periodically PEs spawn behind you...

You might have a skirmish where you should be expected to kill a vile and angle yourself so that tracers kill hitscanners, a couple times (two shots). And other different types of skirmishes.

Another might throw in a mixed mob of low-tier fleeters and PEs spawning incredibly rapidly while perched mancubi exert insane crossfire and much of the ground is covered by damaging floor...

In another, you might have to fight a team of cybs in cramped quarters roaming through library bookshelves. 

 

Hypothetical map (although most of those are fights that exist or adapted from them). But the weapon you're using isn't the be-all end-all of what you're doing.


There are also a lot of maps out there where one uses all sorts of weapons but you're essentially doing the same thing -- just circle, or just tap-move. Conceptual variety and weapon variety have some degree of independence. If people are making BFG spam maps that are all M1+circlestrafe, the reason is their design, not the archetype.

Edited by rdwpa

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On 2/5/2020 at 2:00 PM, Doomkid said:

I don’t know how controversial this is, but Memento Mori is better than TNT, Plutonia and the Master Levels.

Could be because I grew up with Memento Mori long before I owned Final Doom and Master Levels. But I do agree for the most part (I still prefer Plutonia). Memento Mori has its own issues, but I definitely prefer the textures, and music to TNT's. And I generally enjoy the maps by the Moller brothers, and Jens Nielsen over most TNT maps. Only thing I felt TNT had over MM was a more consistent theme across its levels.

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3 hours ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

The thing that is wrong with this type of slaughtermap is its repetitiveness imho. I've played and seen some slaughtermaps where circle strafing and holding the fire BFG key is necessary to progress 90% of the time.

So, let's get a few things out the way:

 

There are boring slaughtermaps, and there are overall good slaughtermaps that may have a few "boring" fights in them. That doesn't mean BFG-centric slaughter is always the same, or boring, or always is a circle strafe.

 

Circle strafing is, however, a necessary evil in many, many circumstances, and it's not only the slaughtermaps that have this problem, but it's instead a general issue that occurs when a fight has been beaten, and the clean-up phase begins (or when the fight was poorly made from the get-go, no matter the weapons and monsters in it). Depending on how large the scope of the fight is, and how well it is paced and balanced, this clean-up phase can last a couple seconds, or for example a minute or two.

 

There are also examples of fights where circle strafing in very specific manners serves an actual strategic purpose, like for instance making sure that corpses stay away from the positions where later down the line a pack of viles might attempt to revive them. So, not every circle strafe is actually the same either, there may be nuances.

 

What I am looking for when think of a fun and well-made BFG spam fight is how long the fight lasts before I'm in the clean-up phase (sustain) relative to how long the clean-up takes. And, once I'm in the clean-up phase itself, I usually like it better if I still need to pay some attention to what I'm doing, in which case having enemies spread out a little, or just having higher threat level monsters like revs help a great deal with holding my attention.

 

Also, most of the decent BFG centric fights out there have some mechanics implemented that make circle strafing either impossible, or at the very least undesirable (if not risky at times).

 

It doesn't even take much to make a fun BFG spam fight, if you know what you need to be doing to keep something supposedly simple and repetitive interesting. Dimensions map 31 is one such case where a pretty simple layout gets injected with enough octane to be genuinely exciting and engaging... And that's despite the fact that, compared to the other maps in the set, it comes across as a "throwaway map" which has been made in a couple minutes.

 

 

Likewise, Dimensions map 01 is a pure BFG spam map, but one thing you are not going to say about it when you play it for yourself is that it is repetitive and/or boring:

 

In other words, a few bad fights doesn't make the "archetype" itself bad, it just means that whatever supposedly boring and repetitive fight you have been watching/playing might not have been very well made.

 

Play these 2 maps for yourself on UV, then we can have a conversation about the archetype as a whole without judging it solely based on something that wasn't very good.

Edited by Nine Inch Heels

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3 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

In other words, a few bad fights doesn't make the "archetype" itself bad, it just means that whatever supposedly boring and repetitive fight you have been watching/playing might not have been very well made.

People can and will draw that conclusion. To each their own.

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51 minutes ago, rdwpa said:

Good BFG spam maps don't make you do one thing: hold the BFG and circle. They throw a lot of distinct looks at you. 

 

One fight you might be melting a horde of revs while figure eight-ing and having to avoid rockets from turret cybs that intercept your path...

It's not just circle-strafing: see, it's more of an ellipsoid! 🤓

 

Instead of one map with 100x the enemies of a normal map, imagine 100 maps. Imagine how many varieties of gameplay such a mapset could bring; the themes, layouts, progressions, encounter types, and even how many different weapons you're allowed to use. It would have more types of encounters than there are types of enemies! Imagine how many more options the mapper has, and how many more options the player has, and how much more mastery is expected of both.

 

Conversely: Doom, Doom II, Heretic, and Hexen have about 30 maps apiece, or 120 maps total. Imagine taking all their maps' enemies and putting them into one map, where you deal with the enemies in bulk rather than as individual encounters. Spam them down then pretend you've mastered playing all four games. Make the map and pretend it has even a tiny fraction of the level design talent put into those games.

 

Quality > Quantity is apparently my Controversial Opinion for this week.

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3 minutes ago, Rainne said:

Quality > Quantity is apparently my Controversial Opinion for this week

Except quality and quantity aren't mutually exclusive concepts for encounter design.

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4 minutes ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

Except quality and quantity aren't mutually exclusive concepts for encounter design.

Perhaps, but slaughtermaps require the least amount of quality for a given amount of quantity, per my post.

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11 minutes ago, Rainne said:

Quality > Quantity is apparently my Controversial Opinion for this week.

 

This doesnt make sense beside:

 

12 minutes ago, Rainne said:

Instead of one map with 100x the enemies of a normal map, imagine 100 maps. Imagine how many varieties of gameplay such a mapset could bring; the themes, layouts, progressions, encounter types, and even how many different weapons you're allowed to use. It would have more types of encounters than there are types of enemies! Imagine how many more options the mapper has, and how many more options the player has, and how much more mastery is expected of both.

 

which is an arguement for quantity over quality. Look at all the times you used the word "more," even italicizing it.

 

So I present you with an alternative way of applying your exact logic:

 

Imagine if instead of wasting the time on 100 different layouts, making sure they are fun to play in, making everything trigger-wise and encounter-wise work the way you want, detailing them up, etc, imagine if you put all that time into one map with lots of monsters.

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1 minute ago, Fonze said:

Imagine if instead of wasting the time on 100 different layouts, making sure they are fun to play in, making everything trigger-wise and encounter-wise work the way you want, detailing them up, etc, imagine if you put all that time into one map with lots of monsters.

What if I told you there are gameplay ideas that can't be measured by bodycounts (or even "measured" at all), and don't even necessarily involve combat?

 

Wasting the time? Copying-and-pasting doesn't take much time. In the time it takes me to do one layout, let's say I could do 100 copy-and-pastes, so that's like 2100 enemies, or 1,267,650,600,228,229,401,496,703,205,376. Is that the number of enemies it'd take to be a substitute for one real map? (Only 99 more to go!) -- Or equivalently, that one real map has as much content as a slaughtermap with that many enemies?

 

Does it sound fun? A slaughtermap that's on the good end of the slaughtermap spectrum would involve a tiny fraction of the number of enemies, and involve more design talent and art to make it work and flow well, rather than just throwing 1.27 zillion enemies at you. -- Just keep following the logic in that direction and you wind up with normal maps.

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1 minute ago, Rainne said:

Perhaps, but slaughtermaps require the least amount of quality for a given amount of quantity, per my post

I have come to understand that this thread is a dumping ground for all kinds of nonsense, but it would be neat if you tried to keep at least the napkin-math outta this. Trying to sell a "monsters used to fights made ratio" as a means to determine "effort made per monster placed" -and therefore imply quality or lack thereof- is not only utter nonsense, it's downright insulting to everybody who sat down for several hours a day to playtest their stuff in order to be able to balance it properly.

 

And yes, I know, you're gonna tell me now that every other map out there also gets tested. Guess what? I'm playtesting several things at the moment, not related to slaughter for the most part, and the simple reality is that -in the realms of gameplay-testing- a well-tuned slaughter fight is usually much more work intensive than the vast majority of small to medium sized ambushes and fights out there. Why? Because not only is a bit more difficult to figure out what's wrong with a slaughter fight (if something is unfair, or doesn't work reliably, etc) since the whole thing has just that many more moving parts, testing the fights also takes more effort per playtest made, because the fights simply take that much longer and they're usually higher on the difficulty scale, too. Also, you go through a dozen iterations of a fight sometimes, all of which you need to test several times over in order to make sure that the damn thing behaves properly after you made changes to it. So, the effort per slaughter fight is exponentially higher than the effort that goes into testing "normal fights".

 

Testing any "normal fight" is simply easier by comparison, because the aspects of these fights that are problematic in some way are much easier to identify.

 

And that's not even considering the testing that may be involved with regards to full runs of a map, to see how the whole thing flows, or how feasible a full and saveless run of a given map would be, assuming that is a design goal.

 

Having said all that, your napkin math is missing the mark, and not just by a few inches.

 

56 minutes ago, Rainne said:

Conversely: Doom, Doom II, Heretic, and Hexen have about 30 maps apiece, or 120 maps total. Imagine taking all their maps' enemies and putting them into one map, where you deal with the enemies in bulk rather than as individual encounters. Spam them down then pretend you've mastered playing all four games. Make the map and pretend it has even a tiny fraction of the level design talent put into those games.

This paragraph is also something else. Nobody would put all the monsters from doom II into a single map to spam them down and claim they beat doom II, because it's complete nonsense to even consider something like that. The point of slaughter maps isn't to play Doom II's entire menagerie in one map, it's to have huge scale fights, which are properly balanced, and require entirely different approaches than your "standard IWAD fight". They are entirely different in large part due to mechanics used, as well as magnitude and lethalty. There are things you simply can't do with only a few dozen monsters, due to how these fights can and will develop.

 

If you think it's as simple as just spamming a bunch of stuff down, how about you sit down and play a couple slaughtermaps? Here's a guide on how to use PrBoom+Here's a set of 4 decent slaughtermaps. I'm looking forward to your demos.

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37 minutes ago, Asking4Id said:

Controversial: there is no reason to ever put a zombieman on a map.

 

It's obvious you never played a Jodwin map, where ammo is at a premium, and you have to backtrack and pick EVERY GOD-DAMN LAST AMMO CLIP from EVERY GOD-DAMN ZOMBIEMAN (which you should preferably have killed WITH YOUR OWN GOD-DAMN BARE HANDS, in order to maximize ammo economy). If you don't do so, you will be soon crying BITTER COLD BLACK TEARS OF REGRET.

 

Other than that, they do make for some pretty embarrassing "sniping deaths" from across the map, if the conditions are just right.

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17 hours ago, ReaperAA said:

While Memento Mori is a very important wad in Doom's history (its the first Doom 2 megawad), I feel that it has aged poorly. I feel that even wads like TNT:Evilution and Icarus are better than MM1. Perdition's Gate in-turn is better than both TNT and Icarus..

 

And all of these don't even hold a candle against Plutonia.

 

Agreed, the MMs are good examples of wads important for historical reasons, but not wads that are still worth playing nowadays. They still have some fun maps, particularly towards the end, but that's about it... Even the mixed bag of TNT is better than MM1...

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Ah, speaking of playing, here's another hot take:

 

- Playing without autoaim is wrong.

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25 minutes ago, Rainne said:

What if I told you there are gameplay ideas that can't be measured by bodycounts (or even "measured" at all), and don't even necessarily involve combat?

Funny you should mention...

 

I made this map:

No monsters at all, just platforming, and a few gimmicks for fun.

 

You know which maps also often have a lot of platforming? You guessed it! Slaughtermaps often have a lot of platforming. In fact, some maps even have rocket jumping:

 

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I never played TNT past map07 up until recently so the first time I heard Into the Beasts Belly was in Scythe map11. I think everyone's really negative opinion of that MIDI stems from the fact it's put into ridiculously long and grindy TNT maps, hence outstaying its welcome by the time the n-th loop arrives. Banging track for anything under 5 minutes though.

 

Also AV ep 2 >>>> AV ep 3 don't @ me 

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I believe what Rainne is trying to say is that she prefers maps that have variety of compelling situations and encounters that don't resort to throwing hundreds of monsters. I am sure there are many wads available that cater to this.

 

An example is Ancient Aliens. Sure it is nowhere near the difficulty of most slaughter wads, but its still more challenging than most non-slaughter stuff. Most of the encounters in it have smaller number of monsters, but the encounters can be deadly nonetheless.

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1 minute ago, ReaperAA said:

I believe what Rainne is trying to say is that she prefers maps that have variety of compelling situations and encounters that don't resort to throwing hundreds of monsters.

Her preferences are of no consequence. The implication that slaughtermaps are somehow less creative, or of somehow lesser quality, is plain and simple absurd. It's also not as if slaughtermaps "resort" to throwing hundreds of things out there, it's a deliberate and legitimate design-choice that aims to accomplish very specific goals, which can not be accomplished with just a handful of monsters due to how this game works.

 

It's one thing not to like something, it's another to declare it as something "lesser" based on napkin-math or the idea that any slaughter fight could just be scaled down to a few dozen monsters while keeping the gameplay and the overall behaviour intact. It simply does not work like that.

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Hoes be mad at slaughtermaps because they can't  play them with mods, the plebs they are

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