RC3 - Quartzite Quarrel - 1024 Eternity map

Hey everyone!

Here's a little something I've been working on for the past week or so. It's a 1024 map with a lot of moving floors and a lot of close quarters, densely packed fights. I tried to squeeze as much variation and combat into this thing as I could without making it feel over-done.

Port - Eternity

Difficulty settings - Yes

Uses OTEX exclusively (not included)

Jumping not allowed

Music - Blindmind.it by Quasian

I hope this thing brings you as much joy as possible this holiday season!

Updated - 1/06/2020

Just over a year and I finally decided to update this one. Tweaked each fight and balanced everything to play more fairly. If you happened to play the last version I'm hoping you find this one more tolerable but still challenging. Big thanks to @MattFright for the feedback last year.

RC3 -  Quartzite Quarrel_V3.rar

Screenshots

To all my fans out there! Just updated the wad with a few fixes and tweaks. Feedback and demos are appreciated!

Screenshots look great. Has anybody tested your WAD?

2 hours ago, Silhou3tte said:

Screenshots look great. Has anybody tested your WAD?

Some people have downloaded it, not sure if they have played it yet or not.

maybe I can get you some testers?

@Biodegradable,

@Clippy,

come take a look a this.  

So I gave this a quick playthrough (On HMP difficulty) and firstly, the skybox is looking a bit Janky. 1 wall is the new sky texture but the rest is the default DooM II sky (also saw a random floating bit of ice texture up in the sky).

The starting area was a nightmare to escape. Firstly, being surrounded by a fair few enemies did make this a pain but the biggest problem was trying to make the strafe-jumps up the staircase. It took a good 20 or so tries to finally make it up, only to die since an arse-vile and a pinky demon decided to trap me and maul my innards.

Maybe a little bit of re-jigging is needed before I can give this a proper review.

10 minutes ago, DynamiteKaitorn said:

So I gave this a quick playthrough (On HMP difficulty) and firstly, the skybox is looking a bit Janky. 1 wall is the new sky texture but the rest is the default DooM II sky (also saw a random floating bit of ice texture up in the sky).

Did you play this in Eternity? I know if you try GZDoom it does end up looking janky like you said.

11 minutes ago, DynamiteKaitorn said:

The starting area was a nightmare to escape. Firstly, being surrounded by a fair few enemies did make this a pain but the biggest problem was trying to make the strafe-jumps up the staircase. It took a good 20 or so tries to finally make it up, only to die since an arse-vile and a pinky demon decided to trap me and maul my innards.

The space in between the platforms should be just enough that you can't run straight over but almost always do-able when strafe-running. Maybe I just became use to jumping the gap because of how much I played it.

Either way thanks for playing and the feedback!

2 hours ago, Silhou3tte said:

maybe I can get you some testers?

@Biodegradable,

@Clippy,

come take a look a this.  

Unfortunately, both (especially Biodegradable whom I kind of know) don't have interests in using the port, afaik.

I may as well try it instead though, Eternity maps are right up my alley.

7 minutes ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

Unfortunately, both (especially Biodegradable whom I kind of know) don't have interests in using the port, afaik.

I may as well try it instead though, Eternity maps are right up my alley.

Sorry, I just thought they’d be interested.

12 minutes ago, Silhou3tte said:

Sorry, I just thought they’d be interested.

Well, they are pretty much the go-to choices for playtesting at this point, you're fine with that.

Uh.... Is OTEX itself not included within the wad or am i missing something? To be fair, i am not very familiar with the Eternity Engine.

2 minutes ago, MattFright said:

Uh.... Is OTEX itself not included within the wad or am i missing something?

Yeah, seems so. I guess, author forgot to mention that properly. 

I don't think so, file size looks too small for having OTEX included too...

2 minutes ago, Misty said:

Yeah, seems so. I guess, author forgot to mention that properly. 

Sorry, I was always under the assumption that you shouldn't include the texture file to avoid having multiple copies. I'll update the OP to clarify.

And now trying to load it either before or after OTEX with the Doom Launcher gives me this result:

7 minutes ago, MattFright said:

And now trying to load it either before or after OTEX with the Doom Launcher gives me this result:

 

So I just checked and it seems like the .wad works but the .pk doesn't. If you have the .wad I'd say try that.

Sorry this is getting too confusing! I appreciate the efforts to play regardless.

6 minutes ago, Btyb88 said:

So I just checked and it seems like the .wad works but the .pk doesn't. If you have the .wad I'd say try that.

Sorry this is getting too confusing! I appreciate the efforts to play regardless.

Had to do some troubleshooting, apparently Doom Launcher's latest stable version is just horrendously unstable and wasn't letting me load the .wad version, you're good. Gonna play this and post my thoughts soon

5 hours ago, TheNoob_Gamer said:

Unfortunately, both (especially Biodegradable whom I kind of know) don't have interests in using the port, afaik.

I may as well try it instead though, Eternity maps are right up my alley.

Hey there how's it going I heard my name

yeah I'm a bit of a snob when it comes to ports and I play exclusively on gzdoom. I'm an old man and don't like to have more than one thing

So I'm going to have to pull a Kevin O'Leary on this one and say I'm out

Well I'm in. Right now I'm setting up Eternity, and I can't wait to try this out.

Oh my god that was hard. It's like Enoz Soahc from Scythe (which is based on Chaos Zone from Requiem) but incredibly harder and with OTEX and cool music. I had to IDDQD 4 times. It's still incredibly good, and only has a few glitches with invisible walls next to ammo supplies and broken lowered platforms. The music is amazing, I love it, goes very well with the incredible gauntlet that this level is. I had tons of fun with this, but my only major complaint is the platforming to the exit/plasma gun, which is not fun and slows down the gameplay a lot. Make more of this, please.

2 minutes ago, AtticTelephone said:

Oh my god that was hard. It's like Enoz Soahc from Scythe (which is based on Chaos Zone from Requiem) but incredibly harder and with OTEX and cool music. I had to IDDQD 4 times. It's still incredibly good, and only has a few glitches with invisible walls next to ammo supplies and broken lowered platforms. The music is amazing, I love it, goes very well with the incredible gauntlet that this level is. I had tons of fun with this

Thanks for the review! Can you tell me what platforms ended up being broken? I thought I ironed all those out but I guess not.

4 minutes ago, AtticTelephone said:

but my only major complaint is the platforming to the exit/plasma gun, which is not fun and slows down the gameplay a lot. Make more of this, please.

While I'm not the biggest Doom platformer either, I figured in a small map like this it was a decent way of squeezing more out of the geometry. But your comment is noted!

Just now, Btyb88 said:

Thanks for the review! Can you tell me what platforms ended up being broken? I thought I ironed all those out but I guess not.

 

While I'm not the biggest Doom platformer either, I figured in a small map like this it was a decent way of squeezing more out of the geometry. But your comment is noted!

Well, there was this plasma/soulsphere platform near the cyberdemon platform that was above a fence, but it broke, and a small space between the exit column and a normal column near the blue key. You can fall into it and get stuck in a HOM hell.

This one took me a while, though a lot of it was because i had to take a break because of frustration, and lower difficulties didn't help either (though not in the way you'd expect), let me elaborate:

Now onto the more positive things i thought of the map:

9 minutes ago, MattFright said:

This one took me a while, though a lot of it was because i had to take a break because of frustration, and lower difficulties didn't help either (though not in the way you'd expect), let me elaborate:

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This isn't difficult as much as it's just absurdly punishing. On higher difficulties, you make one mistake, it snowballs into one or two more which is more than enough to push you into death. To expand on this, i'll use the second encounter with the archvile (or revenant, depending on difficulty) tunnels: the pinkies are easy enough to deal with, you poke them with your butt while you deal with the other enemy so that they can stand still and not harm you, but in both the revenant's and archvile's cases you have to rely on RNG, because while sure, you can very well tank the damage of the first one, you cannot do so for the last one or two revenants (or at least not in higher difficulties). The tsunami of hitscan that comes afterwards isn't very pleasant either, as it's another barrier to ask "did you take damage in the tunnels?" to which if the answer is "yes", you die unless you get really lucky with damage rolls.

 

The rest of the level is much much MUCH fairer, though the one thing that was absolutely ruining my fun then when i'd otherwise be having a blast were the hellknights on top of the walls, which would hit me no matter what because of RNG with how fast they attack, their own damage rolls, how many of them there are, the fact that a lot of the map pre-rocket launcher are just narrow corridors giving them ample opportunity to hit you easily, the fact that you can't even see some of them because of how high up they are, etc.

 

As for the difficulties issue i mentioned: you should consider making encounters less punishing when balancing for lower difficulties (example in this case would be removing enemies that demand multi-tasking rather than just downgrading them), rather than just "easier", since again, the issue here is with punishment and not exactly difficulty. The lower difficulties were absurdly less fun than they could've been also partially because of how there's enough ammo for you to decide what you're using at all times (resulting in endless plasma spam), which even if done for making things easier, it just discourages decision making and makes everything into a "hold m1 to win", whereas you should've instead just been making "skill checks" much less tight than they are on higher difficulties.

 

In short, this isn't a critique to say "don't make maps as hard as you want them to be", but more to show you how to better balance things and such. I do firmly believe that even a lot of the best of the best wouldn't have fun with this (i'm nowhere near them in skill, but i'd still consider me a fair bit above average, and i still didn't enjoy it), solely because there isn't enough wiggle room to learn the encounters and get better at the map, you're immediately pushed back to the start rather than given a "puzzle" on how to optimize your play to not exhaust your resources such as health, ammo and armor. However there might be some people who enjoy this sort of thing so i wouldn't blame you for leaving Ultra-Violence to be this sort of experience, just know that 99% of people won't be very interested if the lower difficulties aren't as punishing. Though DW being DW, i bet someone's going to say i'm "just complaining about something doesn't fit my taste"...

 

I may not commit to your future maps as much as i did for this, but your sheer technical and artistic skills (explained below) make me extremely curious as to what your future maps may look/play like, so i'll keep an eye out :)

 

Now onto the more positive things i thought of the map:

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This is an AMAZING display of your technical skills in mapping. As much as i didn't like the gameplay, you've got some truly outstanding talent when it comes to this, i was always amazed with how the map would keep shifting in unexpected ways that provided entirely distinct level design from the last, and while the platforming feels very clunky i feel like that's just a direct consequence of the size of this map, in which case it's imo just acceptable and even kind of impressive still. I only noticed that, at the start, whether you used the shotgun or minigun, the miniguns at the upper walls would sometimes fall onto the corridors below causing a softlock because of infinite height, though it didn't frustrate me much since it was so early on.

 

Aesthetically, this map is absolutely gorgeous. I love that you didn't just make this a box floating in the void but actually added some background detail, i found that pretty neat and added a lot to the wintery feel of this map. I don't even have anything to criticize on the looks, it's just a solid execution of a fortress in some snowy place.

 

Oh yeah, i also thought the music was pretty neat. I liked it a lot.

 

Thanks for the feedback!

I suppose one of my issues when making maps is the difficulty balance. I always balance it around my own skill level and what I'm expecting out of the map, in this case UV that was very punishing but (imo) still enjoyable. From there I tweaked the lower difficulties just enough so that I was able to beat the map in fewer tries. I completely see where you are coming from though. My original thought was to completely re-work the fights for each difficulty so each one played differently, but I kind of gave up on that and went for the traditional "a little less monsters, a little more health" route.

Bump for update to RC3