Top 10 Worst WAD Cliches

We've all done it: you see AWESOME.wad (or something) floating around the web. It's a mere 61k, so you download that ZIP and read the text file. It usually reads something like:
"This WAD took (2 weeks/2 months/3 years) to complete. It's like nothing you've seen before!"
Oh, if only that was true. You load the level, and are instantly greeted with a BFG and a Cyberdemon in a 1024x1024x1024 cube.
So, now it's your turn to spout: what are the 10 worst WAD cliches, EVER?

Crates.

Or, explicitly trying to avoid them.

Funny you should bring that up, I was just reading a thread about crates... E2M2 is definitely one of ID's more irritating.

The fact that the Doom guy drops all of his keys after completing a level and has to find them all over again. It seems like saving those same colored keys for all of the levels would help him move faster.

Yeah, and also the fact that such a high-tech company as UAC has three keys as their security system... and that they let everyone know what color to use with handy colored lights.

memes

And broken sarcasm detectors.

Using the barrels of toxic waste to take out some enemies and save some ammo....
Well, this can actually be very effective sometimes, if the designer places the Things in the right place and does a lot of beta-testing before releasing their map.

Otherwise, it can be very annoying.

On a similar train of thought:
too much nukage or too many barrels.

While this one's not technically in the wad file, it's still annoying: beefed-up, ridiculous storylines for single-level wads. I don't know about you, but I've never played a wad and thought, "Wow, that was a great level, but I demand to know how the Imps got here!"

Extremely long stated building times such as 1 month (it was rare to find anything in 1994 below that) or more often 2-3 months for what would come to be known as 1994 WADs... I never understood if it was just because none knew what he was doing, the editors were hard to use, or people just didn't take mapping seriously and mapped every once in a while.

Cliches?

Hmm...a crapton of monsters behind each door....corny. Crates...zzzz.

I suppose a frequently used device (aka cliche) is the weapon/key/powerup that is placed conveniently within reach, and no enemy is in sight. Just imagine the player's surprise when the object is picked up. Heh.

[I'm not sure that this qualifies as a Top 10 Worst Wad Cliche, as this type of trap can actually be quite fun to fall into.]

Someday I'd love to see the opposite: someone lists the buildtime as one hour, calls it crap, and gives no story, and it turns out to be the greatest wad ever constructed.

ReX said:

I suppose a frequently used device (aka cliche) is the weapon/key/powerup that is placed conveniently within reach, and no enemy is in sight. Just imagine the player's surprise when the object is picked up. Heh.

[I'm not sure that this qualifies as a Top 10 Worst Wad Cliche, as this type of trap can actually be quite fun to fall into.]

It's annoying when they rig everything you pick up to spring a trap.

I also hate when a map's music is a chiptune from some NES game meant for 8-10 year olds that uses about five pitches and blares endlessly (bonus points if it is only 45 seconds long).

Then there are the enemies about half a map away that you can't get close to, so you end up wasting six shells to knock out an imp.

yomoneyboat said:

I don't know about you, but I've never played a wad and thought, "Wow, that was a great level, but I demand to know how the Imps got here!"

That made me literally laugh out loud

doom2day said:

On a similar train of thought:
too much nukage or too many barrels.

Barrels of Fun is still my all time favorite Doom 2 map. Barrels are good not bad.

Woohoo, threads like these keep coming! Come! They're my favourites!

In no particular order:

• forced linearity, like you see several doors but only one opens, or you keep seeing a single door. Notably for me, Paul Corfiatis seemed guilty in levels I've been playing. Guilty for this. But there are others too, I'm sure.
  
• make a base wad => use crates. Episode 1 of Doom 1 has no crates at all, and seemingly everyone likes it. It's a very tempting decision, mainly when you run out of ideas.
  
• using even more Heavy Weapon Dudes than Shotgun Guys in any Doom 2 map, and more Revenants than Imps. Note: those are badass monsters, can really slow down the enjoyment of the maps.
  That's why I occasionally play Doom 1: there's no monster that can kill me because I haven't planned ahead.
  
• Revenants, Archviles in cages and thin battlements. They're weak there, but some mappers use them a lot. They fall too easy to the rockets, and Archviles also have no visibility and bodies to animate.
  Note that Imps are better suited for cages, because they're more quiet.
  
• playing through the suffering that's called Episode 2, Episode 3 or Episode 4, only to meet a blind sleepy giant who cannot even hit me.
  Cyberdemons and Spiderdemons are supposed to be the EVIL BOSSES, so please place them in a highly advantaged status, mappers. Disappointment came from PE4_DT2, 2002ADO and others with this (gotta check others though).
  
• using those rainbow coloured keys everywhere. It's getting cheesy to always be looking for sweetly coloured keys everywhere, and especially have the ways marked as such, in an uniform manner.
  Keep using them sporadically, or not at all (as was E2M5).
  
• Doom 2 megawads' secret levels obligatorily leading to the supersecret ones. In this same section there are also secret levels which are too easy to find, or ones which can no longer be touched because a secret has been closed forever.
  
• secret levels which are either too stale or too hard.
  Secret levels also can be used to fill up the storyline, give up easter eggs, supply (along with last Level) with a BFG9000 or something, or have a completely different layout (but same texture palette) as the rest of the episode, and that's fine with me.
  
• Making up a Total Conversion or port to Doom, only in ending with using tons of Hexen/Heretic graphics and sounds features into it.
  It's very tempting, but what about imagining that those games didn't exist?
  
• importing Quake textures into Doom. Quake has a slightly different theme to Doom's, and most Quake textures bump inappropriately into Doom's ones.
  

Important to note that there are others, but won't be fitting in the list above of ten cliches. In any way, they're not the worst ten. Using stuff from the MRW or Gothic texture pack could also become cliches, but I'm not that aware.

Not really a cliche by itself, but I hate it when you can't reach a locked door or a switch which requires a key before picking up the said key. That's a complete waste of a good key right there.

Stair sector ceilings that are so low you bang your head on them.

Water that hurts the player yet nukage and or lava does not.

Too many doors. Not every doorway needs to have a door. Some maps have you opening way too many doors. Ooh lets open this door to see where it goes... maybe an outside area! No it's a room with 2 more fucking doors!

Crates that are in a room that have doorways smaller than the crates. I suppose they got in there via teleporter but it still seems weird.

I've completed the top 14.
http://yomoneyboat.fortunecity.com
Several warnings:
1. Gratuitous sarcasm ahead.
2. The page ain't pretty.
Enjoy.

"3 revenants come out of the walls whenever you pick up an item" =/= "innovative and challenging"

Wads with no detail that have coloured fog and dynamic lights to "cover up" the ugliness. Bonus points for not putting anything in which prevents the wad from working in Zdoom and then ranting at the /newstuff reviewer for not playing it in JDoom and seeing it "as it's meant to be"

"Zdoom" wads which have one particle fountain

Wads with unessescary scripting just because the creator knows how

Wads with MP3's just because the creator knows how (if you ask me that was the thing that was most wrong with DRE, he was like "Hay i know how to put offspring in my wadz!" and vastly increased the file size because the music was "cool")

Monsters with editied graphics but not edited behaviour... even if it's just using Dehacked to make them a little faster or tougher, it's better than nothing!

(Not as common) Monsters without edited graphics but with edited behaviour... "hey it's an imp, better blast it with the shotgun... oh it appears to have 2000 hitpoints and it shoots BFG balls now"

Edited "powerful" monsters that weigh the same, blast an enemy with the SSG and watch them go flying back for miles... but not dying!

Vile said:

The fact that the Doom guy drops all of his keys after completing a level and has to find them all over again. It seems like saving those same colored keys for all of the levels would help him move faster.

Maybe he has holes in his pockets :p hehehe I had to laugh about this I never thought about it in that way.

Cutscenes when you hit an switch and see an door open somewhere else in the map, yeah ok like players are complete retards why just not print an message on screen also that says "You have opened an door on the other side of the map"

Texture and flat misalignments all over the place its like playing with thorns in my eyes it hurts.

There seems to be a mix of things in this thread that are actually two different categories: bad mapping and cliches. Bad mapping is just that, bad mapping. It doesn't have to be a cliche (although it often is) and a few of the things people have mentioned here are not really cliches but they are certainly bad, or at least clumsy, mapping. Equally, something may be a cliche but it isn't necessarily bad mapping and some cliches can be very enjoyable.

Most of the things printz mentioned probably are cliches and, in the context he mentions them, are also bad mapping but the things mentioned can also be used well or to create a certain, deliberate effect. I would take issue that imps are more effective in cages than revenants. Possibly, but not if you want a homing, fairly high damage projectile to eminate from a fixed point in the map.

Other things that have been mentioned...

The doomguy dropping his keys didn't bother me as much as the Doomguy dropping all of his weapons before starting a new episode.

"...hmmm, I've just fought hordes of hellspawn, but now I'm descending into hell itself, I'm sure I won't need all this heavy kit that took me all that time and effort to gather."

Although, that's not a mapping cliche obviously.


As for crates, I like crates and I like some crate mazes. I've always liked E2M2 and even once made myself a mega E2M2 where I copied and pasted the crate maze many times so that you have to grab a key in each area before moving on to the next copy of the maze (which would have been flipped/rotated or populated differently).

Cliches? Yeah, the over-use of the "revenants in the wall trap" is annoying. In fact, over-use of revenants is a real turn off for me. Oh, I'm playing a supposedly hard Doom2 map, it'll be revenant-tastic then. Bring on the skeletal horde. Bring on the quit playing option. >:(

I don't know if damaging water versus damage-free nukage is a cliche as much as old fashioned bad mapping and inconsistency.

The cliche of an apparently unguarded item triggering a trap is unquestionably a cliche but it is one that can be fun. I actually like it and take it as a signal that perhaps it's time to save because things are about to get frantic. I think it heightens the anticipation of the fight to come. That is, of course, if the WAD has been done well. Sometimes you do find an unguarded item with no trap and it can be a bit of a let down.

As for build times in ye olde days (especially the very early days)... you try building a map by placing the vertices, then selecting the vertices, then joining up the vertices with a line. Then, once you've closed in an area with lines, select them and hit a button to create a sector with them. All done? Magic! Quit your editor and run a node builder. Sit there for 5 minutes whilst the nodes build then load up that massive 12MB IWAD plus your WAD in Doom to see how it all looks. Add in the spice of, crashes, buggy software and not really knowing how it is supposed to be done and then tell me that you'd make a map any quicker. Kids these days don't know they're born. ;)

One cliche is a map's set-up of having the player pick up weapons in this order: shotgun, chaingun, SSG, rocket launcher, plasma rifle, and BFG. The only variables seem to be the beserk pack/chainsaw. It seems rare for wads to give the player a plasma rifle right at the beginning but with small ammo amounts and moderately difficult monsters. It might be fun, for instance to have a map's weapon progression be: plasma rifle, chaingun, shotgun, BFG, rocket launcher, SSG (keep in mind that ammo placement would be as such that the player would not use the plasma rifle the whole map, the shotgun would still get plenty of use, etc.)

I don't see long build times as issues. Most likely it's that the authors spent a lot of that time for other things. They start their map one day, then they continue and finish it a month later, in another day. Build time? 1 month.

About the Imps versus Revenants (guess who wins :) ) in cages: it's about the attention they get. Revenants alert the player, Imps might get away unnoticed. Revenants in 64x64 cages either are a breeze (two rockets bang) or to be avoided (don't ever bother...). Imps are often forgotten - at least by me. This happens in original MAP13 for me. Their grunts are softer than the roars of the skeletons. Often the player is attacked by monsters more powerful than Imps, so their attention is taken away from the Imps in cages. Imps are weak, but can still harass... Taking player's attention from Revenants sounds impossible.

Edit: I recall "Dawn of the Dead" having the BFG9000 before the Plasma Gun. May sound weird, but once I got the Plasma Gun (last weapon in that map set), it all got more of a breeze.

I can never stand Revenants in huge places, where there's enough room for their rockets to chase you indefinitely. Maybe that's just because I suck :)

They're also really really ugly.

If you actually look at a revenant's face, it's not quite a skull, more like a featureless head.

Oh yeah, let's mention other cliches I wish would disappear.

- Starry skies
- Red skies
- reusing that damn SKY1 from Knee-Deep

Starry skies are everywhere you search, sometimes they mean night, othertimes they mean space, othertimes they're part of a megawad (including TNT) where the designers have decided to rush. What about mountainous nights? Cloudy nights? Void nights?

Red skies often are mountainless variations of original SKY3. It's annoying when they don't appear in hell levels (special cases: HR2 and TNT MAP31), because that warm (not oppressive) red just DOESN'T mix with all those desert brick textures typical to Doom 2. I feel red skies are much more at home with Doom 1 and its baroque gameplay.

SKY1 might be nice but I can't say it fits any hellish area, or any alien/demon made building.

So people, how about grey rain skies (they do look oppressive, even naturally), blue skies (IMO not as overused in Doom as the red ones), yellow or even purple ones??

printz said:

So people, how about .... blue skies ....

Your wish is my command