The DWmegawad Club plays: Dimension of the Boomed & MAYhem 2016

[tmorrow]

10 minutes ago, Aquila Chrysaetos said:

Depending on how things go over the next couple weeks, I should have a brand new laptop

 

Good luck @Aquila Chrysaetos. We are missing your reviews. Hope you are operational soon!

[tmorrow]

4 hours ago, galileo31dos01 said:

One thing, map 05 has a monster that remains idle forever, preventing a max at the moment

 

Which monster was that? I didn't experience that problem in either prboom+ or zdoom uvmax. There are 4 spectres outside the fortress, 2 near the stairs, 1 near the berserk pack, 1 near the rocket launcher. Could it be one of these?

[galileo31dos01]

@Aquila Chrysaetos you're welcome, rdwpa also posts playthroughs so we all have something different to share here, that's the best thing about the dwmc (:

 

@tmorrow It's a monster that never teleported out of its closet the first two or three times I played the map from start to end. Casually, it woke up during my demo recording.  

[Urthar]

It's a glitch that I was aware could potentially occur, but generally it didn't when I tested the map. Essentially a monster won't teleport if there's something blocking the location. Those particular warp-ins are conveyor belt driven, rather than sound activated so a block can occur if there's still live monsters wandering around.

[FrancisT218]

DotB Level 4

 

I don't like the crusher part, and there's a surprising lack of an ending fight - going for a cliffhanger feel instead. But otherwise - this map was pretty great. You get an open world level here essentially, and a full map to help avoid getting too lost. The initial areas are full of only dead monsters, building the atmosphere up. There are eight switches you must press in any order though one is near the required silver key. Again secrets make the gameplay much easier but as has been mentioned you must still watch ammo to some extent no matter what. I nearly ran out on my first run. We see that Spawn show up here too. The hardest sections for me were the big lift lowering with Shambler/Spawns/Mancubi and the blue area with all the Imps and Spawns that come in.

[DavitW]

MAP03 - Gibbous Grotto

It seems like this map is based off of the Grizzly Grotto from Quake, although that was the fourth map instead of the third. We got some great atmosphere here again, With the lighting particularly being impressive with all the dark caves off to the sides and impressive shadow work around the place. The whole maps designed very non-linear, maybe a bit at the expense of the gameplay as the whole thing didn't really seem to flow together too well in my experience. And I gotta say this map from a pistol was pretty damn hard for me so finding an optimal route to go through is definitely a smart idea.

 

I'd say there's 2 parts here that were particularly difficult though. The first was the trap after the silver key door, There was just an unnecessary amount of chaingunners here in my opinion and you have to deal with both a archvile and a shambler here and it's not easy getting a shot at those bastards when they're hiding behind a horde of chaingunners. The final home stretch after hitting the silver key had a similar problem with too many damn hell knights, I understand plenty of modern maps have more monsters in them but I just wasn't feeling it. To be fair it probably would have been easier if I found what I assume to be a secret BFG but I still managed to make my way through.

[tmorrow]

4 hours ago, FrancisT18 said:

There are eight switches you must press in any order

 

Thanks @FrancisT18, if only I could count, I thought there were only 6! Correcting my post now!

[baja blast rd.]

I'll postpone my writeup for 04 likely until Mayhem '16 starts -- it's a complicated map and I'm not in the mood to replay it.

 

04: Spot Reserved

 

05: The Witch House

 

Cool map. In this one Urthar seems to pick some cool mechanics and visual techniques and gets a lot of mileage out of them via repetition -- the 'asteroid islands', the lift sequence with the imps, the badass rising floor section at the end, even the loop around the ascending staircase can leading the blue key jump can be classified as such. 'Gearing up' is in order again; it's possible to go right inside without picking up any weapons, but from a pistol start that leaves you quite undergunned. Combat is a notch or two more intense than usual. The silver key fight is fun, albeit sometimes RNG gives you an easy pass (quick kills of the spawns through the bars) and it can also give you a tougher one (vile, which seems to appear randomly in either the left or right teleporter, resurrects shambler). The ending fight has a lot of 'sure I tested this in prBoom+ at some point, but I conceived of it with GZDoom mechanics in mind' because doing any fighting on the floor in 'terraced mode' is pretty awkward in a way not seen by much in the mapset so far. Thankfully though it's not too much to handle, and the cubbies can be used. I guess the device of 'one or two shots of BFG' appears to be a thing, but I'm hoping to get more shots in a map at some point.

 

I wasn't trying to get a max in under par (generally my goal for playthroughs is just to not have much dillydallying) but that almost happened, which surprised me. There's an oddly placed mancubus at some point. Warps in just to be stuck.

 

 

[Urthar]

MAP04 Necropolis

 

Necropolis started out as a deleted section from an earlier mapset that I had always quite liked, but hadn't been able to use due to problems with it. I thought I might be able to retexture it for DotB, populate it with some hordes and bang out a quick Sandy style city map. And I ran a few tests with about a hundred Spawn dropping off the rooftops, and played around with other monsters including a wandering Cyberdemon, but none of it really geled. (Turns out Spawn act a bit like uranium once they reach a critical mass. Scrag swarms are ok, but Cacodemons do it better.)

 

I tried a variey of texture schemes, but the brick work from The Nameless City seemed to work best once I added some stone trim. And the blue windows were very useful in adding some additional colour. I would also end up borrowing one encounter from E4M8 that I thought was particularly sadistic fun.

 

So after a week or so, I had the main streets of Necropolis laid out, but it wasn't until I picked a soundtrack that I understood what sort of map I would be making. To me, the music evoked the mood of an ancient abandoned city, and I knew at that point that the map would have to remain largely empty.

 

Around that time, CapnClever & Crew were making the Evolution of the Wad videos, including one about Hexen hubs. So I sat down and played Seven Portals for the first time in years. I didn't like all the 'You have completed 2/8 of this puzzle.' messages, but the heavy use of tranforming sections appealed to me. And that gave me the final direction I needed for the map. It was going to be a switch hunt, with very little incidental combat, mostly traps and ambushes. Additionally I would try to make said switch hunt as obvious as possible, since this style of map can be very irritating to some players, and potentionally a show stopper.

 

While I had hoped I would only spent a few weeks on this map, instead it grinded on for a few months. Looking back, I might have saved time just building it from scratch. 

 

So, the Spawn appears on this map for the first time. The idea to use him came from reading this in the mbfedit.txt:

Quote

 

BOUNCES + FLOAT gives the ability for a monster to jump when it needs to reach a high target, but to otherwise stay pretty low.

BOUNCES + FLOAT + DROPOFF bounces back even higher than BOUNCES + FLOAT.

 

However the way this gets implemented in different source ports can vary quite a bit. I would try a variety of things to get the behaviour I wanted, including the Lost Soul's flying attack. (Didn't work. Monster floats slowly backwards across floor after collisions, which is fine when a Lost Soul does it, but for anything else, it looks strange.) So in the end I settled for having a fast, slightly bouncy monster that worked consistently across different source ports, and filled a niche similar to the Kamikaze Trooper in Valiant.

 

The sprite set the Spawn uses, isn't something I'm really satisfied with. I wanted to get closer to how he appears in 'S. Petersen's Field Guide to Cthulhu Monsters, and I tried drawing in stretching gooey tendons to that effect:

Unfortunately, these looked pretty janky at low resolution, and didn't animate particularly well.

 

Edited June 5, 2018 by Urthar

[cannonball]

MAP04 - “Necropolis”

Well this map is pretty big and very very empty to start. The monster we all love to hate is here and my goodness was an entrance, literally causing me to jump as it sprung out after I grabbed the SSG. These spawns are very quick and can quickly make your life a misery (just like Quake). The silver key is pretty much a series of minor jump scares, beyond the silver doors you get more incidental combat mixed with some lethal set pieces including the wizard texture area with the imps/spawns and a couple of revenants and mancubi, and of course the pit with the shambler. 

Progression is a little tough to follow at times given the size of the map and how well spread out the goals are, still this is a truly imersive experience and successfully captures a sense of dread that rarely occurs in either Doom or Quake. Nice job though I must admit those spawns are a real nightmare.

 

MAP05 - “The Witch House”

Well here is mr numpty who missed both the BFG and chaingun which quite frankly made my work far harder than it needed to be. Again the atmosphere is top notch and some of the boom trickery on show is fantastic. The silver key fight can feel a little too unpredictable as it seemed at times the monsters came out randomly with a couple of deaths involving me being helpless as the archvile arrive early and I had zero cover as I stood with lowering bars which gave the vile perfect sight of me but were still high enough to block my escape. Oddly the spawns were helpful here as one rocket too most of the weaklings out in one go as the spawn got caught in the splash damage. The ending sequence was beautiful but oddly not too difficult.

[TheOrganGrinder]

MAP02: Blight Wharf

 

As with MAP01 this one isn't shy about its heritage, re-interpreting elements of Quake's E1M2 Castle of the Damned before going on to do its own thing.  Again, this is a level that's defined by its void spaces more than its structures, dominated by a squarish central courtyard or reservoir with a smaller arrangement of pits and bridges adjacent, in which the various corridors and tunnels feel quite firmly pushed into a secondary role in terms of their prominence as encounter spaces.  We're (re-)introduced to the Shambler here in the climacting encounter beyond the gold door that drops a signature Quake monster into the middle of a Doom-style monster-closets-and-mass-warp ambush.  Compared to the preceding map I feel as though, for the greater part of its running time this level focuses on delivering satisfying pitched battles with ambushes, incidental combat, and smaller-scale encounters de-emphasised until its closing moments.  Will the next level reverse that tendency and instad give us smaller, tighter spaces, a more intricate maze to navigate, and a different pace of combat?

[galileo31dos01]

MAP05: The Witch House

 

Urthar left the brown ancient city behind to introduce the marine to another dimension. First we see is a giant castle painted in a mix of dark blue and silver, the same colours that we could see in the previous map. There're various rocks floating in the void, a few spheres which I don't know what are they. At first, I thought they functioned as switches you had to shoot, you know, the mechanic of shooting something that teleports you somewhere, because crossing the void didn't sound intuitive for me, specially since all the weaponry is on the rocks. Anyway, the gameplay is another step up in difficulty, introducing cool mechanics to add an extra condiment to combat. First we get some low key optional punching or you can target the SSG. The various setups have their own ways to solve them and some might require a particular approach to guarantee success, to the extent of possible. The lifts chain with imps can be cleaned quickly as they are lowered but you can't miss the scrags floating around.

 

With the next two setups: first you get some low-tiers, a manc, and a shambler, later when you jump for the silver key you're trapped inside a cage, and lots of stuff teleport in. Between them, an archvile and some spawns. In the second part, RNG plays a huge role. See, a simple obstacle like spawns jumping inside the cage (while the bars are almost down), or the vile targeting you when you still can't hide yourself, can mess up with your life. In addition, if the shambler's corpse is nearby the teleport destinations, the vile can resurrect him, I didn't know that was possible until it happened (despite occupying the slot of the SMM, it must have the corresponding tag to be brought back to life). So, in the previous setup, the shambler needs to die far away from where the vile teleports in. It's still a tricky setup because the vile can appear in either teleport pad at any time, same with spawns which are incredibly pesky to aim at. I was almost fucked up in my demo, rdwpa and I had similar strategies, but different results. I left the secret blue armor for that part just to have more stability if things went too uncontrollable, recommended only if you're ok to backtrack a bit. Otherwise, it's highly important to keep your defenses high before that fight, ergo the secret soulsphere is a must. 

 

The final part is, interesting and awkward. Movement is jerky on stairs, which makes things like lost souls and homing missiles the biggest deal. I liked how the it's not too dense, just enough to keep you awake, and you can use the imps' cubicles to your advantage. Overall, I had fun, and for once I didn't skip items (:

 

 

Edited June 5, 2018 by galileo31dos01

[tmorrow]

map05: The Witch House, by Urthar
zdoom2.8.1, uvmax, pistol start, no saves, first time played

You start outside on a rocky island. You are in a large circular area with rocky islands all around and a fortress in the middle. It turns out that you only take minimal damage entering the void to cross from island to island. You need to look for the low points where the rock meets the void since you can't climb out everywhere. You can pick up armor, shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher and a berserk pack littered on the islands as well as plenty of health packs which help to compensate for the damage you will take. You will meet 4 roaming spectres along the way.

Entering the fortress is where the action hots up. The first tricky trap is the one involving the shambler. The second dangerous trap occurs in the same area when you run onto the bars containing the silver key which releases an archvile, spawn and several low tier enemies. You might want to use your single bfg shot here before the cheeky archvile resurrects the shambler and other previously fallen foes.

The final fight to open the exit can be quite nasty but there is a trick to it. There are 4 switches in the corners of the room that you need to hit to have access to the exit. Each switch lowers another corner area with a switch. If you run to the new corner, there are lines blocking the enemies in the main room from entering the corner (except a few imps that have spawned in that corner in the first place).

There are two secrets to find that help immensely, one has a megaarmor while the other has a soulsphere.

[LHSpanner]

Map04: Necropolis

 

This really is creepy, a deserted labyrinthine city full of graves, with no company but corpses, and all the doors are locked, but hold on, here's

a switch, what does this - HOLY FUCKING SHIT A TAR BABY GET IT AWAY FROM ME.

 

I hated those little bastards with a passion in their original incarnation, especially when they appeared unexpectedly at point blank range, as

they do here.  Besides the noise I find them deeply repulsive on a primal level, and they were the reason I rarely played episode 4 of Quake.  

Nearly shat myself when I got ambushed by two of them in the catacombs near the silver key, and one blew up in my face, knocking me down to 22%

health, so I restarted.  Handled it better the second time (now that I was expecting it), lost a lot of health but survived.  On the second run, I

started saving frequently, in case I encountered any more.

 

Now given the previous paragraph, you can just imagine how utterly thrilled I was to encounter a trap that releases a shambler followed by SIX of

them.  The only good thing about them in Quake was that they were used sparingly - this is just gratuitous.  After dying three times I godmoded my

way through the trap.

 

Due to the size of the map, progression can sometimes be obscure, fortunately you're given a map powerup early on, so you can see where you've not

yet been.  The overall objective is to press eight switches dotted around the map, in order to release the gold key, which unlocks the exit.  On my first complete run I missed a few of the switches, which is why my time to finish is so long - fortunately if you miss some switches, you have sufficient clues

to work out roughly where they are on the map, which is a plus point.

 

It's a generally good, if occasionally confusing map, and the detail of the lighting is just stunning (as in the previous map); due to the size

and complexity of it, it's the kind of map you could really only make for Doom.  However, that shambler/tar baby trap can go fuck itself with a

thousand rusty rakes.

 

Time to finish - 29:39

 

Map05: The Witch House

 

In visual terms, this map is genuinely jaw-dropping.  An utterly bizarre building floating in the void, surrounded by luminous floating globes

that look like stars from a distance.  The progression around the islands was not immediately obvious, and it took a few false starts before I

realised what was going on.

 

On the inside, height variations are used to great effect, making a relatively small playable area seem much larger than it is, and the

transformations of the starting room at the end are remarkably creative use of an otherwise square room.  The silver key trap, where you're inside

a cage and you have a ton of monsters teleporting in outside, is a bastard of a thing, not as vicious as the trap in Hell Revealed map13 but cut from

the same cloth.

 

My only complaint is that one or two aspects of the gameplay were overly repetitive (the six platforms that take you to the top of the walls, the

four transformations of the ending room), but that's a minor niggle.  Overall: short, sweet and visually stunning.

 

Time to finish - 11:50

Edited June 5, 2018 by LHSpanner

[FrancisT218]

DotB Level 5

 

We move away from the theme of the last three levels and more toward a Quake E4 theme to find the most impressive looking level in the episode. The outside 'void' really does much of the work for the stunning visuals here, and also supports a haunting, foreboding atmosphere. It's certainly an appropriate name for the map! Right from the start, the run across the void is memorable. Inside, there's only three rooms, but each one is used with good mileage, especially the outer two. The rising staircase makes for a memorable ending. You face a pretty good challenge here too, especially the fight after taking the key and the last stage of the ending fight, where it seems the best solution is to try and get the Shambler to infight with some Revenants.

[baja blast rd.]

06: Malign Masters

 

I found the meat of the gameplay fun here -- it's a map devoted to plasma streams, so you get lots of opportunities to practice your manipulation of those -- but thought the level itself flowed quite poorly.  The main reason is the three-switch-lift room. There is so much to do in here that fails to be compelling. First, cleaning up the masterminds, which are complete non-threats when they can't complement arachnotrons that are roaming around. Their ledges are lined with rows of rockets, but to get all of it, you have to ride the lift up two separate times. A stair builder after you visit one side would make perfect sense (the medkits are even on sort-of-stairs-looking depressions). There are hiccups elsewhere too. The last secret in particular is a silent detour at a point where I just want to exit already. Because of all that, it is my least favorite map in the set so far. It's also quite underwhelming if it's meant to be the boss map. It doesn't have the finality or the danger level. 04 and 05 are both harder. 

 

(Btw to grab the secret near the gold key, hold down back to slow your movement speed down enough to hit the first pillar. Also the preemptive BFG shot at the end doesn't do anything, I hadn't checked the automap orientation.) 

 

 

Edited June 6, 2018 by rdwpa

[Aquila Chrysaetos]

Just watched rdwpa's video and I have to say that MAP06 is my favorite from what I've seen so far. I really like the plasma mastermind, I think I'm going to use that in a mod of my own (though there with some DECORATE trickery).

If I understood properly, rdwpa was referring to the two platforms flanking the lift in the crusher room (with the masterminds on them) and we he got there, I thought that switch did exactly what he suggested it should at first, until I saw it didn't do that.

I liked that little gimmick of only spiders, too, that's really cool, and it looked pretty well executed, I think.

[tmorrow]

map06: Malign Masters, by Urthar
zdoom2.8.1, uvmax, pistol start, no saves, first time played

A stone, iron and lava fortress full of malice and hate, not to mention a hell of a lot of spider masterminds and arachnotrons. With 9 spider masterminds and 38 arachnotrons stomping around, you've got 47 ways to die. Ain't math fun!

Ammo is extremely tight on this map, you don't want your shots the miss their mark. As tricky as the secrets are on this map, you will want to find them all and as soon as they come available, they provide the bfg, plasma rifle and ammo. The plasma rifle secret is extremely sneaky, it took me a while to find it.

Once you have collected the silver key, you need to find and action 3 switches to raise a lift to the gold key. The gold key allows you to get to the exit, and inverted cross portal. That can't be good!

Note the map is tricky to uvmax due to the exit setup. You will notice that you are shy an unlucky 13 enemies after reaching the exit. The exit has a damaging floor and 13 enemies salivating at the thought of ripping you to shreds in an "almost death" exit where you end up leaving the map with a solitary hit point remaining. You need time to kill those 13 enemies before the exit so you want decent health and armor going in and at least 200-280 cells (there's only 340 cells on the map in UV) for 5-7 well placed bfg shots to take out those 13 enemies, with a shambler in the mix. Watch @rdwpa's demo for how to fire 2 bfg blasts, one backward and one forward before entering the exit to make the mop up even easier. Only 1 hit point left! Bad luck continuous players! Bwahahaha! (Don't worry, there's a megasphere worth of health and armor next map with no enemies, if you make the right choice).

 

map07: Elsewhere, by Urthar
zdoom2.8.1, uvmax, pistol start, no saves, first time played

A really nice no monster setpiece map. There are easy, normal, and hard portals that all take you to the same place. The easy portal gives you a megasphere top up, the normal portal gives you a medikit while you get nothing for taking the hard portal so continuous players will want to take the easy portal to restore their 1 hit point back to a healthy 200 hit points and 200 armor . There are messages at all of the exits but only the normal exit is operational, taking you to Ziggurat Mayhem, the last playable map.

[gaspe]

MAP05: Some mixed feeling here. The start was good with the ominous building in the void and the floating globes around and I liked the blue-ish aesthetics but the map fails to deliver. The elevator climb and the final transformations of the staircase actually fit the map as weird gimmicks for the Witch House, albeit short and repetitive leaving only the silver key trap as the most interesting moment.

[Urthar]

MAP05 The Witch House

 

The Wizard's Manse and the Ebon Fortress provided the texture scheme for MAP05, which I knew from the beginning I wanted to use at least once.

 

The map name comes from 'Dreams in the Witch House', which is my favorite Lovecraft story, and like a lot of his work, plays with ideas of extra-dimensional non-euclidean geometries. So I always intended for this map to be a bit weird, and possibily very disorientating, with rooms bigger on the inside, etc. And that sort of stuff could work well with portal tech, but silent teleport transitions in Boom proved too limiting for those sort of ideas to sit comfortably, and in the end I would build something far more conventional for the interior.

 

For the exterior, the Witch House was originally set in a swamp, and it wasn't until I was near the end of Necropolis, that I realised I could perhaps set it somewhere more interesting, and a lot more Lovecraftian.

 

While void maps don't appear in the original game, they've been around in the Quake community for quite some time. Coagula is possibly the earliest example of a structure suspended in inky blackness, but the idea itself probably dates back to Quake III Arena.

 

(Edit: Actually it was Richard 'Levelord' Gray who created the first Quake void map HIPDM1 in Scourge of Armagon.)

 

Normally on these sort of maps you either die or get teleported back near the start when you fall into the abyss, but I didn't really know how to do that in Boom. And it occurred to me that perhaps I didn't need to. If all those rocks are suspended by some kind of forcefield, then perhaps the player can glide across it as well. So I did some 242 trickery and added frictionless effects to try to create the effect of floating across a vacuum. In the end I quite liked the effect, it sort of evoked a netherworld lighthouse scene not unlike the ending of Bioshock Infinite.

 

 

Edited June 7, 2019 by Urthar

[gaspe]

MAP06: The usage of the arachnotrons that in some places can effectively roam around was interesting and the low ammo on pistol start force a more careful gameplay. I'm not sure about the new spiderdemon, less health was fine but maybe it's better as a hitscan enemy? I know that it would have caused problems with some infighting and the map would become more trivial but at the same time they don't give the fights that "something more" that they should do. And the invisibility power-ups would make sense if the spiderdemon was still a hitscanner, but now they are more dangerous to pick up actually. The last couple of secrets look rather pointless, unless you need them to help you to uv-max? Not a bad level but it's rather disappointing especially since it feels like it was meant to be a conclusive boss map it lacks a proper conclusion.

 

MAP07: Well it's a nice remake of Quake episode selection level. Oh, there's only one other playable level :(

[galileo31dos01]

MAP06: Malign Masters

 

Thumbs up for the cinematic entrance! It's a fortress dominated by brains on metallic legs, making their debut in the wad, plus a sneaky plasma rifle. Gameplay is focused on incidental everything, look to one side and there's a baby, look to the other side and there's a mommy, take an elevator and there's a whole family waiting for you. Mobility comes at the cost of maintaining the equilibrium between moderately narrow bridges surrounded by the hottest lava ever (and by "hottest" I mean dat texture) and a bunch of thick hitboxes roaming around. Spidermom's new features were a surprise, not only shoots plasma in a faster rate than her babies, but has less probabilities to flinch (♥), faster reaction time (♥♥), and doesn't occupy half of a planet (♥♥♥). It's funny to see something that huge wandering with so much freedom, and not because of my own dehacked patch. 

 

Ammunition is on the tight side during the core of the combat, where it's possible to run out of it like I did in my demo because Good at Doom ™. In a map of this style, rockets are the go-to option for the majority of the enemies, along with the sped-up chaingun as a viable support against arachnotrons and KO the bigger ones. This is possible though, if you add both shotguns and plasma weapons, which I didn't mind using as backups. I vetoed point-blank BFG shots to avoid fatalities in my demo :P. However, rdwpa has a good point about the ledges of rockets, the SMMs work as ammo sponges there, preventing the player to grab those shiny rockets until they're dead, and I support the idea of stairs. Two of the secrets become accessible too late to make a difference: from a pistol start, the backpack is unnecessary once the majority is dead. On continuous it's still not very useful, since you end on type 11 floor, which leaves you almost dead for the following maps (you can revive in the hub map, though I chose to start fresh, ergo swallow my own rocket). The secret soulsphere + plasma ammo seems to come in handy only if you plan on killing everything in the exit room before you die (note: there's a switch to lower the ledge if you don't want to sr50), as it's not actually rewarding imo. 

 

So, if seen as a single map, it's quite fun and develops a lot of effective monster usage, puts the player to maintain equilibrium in order to avoid injuries on pain sector, intensified by the inopportune blur spheres on each teleporter. As a boss map, maybe it lacks what others call "oomph", a sort of finale or perhaps a battalion of spiderdemons at the end, since they won't infight, why not? :P . Just my opinion, of course, the map is still memorable. 

 

Some small things or suggestions:

 

- Spiderdemons still drop clips, that's oddly hilarious because they theoretically don't own a super chaingun here. 

- This detail infinite-heighted me when I did the jump, perhaps it could be moved to the side a bit?

- The backpack should appear earlier, for example, with the secret PR. 

 

 

Finally, what do we do with the hub and ending map? Can we post about them all together in one day?

[tmorrow]

21 minutes ago, galileo31dos01 said:

Finally, what do we do with the hub and ending map? Can we post about them all together in one day? 

 

There's no hard and fast rule on this one. It seems to make sense to either post them as they come become available or save them for the end. Your choice. I went for the former, map07 tagged to the end of ma06 and later today I'll post map09 outro tagged to the end of map08 to be ready for Mayhem 2016 on the 8th, tomorrow.

[Urthar]

My suggestion would be to skip Ziggurat Mayhem if you're intending to play through Mayhem16.

[galileo31dos01]

26 minutes ago, Urthar said:

My suggestion would be to skip Ziggurat Mayhem if you're intending to play through Mayhem16.

 

I don't have plans to play MAYhem 16 anytime soon, so I'll definitely post my feedback tomorrow, it's a nice bonus map for sure.

[DavitW]

MAP04 - Necropolis

This maps takes a slow build up to the action, Starting you off in a big city full of nothing but corpses until you finally find your way to some armaments and the first enemy, which just so happens to be one of those blue spawn cocksuckers. The sight of one of these bastards will either scare you shitless or piss you right the hell off, For me it was about 50/50 each. There's really no set path in this level, the first priority is to get the silver which unlocks most the map but after that you can go about the level pretty much however you want with the objective being to hit 8 or so switches to get the gold key for the exit. The atmosphere was once again great but the gameplay wasn't too enjoyable in my experience, With the worst part being the elevator  with the Shambler, Scraggs and a good dozen or so spawns to fight on the way down. The spawns were a humongous pain in the original Quake but at least they typically only threw 2 or 3 of them at you at once. but here they're can easily overwhelm you you with how fast and erratic they move and they can also easily trap you in a corner at which point you're pretty much fucked, considering you'll take massive damage from their death explosions. Overall I didn't feel too bad save scumming to get through.

[tmorrow]

4 hours ago, Urthar said:

My suggestion would be to skip Ziggurat Mayhem if you're intending to play through Mayhem16.

 

Hey, no way! I wanna play both versions! It's my favourite map in the set!

[Catpho]

I really need to catch up, so here's a really quick review 

MAP03 - “Gibbous Grotto”

Tbh, if this is what catacombs in a grotto look like, i'd live in it (minus the demonic presence of course).

More generic compliments from me saying this all looks really good: great handling of architecture, lighting and texturing that makes brown, skulls and dead stuff look very appealing and adds a gloomy atmosphere to the map. Another layout that's fun to explore, and i like the shift to slaughter-lite encounters so i can use the chaingun and rocket launcher more often (great change from the mostly shotgun dominant MAP02, also more Adrenalin!). Cool addition of new flying imps in the form of Scargs (though i agree with the two fire balls instead of one suggestion from rd). The Shambler fights will be definite highlights, especially the second one with some of Doom 2's resident mid-high tiers coming as backup too.

This map basically took everything that's making Dotb great and cranked it up to 10.5 (not quite 11 haha). Levelset is on a hot-streak! (I'm running out of words and expressions to praise here :P)

Some screenies:

[baja blast rd.]

08: Ziggurat Mayhem

 

Solid map. This is a return to the 01-03 cluster's looser mix of exploration, incidental combat, and arena fighting, after 04's grand concept and 05-06's carefully structured combat. I think it fits in well enough. The action is designed to keep from resting too calmly, but also without using many hard lock-ins. From the tricky SSG-shellbox placement at the start, the 'soft lock-ins' involving lava surfaces and crushers and meaty monsters behind doorways, perched monsters with line of sight of various tunnels, and the general presence of lava on the periphery of many areas, the environment is oppressive enough to keep the player off balance in most areas but not so harsh that comes across as 'the point' of the gameplay. Fighting monsters still takes center stage in that respect.  

 

Minor hiccups are the archvile among the revenants -- doesn't really do much, and is more or less a minor chore to dispose of -- and the soulsphere secret being a detour. I guess another oddity is that the chaingun really feels like an afterthought as far as placement -- you pick it up from a chaingunner corpse and can easily miss it on certain routes -- likely an untouched remnant of the original design for regular mechanics. Feels strange now that the chaingun is a much stronger weapon. Those aren't dealbreakers by any means, though.

 

Another thing worth praising is that for a relatively short map (I guess it's on the lower end of 'medium-sized'), there really is a good amount of variety in the combat elements: a PE, souls, some revenants, some mancs, some trons, a shambler, some nobles, scrags, clusters of low-tiers, stragglers of low-tiers, and a cyb; scattered monsters and packs; fliers, turrets, and ground-based roamers. All weapons except for the chainsaw also make an appearance and can be ideal at some point, without shoehorning in the cliched linear SG->CG->SSG->etc. progression and without compelling you to use more than three or so weapons (SSG, RL, a cell weapon), which sometimes can lead to a herky-jerky combat flow in shorter maps. That is a rare feat.  

 

 

Edited June 7, 2018 by rdwpa

[tmorrow]

map08: Ziggurat Mayhem, by Urthar
zdoom2.8.1, uvmax, pistol start, no saves, first time played

The final playable level and my favourite map in the mapset. A huge quake environment to explore, full of menacing architecture and lots of damaging lava. Scary! Progression is mostly linear but you have a choice to work your way clockwise or counterclockwise around the map.

The map was clearly designed by someone with a deep seated hatred of mancubi. In the role of evil genius, Urthar has placed a devoted switch for gratuitously crushing one of the mancubi and then to add insult to injury, set up a telefrag secret for the mancubus guarding the soulsphere. Urthar, what did these poor, defenseless, majestic beasts ever do to you? Urthar is not too fond of shotgunguys either, devising a 4 crusher switch to whittle 4 shotgunguys down to size (pancakes) in the starting room.

The secret hunt is amazing fun and rewarding to boot. There's a bfg with cells, a soulsphere, megaarmor and some health.

The encounter for the silver key may surprise you the first time when cybie teleports in with a deafening roar to prevent you from swiping the key. You should be able to bring cybie into line easily enough if you've found the bfg secret.

map09: Swim Hungry, by Urthar
zdoom2.8.1, uvmax, pistol start, no saves, first time played

A one room outro with no exit to finish the mapset.

Overall Impressions

Urthar gives us a beautiful, immersive mapset of MBF compatible doom maps with full on quake aesthetics. The environments are a visual feast for the eyes. The quake monsters Shambler, Scrag, and Spawn have been added as new doom monsters, replacing the wolfensteinss, bossbrain and commander keen and are used sparingly and thoughtfully throughout the wad. All the doom monsters that we love so much still make up the bulk of the encounters, after all this IS Doom! In fact all of the monster placements have been carefully thought out as has weapon placement and ammo, being tightly controlled. The difficulty curve in UV is tuned about right for today's veteran players, there is a Cybie fight on the first map and the difficulty rises to a peak in the middle of the episode with some challenging traps and gets a little easier again toward the end. Secret hunters are well rewarded for their searches and there are several cleverly hidden secrets to find. My favourite map was the playable final map08 Ziggurat Mayhem. Download and enjoy!