Is it time for a new mapset classification scheme?

[warman2012]

Warning: This post may feature negative and controversial topics of discussion and possible negative assessments of these topics. If anything controversial or negative is something that may make you angry or lash out, DO NOT READ.

 

 

So, I skimmed over the recent article produced by Jabba on the history of Doom mapping. This had led me to do some thinking on this subject, and have determined that the way that maps are classified and spoken of in the article should be used as a stepping stone to some sort of more formal classification system, if one does not exist already. I am a fairly new Doomer who has taken to playing a few megawads of different philosophies. Obviously, as I have played maps from these mapsets, such as Akadelma, Ancient Aliens, Exomoon, Lost Civilization, and Super Mayhem 17; I have come across some of them that I like enough, others I do not care for. The ones I do not care for are in the vein of Plutonia, Plutonia 2, Super Mayhem 17, and Doom Redux; to name a few. These I would label previously as "slaughter" because of the difficulty and/or navigability of the mapsets. After reading Jabba's article, I feel that the use of the term "slaughter" is erroneous.

 

So, therefore, I propose that a new system be looked into to better categorize mapsets if one does not exist already. These categories optimistically should be placed in the map readme so that a player gets a basic expectation of what to look out for. I have thought of the beginnings of a system, of course I am open to suggestions to make it better for the community to soak up.

 

The system I have come up with is fairly simple. The categories included below indicate some kind of theme that the map will follow and a number scale that goes up to 5. The higher it ranks, the higher it focuses on that theme. Not all themes have to be used, but if the mapset features a mix of themes, more themes would better describe the mapset. The themes are thus:

 

• Challenge-This category focuses on challenging monster placement and large arena fights, not necessarily slaughter.
• Adventure-This emphasizes Eternal Doom-like gameplay.
• Slaughter-This emphasizes gameplay akin to mapsets like Sunder and Sunlust.
• Vanilla-This emphasizes gameplay akin to the monster placement and difficulty of the Doom iwads.
• Puzzle-This encompasses mapsets that have encounters that need to be approached with strategy.

 

The way to use these categories would be something like this: If I had used this to describe what I thought Super Mayhem 17 was, for example, I would put it at Challenge: 3, Puzzle: 2. This mapset had a few maps that necessitated a strategic approach to gameplay, and had encounters that would have been more challenging than the Doom iwads, thus vanilla would not be a good fit in my mind for this mapset. Now of course, this is just my own suggestion. I would like to see the community use something like this system for their discussions and to make mapsets easier to identify.

[Spectre01]

I support more detailed text file descriptions to accompany new mapsets. Especially when it comes to which port and renderer the author recommends for the intended experience. i.e. Software vs OpenGL, or whether the author recommends GZDoom with dynamic lights etc. regardless of the map format.

[DOEL]

Challenge being like Alien Vendetta or Hell Revealed 2? Not sure what adventure could compare to, haven't played Eternal Doom.

[warman2012]

16 minutes ago, DOEL said:

Challenge being like Alien Vendetta or Hell Revealed 2? Not sure what adventure could compare to, haven't played Eternal Doom.

 

Challenge being more along the line of Plutonia and Plutonia 2. Super Mayhem 17 wasn't all challenge, it had some aspects of Plutonia in it, just not enough to call it an outright Plutonia clone. One could also use Lost Civilization as an example of an Adventure mapset. Large, and has an emphasis on exploration through its details and its layout.

[DOEL]

I find that I like something between Challenge and Slaughter. I need to try some adventure style wads.

[warman2012]

16 minutes ago, DOEL said:

I find that I like something between Challenge and Slaughter. I need to try some adventure style wads.

I think other wads like Epic could be classed as adventure. Adventure just tries to aim to tell a story through its environment. Mapsets that would be adventure would be less inclined to be abstract with its textures and layout. Check out Jabba's article on the homepage. It will better explain what an adventure mapset would be.

[Nine Inch Heels]

3 hours ago, warman2012 said:

Challenge-This category focuses on challenging monster placement and large arena fights, not necessarily slaughter.

So, movement challenges and platforming don't count?

 

3 hours ago, warman2012 said:

Slaughter-This emphasizes gameplay akin to mapsets like Sunder and Sunlust.

Except SunLust isn't even a slaughter WAD, it simply has some slaughtermaps in it. In fact, even SunLust's txt file says as much, and I'd like to think the authors of an award winning megawad had a pretty good idea what they were going for when making these maps.

 

3 hours ago, warman2012 said:

Puzzle-This encompasses mapsets that have encounters that need to be approached with strategy.

And what about actual puzzle maps like "the given", which is all puzzles but no monsters at all? Where do you put these then?

[gaspe]

Why that warning?

This seems quite stupid to me anyway, there's already a classification system of sort and having to use such strict themes as you proposing will only cause problems. When talking about puzzles in Doom I always think of the switch hunts or something pratical to do to progress in a map, which also seems to be consensus. Your definition of puzzle is redundant with the challenge category. "encounters that need to be approached with strategy" is so broad that you can find it everywhere and it can change depending on the player, there could be encounters that to me are a cakewalk but they can require a less skilled player to actually use some strategy. "Eternal Doom-like gameplay" doesn't mean so much, the actual encounters are on par with the other good wads from that era, are the various puzzles, cryptic quests, switch hunts that are some of the defining traits of the wad  and if anything give it a slower pace. And you can have adventures with the "Eternal Doom-like gameplay".

[yakfak]

if we've learned anything from decades of nerdy internet compartmentalization it's that metatags are more useful than categories

 

Eternal Doom would get like:

Puzzle

Lost

Gimmick

Big maps

Techbase

Medieval

Oldschool texturing

Hidden viles

Music too short

[erzboesewicht]

I had recently thought about a similar initiative. Apart from the big, well-known mapsets, it's pretty difficult to find WADs that meet certain expectations. For example, I recently played Eternal Doom the first time and after that I searched for similar adventure/puzzle-style mapsets but it was pretty difficult.

 

I think however that yakfak is right here: meta-tags would be more suitable, because they allow several "categories" per WAD. Particularly megawads tend to use several map concepts. For example: how would you classify Alien Vendetta? It's in my opinion a WAD with adventure, challenge and (light) slaughter elements. Idem Valiant. Sunlust could be classified as challenge, slaughter and "combat puzzle", Eternal Doom as adventure and (traditional) puzzle. This would also make the whole thing less controversial as no lengthy discussions would be necessary if a WAD fits better in category X or Y.

 

Meta-tags have also the big advantage that they can be refined very easily when people feel that it's necessary. For example, if a new genre appears (e.g. "pacifist slaughter" lol), a new metatag for it can be added without problems.

 

It's obviously pretty much impossible to require all wad authors to re-classify their works in their text/readme files. So I think a good idea could be to use the Doom Wiki and it's category system, and obviously if people want to add metatags to the TXT file of their works, even better. The Doom Wiki's category system works very much like metatags, as it allows infinite number of category annotations per page. To work as it intended it requires, however, to create category pages first, which needs at least a minimal bit of agreement of the community. But I think one could start with the less controversial categories, like "Adventure maps", "Puzzle maps" or "Concept maps".

 

By the way: I would differentiate traditional "puzzle maps" (like Eternal Doom MAP30) where puzzles are not combat related from "combat puzzle maps" like Sunlust's, which could also be called "combat strategy maps".

Edited December 14, 2019 by erzboesewicht

[warman2012]

Metatags are good as well. The "categories" I suggested were a type of metatag in their own right. The numeric category was an initiative to try and put a suggestive rating on how much that element/tag is featured. If that is too complicated a simpler solution is fine. The whole idea behind this was to sort out a new system.

 

If anyone has anything else that is better, please share your system and examples of how it would work.

[Nine Inch Heels]

19 minutes ago, warman2012 said:

If anyone has anything else that is better, please share your system and examples of how it would work.

What we currently have is stuff like adventure maps, challenge, slaughter, puzzle, platforming, rocket jumping, and the good ol' "straight forward Doom"... All that stuff comes in different shapes, sizes, and difficulties. It's been like this for "ages", and it's worked fine.

 

Most maps have a txt you can read before downloading anything to begin with, so the risk of running into something you absolutely don't want to play is minimal already. And even if you happen to grab something you didn't quite like, who cares? It's free anyway.

[Super Mighty G]

I agree with NIH, we have a vernacular that has worked fine for over a decade and I see no need to change it. 

[SOSU]

Guys if we do this then we get a giant lump of "Challenge 5" maps that are for vastly different skill levels :/

[DavidN]

It’s simple - we need someone to play every Doom WAD ever made to objectively rate the challenges against each other!

[DavidN]

I wonder if there's a meaningful way to do it programmatically? To look at the density of monsters on a map - its size versus the number of monsters in it, the types of monsters and so on... but you'd then have to consider how monster closets would affect the apparent size of the map, and if the huge powerful monsters are meant to be killed by clever means like crushers, and scripts that create monsters...

[Stale Meat]

With just how many different flavors of Doom you can milk out of making levels, a more intricate way of categorizing levels isn't necessarily a bad question to ask. To actually do something like this though would require not only having these classifications fleshed out, but also have a significant number of people including map makers agree with it in order to have it codified. Combined with just how niche some fairly standard definitions actually are (straight up puzzle maps for example) I don't see something like this getting traction.

Now a Metatag way of defining wads could be a workable alternative and probably doable with the beta downloads format. The biggest problem with that would be deciding whether to leave the actual tagging to Archive managers vs User submissions.

[leodoom85]

I think using the README with the description of the wad is enough to give you an idea of how it is. Heck, even some threads here have a theme slapped in it.

[3saster]

On 12/14/2019 at 8:33 PM, DavidN said:

It’s simple - we need someone to play every Doom WAD ever made to objectively rate the challenges against each other!

Wonder how TimeOfDeath has been doing...

 

I feel the readme + current vernacular is good enough tbh. Meta-tags sound like a good idea, but I imagine things would get mislabelled, like Sunlust as slaughter, which as NIH stated, largely isn't slaughter for the vast majority of the levels. Doom is diverse enough in that trying to quantify stuff like this is gonna be a little tricky, even without mislabelling. I'd think Valiant and Ancient Aliens, for example, don't fit into any of your categories (I'd call it 'run-n-gun' style, personally). Challenge+Puzzle+Slaughter will also have huge overlap, since contrary to popular belief, most good slaughter-maps are a sort of puzzle, in a sense.

 

At the end of the day, if people feel the need to add new terms, it will happen naturally (that's how language works!), no need to force it. I've seen people use the term 'slaughter-lite' for example, to refer to certain types of skillsaw's maps, and maps like it.