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lwks

Why is Plutonia good?

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Doom and Doom II can become a simple walk in the park after repeatedly playing them again and again, learning skills along the way making the easier difficulties unnecessary, which I think all this was done by design. Id wanted you to play again and again, and they wanted you to get through Ultra-Violence, and maybe even nightmare if you were crazy enough. 
 

I think Plutonia and arguably TNT were not designed this way. Not that they don’t want you to play them over and over, but more so that they were not designed with a learning curve in mind. They expected you’ve played the other games a lot already, and the challenge reflects that viewpoint in Plutonia the most.
 

So to me, the difficulties with Plutonia feel more like an enemy density filter and less of a true difficulty option like in the base games. For most people thought I’d say it just never feels as good to say you beat something on anything other than UV or for the sickos... nightmare. 

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6 minutes ago, TriTT said:

I think Plutonia and arguably TNT were not designed this way. Not that they don’t want you to play them over and over, but more so that they were not designed with a learning curve in mind. They expected you’ve played the other games a lot already, and the challenge reflects that viewpoint in Plutonia the most.

 

Mm... nah, TNT not so much, it's only a bit more difficult than Doom 2, with the exception of maps such as Mt. Pain, which were purposefully designed to annoy the player.

 

Regardless, they were both designed for people who wanted more Doom and thus were at least a bit familiar with the core gameplay, while Plutonia was designed specifically for experienced players and people who wanted to challenge themselves.

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I'd put it in short that I do not like most of the first 10 levels of Plutonia, but there's some great stuff later on.

 

Which maybe points to Doom gameplay being generally more prone to feeling that way when the levels thrown at you are brutal and you have a small arsenal to deal with it all, because much like Hell Beneath those early Plutonia levels don't give a shit that they are the start. They're harder than a lot of stuff later on. 

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1 hour ago, Wagi said:

The problem with cheap traps like that is they invariably kill a first-time player the first time, but then the trap becomes a menial task every other time they play it now that they know it's there. It basically transitions from "Oh that's bullshit" to "Oh that's boring" while at no point ever adding gameplay value to the map.

 

Compare this to something like E4M2 where the map is challenging to a first-time player without requiring foreknowledge to beat the map. Whenever you play it, even if you're more than good enough to beat it, you still have actual combat going on rather than "I have to remember to pull my rocket launcher out BEFORE I end up in this coverless room with an Arch Vile".

Thank you, this is exactly what I mean, instead of engaging with the game's mechanics you just memorize which guns to use in certain points, would even argue it resembles a quick time event a little bit

 

1 hour ago, seed said:

Regardless, they were both designed for people who wanted more Doom and thus were at least a bit familiar with the core gameplay, while Plutonia was designed specifically for experienced players and people who wanted to challenge themselves.

Funnily enough Plutonia was actualy designed FOR Dario TO Dario

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13 minutes ago, lwks said:

Funnily enough Plutonia was actualy designed FOR Dario TO Dario

 

Yes, "for people who wanted to challenge themselves", since that was his main goal. Reading comprehension 101 :p.

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Lmao sorry, what I wanted to say was "more specificaly" rather than "actualy", wrong word

Not saying you're wrong...but I ain't wrong either haha

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Personally, Plutonia is by far my favorite IWAD for speedrun. Every level have speedrun tricks, and the single segment challenge is very rewarding, especially in nightmare.

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Some people like to repeat and repeat until they solve the problem.

Real perseverance.

Forget a simple trap... Restart.

For some, this is fun.

 

For others, not too prone or fond to repetition ad nauseam, a challenge where you are seriouslly at odds, but with skill and keen eye you spot the solution or the way to advance, that is fun. Kama Sutra and Doom 404 comes to mind as examples of this. The maps themselves shows the way to progress, is up to the player fit the skill needed to makde it throught.

i'm with @Soundblock.
I played a lot of games, and probably others doomers here, too.
There are diferent approach to games, for example:
-Super Mario Bros. gives you a limited set of abilities: jump, crounch, stomp, and run. Fire if you want more points. But just five movements to traverse a lot of challenging maps.
At first, you play and play, and lose, and restart and again, until you get the handle of how the maneuvers are. But after that, its just up to your own skill if you can make it further and further.
For me, i played Super Mario two times on my life. One when i was 4 years old, and the other when i was 13 years old.
First time, i played and get the grasp of it, not tried at all to complete it. Just tried to find what can and what can't be done.
Second time, knowing the maneuvers, i made it to the last map in one sit.
And i had real fun with it, why? Because the game pushed me really hard for using my head and thinking ahead about how to solve the different situations.

I'm with Vorpal, too.
I didn't played Plutonia until like 2008 or so.
But before playing it, i had already beaten some really challenging mapsets: Hell Revealed, Memento Mori, Alien Vendetta, etc.
Those mapsets are challenging if you completely grasp the mechanics of Doom and know how to handle them, and punishers if you don't.
But when i played Plutonia for the first time, i get caught on the very first trap, ambushed both sides by chaingunners that zapped my health almost instantly.
Ok, this is challening i thought. Next time i made it throught without problem.
Next level i get caught on the crusher trap.
Then i started thinking, are there things that i'm not paying attention before falling to them?
After a few more death traps on other maps, i found that not, it wasn't that i wasn't paying attention properly to the environment, it was that the environment almost gives no clues about their traps.
Already seven maps into it, i wanted to complete it, and i started to have the other feeling... a constant deja vu.
Isn't this structure similar to another one in Doom 2 or my mind is playing with me?
It wasn't.

Anyway, after getting to the end and beating it, Plutonia was the IWAD that i least enjoyed, but one that i can certainly appreciate as it takes players of their safeground even when they have the skill and the handling for survival.
I played Plutonia on and off through the years.
Always getting caught in some trap i forget...

So yeah, to anyone their own taste.

But no, foreknowledge is not a good gameplay design.

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On 7/21/2020 at 11:40 PM, GarrettChan said:

If I have the skill level of Civvie, I wouldn't call myself a good player in Doom.

 

Finally someone fucking said it. He provides interesting commentary and is not shit enough to push through the whole wad, but he's far from a good player. Of course, he doesn't play ridiculous challenge wads 24/7, and he never aspires or claims to be a "super pro mega gamer", but rather a slightly above average, Average Joe gamer dude, who plays various games from time to time. People just give him way too much credit tbh, but that's just what 200k Reddit subs do. They're gonna overplay and overblow whatever their fave youtuber says by a thousand.

 

But you have to put it in a perspective to a casual Doom player who just finished Doom I Episode I and MAYBE the rest of Doom I and MAYBE mAYBE Doom II in its entirety. When I first tried Plutonia as a kid, I got my shit handed to me at the invisible bridge in MAP02 IIRC. Kept running my head against that shit and 10-13 year old me still didn't figure out that Doom had bullet triggered switches to begin with. And, to an average casual gamer, Plutonia might give them quite a bit of a run for their money in terms of difficulty. Walk up to that geek neighbor who only plays League of Legends and fucking Farmville, he won't even bother with MAP01, let alone the rest of the wad.

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Dario is now doing level design at Valve. I think that kind of speaks for itself.

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I think it's been said enough times here already, but I believe that your enjoyment of plutonia is directly related to how much experience you have in doom, more than just your overall skill level in games. As you start to get the hang of the game you start wanting to run into more interesting, and most of the time tougher encounters, something which plutonia does a hell of a lot better than any of the other iwads since it doesn't mind being more unforgiving and/or cruel. You can play all the way through doom 1 and 2 without really being aware of several game mechanics like mancubus fireball patterns, revenant/pinky kiting or bfg tracers, but they become pretty much necessary to beat plutonia reliably on higher difficulties. You also don't get situations like infinitely reviving chaingunners, archvile mazes or invisible bridges, which as frustrating as they can be, end up making you play differently and are much more satisfying to beat, and also teach you strategies that you'll probably unconsciously start to apply to other combat scenarios.

I personally don't find plutonia that hard anymore (but not to the same extent that some of the godlike players here do, I still find it pretty challenging all things considered), but it was essentially the wad that got me out of my comfort zone and made me learn. It might suck your first time round, but it's a necessary stepping stone towards being able to enjoy newer and better, but also harder wads. A trial by fire chaingunner, I'd say :)

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On 7/21/2020 at 4:50 PM, GarrettChan said:

and almost everything is brown and green

That's the color of most Doom Console ports. That means Plutonia is secretly the lost maps of Doom 32x obviously. For real I have yet to play most of Plutonia because I am not a good Doom player by any means, slightly below average at best.

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3 hours ago, uber said:

I think it's been said enough times here already, but I believe that your enjoyment of plutonia is directly related to how much experience you have in doom, more than just your overall skill level in games.

I know this is just being said as a general statement, but having spent a frankly ludicrous amount of time playing Doom over the years, I strongly disagree. Playing various wads over time all fully cemented every enemy's behavior and attack patterns and how to best deal with all of them, and these various mapsets did so without resorting to tricks that are just mean beginner's traps.

 

Obviously everyone's bar is different, but this is just how I feel about it. I've played many wads that commonly tend to get called "as hard as Plutonia" but I can play them without ever dying because my knowledge of enemy attack patterns is so cemented - I don't also require knowledge that in room X, wall Y is going to open at an arbitrary point which will surround me with chaingunners and close the door behind me, so the only way to beat it is to move to a specific spot right as that happens to minimize damage. Now, if these fights were actually choreographed, IE even a first time player has various hints the trap is coming and has a chance to prepare, that would be a different story, but so often in Plut it's just that "ugh gotta save before each circular brown room with chaingunners and revenants".

 

I guess it can be argued that the truest of true Doom pros will be ready for any wall to suddenly open at any moment, 0 choreography required, but that just makes me tip-toe everywhere which quickly passes from cool and sneaky to just getting boring. The Doom equivalent of walking on eggshells, I suppose.

 

Even slaughtermaps with their thousand-and-up monster counts tend to be more forgiving for first-time players who have a strong Doom skillset. It's one thing to give me enough ammo and room to just keep movin' and keepin' the enemies at bay. I can keep that up for quite a while and if I get hit with a stray Rev rocket or Manc fireball, it's all on me for letting my attention slip.

 

Plutonia will (by virtue of repeated exposure) teach a player all the enemy attack patterns in time, but other (in my opinion more well designed) wads teach you all the same lessons, but are also designed in such a way where every time you die, it's entirely on you. No dirty tricks or "particular trap in a particular map" type foreknowledge required.

 

(I love this thread because it's making me further evaluate and hone in on why I love the wads that I do..)

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There are, for sure, some bullshit traps in Plutonia. But they're not that frequent.  Most of them are also telegraphed. Partly inspired by this thread I'm replaying some Plutonia maps to refresh my memory. I've played about half of them now, but so far the only two traps which I really would describe as a highly likely death in a blind run even with some skill, is one in MAP25 after a teleporter who takes you in a place with two revenants in close distance, and a fake wall chaingunner trap in MAP22. (I'm not a skilled player, maybe not a beginner, but at most average.) Many other traps are challenging, but can be tackled without foreknowledge.

 

I'm paralelly playing Speed of Doom and this kind of traps is also present in this "almost universally acclaimed" megawad, in this case mainly close quarters pop-up traps of mid-tiers, hitscanners, and even cyberdemons (map32). So far all harder mapsets I played have some of these "bullshit traps". It may be a question of personal preferences but I think without them they would be a bit more boring because of the missing "surprise" element. And some awareness helps preventing deaths. In Plutonia, particularly teleporters to other areas and lifts seem to be "evil", but if you become accustomed to that, then you know that you must concentrate especially in these situations to react fastly. I also don't see that most traps have only one solution you need to know before. You can tackle them in many ways.

 

Well, Speed of Doom was surely partly inspired by Plutonia, the gameplay has often similarities, although obviously SoD adds bigger hordes and some maps are more spacious. But despite of the "Plutonic" traps I'm having a lot of fun with it. What we can ask: Would Doom history have been different if people instead were more inspired in MM1 or TNT (non-Casali) stuff instead of the Casali brothers' style? The bullshit trap, at least, is not a Casali invention, as there are many examples in Doom/Doom2.

 

I however think that it's totally legitimate to not like this style of trap-oriented gameplay. But I'm having fun with it.

Edited by erzboesewicht

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Imo I always thought some of its enemy placement was cheap, and it has some really infuriating traps

But it's hell of a lot fun, like, even while infuriating and sometimes stupidly hard, it remains a fun milestone to overcome!

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On 7/21/2020 at 11:58 PM, vdgg said:

Does anyone know where I can find playthrough .lmps recorded by Casali brothers themselves? I watched them aaaages ago. I remember them being quite slow (they approached their own fights as puzzles). Not sure if all maps were included, I only have a vague memory of "Aztec" which was insanely hard to me back then ;) Now I have a desire to see how they handled MAP15

 

 

Edit, never mind, it is right there on Doomworld, see 2 posts below

I've converted a demo and uploaded it to Youtube. I hope I'm allowed to since it's not my own recording. If anyone thinks it's wrongful then please let me know.

 

 

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On 7/22/2020 at 5:41 PM, lwks said:

 

@head_cannon Well Plutonia certainly raised the difficulty of the Doom maps, that's for sure, but you see I'm more interested in the actual "map theory" stuff you know? What were your greatest moments in the map set?

 

At its best, Plutonia could create little "aha" moments where something that seemed overwhelming at first was revealed to be far easier than it appeared. Moments that demonstrate something about the game that had never been brought into focus before. (In id software's levels, I mean. These lessons are all old and obsolete now, and there are probably PWADs that came later that do a better job of teaching them, but it had to start somewhere.)

You wanted examples, so these are the clearest ones that come to mind of how Plutonia taught me that there was something I was missing - the times that the level design focused on an aspect of the game that I had never thought about before:

  • When I realized that the gang of Revenants who guard the Rocket Launcher in MAP01 - who I had found so terrifying at first - could be kited into the niche with the window and kept safely confined there.

  • When I realized how in the Baron battle in MAP04, it was actually safer to stand on the damaging floor in order to gain the space to dodge & fire rockets.

  • When I realized how the short little pillars around the Cyberdemon in MAP12 and in the Mancubus room in MAP13 were just tall enough to block monster projectiles while allowing my hitscan attacks to pass through.

  • When I realized that the wall of bullets that greets you at the end of MAP16 that had seemed so scary was designed so that nearly every single zombie gets wiped out by tracers in a single BFG shot.

I could go on (honorable mention to the moment in MAP04 where, upon picking up the level's only RadSuit, I realized that I could go back to the Plasma Gun pit and clear all those infinitely-tall Spectres who had blocked the jump to the weapon), but I hope that I've demonstrated why I remember The Plutonia Experiment as "ingenious combat puzzles" rather than "tedious Dragon's Lair-style trial & error"

 

"Highly-choreographed setpieces" is not everyone's favorite style of gameplay, and when it's done poorly, I sometimes resent not getting to make my own decisions and being forced to jump through these hoops, but what I'm trying to get at is that when I played Plutonia, I didn't even know that the hoops were there, and their discovery made for minor little revelations.

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