The DWmegawad Club plays: Three is a Crowd

[Gez]

1 hour ago, Phobus said:

(that I didn't go after in revenge, as I don't think I could get to the room it's in)

Make noise, and the baron comes for you. You can get to its part of the room and activate the prominent switch, which merely opens the otherwise-unmarked secret exit you've found and that can also be manually opened.

[Phobus]

I see my secret hunting skills are too good! Oh well... Not the worst failing to have, and it's good to know 100% completion enthusiasts have been catered for!

[kalaeth]

MAP26 : Palm trees with flaming skulls on top.. Glad they aren't flammable. It's a tiny courtyard (I think I've written this word more times in the reviews for this wad than ever before), with many fake doors and a switch, that opens one of the doors and reveals a manc, just sitting there, asking to be showered with rockets. I oblige. And then, as a reward, more rockets! And a glimpse of whats to come. We leave the courtyard (there it goes again, that word) and pass an arch to get to our unlikely ally, a poor caged imp! There's a button we can't press and a door we can open, so choices aren't plentiful. First I snipe the zombimen with a pistol, because I can, and down we go, down again, fall into a secret, grab a blue armor and get back up so we can go down again. The town square from the glimpse has been de-spiderized and I can enter, fearlessly into it, gravitate towards the broken door, kill a single lost soul and then, finally, open the one door that works and is at ground level, not falling for the obvious monster on the balcony trap and climb the stairs, open a door and finding myself on a hedge maze. My memories of plutonia tell me there will be an archie here so SSG and or plasma? Plasma. It was actually a pain elemental, but the plasma did it's work just fine. Secret chainsaw and backpack, all enemies in the zone dead, we leave. Going back to the caged imp and the yellow keyed door I find a swarm of specters for whom the SSG proves to be the last thing they see. And then I die to the barrels. Second go and I find the tinny compartment to hide, which allows me to outlive the barrel explosion. Outside the imp is free! He presses the button I couldn't press but what it does I know not. Oh, there he is again! I need to open those red bars to help him, but first I need to find the red key. Pressing another switch I find a area filled with nukage and a couple pain elementals. There's a path through the nukage that I follow, to find the red key, return to the switch, freeing the imp so that he opens the bars blocking my way. Thanks imp! And now we cross the courtyard inside a tunnel without ceiling, and our friend the imp grabs the blue key and delivers it to us! Key in hand we go back to where a blue door was, press a switch and revenants! And mancs! And a weird room with but one exit into another room, where we can see a lonely baron strolling behind glass windows. Just because I can't pass it doesn't mean he can't. He can. And he did kick my ass a bit, but not enough to kill me. A non-secret secret door is the path for us and the exit is just right there, however I'm missing one secret. Ah, a secret inside a secret, I see. Done.

 

100% k/s/i, 19 minutes 11 seconds, 1 death (damn those barrels!).

 

totals : 8 deaths spread over 8 hours 20 minutes and 2 seconds of time.

[Omniarch]

MAP26: Unlikely Ally - 100% kills 33% secrets

Another warm suburban level, this time with an unusual gimmick.

 

First off, I really like the look and the layout of this one. Of all the episode 3 maps so far, this one gives me the strongest impression of a real place. It feels grounded, homely even, at least on the surface. The underground sections are a little more abstract, with hellish details and some devious contraptions.

 

Combat is generally entertaining, though not as much so as the previous map. There is some grind here and there, like the maze ambush or the various squads of mancubi, but ammunition is fairly plentiful, so its not a huge problem.

 

The main selling point of the map is the main gimmick, that being the titular unlikely ally. The puzzles are simple but clever, and fun to watch play out. By the end of the level I felt a real sense of kinship with the helpful imp. Sadly, it does not survive the level.

 

Overall, fun and brief, with an amusing and well-executed gimmick.

[Scypek2]

MAP26: Unlikely Ally

 

The 13th map I made, the first proper city map, and the subject of the third challenge: "Make the player feel sorry for an enemy". Oh boy! Talk about a vague objective. How am I supposed to control the player's feelings?! Some people feel sorry for the demons by default, no special setup needed. Others will see a helpless pinky stuck between twenty barrels and feel nothing but righteous satisfaction.

 

Finally, I decided on something ambitious: I would make a demon meet a sad predicament, but before that, I would PROVE to the player that the demon was not, in fact, out for their blood. And that brings us to the level's current setup: you meet a caged imp (It's actually possible to kill him at that point if you try REALLY hard, but what matters is that an itchy trigger finger alone isn't gonna do it), and later on you jump into a thin corridor. As you go though it, a wall opens up and an explosion begins to approach you... the one switch within your reach doesn't save you... but it does release the imp! And the imp does not reward your selfless action with a fireball to the face. No, it takes a look at you, and then presses a switch to open up a closet and let you hide from the barrels.

 

Okay, what? Let's back up a little. What's even going on?! I thought this was vanilla Doom, I hear you say. What's with the friendly monsters pressing switches?! Well. With enough knowledge and stubbornness, everything is possible.

 

I always liked the idea of the player not being the only one to press switches. And I actually implemented that in my Doomworld Mega Project 2018 submission, where you can see a Nazi throw a switch behind a bulletproof window in the prison area. But that was just a motionless guy staring at a wall that changed, and in Boom format on top of that. This imp actually walks up to the switch, and only then is the switch pressed. In vanilla. So how does it work? There are many components.

 

First of all, there's the bulletproof window. It's a real classic, so I won't elaborate too much on it. Just an untextured raised sector, mostly. What matters is that it keeps the imp from attacking you, and vice versa. But since the imp has been alerted (you probably fired your gun in the vicinity already, and if you didn't, you BETTER do now!), it will still try to chase you down. How on Earth does that translate to going AWAY from you, and towards the switch? The answer lies in monster AI! Monsters usually try to go towards you, but they'll try other directions if they have to. Curiously enough, there's one thing all monsters hate: making 180 degree turns. They are capable of it, but will only EVER do it if it's literally the only option they have besides not moving at all. If they can move without making a 180 degree turn, that's what they'll choose to do, even if they have to stray far away from you as a result. You can easily see this in E3M1 of Doom: once a demon begins walking back through that thin corridor, it won't turn until it bumps into a wall at the the end, as that's when the 180 degree turn becomes a necessity. And so, I put up a few monster blocking lines, close enough to each other that the imp cannot move sideways at all. And so it will walk in a straight path between you and the switch, only turning upon reaching the end as that's when the 180 turn becomes unavoidable.

 

Okay, so he approached the switch. What then? Vanilla Doom doesn't have many monster-activated linedef actions. It's just one type of door, a few kinds of teleports... and, crucially, walk-over lifts. In original Doom, that usually just means that thing where a lift goes down as soon as you step on or off it. But that's a remote action! It affects whatever sector is tagged. And that opens a whole lot of possiblities. For starters, the door of the closet that lets you hide from the barrels is obviously a lift. But so is the switch itself! The way it works is just like in my DMP2018 level: there's a super thin sector in front of the switch face, with the switch off texture. Behind the thin sector, there's a switch on texture. And when it's time for the switch to activate, the tiny sector gets lower. And that's it! Only in this circumstance, I didn't have the option to insta-lower it, so instead I just made the texture lower unpegged. That makes the switch texture change gradually, but a lift movement is fast enough to keep it from being too noticeable! To this particular switch, I added an extra touch: ANOTHER extra thin sector in front of it, this one working as a regular switch and preventing the fake switch animation thingy from happening right in front of the player, when it would be a lot more noticeable. That outermost sector is only raised if the player can get close, and gets lowered for the duration of the "switch-pressing imp saving you from barrels" sequence.

 

The other encounters with the imp largely rely on the same mechanics: remote lifts and tight spaces forcing the AI to behave in the desired way. There are also a few lifts or otherwise moving floors that sink down and form tiny invisible gaps in the floor, dynamically restricting the monster movement. After all, monsters never step over tall dropoffs... even if the gap is so thin it's not even possible to fall inside at all. This has been another hugely important part of this. For example, the imp just goes back and forth at first, but as you continue onwards, one of those floors raises and lets the imp go, teleporting him to the next section.

 

Finally, the imp "picks up" a keycard and brings it to you. It just gets lifted high up (using this mechanic where items start off on whatever height their center is, but then snap back to the highest floor within their hitbox as soon as any sector movement at all occurs inside said hitbox), and then another key pops up (using the same mechanic) elsewhere.

 

Then finally, the feeling bad part comes in. It's not very tech fancy now, just a static scene of an imp dead in front of a baron. It used to be just as quirky, advanced and animated as the rest of scenes, with the baron very intently killing the imp right in front of your eyes, but it ultimately proved too hard to implement elegantly, or even consistently. It was gonna use the same trick as Batman Doom, which features two gangs fighting each other without your involvement at one point. Only in Batman Doom, they had Dehacked that could force the two groups to shoot as soon as they're alerted, and aggro each other immediately. Here, I could only rely on RNG making the imp hit the baron sooner than later. And even then, the baron had to enter the pain state to react at all! I made another convoluted contraption full of monster-activated lifts... but even in the best case scenario, it still involved the player sitting in a hole for a long while, waiting for the two monsters to do their thing. It was a pretty neat effect still, but I think I never managed to make it 100% reliable, and that's why I gave up on it in the end.

 

Miscellaneous notes:

• I'm pretty sure this level has the only instance of brown slime in the whole megawad, and it has a nice realistic touch of a flooded staircase. (Edit: almost... MAP05 has it too, but it's the harmless kind with a slightly different texture.)
• The hedge looks messed up when used on a lower texture in vanilla... luckily, the particular texture being used makes it look alright!
• I love the combination of the strobe light behind a lowering wall in the red key area. It feels kinda intense and foreboding, like something's about to happen, and it does.
• To avoid confusion, your unlikely ally is the only imp on the whole level. Let me tell you, making maps without those guys is something of a challenge! They're the most versatile Doom monster, hands down.
• The starting area is one of my favorite places in the whole megawad. I just managed to get it looking particularly lively and realistic...

Edited July 31, 2023 by Scypek2

[tmorrow]

map27

An adrenaline pumping fun cybie map. Once you destroy the barrels and head into the area with the yellow key, you will spy f-f-f-f-five cybies! Head to the yellow key and the 5 cybies come alive and the chase is on.

You want to stay in front of the cybie wave and each new area you visit tries to delay you with enemies blocking you from the switches that reveal the next area you can escape to. Once you take the lift up to an upper area and clear out the enemies up there you can afford to relax a little, since the cybies can't easily shoot you up there, if you are careful.

Further on and you can open the way to the outside again and race for a large stash of cells and an area with a megasphere. At this point the balance tips in the favor of doomguy. Cybies hate bfg spam!

The death exit ends our 3rd episode. I wonder what the next 3 maps will bring.

Edited November 27, 2020 by tmorrow

[Egg Boy]

Map26: Wow. another brilliant map. It starts out as a pretty generic city map, but then the imp buddy sequence starts. This is one of the coolest, and cutest things I've seen in a doom map, let alone a vanilla map. Such a well executed concept. I really can't praise this one enough, it really shows off the quirkier (and in my opinion) best features this wad has to offer. Also, felt really bad for the imp, can't believe that baron got him. I wish he had a happier ending.

[golbeeze]

+++Plutonia

Edited November 29, 2020 by golbeeze : Changed vote

[TheNoob_Gamer]

12 hours ago, tmorrow said:

The death exit ends our 3rd episode.

Oh I assure you, the final person's journey hasn't quite ended there yet.

 

Speaking of the protagonists, which one was Doomguy?

[Gez]

My understanding of the timeline is this:

 

MAP01: first marine in the base. Death exit represents going to Hell.

MAP02-MAP09: Still the first marine in Hell. Death exit in MAP09 is "non-canonical" as the marine is actually still just trapped in the cage.

MAP10-MAP18 (and 31-32): Second marine in the base. Death exit in MAP18 is canonical, as he sacrifices to open a gate so that the third marine can rescue the first.

MAP19-MAP27: Third marine in the city. Death exit in MAP27 represents going to Hell through the portal (just like for the first marine in MAP01) opened by the second marine.

Spoiler

 

MAP28: third marine in Hell. Death exit represents being sent to an even worse part of Hell, I suppose.

MAP29: still the third marine in super-extra-painful horrible Hell. Death exit is canonical as he manages to rescue the first marine after a grueling ordeal.

MAP30: back to the first marine, who finally prevails thanks to the help of his two friends (and, though he doesn't know about it, that one imp in the city).

 

 

18 hours ago, Egg Boy said:

Also, felt really bad for the imp, can't believe that baron got him. I wish he had a happier ending.

Well, nothing is impossible, and he gets to be with the three marines on the BOSSBACK screen. (I'm pretty sure it's this imp specifically.)

Edited November 27, 2020 by Gez

[TheNoob_Gamer]

3 minutes ago, Gez said:

My understanding of the timeline

I felt you have interpreted it correctly, but maybe you should put a spoiler? The last 3 maps are the best ones in the megawad imo, both in gameplay and narrative. 

[kalaeth]

MAP 27 : Barrels. Barrels all around. Far far away cows, many cows. Arming a rocket launcher I take a deep breath and open the door, carnage is incoming. And in an anticlimactic turn of events, I'll need the yellow key first. Time to go around the building then, and for that, the barrels must go. Death one : gangbanged by cows. Death two : I missed the key...  Third time is the charm. I ran from switch to switch until I reached the BFG and the invulnerability spheres, wiped the cows and now it's only a matter of finding the one secret and the exit.. Secret found, into the inverted cross we go and *splat* I am dead.

 

100% K/S/I, 2 deaths, 4 minutes 09 seconds.

 

totals : 10 deaths spread over 8 hours 24 minutes and 12 seconds of time.

[Phobus]

MAP27: Pushback

We've made it to that portal the second NoPants2 marine in our story saw rising as he died, and can jump in... Right after we deal with this level. It's a pretty small level, which is ideal, as the amount of pressure you get from five Cyberdemons that jump in to defend the portal as soon as you grab the yellow key is pretty difficult to manage. I died a load of times on this map, stealing the opportunity to save when I got a moment, which kept the frustration a little at bay, but this is the kind of setup where I simply don't avoid taking damage, even with the handy secret early in the map that gave me a BFG to beat my way through the bulk of the level with. I correctly surmised we'd have a big bulk of cells to take on the Cybs with near the end (many reckless BFG-based deaths were had) and took a violent rushing approach.

 

I's challenging, rough and short. Seems perfectly acceptable for this point in a megaWAD, and moves the story on nicely by getting our remaining marine to Hell. Incidentally, it looks like the sky in MAP28 is back to the first episode one. How was that achieved in vanilla?

[Omniarch]

MAP27: Pushback - 100% kills 100% secrets

This map is awesome. I have not had many experiences in Doom as thrilling as this one, racing through a burning city pursued by five cyberdemons, hosing down hordes of monsters with streams of blazing plasma in a desperate attempt at survival.

 

Pushback is the very definition of a thrill ride. Everything after the acquisition of the yellow key (and the map's very obvious and essential secret) is a non-stop slaughterfest, involving all the most powerful weapons in the game. The whole experience is cinematic in its orchestration. Right off the bat, huge off-map structures loom on all sides, while the quintet of antagonists stand tall on their perches, only to emerge from a reverse crucifix to wreak terrible vengeance upon the last marine. The whole progression really feels like an epic chase, with the player scurrying ahead on the oncoming menace, always mere moments away from fiery annihilation, only for the tides to turn at the very end, placing the antagonists on the defensive as the player retaliates with wave after wave of BFG tracers until all opposition is reduced to chunks of meat and bone.

 

This is easily one of the best maps in the wad, and a great way to cap off the third episode. Next stop, hell, for real this time.

[Scypek2]

10/10 timeline, Gez! Down to the details of the BOSSBACK. The imp was a later addition, and I'm glad I thought of it.

 

While we're at the topic of the graphic lumps (and at the level depicted in one of them), I'm really happy with how they all turned out, and helped define this wad's aesthetic and personality. It started with the titlepic, which was the first thing made for the project. I actually made that textureless maze in Doombuilder, though the marines were added in post-processing. With the red title and green people, it started the trend of grayscale scenes with small colored details.

 

 

The yellow color for the level names was probably chosen because it's the most interesting of the three doom font colors I got for Bitmap Font Writer, and it matches the prominent yellow skull key as well. That in turn ended up inspiring yellow highlights in other graphics lumps, and also repainting all of the main menu graphics yellow, when I found the red to be blending in too much with the E1 sky.

 

Big shout out to @P41R47, who came up with several different status bar designs for 3IAC, and iterated on them to create what we have now. The final version really has it all - dark stone that matches the other custom graphics, textures matching the three episode themes poking through, bright yellow labels, and hollow red numbers matching the title pics. I did the number graphics myself in the end, but having them match the title font like that was inspired by one of @P41R47's designs as well.

 

Finally, there's the BOSSBACK picture - the only one without the grayscale and dark vignette, because it's already nicely mono-colored enough, but I suppose it could also symbolize the heroes breaking free from the evil overseer's influence. Somehow, I couldn't find suitable rocky ground images on the internet, and I ended up using my own vacation photo, rotating a sandy cliff 90 degrees and coloring it red. Then to give the scene some depth, I used @Eradrop's generic but lovely hellish mountain skybox for the background, and finally blended it with my own noodly sky to make it all nicely consistent.

 

The BOSSBACK caps off the storyline really nicely, and combined with the visual storytelling makes the text screens pretty much redundant.

 

Anyway, on to the level!

 

MAP27: Pushback

 

Every episode so far had a considerably different weapon progression. The first episode was the craziest at first, starting you off with a plasma gun and a SSG, giving you a BFG to play with for about 10 seconds before taking all your weapons away after the first level, forcing you to get through a level with nothing, and then another level with just the rocket launcher. Then you get the SSG before getting the chaingun or even the regular shotgun, but by level 5 things become more normal. Besides the fact that the BFG is more easily obtainable than the plasma gun in that episode.

 

The second episode was the most normal in comparison, dutifully following the path of shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher, SSG and plasma gun, with the BFG staying secret. Then the third episode makes things weird again, giving you the plasma gun right off the bat and forcing you to choose between the chaingun and the rocket launcher afterwards, before settling into more normalcy by the time the SSG shows up. One persistent feature of that episode, besides the plasma gun supremacy, is the fact that the BFG never shows up, even inside secrets, since that would mess with the balance a lot. That is, until MAP27, which has a secret BFG at the start and a non-secret BFG at the end, cause this is the final map of the episode and nothing matters anymore.

 

MAP25 is probably my favorite in terms of aesthetics, and MAP26 may be my favorite in terms of pure gimmick. MAP27 though, rivaled perhaps only by MAP11, is my favorite combo of gimmick and execution. It's a really short map, with a lot of action, a lot of dying, but also plenty of satisfaction. I playtested it every way under the sun, on skill 1, skill 4, with the secret, without the secret, and it's been frustrating at times, but it never quite got old. My favorite bit may be the blur sphere and the room full of hitscanners it precedes - you have to choose between the risk of getting hitscanned and the risk of erratically flying rockets, and choose fast.

 

The aesthetics ended up quite unique too. It's the most open-looking of all maps, with just a low fence and detached building blocks behind it, instead of buildings surrounding you from all sides. Somehow I kept it all really low on visplanes, too. The window that lets you collect the blue key overlooks the starting building, with its several floors filled with fire burning behind windows. I did that with a technique I first implemented in my DMP2018 submissions, except this time I used midtextures for the walls between windows instead of the windows themselves. Multiple differently offset midtextures one unit in front of each other, with the closest ones at the bottom to make the detachedness the least visible.

 

One last bit of trivia: while the ruined building provided a fine perch for the five cyberdemons, it was originally standing intact, as seen in the CREDIT lump background and the end of MAP18. But its height and position would cause it to be cut off by the hell portal's low sky ceiling when viewed from a particular angle, so it had to be demolished.

[TheNoob_Gamer]

8 hours ago, Phobus said:

it looks like the sky in MAP28 is back to the first episode one. 

Spoiler

My understanding is that it is purely a visual trick - a sector that looks large enough combine with the hell "sky" as the midtextures. Freelook and the whole thing is exposed.

Might ruin the immersion, so click on it at your own risk.

[tmorrow]

map28

You begin by dropping into to a red brick room with enemies waking up from all sides. There are 8 lifts, 2 in each of the four directions and all 8 areas have enemies there too. Fortunately you have an invulnerability to help out as you quickly scout the area, picking up weapons and taking out what you can.

There are teleporters in the upper areas that take you to triangular areas with goodies. The upper areas also have a door to a key. You need to take the keys in order, west for yellow, north for red, west for blue and south for a soulsphere and to open the way to the exit. Naturally there are traps with each key pickup to deal with and more goodies revealed to pick up.

Collecting the yellow key brings 2 hellknights nearby and 2 pain elementals and some demons from the south east area below.

Collecting the blue key brings 2 chaingunners nearby and 5 mancubi from the southwest corner below.

Collecting the red key reveals 2 revenants nearby and an archvile and some chaingunners from the northwest corner below.

At this point you will hear a cybie stomping around in the northeast closed with some revenants, eager to get out. Entering the southern soulsphere room wakes up 2 archviles in closets nearby and cybie and friends below. Go get 'em.

There is a megaarmor and invulnerability secret to pick up to help with the more difficult fights.

On the path to the exit, you discover one of your good buddies at last in a familiar area you reach in map09, but he's locked in a cage. Following the path to the end reveals more of the story and a death exit.

[Egg Boy]

Map27: This map is short and simplistic. Grab the yellow key, and run from the pack of cyberdemons. Things really get tense when you are in close proximity and have to kite them around corners so you can make it up lifts and stuff. The length makes it so the concept doesn't really outstay its welcome, though I do feel it could have been spread a bit longer.

[Biodegradable]

Just going to chuck in my vote for next month's WAD: +++ 180 Pour Vivre 

[Phobus]

@TheNoob_Gamer - Moving around was enough for me to see what was happening after your description, and indeed looking up does throw it out completely, but from a starting perspective that's still a clever trick!

 

MAP28: Reunion

This map has a decent initial resource scrambling battle, but after that just pads out the time with a simple repeating formula until we do the exit, which continues the story and has a good setup for the next map, complete with some text to let us know what's what. I didn't find either secret, but didn't really need them, plus Gez has already explained progression, so I knew I'd not be carrying anything over. Music in this map is the same as the title track, which was an interesting continuation on loading the game up!

 

Not looking forward to tomorrow's map, but we're two days from the end, so I'll try and soldier through.

[Scypek2]

MAP28: Reunion

The fourth map I made. Like all of the maps from 27 onwards, it contains an essential piece of storytelling, but it's not that notable otherwise. My favorite part of the map might be the temporary staircases that form to let you out of the gray rock areas accessed by teleporters. Another fun gimmick this map used to have was keys on top of sprite pillars (like the soulsphere in MAP23, and a few different objects in my DMP2018 map), but for some reason just one of them kept glitching out and warping the column sprite on top of the actual, invisible sector pillar, despite being identical to all the other columns.

 

The hellish sky at the start (mirroring the other hellish arrival at MAP02) is my favorite kind of trick - the kind that's bafflingly straightforward at its core. It still required some finesse, with the sector with the sky linedefs being fullbright, and non-orthagonal to avoid fake contrast. By the way, the two secret tunnels on MAP22 also have some linedefs around them with a vertex shifted just one unit away from being orthagonal, to once again turn off the fake contrast that would've made the tunnels to easy to see. In the end, the sky hole ended up looking ever so slightly imperfect from the bottom... but it's hell, so I have an excuse for any and all illogical visuals.

[Moravectomascb]

Map18-I just broked that. I cant died by romero and I just used rocket and 2 times, I get like invisible, 0 hp 0 armor and monsters cant see me.

https://ctrlv.cz/7jvY

https://ctrlv.cz/dsW3

But 1 times I died. :D

[tmorrow]

map29

I was expecting a toxic waste management map at some point in the wad and here it is. It is also an icon of sin map but that doesn't raise its ugly head until the end. This map is almost completely filled with damaging floor. It is pain sector from start to finish, either sector effect 7 (-2 or 5% health) in most areas, sector effect 5 (-5 or 10% health) in toxics waste areas and sector 16 (-10 or 20% health) in the lava. There are 5 soothing water areas, 4 of them hidden in secrets and one of them at the end of a long toxic waste run full of hazards and these are the only places it is safe to take a breather. Developing a viable and efficient route through the level is what this map is all about.

To help you out there are quite a few stimpacks, medipacks, soulspheres, green and blue armors, berserk packs, invulnerabilities and even rad suits along the way, many of them hidden behind the maps 6 secrets. There are also optional areas and you need to decide whether to do them or not. The 6 secrets yield a bunch of stuff that's worth picking up:

1. bfg and cells
2. an invulnerability
3. berserk, megaarmor and soulsphere
4. an invulnerability
5. soulsphere and 10 radsuits
6. a rad suit

Dropping down to the 10 rad suits in the huge toxic waste section is optional and can be considered to be a trap, even though the entire toxic waste area is devoid of enemies. Rad suits don't stack and the path to get out is long and linear, circumscribing most of the map and worst of all is full of deadly wrong turns. There are some dead ends and a loop that gets you nowhere. There is a false wall that is a minor shortcut along the way. When the path forks, one fork takes you to a barred dead end, forcing you to backtrack. There's a dark area where you can accidentally fall and end up back in an earlier area. Then there's another fork in the path where if you go the wrong way you'll have to negotiate a maze room with a chainsaw, green armor and a bunch of stimpacks and is not worth it. Once you memorised the good path through the toxic waste, it is fairly easy. it's not the fastest way to go but I found it the funnest. One rad suit is enough to make it all the way to the safe water sector with plenty of cells and health. Another bonus is that it avoids returning through the crusher area.

Once you have collected the blue and red skull keys, you can make your way to the exit area. There's a lot of information to take in once you enter the final room and precious little time. The main features of the room are:

1. There's a corridor that takes you up some stairs from where you can jump to collect the 2 soulspheres, megaarmor and rockets on pedestals.
2. There's an alcove with 3 megaarmor's that closes when you get near, but you can open it up again and collect one when needed.
3. The archvile pillar has 2 switches, one to raise stairs to a skull door and the other to lower the reptile skinned pillar so you can get on it.
4. There's a switch on a ledge full of medikits that will lower the ledge to the floor.

Items 1-2 are performed as required to keep your health and armor topped up. Items 3-4 I like to do as soon as I've cleared the room of the initial enemies.

Once you enter the skull door, the icon of sin starts up. There's a switch to reveal another switch to the right of the teleporter below. The new switch lowers a panel back in the main room to a switch that you have to use 8 times to raise the reptile skinned pillar high enough so you can exit the room. With good timing you can spam this switch and action it twice each time. This means it takes 4 trips through the skull door to hit the switch, take the teleporter and then hit the lift raise switch twice if you play it perfectly. On top of all this you need to collect health, armor and cells as required and keep the enemies in the room thinned.

Once the reptile pillar is high enough, lower it, get on and get the hell out of there. If you have enough health at the death exit, you can turn and see your buddy through bars, still locked in a cage.

[Egg Boy]

Map28: Your average arena map. I'd say its at its hardest when you're scrambling around with just your pistol, looking for weapons while the halls fill with monsters crowding around the doorways, just waiting to ruin your run. After cleaning the initial horde, nothing quite reaches that level of difficulty. There is a tense archvile scare, where you fight two in a tight hallway. In my poor judgement, I decided to use a rocket launcher, and while I didn't die, I lost nearly all the health the soul sphere I had just got granted me. The ending is really interesting, plot wise. You meet the marine from e1, but they are still imprisoned, so I go to destroy the icon of sin, only to find that it had allowed me to reunite with that initial marine. Very strange, and it makes me wonder if that's even the marine, or a figment created by the icon to trick you into not finishing what that marine had started.

[Phobus]

MAP29: Sheer Poison

This map was everything I thought it would be: frustrating, tiresome and a little too high pressure to enjoy. The monster spawner section at the end definitely didn't help, and I'll confess that, after dying whilst trying to get to the fully raised platform that would've gotten me out of the map legitimately, I loaded up my save and just cheated my way up.

 

I used as many tricks as I could to cheese my way through most of the map, like standing on the edge of stairs (where your centre isn't touching a floor and therefore you don't get damaged) in order to have a moment's respite to save and think. I also had a spare save at the start of the level in case I ended up in an unsalvageable situation. I found four of the secrets, but due to the constant damaging nature of the map, combined with the non-linear progression and deliberate maziness, I probably squandered a lot of the benefit of each - particularly the Invulnverability.

 

All told, simply not my kind of map. I can respect the effort that goes into it all working (aside from the radsuit secret by the maze, which you can get shut inside of) and balancing the health so that it's beatable, but the basic idea is frustrating and not a lot of fun, so quality of execution is very much an academic point. This is probably my overarching feel of this megaWAD thus far - the technical side of it is impressive, which is something I can appreciate on a mapper-to-mapper level, but the actual enjoyability is very uneven, which would make this a tough map set to recommend.

[P41R47]

Sorry if my recommendation dissapoint you, @Phobus.

The sheer amount of technical creativity made me forget the enjoyability... or put it on a secondary place, at least. And thats an error as enjoyability is first always.
I still found it weirdness to be enjoyable, but surely some may feel it a bit overwhelming...

 

Even so, along your 25 Years on Earth, this one still holds pretty high on my list of megawads to recommend.

Maybe its not for everyone, as i look a lot of members of the club left the playthrought along the way, but i think its a project that put the bar a little higher to what can be achieved on vanilla limitations.

 

On another subject, for the next month, the club members may prefer to play something more relaxed but still greatly enjoyable.

 

So i propose the following:

 

+++CPD

 

Limit removing high challenge with little hints of storytelling.

It surely needs more love. And playing it here will surely give it more exposure.

 

Hope you like it if it is selected, guys!

 

Edited November 29, 2020 by P41R47

[tmorrow]

15 minutes ago, P41R47 said:

something more relaxed but still greatly enjoyable.

 

Hmm! I found CPD to be a little harder than 3IAC. I rated CPD map31 to be on the hard side and map30 to be so hard I didn't even attempt a uvmax of it. I'd say that the other 30 maps are comparable to 3IAC. CPD is certainly a worthy mapset for the club to tackle though. In fact I'll join you in casting a vote for it!

 

+++ CPD

 

[Horus]

By my count that makes 3 votes Plutonia, 2 votes DBP23/19 and 2 votes CPD. No WAD has the four votes necessary for a thread to be started yet 

[Gez]

On the whole 3IAC is a very cool mapset IMO, with interesting takes on Doom's game mechanics and usual mapping conventions. And the way it manages to tell a story with the constraints of the Doom engine, is also noteworthy. I like how each of the three character has his own soundtrack. On the whole, an excellent mapset for veteran players due to the way it challenges Doom habits.

 

But the MAP29 challenge was the one I ended up disliking. I figure it'll appeal to speedrunners, though, since due to the near-constant pressure of floor damage it's a map that needs to be run through ASAP, and you're basically forced to grind your way through trial and error until you find a good route from start to end.

[ElPadrecitoCholo]

It has taken me days, days with very little time available to play, but ... finally I bring the next part where I, I bring before you my progress of the entire Megawad, from the last time I had made my Post, to the map that was playing today, although clearly I will have to divide the Post into two parts, so that it does not feel so heavy having to see everything in a single publication, and even more considering that I must put the images as evidence that I was playing all the maps without any exceptions, so here we go.

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MAP 16 (Risk Factor):

Status:

*Deaths: 0

*Saves: none

 

 

A map with enough space, with several rooms and a field outside the internal area, the whole place has really seemed very interesting, considering that there are limitations in the map, the exterior was what I liked the most of the whole area, it which is a good sign of achievement on the part of the creator. Another thing that this level stands out for is its difficulty, which is really high, due to the fact that it has many Chaingunners, other Hitscanners, and high resistance enemies, but they are neither the baron, nor the Hell Knight, or even the Revenant, but hey, it is still challenging only with the enemies that are present in the area.

 

MAP 17 (Deadlift):

 

Status:

*Deaths: 0

*Saves: none

 

 

A very misleading map, at first it makes you think that by killing a few Hitscanners, and putting the exit in front of the Marine's face, victory is already assured, or at least when you open the door you should see the enemies to be killed, but I did not believe that when I arrived, because in previous maps, I had realized that certain walls could be climbed, which seemed strange to me because there was nothing, but now it was quite useful to remind myself of that map where you arrive at this place, only now, with much more activity than before, because it turns out that you must go to several places, turn from left to right, collect the only 2 keys that are on this map, and Finally, open the alternate exit behind the paths that can be seen between the walls. The difficulty is where it is present again, because this map has some combats that, I do not know whether to consider them mini-Slaughters but it is that it sends you to launch enemies so that they are killed directly and not tactically, and here, between normal enemies that do not appear, it would only be the Mancubus and the Baron of Hell, because the others are ready to kick the marine's butt once more.

 

MAP 18 (Nowhere Fast):

 

Status:

*Deaths: 0

*Saves: none

 

 

(This place has been quite strange, but at the same time, quite interesting, although it is rare that this huge place is found in a secret.)

 

(Oh yeah, the second Marine had also survived the instant death of that area.)

 

MAP 19 (Crossfire):

 

Status:

*Deaths: 0

*Saves: none

 

 

A map only made as a form of Slaughter, since there is a huge open space, enough enemies, a lot of Cell ammunition, and most importantly, 3 keys to collect, and that the map is not big enough to need them all, but Apparently, the way of escape is really blocked, and you need the keys for access, by the way, the structure and decoration implemented here, is somewhat stale in my opinion, since there is not much to highlight here, to Except for the elevator part, I really liked that one, but on the other hand, the rest of the map felt very empty regarding details and other things, but hey, I suppose that much more effort cannot be asked of maps like these. Switching to the difficulty, here it does stand out at all, it even seems that it is a bit unfair if you start in Pistol Start, but really what is horrible about this map, apart from having many very resistant enemies, is the fact that It has many, many Archviles, which literally chase you throughout the area, and even having places to protect yourself, it is difficult not to receive damage from them because actually seeing them come to you is a guaranteed scare, and apart from that, lethal damage for the Marine. I don't know about you, but for me, this was a very horrible start to the third and last part of this whole adventure.

 

MAP 20 (Rocky Road):

 

Status:

*Deaths: 0

*Saves: none

 

 

A very open map, in the sense of the structure used here, has several explorable areas, and in truth it is very easy to get lost in this map, also, I do not really know what to compare this map with, since it has many things, both outdoors and indoors, and to tell the truth, there is nothing to compare it to, but you just have to take into account that it is like a kind of laboratory or something like that, that it is built inside a mountain, More or less the concept must be understood, but in the end, it is large, spacious, has many closed places, and several places to explore. With the difficulty, it also has its own thing, there are quite a few enemies here throughout the map, and in truth there were no exceptions, all the basic enemies of Doom 2 are here, which, that already says enough by itself, that for True, the good side of this is that there is no boss present, so everything can go quite calmly during the extensive tour of the place. Another detail that I liked about this map was the end, where we go on a subway train to another town, that part very creative.

 

MAP 21 (Flushed Away):

 

Status:

*Deaths: 0

*Saves: none

 

 

A varied map, with a lot of radiation by green liquid everywhere, is the marine in a nuclear plant or something like that? In a toxic waste factory? No idea but hey, the point here is that, in the visual term, many things will be seen in relation to the technology area, there will be areas in which they will have this kind of textures, but there will also be others where palm trees and a city will be appreciated in the middle of the night, in truth this kind of things cause me much confusion, but in short, visually, there is little that is different from what has possibly been observed in previous maps. As for the difficulty, if its curve is elevated, since, you start with a Cyberdemon that greets you from a distance, while several Pinkys are behind you, and later there will be both weak and resistant enemies, in addition, something to highlight about this map, is that it brings a lot of Archviles with it, so, as always, I took the trouble to be cautious, and avoid dying not only from the Archviles, but also from the Hitscanners, and the other demons that appeared here, damn... as I hate when they attack in groups in very small places.

 

MAP 22 (Treasure Hunt):

 

Status:

*Deaths: 0

*Saves: none

 

 

(what a beautiful view)

 

An extremely difficult map to understand, the truth is that one gets quite confused with everything that the map presents to you on the screen, there are parts that hide things between the structures that seem not to be revealed, unless you get the monitor for the automap which works really well, although to tell the truth, no matter how good the structure and layout of this map look, so much so that it reminds me of a level from Doom 2, I must admit that this level is nowhere near one of my favorites, not only because it is confusing, but it also has certain errors in the logic that it poses to the Marine, even more so in how the progression should be carried out to reach the exit, an example of that could be with the path of the palm trees towards the small labyrinth in a building, the decoration of the bars is so well done that one does not notice the missing bars until after having returned to the site about 5 minutes after having been there before, and the most funny is This map even seems to be made for Speedruns players, because the yellow key is very easy to get, and without having to do much more, you go straight to the exit and that's it. Now with the difficulty, that is another term, because the difficulty of this map is high, because there are enemies that consist of being Hitscanners, Imps and pinkys, and then put strong and resistant enemies, basically all the normal Doom 2 enemies, But in the same way, it is not difficult to defeat them, even more so than in the trap where everything happens is in a simple path, so, just by using the BFG you will have already cleaned a good part of the area, in the end, a very strange and ugly map for me.

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The second part will be ready later.