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Lampenpam

What do you consider the primary way of playing your wad? Pistol-start or continuous play?

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What do you, or would you, design your wad for? Pistol-start or continuous play? My impression is that the vast majority of megawads are meant to be played with pistol-starts primarily, but a lot of people new to Doom modding might not even know about it at all. So what experience is more important to you to be balanced and enjoyable, and with this being the best or 'intended' way to play the wad? Also, do you test both playstyles?

Edited by Lampenpam

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The last thread you made with this exact topic was locked, does anyone know why? There's currently three locked threads on the frontpage with seemingly nothing wrong with them.

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I figured I just posted in the wrong place. It would have been nice of the admin to give me some notification though and not just lock without letting me know of anything or just moving the thread, but whatever

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Normally, I don't want to tell the player how to play my WAD, so I try to optimize for both continuous play and pistol start. Personally I prefer the latter though.

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You should always, always, always optimize your maps for pistol-start for people who swing that way like myself. If you feel continuous play is that important, give the player a couple medkits or something at a map's exit like in Ancient Aliens.

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I'm myself mostly a pistol starter, and the few maps I made (until now privately - one is soon to be published) are also balanced for this playstyle. But I think there are legit ways to balance wads primarily for continuous play, i.e. when you don't want to make the player start each map pistoling or single-shotgunning in a series of "introductory fights" but go into straight slaughter or non-slaughter hard gameplay.

 

The simplest idea is here to handle out all weapons the player would find during "normal progression" of the previous maps at the start of the next map. So pistol starters get almost the same experience than continuous players, and you can use ammo scarcity to play a bit with a slightly different experience for those who want extra challenge. Weapons which are found in secrets could also be placed in secrets in the next level, or as part of the normal progression there, but not directly at the start.

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I am always gonna bias to continuous because I love narrative, story driven levelsets. And continuous play just adds to the narrative thing. That said, when making maps I always design for both pistol and continuous play, with a leaning towards continuous play balance, which will logically make pistol starts harder.

 

But I do tend to playtest maps individually from pistol start, so I work to have just enough ammo to scrape through on pistol start, to allow for the extra ammo that continuous players will bring with them.

 

I find that I don't need to balance for health for both continuous and pistol starts, because if the player comes into a new level with, say, a megasphere from the previous level, that health/armor is generally not replaceable upon arrival in the new level, and will wear down until the player hits the point at which they start picking up medkits/stimpacks again.

 

 

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I played Doom continuous for such a long time(I've been playing Doom on and off since 1995!...yeah I'm old), even after I got back into Doom earlier this year. But after beating TNT and Plutonia on continuous yet again, and then seeing other Doomers talk about how much harder some of the maps were on pistol start, I realized I wasn't giving myself enough of a challenge, because  I was entering maps like Onslaught and River Styx with more than enough ammunition to just breeze through them. 

 

So, recently I switched to pistol-start, and haven't looked back. Like many others have said, it just makes you appreciate weapons like the shotgun, chaingun and even pistol! And you have to be more resourceful with your ammo. More often than not, it makes the maps more challenging(and when I finish a map on 3% health, it's pretty satisfying!).

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