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40oz

The Most Annoying wad in the world

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Some of my best threads were made on Newdoom.com, but the community there is kinda small and figured this would be a better area for discussion. Sorry to anyone here that's from Newdoom.com and have to see a thread they've seen before.

Copied and pasted from Newdoom forums:


Somehow I got this idea for making a megawad. Simply named "The Most Annoying wad in the world" And I'm brainstorming things that would make any ordinary wad incredibly annoying. Many things I've come up with include:

-Unseen teleporters
-being forced to kill a cacodemon or hell knight with only a pistol with 50 bullets
-Unnecessarily unaligned textures
-very, very little amount of ammo and health. (or stuff a whole load in the beginning so you have to keep backtracking for more)
-Hell barons and Cacodemons in really tight rooms
-Really tight hallways
-Dramatic height differences
-Poor texture choices
-Archvile in a perfectly square room.
-Lots of revenants
-Lots of text scenes and Deep water (If in Zdoom)
-Annoying sounds and music. (like those quotes recorded from movies in 50% of those 1994 wads)

Can anyone think of some more annoying things to throw in a wad?

I dont think anyone would bother to play through the whole thing. Not even myself. But it would be hell for reviewers.

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KDIZD monsters...

Anyway, instead of trying to make the most ANNOYING wad in the world, try to make the best wad that you can.

The community already has enough jokewads, 99.99% of them sucking major ass.

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JohnnyRancid said:
But it would be hell for reviewers.

Hell indeed. They would likely say something like this: "This is the piece of shit JohnnyRancid talked about in the forums. I breezed through it a bit and here's my advice to the community; ignore it, there are better things to waste your bandwidth and time on."

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JohnnyRancid said:

Can anyone think of some more annoying things to throw in a wad?

  • Use of light=255 in large areas next to hallways w/ light<112
  • Plutonia.wad's way of putting ambushes
  • dead-end acid pit only 25 units deep, preferably doing just 5% damage
  • very, very complicated levels which can just be completed by falling on a nearby slime pit which ends the level at <10% health
  • deliberate use of bad texture, or lack thereof, effects (Medusa, TFE, HOM)
  • repetitive motifs. This could happen when you make too many maps yourself, for a megawad, as it's the case with Plutonia and some of pcorf's work I played so far (some pe4, 2002ado, twzone 1 -- it became samey)

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JohnnyRancid said:

Can anyone think of some more annoying things to throw in a wad?

Yes, but I already did it years ago.

If you're going for "annoying", you really should combine it with "creative". Anybody can dump garbage into the archives; there should be some greater evil scheming behind it.

Admittedly, there was a bit of filler in The New Doom, but there were also some good annoyances and pranks that, to my knowledge, hadn't been used intentionally in such ways before:

- The dead-end lift. You start in a large long hallway. A chamber behind you suddenly reveals a horde of cyberdemons, leaving you to flee toward the lift at the far end of the hallway, but not before the main hall turns into a crusher. If you manage to avoid the flood of missiles while running to the lift, you've got an even harder challenge waiting for it to come down; it is a tall lift after all. Once you finally make it, you sigh in relief as you begin your ascent to safety... only to hit your head on the ceiling and descend back down. The proper exit is behind the cyberdemons.

- Obnoxious obstacles. Every single location you need to visit to continue what should be a fairly short path is in plain view... if only it weren't for those brown shrubs, light posts, and dead bodies forcing you through deviation after deviation.

- The invisible maze. A giant open courtyard. The exit at the far end. Various projectile-based enemies scattered about. Arachnotrons at every corner with full aim coverage of the entire area. Not a big problem by itself... but when you're stuck inside the large maze that spans the entire courtyard and is built entirely out of unmarked, not-on-map, invisible, impassible lines (not to mention occasional passages to step outside the maze), the elementary becomes the impossible.

- Endless running. As you descend into the outer depths of the base, moving far from the limits of the visible auto-map, the line between it and hell is crossed. What you also crossed as you entered the skin tunnel is a 2-sided line with a full but passable mid-texture only viewable from the other side. To your left, as the tunnel curves right, is also a full but passable mid-texture only viewable from the entry side. If this goes according to plan, you turn right and begin running through a massive tunnel that loops back to the start, but because you only see the mid-texture from one side, the entrance looks like a solid wall once you loop back to it and after running so long, you won't look behind you to see that you passed through the "wall" you thought left you no other option but to turn right upon entry. Simple as it is, I've heard from people who it worked on.

- The incomprehensibly tall lift. Three paths await you at the center of Sky City. Only one is the correct path to take first. Only another is the correct path to take second. The final is merely that. The way to reach them? The central lift... which begins at approximately 10,000 pixels above your ground location, leading up to the paths, also somewhere between 5,000 and 9,000 pixels above ground. Expect a 2-3 minute ride to reach each path. And always warp back to the start after completing a path.

- The four elements. Stone, Wood, Marble and Hell. Four long spiral hallways to be completed in succession. Better experienced than described. A co-op demo was attempted, only to be cancelled after a few days.

- The control panel. A couple hundred switches. A couple hundred traps. 1 exit. No hints.

- The long, narrow hallway of W1 teleports. Complete with cyberdemon at far end.

- Boss shooters. Hundreds. Annoying, if only for the inevitable lag.

- Long and complicated level which only gets harder as time passes (courtesy of further boss shooters), only to leave off at a dead end. The exit was in a secret right behind the start.

- The blue room. There isn't one.

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Maybe have a theme for each map-

A map with nothing but barrel traps.
A map with a huge maze that's invisible on the automap.
A map full of secrets that contain NOTHING! (for zDoom)
A map where all the bad guys are sniping from behind duck blinds.
A map with multiple exits - all but one of them restart the map.
A map with no ammo and no enemies that drop ammo.

I might add to this list later.

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Lüt said:
- Endless running. As you descend into the outer depths of the base, moving far from the limits of the visible auto-map, the line between it and hell is crossed. What you also crossed as you entered the skin tunnel is a 2-sided line with a full but passable mid-texture only viewable from the other side. To your left, as the tunnel curves right, is also a full but passable mid-texture only viewable from the entry side. If this goes according to plan, you turn right and begin running through a massive tunnel that loops back to the start, but because you only see the mid-texture from one side, the entrance looks like a solid wall once you loop back to it and after running so long, you won't look behind you to see that you passed through the "wall" you thought left you no other option but to turn right upon entry. Simple as it is, I've heard from people who it worked on.[/B]


Yes something like this was done in a custom Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory level (a Gamma Jump level - if you really need to know state so but it isen't really important to what I'm getting at).

Basically a poster on the wall said "Go through here for free porn!", so you go through the teleporter and end up a tunnel with one reptitive blue texture on every surface. Lamps dangle from the ceiling every so often (like Wolfenstein 3D), and a HUD message says "Welcome to the porn tunnels, get to the end for free porn!".

It starts off normal, your going through these different areas, and eventually you fall into another tunnel (that looks the same). This is where the endless running begins. You just run round and around and around over and over again, but the hole in the ceiling you fell through is only textured on the side facing you when your on the floor. It takes a couple of laps to realize that your endlessly running in a circle, and the only thing you can do at that point is respawn.

Ironic though, that free porn itself is in the level, and it's not even that hard to get to.

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Lüt said:

If you're going for "annoying", you really should combine it with "creative". Anybody can dump garbage into the archives; there should be some greater evil scheming behind it.


Well surely, The wad would definitely be designed so that is absolutely playable. But despite looking like a decent wad, the gameplay would be perfected in the sense to making the odds not only against you, but secretly against you so that when such an event happens, the player will want to retry the map again, expecting the unexpected threats to the player throughout the level.

I remember from the thread I made at newdoom, some of the members suggested some really good ones, such as:

A floor that is damaging but doesnt use a nukage, lava, slime, or blood flat.

A giant room with a BFG, and a Cyberdemon, with an invisible wall directly in front of it, so that the only shot would be wasted, and wake up the cyberdemon.

A room full of switches that activate a barred door one at a time, but they all have to be hit in order and at a certain time, and if done wrong, a pair of hell barons are warped in.

A window at the start of a map that views a highly valuable item such as medikits, a supercharge, a key, a weapon, but can never be reached, or may look like it can be reached by a certain motion such as getting to a ledge and leaping in, but a door closes in front of the ledge as soon as you try.

An extremely steep staircase that when you jump down, you're surrounded by barrels.

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JohnnyRancid said:

A window at the start of a map that views a highly valuable item such as medikits, a supercharge, a key, a weapon, but can never be reached, or may look like it can be reached by a certain motion such as getting to a ledge and leaping in, but a door closes in front of the ledge as soon as you try.

At least when the door comes down the player will see it was a trick. If you really want to be an ass, don't include the closing door at all but instead make it so that the ledge is just out of reach, even with strafe50. The player should think the jump is possible and will likely try many times before giving up. Make it seem like they came so close that they just might make it on the next try--even though it's really impossible (just be sure there's no nearby walls to rocket-jump from).

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GreyGhost said:

A map with nothing but barrel traps.
A map with multiple exits - all but one of them restart the map.
A map with no ammo and no enemies that drop ammo.

Some variants might be interesting if done properly ;)

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The most annoying map in the world is the one rotting in your documents folder half-finished.

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In order to be annoying, the map does not need to be ugly. Noone would think that you haven't aligned the textures just to annoy them. They would rather say, it's because of laziness and lack of skill... and poor texture choice is one of the first steps, to make sure people will keep away from your wad.

If you want a very annoying map, you'd have to come up with a gazillion of nice traps (and ways to avoid them, because unavoidable traps would be... very meh), forcing the players to think in a different way, that they are used to.
Putting an arch vile where you can't hide from him, is a pitiful excuse for trying to be annoying.

Think Imaginatively! Weapons and monsters that act in a very funny way (completely different to what you might suspect), lights that go down to zero when you enter an area, but when you're far away - you can see it perfectly well...

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Anything more annoying than this wouldn't be playable after the first second of play.

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Similiar to the "regular looking floors that are actually damaging", you can make the ACTUAL lava river or lava flows completely harmless (or maybe only certain bits of it harmless, like invisible islands of damage-free goodness)

Sudden Ghouls (i.e. from Ghoul's Forest) jumping out of places you really wouldn't expect them to be.

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A level full of monsters that can only be killed by tricks like teleporters or crushers.

Pits that can't be escaped from (this could be combined with the harmless lava/nukage already mentioned).

Requiring access to a hard-to-reach (or hard-to-find) secret to complete a level.

The use of W1 or S1 triggers to complete a level (that is, if you miss the opportunity the level becomes unwinnable).

Keys with no corresponding door -- or alternatively, locked doors with no corresponding key that are either opened by alternate methods or not needed at all.

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An annoying level made on purpose makes no sense, but an intentionally annoying megawad is just stupid. If you have the time and interest on mapping, please do something actually fun. If I want to be annoyed I could play through a slige megawad using older versions of Freedoom, and choosing nightmare skill, with the windows of my room open in at max in a sunny day, and having only two hours of sleep.

And if you're for a joke wad, then try something that could make someone laugh, I don't know you, but I don't laugh much when I'm annoyed.

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Doesn't exist yet because I have yet to learn how ZDoom's scritping system works.

The .wad would involve a remake of the Domb & Dumber "most annoying sound in the world" scene.

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Vegeta said:

An annoying level made on purpose makes no sense,


It makes plenty of sense. The wad is sure to make you laugh, not because it is intentionally bad, but it maybe one of the most dramatic wads that forces the map against you more so than the balance of ammo/health and monster ratio. Good gameplay is almost entirely comprised of the monsters you fight, to the ammo, weapons, and health available.

It often bothers me when I am forced to have to fight a mess of monsters with no ammo to kill them with, but it's certainly not laughable. It gives the impression that the mapper was a moron and sucks at mapping. This wad would be done in such a way that while the player gets trapped in obvious shitty situations, it would be apparent that the mapper set it up that way. I played Lut's NEWDOOM wad, with the extremely long elevator to nowhere and all the cyberdemons. Had that map been revamped to look someone took more than 30 seconds to make it, it would make an excellent map for "The Most Annoying Wad In The World".

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I reckon all you modern Doomers would absolutley hate Map23 of twzone.wad!. I made the map way back in 1998 after coming up with this unique idea. You are on a spaceship and you are presented to quite a few rooms with heaps of switches along one wall and all but one of those switches opens the right door. So for those idiots who can think they can proceed without saving, think again and save because if you press the wrong switch and you're dead as many Cyberdemons and other monsters give you no chance!

Mock 3 might be a very good idea actually but I think people are starting to get fed up of Jokewads. I mean I laughed my butt off at Mock 2 but since everyone seemed upset by Cybie3 its a sign that people are getting sick of jokewads. You know I think I'm done with my Jokewads and now I'm busy working on something more real and what I'm capable of. Whispers of Satan.

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Mock2 was funny because of how stupid it was. It was a great joke. Making a Mock3 or even anything even remotely like what it would be, is just a stupid waste of time.

Waste of bandwidth, waste of time.

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Mike.Reiner said:

Mock2 was funny because of how stupid it was. It was a great joke. Making a Mock3 or even anything even remotely like what it would be, is just a stupid waste of time.

Waste of bandwidth, waste of time.


The Mockdonalds level was just so crappy it made me almost piss my pants. The slide joke was really funny!

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YMB said:

Put your time and effort into starting Mock 3 instead of this.


Im just shootin this out because it's easy to get a guideline of what kinda maps and what theyd look like in the wad. Unlike how it is to make a GOOD wad.

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CODOR said:

The use of W1 or S1 triggers to complete a level (that is, if you miss the opportunity the level becomes unwinnable).

Makes no sense, unless you mean the unlikely use of "dark red" once-only teleporter lines in VANILLA Doom. Which is unlikely, really. So what did you mean?

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printz said:
So what did you mean?

Walk over a W1 line. This opens an open-wait-close type door that leads to the exit. This is the only way to open this door. If you don't make it before it closes, you can't finish the level.

I'm assuming the point of this is to make the WAD with the lowest replay value in the world...

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have the player go down a long hallway, only to have bars come up halfway through. Once the path is blocked off, have a door open up next to the player to a room filled with hundreds of switches, only one of which actually raises the barricade. The rest of the switches just kill you. The only hint you get is that the texture on the correct switch is off by 1 unit. For added measures, throw a cyberdemon into the room along with a shit load of voodoo dolls.

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