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hardcore_gamer

What is the worst monster placement you have ever seen in a WAD?

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The tittle speaks for itself.

What WAD in your opinion, has such horrid monster placement that it could count as begin the worst you have ever seen in a WAD?

Personally I can't think of any single WAD right now, so I am just going to nominate every WAD where you get attacked by huge groups of revenants and arch-viles in open areas with no place to take cover and not enough health and ammo is present.

Whats your opinion?

Discuss.

EDIT: Oh! And bullshit ambushes count as well, and by bullshit ambushes I mean bullshit as in "this room now suddenly has 30 monsters for no reason because you stepped on that linedef" (not to be confused with traps where secret doors open or walls lower).

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I dunno about "the worst!". But I think Legacy of Satan is pretty poor in monster and item placement.

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Nothing jumps to my mind as the worst I've ever seen.

The wads where monsters are placed for the sake of looking cool or based on what makes sense, with no consideration of fight dynamics are pretty bad - KDiZD, WoS, almost any E1 remake out there, to name a few.

I suppose any wad where you build a whole layout without even thinking about monsters until you're done is likely to end that way too, although with enough trial and error you can always find something that works for any given architecture.

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It's a difficult question, because any kind of solvable monster placement is a legit challenge, even if it consists of chaingunners or revs in ambush; even arch-viles. Under regular difficulty, you still have time to run out of their way into a hidden room, or kill them before they do you in, after of course having the common sense to ready a rapid-fire weapon and expecting anything happening. Failing to beat them means it's a tough one; succeeding it means victory and happiness, so it's win-win.

So the monster placement that sucks in my opinion is the obviously bad one, such as placing lots of meatshields while having no ammo to shred them, or noob maps which contain gratuitous unkillable cyberdemons in close quarters to boot.

@Phml: well, I agree on KDiZD. Despite its attention to graphic detail, maps like Z1M7 are almost unplayable from a pistol start.

Also, it's bad when you're given a generic Doom 1 wad, and you can blast practically every monster in it with the shotgun, no need for anything fancier. Doom 2 solved that crisis by putting more rapid-fire and meat-shield monsters against you. Doom 3's shotgun has a sucky spread, but it's still & once again too comfortable. With Doom 1 I'm not talking about KDiZD; I'm talking about others which give you too much comfortable shotgun ammo and don't ambush you with enough sergeants to warrant the need for anything better. KDiZD actually gives you too little ammo on pistol-start.

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Ooh, I just remembered: there are a huge amount of barons in coop in Scythe II map15 (note that it's my least favorite level, I actually really like the WAD overall). You only get a shotgun, so they take forever to kill, or continuously annoy you if you run past them. It's also annoying to run up the narrow steps to kill them. Monsters that take forever to kill yet pose relatively little threat for their health aren't a good idea in my opinion, since it bores people. ID probably included Hell Knights as a baron replacement because they knew this.

Also, I didn't think the chaingunners at the end of Doom II map15 were particularly well placed. They could aim at the player just fine, but the player couldn't really shoot back well with a 320x200 resolution and lack of vertical aim. That was a bit frustrating.

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printz said:

@Phml: well, I agree on KDiZD. Despite its attention to graphic detail, maps like Z1M7 are almost unplayable from a pistol start.



Guess what: It was never intended for pistol start and therefore not or only poorly tested as such. Don't judge a WAD by a play style it wasn't made for.

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Graf Zahl said:

Guess what: It was never intended for pistol start and therefore not or only poorly tested as such. Don't judge a WAD by a play style it wasn't made for.

In hope that an interesting thread doesn't attract people to hijack it by beating a nearly-dead horse, I'm continuing this discussion in private.

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Graf Zahl said:

Guess what: It was never intended for pistol start and therefore not or only poorly tested as such. Don't judge a WAD by a play style it wasn't made for.


Why would you do that? Do you expect people to never die on your maps?

Making a map pistol start friendly is as simple as putting a chainsaw in the starting room, or a chaingun and a couple bullet boxes. Even if they have to be hidden in a secret room. (i.e. MAP10: Refeuling Base)

I'm usually pretty picky thing placement these days. To be honest I hate the thing placement in many of the wads I've played that it's near impossible to single them out one-by-one. One thing I can say for sure is that I loved the thing placement in Scythe 2, Most of Memento Mori 2, and the first half of Hell Revealed 1.

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Why would you do that? Do you expect people to never die on your maps?


KDiZD is a ZDoom-only wad, it's likely the default behavior (autosave at the start of each map) is what's intended.

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Phml said:

KDiZD is a ZDoom-only wad, it's likely the default behavior (autosave at the start of each map) is what's intended.

What about playing it in Skulltag coop?

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40oz said:

Why would you do that? Do you expect people to never die on your maps?

You're supposed to play the levels in sequence, and yeah, without dying. You die, you lose, game over or reload a save. The intermission script tracks your stats across all levels and opens the secret level only if you either consistently max or near-max each map, or remain under the par time.

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hardcore_gamer said:

Care to go into detail about this sudden and possibly trollish reply?

I've noticed a theme in your thread creations. You're mostly just making threads where you want to point out how things suck. Like in this thread, you're basically asking people to drag out different projects just so you can shit at them. That's hardly constructive, or particularly social behavior.

My post was in a way trollish, but almost every thread you create is trollish. But really. I just answered to the very question you posed.

40oz said:

Why would you do that? Do you expect people to never die on your maps?

Zdoom got autosave at map change. If you die and respot, you don't lose anything.

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Graf Zahl said:

Guess what: It was never intended for pistol start and therefore not or only poorly tested as such. Don't judge a WAD by a play style it wasn't made for.

While I can accept this, I still stand by my position that the amount of pistol usage required in z1m1 is absolutely atrocious.

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kristus said:

Zdoom got autosave at map change. If you die and respot, you don't lose anything.


Not if you turn it off. But I guess that's my own fault for preferring doom in it's original behavior.

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LOL thread derail.

As for the question in the OP, wow.wad. Monster placement doesn't need to be unbeatable or unintuitive to be bad. It just needs to make you want to smash your head against the computer desk due to its idiocy, and I believe the illusio-pit does that.

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Those maps in Plutonia where they'd hide arch viles under the floor and keep resurrecting the chain gunners. I really hated that. I never really get mad in Doom, but seeing the friggen dudes keep coming back to life sparked a bit of irateness in me.

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40oz said:

Not if you turn it off. But I guess that's my own fault for preferring doom in it's original behavior.

IDCLEV xx
If you did then you wouldn't use Zdoom.

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kristus said:

I've noticed a theme in your thread creations. You're mostly just making threads where you want to point out how things suck. Like in this thread, you're basically asking people to drag out different projects just so you can shit at them. That's hardly constructive, or particularly social behavior.


Of course, this is all a part of my secret agenda of systematically making everybody else look bad and is not in anyway an actual and a entertaining discussion(sarcasm).

And what are all of those "other threads" you speak of? I have made countless threads during my years as a user on this site and the only other threads I have made that I remember where I expressed my dislike towards said WAD were the threads were I expressed my dislike of Doom 2's levels for not begin as fun as those of Doom 1 and allot of other people feel the same.

And another thread were I bashed the Playstation version of Final Doom and the Master levels and I am not exactly the only person who disliked Final Doom. This guy sums up my thoughts of Final Doom for the Playstation pretty nicely, he talks about Doom 1 first so skip it straight to 4:16:



The PC version also wasn't very popular with allot of people hating it.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/finaldoom/review.html

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/finaldoom/players.html?tag=player-reviews%3Bheader%3Bmore


The only actual community WAD I think I have ever openly attacked is Knee-Deep in Zdoom, and great many people also expressed their dislike towards that WAD.

I would also like to point out that a long period of time passed between the creation of those threads.

Stop guessing my motivations and just accept that fact that not everybody shares your taste.

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hardcore_gamer said:

...and allot of other people feel the same...

...and I am not exactly the only person who...

...and great many people also expressed...

So basically your defense is being a sheeple?

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Oh, the irony! OP wanted people to list wads with a specific point they didn't like about it. Someone says OP's work. OP blows top.

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Gez said:

So basically your defense is being a sheeple?


Defense? I don't need any defense to have an opinion of my own. I just don't like those games and I would really appreciate it if people simply respect that instead of hurling insults at me almost as if I attacked their child. The reason for why I mentioned that other people don't like the game either was to get the idea across that allot of people (including me) simply did not like the game.

I love Doom just as much as most of the people on this site, but the bullshit fanboyism I have seen from some of the people on this site almost rivals the crap Halo fanboys are known for hurling at people who don't love the game as much as they do. I don't bash Final Doom because I think its cool or because I am looking for attention, I bash it because I just genuinely don't like it.

Khorus said:

Oh, the irony! OP wanted people to list wads with a specific point they didn't like about it. Someone says OP's work. OP blows top.


Criticism and a troll comment isn't the same thing.

keep it in mind that we are only talking about monster placement here, I have never heard anyone bash my WADS for having terrible enemy placement, the fact that he said every single WAD I have made ever has the worst enemy placement he has ever seen without going into any detail about his claim whatsoever suggests he was just trolling or trying to start an argument.

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Gez said:

So basically your defense is being a sheeple?

Uh... I hate to say it dude, but you're coming off as a major troll here.

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