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Alfonzo

Doom 2 The Way id Did [Final Beta Released!]

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I've played through the first 8 maps from a pistol start. While pistol-starting is fun and this wad apparently supports it more than the original Doom 2, I encountered the P_AddActivePlat error on map08. Didn't really want to play through the whole map again. Also, I noticed a HOM on map07.

But besides that, this wad is a blast. The gameplay is absolutely phenomenal, and I dare say it even surpasses Doom 2 in this regard, which doesn't happen very often. I also checked some of the later maps and I basically loved each map so far, they're all what Doom is all about, the essence of Doom. Their pace is almost unrivalled when it comes to custom levels, there are many traps but they're survivable as long as you're playing well. There's lots of interconnectivity and height variation. Map07 has already managed to smash all Dead Simple remakes to pieces. Map08 with its frantic pistol start reminded me of Refuelling Base. DTWiD was okay, but really pales in comparison to this project. But then again, I love Doom 2 and "just like" The Ultimate Doom.

And please, don't make these maps easier, really. And don't remove any revenants.

Thank you guys for this megawad! For me, it's inevitably going to be one of the greatest, even though aesthetes may sniff ("oh, it looks so plain!"). Anyway, those who are obsessed with graphics really should play Battlefield 3 instead!

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There are boat load of HOMs don't bother reporting them, we're not fixing them.

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Melon said:
You know you've got a good wad when I can't put it down.



Ofc, on my 2nd playthrough. About to be on my 3rd, only this time with Hard Doom :D

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Is it just me, or if it wasn't because of the music and the new monsters, MAP08 would feel like a Shores of Hell map? :P

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Some comments on MAP08:

- As I mentioned earlier, it has a very strong Shores of hell-ish feel to it.
- I'm not sure because I was playing in ZDoom, but the lower texture here might look wrong in vanilla: http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/208/screenshotdoom201305192.png/
- To be honest, I didn't dig the whole slime maze thing.
- And finally, are both of these supposed to be secrets?

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/402/screenshotdoom201305192.png/
http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/593/screenshotdoom201305192.png/

I mean, they are tagged as secrets, but they are not hidden at all :P

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I really like the maps. The Sanctuary was an awesome map. Loved all of the Romero maps too (esp MAP20), you'd think Romero made them all!

Looking forward to the final release.

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Ok, I'm at level 29. What I have noticed is that towards the end, the levels get really good at rendering the bleak "Hell on Earth" aesthetic. Like, not trying to be more hellish than Hell itself, but faithfully showing Earth warped by the demon invasion. That said, I was disappointed by the lack of an "underground Hell" level like The spirit World. Instead we get levels 28 and 29 which are both more reminescent of "The Living End". Not that it's bad - Hell itself has already been visited in DTWID, there's no need to rehash it. But in the first playthrough, I unfortunately couldn't pick up the tension and feeling of pulse-pounding terror that The Spirit World offered. That level was one scary motherfu, the music helped it too. Both level 28 and 29 are very good, reminescent of The Chasm in how the environment itself tries to kill you - but perhaps one of these levels could be swapped for something with more claustrophobia, more intestines, more hell.

Also, The Living End offered a crowning battle with a Cyberdemon, which gave the level a feeling of penultimacy. I'm midway throughout The Mortal Coil, so I can't really tell whether the level offers the same crowning moment.

Also, I have to say that the 3rd sky chunk of levels feels slightly less hellish than Doom 2, but overall the feel of D2 has been captured to much the same degree as DTWiD did (perfectly and then some). Bleak, dark, upsettingly empty at times, full of dangerous carnage at others. It's particularly more impressive due to the fact that Doom 2 is mostly free for all when it comes to design, and so many megawads have already been made that it's not even funny. But the effort to keep things faithful has obviously been outstanding. The pack has the same number of gimmick levels as D2, but the gimmicks are different (like crushing ceilings instead o' barrels etc). The number of arch-viles is alright too.

Overall, I feel that the goal of the set has been achieved - this does feel like D2 a lot. Level 22, "The Crucible" poses quite an aesthetic contrast, though. While gameplay-wise it's a blast, I'd say it's too pretty for Doom 2. It basically looks like a Thy Flesh Consumed level with its brightness, prevalence of evil green walls and lava. I suggest turning the lighing down three notches in that level, it would be pretty awesome then. The level it's (probably) supposed to replace, "The Catacombs", was much darker. Or at least not as annoyingly bright. A level with elements of similar architecture in Doom 2 "Bloodfalls" showcased how memorable low-lighting similarly textured areas can be. Now for a technical issue I've noticed:

- Megasphere secret in level 22 doesn't register. I dunno if it was intentional to leave it unofficial or not, though.

EDIT: Ok, completed the game. Level 29 DOES get its memorable feeling of penultimacy, and level 30 is a masterpiece. Took me a minute to figure out what you're supposed to do (so much for FPS games being for dumbasses, duh). I also loved the increased number of rockets required. Greatly added to the suspense, made me feel desperate to survive. Since the rockets will definitely hit, though, I think this was a natural choice, needing to execute the strategy only 3 times would have been too easy.

Now I await instructions regarding what to look for specifically. And I extend my hopes that there will be some stuff added to the final release (in addition to the secret levels) to surprise all of us beta testers and make the final release something worth waiting for, even for us.

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MAP11: Another quality map with no complaints.

MAP12: City maps yaaaaaay! I did like this, but didn't we already have a pinkies + mancubus trap in MAP10? Still unsure about this revenant placement too, maybe use arachnatrons? They're the quintessential city map monster.

MAP13: Did not finish. I wanna say this map is authentic and I'm sure it is but my god it irritated the crap out of me. Still crying about revenants, but this time it might just be because I'm a huge pussy. The leg hanging from the sky didn't really feel like an intentional Doom 2-esque mistake and more like you were just taking the piss. Map looked appropriate, had that nice city map style exploratory feel and the need to find your weaponry so that was all a big plus from me, but some of the encounters themselves? Eeeehhh.... I felt like I was missing some sort of massive ammo cache somewhere, probably a secret.

]DEMOS

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Well, as for difficulty, I have no complaints, it was alright in any level. I breezed through the game, but that's because my skills have advanced quite a bit. Not that I felt this was a pushover like DTWiD was. For Doom 2 the difficulty's good. I can't really complain about the monster placement either, I thought it was good. I was thinking "too few Barons", but then I got to level 29, haha.

That's what's good about this level pack. It doesn't use as many Barons, Cyberdemons or Spider Masterminds as Doom 2 did, but it manages to remain just as difficult, or even more so.

EDIT: Oh, and I apparently forgot. Level 19: Bedlam is nothing short of amazing! While clearly located on Earth, it brings very warm memories of Inferno. It's also confusing in the best possible Doom 2 way, so the name fits it to a T.

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esselfortium said:

I like Starstruct :(


I suppose I can imagine Tom Hall using the name since it's a Doom Bible reference and it is a nice tie-in with MAP08 being in the style of a Hall re-work, but my issue is that it should work at face value as well and it doesn't sound like any other Doom II map title. E1 map titles are generally either generic real place names or are descriptive of the main concept or set piece featured in the map.


More importantly, I've played most the E1 levels and watched Skillsaw's stream up to, I think, around MAP20 and the projects looks good from what I've seen. I'll hopefully give some more detailed feedback than that after I've played them again.

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Tarnsman said:

Revenant: UV Total: 176 (Most on 1 Map: 22) Doom 2 UV Total: 90

What about linedefs/sectors?

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MAP14: Wow this map was a ton of fun. Nicely done. The theme felt like the sort of thing id might do.

MAP15: Reeevvvvaanaaanntttsssssss fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck rrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggg! Alright, that's that out of the way. I need to stop whinging about these guys I think. Anyway, this map was also a lot of fun. Very Downtown-y. Actually I was thinking while playing this, MAP13 was also Downtown-y and while I didn't enjoy MAP13 anywhere nearly as much, it was definitely more original. One thing I can see being a huge difficulty when making D2tWiD is that Doom 1 had more clearly defined themes across sets of levels so it was easier to make something original while fulfilling the project's goals. Because Doom 2 is more of a grab bag of unique concepts so far every level that I have played has reminded me of a specific level from Doom 2. I suppose that's unavoidable, but because of this maybe MAP13 was the more successful map than this one? Regardless, this map is fun but the revs make me want to cry. Again.

MAP16: Oh wow. It's funny I was just talking about levels reminding me of specific Doom levels but this one didn't, but yet it still felt id-like. I am very very impressed, what a level. Loads of fun and pretty original. Most successful map of the wad so far. Superb.

]DEMOS

Halfway point summary

I should really crack on with my Mayhem map so I might put this down for a day or two but I did want to talk about my thoughts so far. On the whole I'd say this wad reached the goals of the project but I think there have been three things that I want to reiterate:

1) Revenants - there are so many of them, and many uses of them feel out of place. I've harped on about this enough I think.

2) McGee maps - the MAP02-MAP05 stretch has a lot of good maps in it but I think what I felt was missing was a level more along the lines of MAP03 or MAP05 from the IWAD. This might be because those two maps are two of my most remembered McGee maps so I'm concentrating too much on them. MAP02 and MAP04 from the IWAD were McGee's two very hitscan heavy maps and this is how many of the McGee maps present in this wad feel but I thought the IWAD had a slightly different feel overall, e.g. giving you huge survivability boosts right in the opening rooms (blue armour in 03, soulsphere in 05) and some big weapons earlier in the wad (SSG map 02, RL map 03). Being different in this respect is OK and avoiding total mimicry is one of the aims of this project, but I'm just throwing it out there.

3) Early map difficulty - now I actually went and replayed the IWAD up to MAP07 from pistol start and in some places, especially the red key area of MAP02 and the start of MAP04, it was more difficult than I remembered. I did this because I thought MAPs 05 and 06 in this project were out-of-whack for the mapslot, especially 06. While I still think MAP06 is far too difficult maybe MAP05 is OK and I just suck, or it could just be my endemic failure to deal with revenants. I've not finished a number of other maps in this set as you'll see from my demos and comments but the rest of the maps have felt fine difficulty-wise and I have no complaints there.

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Melon said:

MAP16: Oh wow. It's funny I was just talking about levels reminding me of specific Doom levels but this one didn't, but yet it still felt id-like. I am very very impressed, what a level. Loads of fun and pretty original. Most successful map of the wad so far. Superb.


Very flattered to read this. :)
Watching your demos now!

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Well, Cul-de-sac was a good level alright! Personally I'm not overly fond of the texture colors used. But it did remind me of The Inmost Dens in several ways. A bit :P

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Thanks a lot for all the feedback, folks. It's immeasurably helpful!

A good number of players both within and without the thread have noted that map04 feels far too removed from the project for its lack of "idiocy". Rest assured that it's the first thing that's getting overhauled on my end, as I've already sat down with a number of folks to look through the map and pick out in detail what needs addressing (hint: everything). I made the map back when the project was still finding its feet, and while I was confident in the authenticity of its progression and geometry, I noted a lot of inconsistency in other areas. I pretty much set it aside until after the beta was released... at which point I knew it would need renovating.

Anyhow, on with the show:

Melon said:

MAP12: [...] Still unsure about this revenant placement too, maybe use arachnatrons? They're the quintessential city map monster.

This is true! At first we were a little apprehensive about placing arachnotrons in a map that was both in the map12 slot and featured a central structure around which most of the map is based, but the fact that they're used in a couple of maps in this way does suggest that we could get away with it.

Plus, as you yourself have noted, the number of revenants (and Hell Knights, incidentally) really needs to come down across the board. Except for in map15, that is, where they will probably remain en mass. If you take a look at the monster distribution between mid and upper tier types, you'll discover that in most cases the total number comprises a modest or small number across most maps, with monstrous spikes in maps that dedicate certain set piece encounters to their use. Revenants, Hell Knights and Barons fall into this camp perfectly, and in the case of Revenants almost half of their number is shared between 3 maps (map16, 27 and 28). This was always going to be addressed after the maps were completed, and so now it's a case of pinpointing which encounters feel superfluous and which ones should remain. With almost double the number of Doom 2 revenants, it looks like we have our work cut out for us.*

Xfing said:

Oh, and I apparently forgot. Level 19: Bedlam is nothing short of amazing! While clearly located on Earth, it brings very warm memories of Inferno. It's also confusing in the best possible Doom 2 way, so the name fits it to a T.

Thank you, sir! There are a few pwadisms that crept in and need to be removed, such as the unintentional but quite prevalent border trim around the buildings outside, but I'm quite happy with it on the whole. I rather think I do Sandy at least a little better than Mcgee (just a bit).

Those support 3 pillars in the northeast cavern need to be melted down and sold for scrap, though. I hate them.

I was disappointed by the lack of an "underground Hell" level like The spirit World. Instead we get levels 28 and 29 which are both more reminescent of "The Living End". Not that it's bad - Hell itself has already been visited in DTWID, there's no need to rehash it. But in the first playthrough, I unfortunately couldn't pick up the tension and feeling of pulse-pounding terror that The Spirit World offered. That level was one scary motherfu, the music helped it too. Both level 28 and 29 are very good, reminescent of The Chasm in how the environment itself tries to kill you - but perhaps one of these levels could be swapped for something with more claustrophobia, more intestines, more hell.

Noted. There are a couple of maps that could be worked more toward that sort of hellish depiction. Marcaek is presently reworking parts of Crushed Spirits, and although the map does lack the geometrical similarity of Spirit World for its curvy architecture, the oppressive, skyless, abstract nature of the map could be made to stand out more for this purpose. Map27 is the only other candidate that I can think of, although Waiting For Romero To Play demands a rather different brand of atmosphere.

*Playtesters take note!

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st.alfonzo said:

This is true! At first we were a little apprehensive about placing arachnotrons in a map that was both in the map12 slot and featured a central structure around which most of the map is based, but the fact that they're used in a couple of maps in this way does suggest that we could get away with it.

Ahhh good point. MAP12 already feels pretty Factory-y and I suppose arachnatrons might have pushed that over the edge into full-on remake territory.

MAP15... yeah I'm sure the revenants are fine. My outburst was largely more because I'd be doing so well and then they would hit me with a big 80 damage missile and end my run, as they have a habit of doing and that can get pretty frustrating, but hey that's revs for you. Perhaps my feeling of too many revs partially stems from playing a number of PWADs that are so rev happy that I can't help but associate them with PWADs. Interesting that MAP16 has so many, now that you mention it is does have a lot, but weren't they all mostly grouped together on that one ledge? Gosh I've forgotten already.

Xfing said:

Well, Cul-de-sac was a good level alright! Personally I'm not overly fond of the texture colors used. But it did remind me of The Inmost Dens in several ways. A bit :P

Interesting that it reminded you Inmost Dens, Flooded Library was the level that when I played it I thought "this is the Inmost Dens level". Cul-de-sac seemed far too open and full of Sandy-isms like the grey rock area and perpetual lift "maze". If anything the openness reminded my more of Suburbs but of course it plays nothing like Suburbs. I suppose it has a bit of a Romero-Sandy combo vibe going on and in Doom 2 the maps were much more obviously made by a single author so maybe it's not as authentic in that one respect? Hmmm...

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Melon said:
Interesting that it reminded you Inmost Dens, Flooded Library was the level that when I played it I thought "this is the Inmost Dens level". Cul-de-sac seemed far too open and full of Sandy-isms like the grey rock area and perpetual lift "maze". If anything the openness reminded my more of Suburbs but of course it plays nothing like Suburbs. I suppose it has a bit of a Romero-Sandy combo vibe going on and in Doom 2 the maps were much more obviously made by a single author so maybe it's not as authentic in that one respect? Hmmm... [/B]


Oh, now that you mention it, you're right. Flooded Library is definitely more reminescent of The Inmost Dens. As for Suburbs, this was a very memorable level due to an unseen up to that point number of enemies you have to battle at the same time. This has very likely come across as shocking to anyone who had finished Doom and only played D2 for the first time. I love how The Causeway redoes an encounter of such magnitude.

Oh, and one more thing: BARONS OF HELL. This level pack really has few of them compared to D2. Even though the Barons from "Tricks and Traps" technically shouldn't all count because they get slaughtered, even without this there are copious numbers of Barons throughout the level pack. I got the impression that there was a bit too few of them in D2TWiD(even though the ending of level 29 made up for it and then some).

And one more thing. I have noticed that several people are of the opinion that the original Doom and Doom 2 levels contained "idiocy" compared to the levels made nowadays, like say, Community Chests. Would someone care to explain to me what "idiocy" are we talking about? I would say that the original maps of Doom and D2 (and D1 and 2 TWiD by extension) are much better gameplay-wise and atmosphere-wise than most of today's maps.

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Xfing said:

Oh, and one more thing: BARONS OF HELL. This level pack really has few of them compared to D2. Even though the Barons from "Tricks and Traps" technically shouldn't all count because they get slaughtered, even without this there are copious numbers of Barons throughout the level pack. I got the impression that there was a bit too few of them in D2TWiD(even though the ending of level 29 made up for it and then some).

Excluding Tricks and Traps, there are 11 barons in all of Doom II. They're as rare as underdone meat. D2TWiD presently has 31 in total, with the majority of them being housed in map29, and when disregarding that map we have 12 barons throughout. I'd say we're pretty much bang on target here. We could probably stand to redisitrubute some of them, granted, as a couple instances of their use don't feel overly authentic.

And one more thing. I have noticed that several people are of the opinion that the original Doom and Doom 2 levels contained "idiocy" compared to the levels made nowadays, like say, Community Chests. Would someone care to explain to me what "idiocy" are we talking about? I would say that the original maps of Doom and D2 (and D1 and 2 TWiD by extension) are much better gameplay-wise and atmosphere-wise than most of today's maps.

Idiocy is a terrible pun I occasionally use as a way of saying whether something is authentic or not -- carrying the qualities of what one would expect to see in an id map. Certianly it's not to say that the maps have stupid design choices, heh.

To ask what sort of qualities come with an id map, though, is to ask at once a packed and pointless question. The first because we can discuss for hours what makes the id design unique, but really pointless because while we can use the word to refer to Doom 2's design in general we can really only speak about how authentic the map is with respect to the author whose design it's trying to imitate. Of course, there are a good number of design elements that pervade across all of Doom II that could make justified use of the word... but again, that's a hefty discussion, and I'm not sure I have the inkwells to jot it down. At least not right now!

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THANK YOU! Pure Doom at last!

Played through the first few maps and had an absolute blast.
If it continues like that and there are not too many death traps/crushers then this is going to be in my all time top ten ; )


- Encountered one error in Map7 - this was only in Risen3D it worked well in GZdoom and Zandronum: could not pick up the plasma gun! and I was able walk through the wall behind the plasma gun right into the void.

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If there's something that's really unique and lets the D2 levels (and D2TWiD) stand out even after all of these years, is the clever use of rising bridges or columns that are used by the player to gain access to later areas of the map. This was very prevalent in maps like The Living End, The Chasm and similarly in many later maps of D2TWiD. Clever key mechanics are also a great thing. No one designs levels like this nowadays, and it's still a viable way to do it. D2TWiD is a blast to play.

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Marcaek said:

I agree, contentless posts are the greatest thing.

I say meh because that is my exact opinion on this.

A few of the maps are good. The majority though...

Meh.

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sgtcrispy said:

I say meh because that is my exact opinion on this.

A few of the maps are good. The majority though...

Meh.

Thanks for elaborating! Your detailed input has been very helpful and informative in steering the project in a positive direction.

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