Progression

[40oz]

In acceptance of the fact that we are all playing a game that is well over 20 years old and there are is next to no mysteries about the game regarding its gameplay that remain unsolved in Doom, what are your opinions on the concept of "progression" outside of the main IWADs?

While some players/mappers do away with progression all together and just dump the player directly on top of a pile of weapons and surround him with any monsters he so chooses, others approach maps and episodes and megawads with a more hierarchal ideology modeled after Doom 1 and 2, where MAP01 uses all pistol and shotgun against imps and zombiemen. And things like BFGs, Plasma Guns, Archviles and invulnerabilities don't dare show up until at least halfway through.

In my experience, made up from playing every user made Doom map I download exclusively from pistol start for over 3 years, I'm questioning the irony in that the circumstances of the lower half of the hierarchy spectrum is debatably more challenging than the upper half can be made to be. The lowest tier weapons in the game are dangerously futile against the majority of Doom monsters, and the lower tier monsters like zombie men and shotgun guys which are all too common in early maps are extremely difficult to avoid taking damage from, meanwhile the most powerful weapons often guarantee instant kill on most monsters, and the top tier monsters have patterns in which they can be evaded without taking even a little bit of damage.

I understand the alleged risk of running the game play dry if you give the player too much too early and expose all of the monsters right away, without giving the player to experience that "first encounter" feeling. I also see the merit in intending to give the player a more thorough experience (once he has the guns, you can't take them away) but I feel this is a way of controlling the choices the player is allowed to make. I'm also feeling as if progression isnt very valuable in a "new" doom wad, unless the wad is implying that youre playing it in place of, or before having completed Doom 2. I've since been very welcoming towards maps that give you an SSG or a rocket launcher up front and have an over abundance of ammo provided the map looks good and the monsters are presented in a strategic way, and less interested in maps that insist I pick off chaingun guys and cacodemons with a shotgun and only a shotgun and waiting until the very end to give me a more varied selection of weapons and monsters to kill.

Do you think progression is important for Doom levels or is it dumb to suggest that there is a preferred order of monsters to throw at the player and weapons for him to collect?

[gemini09]

I feel it's very important with progression because it allows for mystery and exploration, whereas full scale war right off the bat is like another round of "Well, here we go again.................".

[Xegethra]

I think it matters, if you want to make a map with increasing challenge then it matters...people do still want to play such maps.

Progression can happen for story ideas too if people want it to. Not everybody is entertained by being trapped in a room mindlessly shooting a bunch of Barons over and over and over.

Some people want to play through a series of maps and gradually have their challenge increase, they want to explore maps, to see what new sights and gameplay ideas can be made, and there are mappers giving this a go and not just making it about zombieman shooting. If you say it's pointless because the official games already did this...then you may as well say to the gaming industry "Stop making games man, I've already played a game that allows progression, I'm just gonna play slaughter maps all day."

People wanna make or try to make interesting maps to keep you hanging around. It's nice to see maps that give out good progression...it's too easy to dump everything on the player and let them have at it...that limits their choices even more than giving them progression to work through....at least with progression they can take it at their own pace...but being thrown in, they can't...it's just hold the shoot button until you win/die...nowhere to go, nothing to do...some people find that rather boring. It's fine if the map(s) progress steadily to a massive fight, but having it right away gives the player nothing much to think about, or do and doesn't give a lot of room for map creativity.

At least when trying to make something to progress though, it is more likely to make the mapper think more about how they create things.

[40oz]

I think your getting the wrong image in your head. I'm not talking about a progressive map and a slaughter map as the two options here. MAP01 of Hell Revealed 2, for example, has a supershotgun right at the very start of the map as well as a rocket launcher and a plasmagun. It also uses archviles, mancubi, and chaingun guys, but the map wouldn't ordinarily be classified as a slaughter map. The layout is too complex and there are too few monsters in total.

[Phml]

Progression is important, but slavishly sticking to one specific interpretation of the concept sounds dumb to me. It limits your options for no reason. Heck, I'd argue it makes things worse, because you know what to expect. Good pacing isn't going gradually from 1 to 10, you need spikes, you need peaks and valleys.

I can't get into the head of someone who fights an arch-vile for the first time in a mapset and sees the encounter as something special, even though he has killed hundreds of arch-viles in his Doom career. The mindset is alien to me. It just feels like an arbitrary distinction.

Especially when, say, you see people bitch about cybies in a map01 despite it lasting 2 hours while they're totally fine with a cybie in a map10 within a megawad where you complete each map in 2 minutes. So breaking up that map01 into tiny parts so that cybie encounter would end up being in map15 would make it fine? That's just nonsense to me, borderline autistic.

[scifista42]

40oz said:

Do you think progression is important for Doom levels or is it dumb to suggest that there is a preferred order of monsters to throw at the player and weapons for him to collect?

Progression itself is a good thing who want to see a bit of consistency and "build up" while playing through a map, or a mapset. This is irrelevant and even contraproductive to other players, those who just want to see some random maps, and have as good fun as possible in each individual one. It's probably best to take both groups of players into account when mapping: Make effectively good maps with a glimpse of progression throughout them. This is an utterly naive and over-simplifying theory, but whatever. Focusing only on the latter group (=ditching any kind of progression) can also work, if you purely want to please these players. Likewise, vice versa. Target group of players matters.

When creating a "progression", let's keep in mind these things: Map/mapset can have its own unique progression, not a one copying the IWADs, and it can feel logical and alright within that particular map/mapset. See BTSX E1: Most monsters appear already in MAP01, yet the wad clearly has a progression. It's not just about the cast itself, after all. I agree with Phml's post above.

Remember that you can set up the starting standard however high you want. Then, build a progression further however quickly you want. And finally, let it "stabilize" whenever you want. For example, I see no problem in introducing the SSG and nearly all monsters before MAP03, then let the early maps be pretty much an SSG-only practice with increasing difficulty, then introduce higher level weapons in later maps. But it's possible to start even higher, however high. Say an extreme example: One Cyberdemon in MAP01, two in MAP02, 100 in MAP30. Depending on the implementation, it *might* work on the whole and stay "feeling coherent". In theory. Umm...

I no longer play mapsets continuously as much as I used to, but sometimes I do, and then I prefer to see some kind of progression, definitely. At other times I fire up a random map from the middle of a megawad, and what? It should be alright. The principle basically applies to individual maps too - I can enjoy both long maps consequently and slowly introducing weapons and things, and small and intense progression-less challenges. These were just extreme examples, again, I know the spectrum of existing maps is much wider.

tl;dr - Both progression and "efficiency" should be taken into account when making maps and mapsets.

[Stupid Bunny]

I guess it really depends. As far as from one map to the next, I guess I like my episodes and megawads to have a progression of some sort, but of course what that progression looks like isn't set in stone. Plutonia and Doom II both have somewhat of a difficulty curve, though of course the former gives you revenants on nearly every level and encounters with most monsters from MAP01 on. It doesn't have to be totally linear or predictable, and indeed it can be exciting to abruptly jump between two levels from a gentle learning curve to total madness. (Scythe II MAP23, I recall, was insane compared to most any of the levels that came before it.) There's also no harm in having a rather difficult level between two comparatively easy ones, which can also make things interesting and put the player off guard. Besides, you could think of a WAD with a whole bunch of equally hard maps as also having a linear learning curve, only with a zero slope. :P

[Inkie]

Its something that map sets should have, but there are no hard rules on what it should be like. Its like another aspect of the set's feel and style.

[purist]

I like weapon progression. Not necessarily in a conventional order but a gradual accrual of an arsenal allows for a variety of gameplay situations. For me the SSG is the most crucial weapon in this regard since most megawads lean heavily on the weapon from an early point because it usually given out quickly, it the all round most effective weapon and it's ammo is the least difficult to suppress. In contrast you can throw out a BFG in MAP01 and starve the player of cells thereafter to effectively remove the weapon from selection.

I think it's less important to have a monster progression other than to have numbers and types of monsters appropriate for the weaponry available. Shotgunning Barons is an example of where this is done wrong.

Lately I have been thinking of difficulty progression as something that is more important for the lower skill levels. My take is:

Skill 1: Entry level. Shallow learning curve which is very forgiving for most of the PWAD. Assume your player hasn't played Doom before.

Skill 2: Gradient of skill level exists but is steeper than what would be used in a commercial game. Assume the player has plays Doom and other PWADs and has a degree of competence with the game.

Skill 3: Skilled/ experienced player: Steep or no difficulty gradient. Maps start bloody from an early point and don't pull punches. Assume the player either already knows the levels in the PWAD from a lower difficulty and wants an enhanced challenge or is willing to grind through the levels and die a lot.

[SYS]

I think of it more as pacing rather than progression. But if it looks good and plays good, who cares?

"2 out of 5 stars because not enough time running around in the dark with shotgun guys using only a pistol and shotgun."

Seeing as your audience has seen it all before, the expectation isn't there. Make the experience that you like to play without ego and if people happen to like it, great.

[mouldy]

Doom has a kind of compressed rpg style progression going on where players aquire more and more powerful abilities over time, while building up experience in a literal sense by uncovering the map, which gives them access to new areas via switches/keys. This can happen over a single map or several if the weapons are spaced out, and you can see the importance of this constant build up when you see how many megawads force death exits at certain points just so that the progression can be reset once everything has been discovered. Of course there are hundreds of ways of orchestrating it, and even a slaughter map that dumps all the weapons on you at the start has this progression in the sense that weapons are only as powerful as the opposition allows. It doesn't make much sense to me to talk about particular monsters being stronger or weaker because all monsters can be dangerous or weak at any level depending on how they are deployed and what tools are provided.

[Hoodie]

Progression is the main part of videogames.

It's what makes a good game.

Having everything at the beginning feels like work, not a game.

I don't know man, this is like asking, "what is fun?"

[Xegethra]

40oz said:

I think your getting the wrong image in your head. I'm not talking about a progressive map and a slaughter map as the two options here. MAP01 of Hell Revealed 2, for example, has a supershotgun right at the very start of the map as well as a rocket launcher and a plasmagun. It also uses archviles, mancubi, and chaingun guys, but the map wouldn't ordinarily be classified as a slaughter map. The layout is too complex and there are too few monsters in total.

Perhaps, but to me getting heavy weaponry early makes it at least on the way to being one, just like getting loads of enemies but little fire power...two kinds of slaughter map to me, as lots of slaughter happens...either to you or the enemies, not much middle ground.

I guess I think of them as being anything that throws you into the thick of it as being such a thing, be it weaponry or enemies or both. Maybe that is the wrong idea of it, but it's how I've always seen it.

I'm not much of a fan of that, whether it be in a series of long levels or set in arenas.

Either way, I tend not to have fun so much with maps that give you lots of fire power at the get go, or throw you into a pit of enemies from the start. I like them both to start off small, and gradually increase, otherwise they seem too hard or too easy where the progression happens to quickly or is too stunted or doesn't really exist. Again whether it is in one single map or a series of them.

[durian]

I like maps/mapsets to have a difficulty progression, with peaks and troughs along the way, but that can be achieved with all manner of weapon and monster set ups, and I find it more interesting/exciting when they deviate from the more standard weapon/monster progressions.

[joe-ilya]

Just give me something fun and not heavy or bland and I'll be fucking pleased.
I'm not the guy to whine about atmosphere or consistency or something as small as progression, that's just sensitive. Come on.

[40oz]

durian said:

I like maps/mapsets to have a difficulty progression, with peaks and troughs along the way, but that can be achieved with all manner of weapon and monster set ups, and I find it more interesting/exciting when they deviate from the more standard weapon/monster progressions.

this is what I'm getting at. Progression relative to difficulty isn't best modeled after what Doom and Doom 2 did. I'd think for maps to start off easy and gradually become more challenging, you'd use monsters like imps, cacodemons, hell knights, and pinky demons, accompanied with the necessary firepower to kill them. And as you near the end, you see more monsters like chaingun guys, archviles, revenants and archviles, and as purist suggested, limit cells and rockets so the more powerful weapons must be used sparingly, and the player is often reduced to super shotgun and chaingun.

I feel that is better representative of a working difficulty curve than the way some mappers stretch the pistol start panic of searching for a usable weapon, and working your way up. As more weapons and armor are acquired, the difficulty shrinks.

[cs99cjb]

40oz said:

I feel that is better representative of a working difficulty curve than the way some mappers stretch the pistol start panic of searching for a usable weapon, and working your way up. As more weapons and armor are acquired, the difficulty shrinks.

Not necessarily: even with a rocket launcher and combat armour, a player mobbed by revenants with no line of retreat will be dead fairly rapidly given the rate at which they advance and the damage done by their attacks. I must admit, the plasma rifle kicks ass though. It should probably have some kind of blast damage effect when used at close range to compensate.

[40oz]

Yes, that last sentence isn't very concrete. There are circumstances where the acquisition of better weapons doesn't always lower difficulty.

i.e. a Lost Soul is better killed with a shotgun than a rocket launcher too, even though they are generally easy monsters. Or an even better example, imps hidden, ready to ambush around every corner and alcove will be much faster and easily neutralized with a chaingun than with a BFG9000 when they are encountered one at a time and not in one plane of view.

[Gez]

People here focus on weapons and monsters, but for me Doom progression in a continuous playthrough is more of a two-step thing: before and after the backpack.

The backpack, by doubling your ammo reserve potential, lets you grab a lot more ammo off the floor, waste a lot less of it and reduces the amount of backtracking needed for scrounging up ammo when there's a shortage of them.

The backpack is the only permanent powerup since it lasts you until gameover (or death and pistol restart), just like the weapons.

The backpack is a game changer. Once you have it, you are more powerful than before, and there's no going back (except through forced reboots like a suicide exit). Having a backpack means that you'll accumulate ammo in the weapons you aren't using much, to the point where you have enough ammo that they get worth using when running low on your primary weapons. It also means you can start a level with 400 bullets, 100 shells, 100 rockets, and 600 cells.

In No Rest for the Living, the developers decided that there would be no backpack throughout most of the episode -- I think the first backpack in in MAP07? Very near the end in any case. I assume that when a level set is carefully balanced, the importance of the backpack has been assessed by the mappers and playtesters.

So yeah. When you get the backpack is when things start to get serious.

[gemini09]

Gez said:

The backpack

I remember it always giving a great relief whenever I obtained the backpack in megawads, as that was pretty much the point where ammo no longer was a concern - you could always stack up. This would of course be different if the max values were less, but 100 rockets, 100 shells, 600 cells and 400 bullets were never depleted in any non-Hell Revealed type megawad.

[Dime]

Even though the first case can be executed well, constantly giving full ammo and just throwing monsters around can become boring. I sort of understand what you're saying about choices, but in a lot of games some weapons are just overpowered.

In serious sam for example it felt like I was only using the minigun for the latter half of the game because massive ammo packs were given to me before every battle. And over time these ultra-powerful weapons feel less satisfying with overuse which is a very bad thing in my eyes. Hell, go watch J4rio's demo of refueling base. Every BFG shot is just insanely satisfying compared to using 600 cells on 100 hell knights.

[gemini09]

Gez said:

So yeah. When you get the backpack is when things start to get serious.

I suppose it can be likened to kindergarten and elementary school in that regard.