What did you think of No Rest For the Living?

[MeetyourUnmaker]

Haven't fully played it but it looks like better levels than the default Doom 2.

[40oz]

Its good.

There are wads ive played that id be more likely to pay money for, but from professional level designers, you do get some pretty great maps.

There are plenty (good) secrets, lots of monsters, fun and exciting traps, and interesting layouts. You wont be disappointed.

[Jaxxoon R]

I love it, it's well-rounded and kept me interested throughout. The maps by Russel Meakim were consistently my favorites.

[joe-ilya]

It's great and I hope there'll be a sequel.

[scifista42]

Good wad with all nice looking and classic-style fun to play maps.

[Job]

Better maps have been created by this community for free.

[purist]

They're really good limit removal style levels. Some cool ideas and generally interesting to play a professional quality map set from designers disconnected from the community and design tropes.

[vdgg]

Maps 01 and 05 are awesome. The finale is pretty dumb. No backpack until the last map = good idea to make continuous play balanced.

[LogicDeLuxe]

purist said:

They're really good limit removal style levels.

Is BFG edition actually limit removing? Or did they just increase some limits like Doom+?

[scifista42]

They just increased some limits.

http://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doom_3:_BFG_Edition said:
The BFG Edition also features The Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and No Rest for the Living as bonus. These run using an integrated version of the original Doom engine called Doom Classic, based on the code used by the Xbox 360 Doom and Doom II ports.

See Doom Classic in this list of Static limits ("Raised values" column).

[Urthar]

NRFTL is one of my favorite map sets, and one of the few I've played multiple times.

Russell Meakim did a few videos on the making of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coH6W9Sytb4&list=PLZmVk4US70oh1wBUhL9SSRWalmIQwA-BE

[Dragonsbrethren]

I thought it was a really fun map set. A bit too cluttered in places for my tastes, but that was just an aesthetic issue, it didn't harm the gameplay (that I can remember, anyway). The maps certainly stood out as unique by being so detailed using nothing but stock Doom 2 textures.

Urthar said:

Russell Meakim did a few videos on the making of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coH6W9Sytb4&list=PLZmVk4US70oh1wBUhL9SSRWalmIQwA-BE

Thanks for this, can't wait to watch them.

-edit-

Watched that video so far. I love hearing other designers' insight. I have to admit, I never saw that yellow key at the start. I'm not sure how I didn't, since I do remember looking out the windows at the start. I think I missed seeing the chainsaw, too. I do remember seeing the SSG, but the first time I was playing, I actually exited the level (after getting the yellow key) without going back for it. Totally forgot by the time I was that far along.

Also, I think demonstrating design with Brutal Doom, something so different from the intended gameplay, is an odd choice, but his reactions are hilarious and outside of the Mancubi, it doesn't seem to have broken anything.

[Janus3003]

Just started playing it again last night, actually.
My favorite part was Map 5: Vivisection. It did a great job at constantly escalating the threats. It wasn't just more and more monsters, but walls lowering and taking away previous points of cover. There was no real safe place in the map, and it was a ton of fun.

[RUSH]

It's a great mapset. Only 9 levels long but they're all quality. There's a lot of red textured everything in the later half which gets a little repetitive but no more so than all the brown in Plutonia. Actually, it's still a lot less repetitive than Plutonia. The level design themselves are pretty brilliant with lots of "wrap around" hallways and clever key + door placement. The secrets are fantastic and a challenge to find, and the later "open-world" E3M6 style levels are a blast to play.

Lots of open canyons and courtyards which are fun to run around and blast monsters in at high speeds. I also didn't get the super shotgun until i was a decent way into the mapset so it was nice to have to focus on using the regular shotgun and chaingun more often. They work well too since there's a lot of far distance shooting required in the more open levels and both are great ranged weapons.

[Doomkid]

Job said:

Better maps have been created by this community for free.

While this is definitely accurate, wasn't NRFTL just a bonus pack-in alongside BFG edition for the classic Doomers? It isn't free to distribute, but it wasn't actually part of the price you pay for BFG edition, was it? It seemed more like bonus content.

Overall it's a great WAD. I played it both on Xbox 360 and on PC and enjoyed it thouroughly both times.

[ReFracture]

I had the misfortune of playing it first split screen on the PSN version. The maps were good, the 15ish FPS and unresponsive controls were not. I had to play it again when I tracked down a wad for use on PC to enjoy it.

[MFG38]

It was, uh... decent. The maps were well designed and all, but the final map was kinda BS with all those imps, and it took me a dozen retries to plow through them without too much harm.

[Tracer]

I liked it.

[Deleted_Account]

I didn't like it. That's not to say I hate it or anything, it just wasn't my cup of tea.

[Blastfrog]

Piper Maru said:

I didn't like it. That's not to say I hate it or anything, it just wasn't my cup of tea.

Same. I almost feel guilty for not being able to enjoy NRFTL, because of the following:

purist said:

They're really good limit removal style levels. Some cool ideas and generally interesting to play a professional quality map set from designers disconnected from the community and design tropes.

As much as I love this community's output, I like variety and figured a new semi-detached and professionally produced mapset would at the very least be interesting to see how they tackle design differently between themselves, this community and the original crew at id. I can't find much of anything to criticize objectively (mostly just that they used too many redundant sectors, but that's just not knowing the tools as well, doesn't affect gameplay), but something about it just failed to grab me. They all felt too perfect and sterile.

I felt like I was playing something that rigidly focused on a set of design goals that were solely centered around the raw gameplay mechanics, seemingly discarding more informal design that communicates environmental storytelling to the player. Not like plot was ever important in Doom, but I always felt like each level had its own identity, personality, history, even if it still just boiled down to switches, keycards, guns and monsters.

There was just something about the flow and pacing of the original map set that felt like an experience, Doomguy's struggle against the demons, even if it was abstract and could easily be completely recontextualized just by renaming and retexturing the level. It's entirely subjective and I'm still not sure what it is that NRFTL is failing to do what the originals did for me. It just feels like it was designed with the context of "it's a game with these specifically balanced elements" and not "you're a one-man army against hell's seemingly unstoppable legions".

The gameplay, while very polished, doesn't really seem to innovate as much as community made maps, they seem to follow a formula. It pulls of said formula very well, but nevertheless it feels kinda old-hat. If the gameplay alone doesn't do it for me, I look to atmosphere.

I will say that Sandy Petersen's levels gave off this "story without story" feeling the most, and Romero's somewhat. Hall's maps are actually very story-driven, but are rather buried under the rough development process they went through. Even Doom 64 which felt rather formulaic and bland compared to the original design (IMO) still felt like it had more intangible "story context" than NRFTL. Hell, the scripted events probably saved some of its levels from feeling too stale.

I want to like it, and I support it on principle (hey, not all the custom maps can be by us, right?), and it's got the gameplay down, but I somehow feel the atmosphere is lacking, among other things. It's average, yet polished quality. Not exceptional by any stretch Does any of this make sense or am I just incoherently rambling on low sleep again?

Let me ask you this, would we still be talking about this set if it were just uploaded straight to idgames without any fanfare, let alone that of having the "official" stamp on it? It disappoints me that it's good, yet so forgettable.

[Xaser]

Sodaholic said:

Let me ask you this, would we still be talking about this set if it were just uploaded straight to idgames without any fanfare, let alone that of having the "official" stamp on it?

My two cents on this: there's indeed a good amount of bias towards NRFTL because it is a commercial release (and made a big splash due to the "holy shit new 'official' levels" thing), but it is IMO a hella solid mapset that would get some recognition for sure -- certainly not on the same level that spawns stuff like this thread though. :P

[Dragonsbrethren]

Sodaholic said:

Let me ask you this, would we still be talking about this set if it were just uploaded straight to idgames without any fanfare, let alone that of having the "official" stamp on it? It disappoints me that it's good, yet so forgettable.

Most likely, it's an extremely high quality map set. Being a set of official levels certainly got my attention, but the maps themselves hold up great. Someone in this community would've taken notice to it, and then it would've been on one of those greatest megawad lists, I have no doubt.

I really don't see what you're trying to say about storyline and atmosphere. There's a pretty clear progression both to the map set as a whole and in each individual map.

[Antroid]

I thought it was incredibly dull. I couldn't even bother to finish it. Visually it was boring and didn't seem to try anything interesting (not even original, just interesting), and the impession I got of the gameplay was very repetitive and formulaic with too much of layouts looping on themselves in ways that want to seem clever but are super predictable and pointless (only seeming to exist to save effort for making new areas) and new monsters being released into the same cramped places that you've already cleared. I didn't feel like the mapset had any soul whatsoever.

[Gez]

Sodaholic said:

Let me ask you this, would we still be talking about this set if it were just uploaded straight to idgames without any fanfare, let alone that of having the "official" stamp on it? It disappoints me that it's good, yet so forgettable.

Yeah, I'm sure it'd have made a splash. Not as big a splash of course, but it's still a nice chunk of very solid levels, so they would have gotten good review in T/nC and been nominated for the Cacowards.

Trying to imagine NRFTL as a non-official set just dropped into the community, I see Way Too Many Dead Guys.

[Drilbur]

I really enjoyed it. Made it worth buying Doom 2 for my Xbox 360.

[The Ultimate DooMer]

Most overrated mapset in history thanks to it's "official" tag.

It had some ideas in it (notably the large secret areas a la Wolf 3D), but doesn't stick out in the slightest next to other projects of this size.