Making the player kill stuff

[40oz]

In many FDA and playtesting demos I've watched, a trait I see among some playtesters is they will avoid firing their weapons for as long as they can help it. They play stealthily, observing everything around them, looking for hidden secrets, staying out of sight of monsters, and meandering peacefully around them as they try to (unsuccessfully) splatter the player.

I understand one might do this to highlight a potential design flaw that depends on monsters' hearing, such as in teleport ambushes. Personally I'm not a fan of a shoot switch in the start area, or barrels blocking your path or a fat monster in a narrow hallway. But I also see players avoiding monsters even after the first shot is fired. Usually the player will surgically remove the troublesome monsters like archviles, pain elementals or chaingun guys, or handle any trapping scenario where the monsters are in close proximity and there's little space to move. But when there is space to move, monsters such as imps, pinkie demons and hell knights seem to get left behind as the player simply meanders past them, even when they've carrying a super shotgun and 70+ shells. Sometimes this becomes a real hazard later on when those leftover monsters return with reinforcements.

This has always been very bizarre for me. I shoot everything. Everything. If I've got a gun and ammo to spare, I dont hesitate to shoot on sight. If it moves, I want it to stop moving, even if its not putting me in any immediate danger. Any number less than 100% in the kills counter at the intermission is insulting to me. This doesn't seem to be the case for everyone though, so when I test my maps its hard to anticipate that a player might even try to get through the map without killing the monsters that are trying to kill him. Its really alien to me.

So first of all, is this a common way of playing maps? Even if not for testing purposes? Am I in the minority that I kill monsters that even pose menial threat to me? And furthermore, what circumstances involved with seeing a monster would sway you to hold your fire, and how can I, as a mapper, prevent these things from happening?

[baja blast rd.]

As a mapper, I've placed monsters like chaingunners in order to fight back against the eager pacifist trolls that play my maps (you know who you are ;-)). Usually near the start, but sometimes even in the second battle, you can find monsters that exist solely to make the player shoot at something.



As a player, I try to get a feel for the ammo balance before taking everything out. I don't want to end up wasting supplies that turn out to be valuable. I also enjoy instigating infighting and will often do that even if I'm fully stocked.

Honestly, I can't see going out of your way to discourage this play style as a good thing, at all. I'm personally less likely to leave monsters alive in maps that have closed, completely linear layouts, especially if they arm me to the hilt. Design your level as a single long hallway and I'll kill everything. Yeah. I guess you could completely refrain from placing monsters that aren't serious threats, or you could position all monsters as a latent threat in some way (e.g., by staging your map as an invasion map, where monsters have to be killed quickly lest the player get swarmed). But other types of gameplay exist.

[scifista42]

I believe it works like this: Many of experienced Doom players are no longer satisfied by the mere act of killing stuff. They want concentrated fun, in the form of challenge and/or interesting-ness, and don't want to waste time on routine killing for the sake of killing. The mapper should obviously reflect this by making his map fun, challenging and interesting, for as much of the total playtime as possible.

[Grazza]

"It does not kill me, so why should I kill it?" - Steffen Winterfeldt in 30nm6520.txt

That's pretty much my view too. I feel I have been wasteful if I get 100%s. I went into slightly greater length here. The rest of that thread may also be of interest, as it addresses a very similar question.

[Chezza]

I share the same views as 40oz in terms of feeling off putting if you don't have a 100% kill in the intermission score screen and how ignoring monsters instead of killing them is very strange.

There is rationale to it of course, if any monster is free moving and you run into a dead end, a horde of evaded monsters may catch up to you. However it's more about the sense of completion that drives me. Probably one of the reasons why I get both stressed out and bored when playing Slaughter-maps. I can't finish the level until all monsters are killed and ammo belt as full as possible (secrets are my exception).

One of my friends who playtested my maps did lots of evading which I didn't expect. It revealed that some of my maps can be sprinted to completion if you know where you're going. So now I consciously designs some rooms to either backfire on such strategy or lock the player in until he does it how I want him to lol

[gaspe]

It depends on the playstyle that someone has. Many time if everything is too quiet I punch the air to alert monsters on purpose, when I play normally I like to kill everything if possible and I use saves sometimes.
If I'm recording a fda and thus I don't know the map and I can't use saves I'll play more carefully and I skip fights if I see that the situation it's too awkward or if I can save ammo for the coming areas. The main goal is to survive and to reach the exit.

[40oz]

Grazza said:

"It does not kill me, so why should I kill it?" - Steffen Winterfeldt in 30nm6520.txt

I understand that you and many others (according to that thread) live by that mantra when playing Doom. I want to ask why you would choose to play a game like Doom that way, but now that I think about it, I might have even more trouble explaining in a logically plausible way why I kill monsters even when they aren't a direct threat. I've seen videos of people playing Doom and sometimes after they die for the second or third time they just get frustrated and try to bypass everything. But I get a lot of entertainment value out of watching monsters get thrown back by my rockets, berserk knockouts and ssg blasts into a pile of pixelated gore. On a good map, sometimes dying and starting the map over is a relief! I dont know, there's a certain dominance quality I guess from waging mass genocide on an ill tempered ruthless demonic race.

This is a really psychologically revealing conversation isn't it?

[Fonze]

Lol, well if nothing else, at least you don't discriminate 40 ;p

I share the same view, though, that I want all 100%'s (assuming it's a map I enjoy).

However, I also tend to play stealthily at first in order to get my bearings and to pick out a good strategic location for my next impending death. It's one reason I map the way I do, but the problems 40 mentioned in the OP are ones I think about as well. It's also a reason why I tend to place less ammo than most players would use, because by the time I've picked out a good location, in-fighting has usually occurred. Which is of course a mistake on my part, but I haven't quite fine-tuned the ratio I need to add on top of my own numbers yet. Everything with time...

Personally, I like rdwpa's solution as a general way to force the player to act. High-threat monsters that cannot be snuck past are a great way to force the player to kill-or-be-killed.

However, when it comes to monster-closets, dummy-sector traps, and the like I cannot stress enough the importance of back-up systems. Generally speaking, the more non-linear a map is, the more quality control that needs to be done to its trap/bypass-able systems to ensure their relevance should a player choose to skip them. Of course a map can go overboard on this stuff, but I'm assuming we're talking about simply having them for the sake of the ole 100%.

Take these shots for example: (a very basic and too specific one for our general conversation, but I'm too stupid to put this clearly in a general sense so we'll just go with this specific example) This example is of a monster-closet that is permanently cut off from the rest of the map (a dummy sector). This comes from my second tutorial on belts, which isn't important except for the fact that this was less work for me to illustrate this point. But this trap uses a belt, so it's a very specific example.



This simple-to-install back-up "sound" system not only prevents these two monsters that are too close together from not teleporting (or if the player doesn't alert them in time), but it also gives your wad that extra element of seeming-randomness as the second monster can now teleport to two different locations.





This also relatively simple back-up sound system adds another sector in front of the dummy sector with a height that blocks the sound. As it raises, it not only allows for another monster closet (if that's your thing), but it also allows the "sound" back-up system to work only after a certain point, which arguably could be done in this example with sound-blocking lines, but in the real thing that is not always so.





This last picture focuses on backing up a system that might never be tripped in the first place. Adding in that new sector to the right (towards the player) and moving the dummy sectors north (in this case) allows monsters to take the east teleport out of the trap to a more relevant part of the level, should the player bypass the initial trigger.



I had typed this up earlier, but had to go back to work. Now that I'm posting it it's a bit late, but hopefully still somewhat relevant.

[Tosi]

I usually try to kill everything but some maps make it so tedious that if I can get away with it I will just sneak past the monsters as much as possible.
If I'm at the end of a map and the exit is sight, and all of a sudden 10 arch-viles pop up, I'm just going to run past them into the exit anyway. Throwing everything at me right when I'm almost done just makes me want to get it over with faster.
I like the original iD maps where you open the exit door and there are like 2 imps or a Hell Knight in there. In my opinion, the climax of a map (meaning the largest fights) should happen when the player is about to clear the final hurdle to open the way to the exit, whether it be picking up a key or pressing a switch, not when they're about to fly through the exit.

[Jaxxoon R]

Why don't people play maps like I want them to why do different people have preferences and develop perfectly functioning playstyles differing from my own how can I force people to play maps the way I do

[VGA]

You can use dehacked and/or hardcoded map effects to force the player to kill monsters. You can make the Barons drop red skulls with the Spawn codepointer (MBF) or directly activate a linedef with LineEffect (MBF).

Or you can make the Cacos have a KeenDie code pointer in their death state so only when they are all dead will the sectors 666 be activated. I think this is vanilla compatible.

Or you can use the BossDeath pointer on most monsters to force the player to clear the map before being able to exit it. Vanilla, too, but only works on specific maps.

I got my info here:
http://www.doomworld.com/eternity/engine/codeptrs.html

The only real problem I see is that the map cannot be easily included in a mappack and the mapper cannot reuse the same effect on the same map.

UAC_DEAD used some vanilla hardcoded effects to force the player to first kill all the barons to get access to the Cyberkiller, then the Cyber has to be killed as well. That's why it is at spot E1M8. Same can be done with the hardcoded effect of the Mancubi at MAP07.

[Xegethra]

I think it's just fun, their way of playing is enjoyable to them. Some people like feeling like hard power houses and blowing away everything in sight, while others feel good being evasive like some sort of stealthy future soldier being all "Pssh, these monsters ain't nothin, just gonna walk past".

I'm a heavy monster killer too, I pretty much waste everything in a room, however I'm not that bothered if I don't get 100% as I won't go out of my way to find any lingering monsters I might have missed. I also do what Tosi does, I just bolt it for the exit if they decide to put a load of heavy monsters right at the exit....that switch is there behind one of them, and I'm gonna press it and make them watch me take that service lift into the next level while giving them the finger.

[yakfak]

whenever I notice I'm in a linear map where the ammo is meted out to exactly match the next wave of resistance I meet, I try to dash ahead so I have more bullets to work with & with the vain hope some of the monsters will kill each other off anyway. Naturally it gets me killed as soon as the map loops back on itself but it's nice to dream.

[Angry Saint]

This is something I have noticed too.

It seems that for many players the fun does not derive from killing monsters while trying to avoid to be killed, during the exploration of interesting places, with eventually some switch to press, which should be, in my opinion, the definition of playing a shooter game.

Some players instead see a doom level like a test of coordination and knowledge of the monsters behavior (speed, rate of fire, etc...), a problem which solution is the ideal set of movements done in order to minimize time and resources losses.

This may derive from the fact that the usual monsters are so well known not to pose a treat anymore, but instead it is monster placement and level design to be the source of dangers.
If this is true, I wonder why so many players still prefer vanilla or limit removed maps, and not zdoom stuff with new decorate monsters to fight.

I personally prefer the first version of fun. I like exploration and killing, even if I have to kill just a random zombieman.

[printz]

Put the player in arenas. Use all Dehacked tricks you know to make monster deaths required to continue the game. Use more instant-hit attack monsters (the player can't just run from them) than slow projectile-based ones. Use Dehacked to make the monsters more powerful.

[scifista42]

Angry Saint said:

It seems that for many players the fun does not derive from killing monsters while trying to avoid to be killed, during the exploration of interesting places, with eventually some switch to press, which should be, in my opinion, the definition of playing a shooter game.

Some players instead see a doom level like a test of coordination and knowledge of the monsters behavior (speed, rate of fire, etc...), a problem which solution is the ideal set of movements done in order to minimize time and resources losses.
[...]

I personally prefer the first version of fun. I like exploration and killing, even if I have to kill just a random zombieman.

I personally see a Doom level as a combination of both, sometimes more of the first and sometimes more of the second, and I can enjoy both, actually kind of seek both in the Doom maps I play.

Angry Saint said:

This may derive from the fact that the usual monsters are so well known not to pose a treat anymore, but instead it is monster placement and level design to be the source of dangers.
If this is true, I wonder why so many players still prefer vanilla or limit removed maps, and not zdoom stuff with new decorate monsters to fight.

Possibly because ZDoom wads with truly decent monster placement and level design are rarer than vanilla/limit-removing/Boom wads with them. And that fact itself may be caused by the fact that a lot of talented/hard-working Doom mappers are also interested in speedrunning and traditional demo-recording, for which ZDoom isn't really suitable. Also that some Doom players are apparently strongly accustomized to the very exact behavior and "feel" of standard Doom bestiary/weaponry/game-mechanics and prefer them unchanged. Maybe also that ZDoom's abundance of features can make a lot of (inexperienced) mappers focus on unnecessary details moreso than on quality monster placement and level design.