Revisiting previous maps in new maps

[Tango]

I just finished playing Dark Souls 1 for the first time and was really in love with how the game's world unfolded. In particular, the way everything connected so well, and how you slowly uncover shortcuts between old/new areas, made me really enjoy exploring the map.

Does anyone know if there have been any map sets in Doom that do this sort of thing on a larger scale? Discounting actual hubs in Hexen or ZDoom mapsets, I can't really recall any wads whose later maps have you revisiting older ones. Not quite the same as what Dark Souls does, of course, but I think it would be really neat to have parts of early maps that are visible yet unreachable, but are used in later maps, as you "return" to the same area. So for example, you could have a map01 that shows the player a bunch of unreachable areas, a normal map02 in between, and then have map03 loop you back around to one of said unreachable areas of map01, so that you re-explore map01 but with some new areas opened up and a new route.

Generally most of us don't even bother making maps start where the last picked off (there are some exceptions, like map09/10 in AV), and I never really myself considered it that important, but from a player's perspective, I think I would be much more interested in the environment as a whole if there's some sense of maps composing a larger piece, rather than their connection relying solely on thematic elements.

[scifista42]

Going Down MAP31 and MAP32.
The last map of SecretDoom: Disrepair.
The last map of DTS-T.

[kuchitsu]

IIRC in Scimitar there are many instances where you get to see the later maps through the windows and stuff.

[yakfak]

maps 11, 15, 29 and 30 of ALT have some good flashback-y surprises, in a story-line sense. the first six maps of the set feel largely concurrent, too, map 5 sort of playing out like a hallucinatory aside between two physically linked maps. Acquired taste though, as I've learned...

in general I agree that limit-removing sets could learn a lot from Dark Souls's environment design, in all sorts of ways; the game's labyrinthine, exploration-friendly progression is certainly the big one but the game also teaches a lot about use of darkness and the sheer character that a huge amount of debris can add to an environment

[Empyre]

There is a little bit of that in my empyrion_v29 (ZDoom's Doom-in-Hexen format).

[everennui]

I've been thinking about doing something like that. I have a cave map I'm working on. ...can't decide if I should make it a secret in the first level that cuts to the last... or maybe second to last a la Starox. I did have it in my map03, but with 8,000 linedefs I had to cut it in favor of a new map. All of my levels contain portions of the previous map and if one was to take all of the maps and stack them on top of each other, they should align. Unfortunately I have to lock off most of the previous maps because of engine limitations.