Balancing around Pistol Start vs Continuous Play

[Spectre01]

I enjoy both playstyles but it seems like continuous players have been getting the short end of the stick when it comes to wads recently. I see the phrase "designed for/intended to be played from pistol start" a lot more in text files, which is absent from older wads. Now I know the original IWADs were tested where every map was "beatable" from a pistol start but the gameplay wasn't balanced around it or always more enjoyable. Kind of how Dark Souls is "beatable" without leveling up and various other player-imposed restrictions. So when did pistol start play go from being a niche category for speed/challenge runs and instead the normal way of playing every multi-map wad/megawad? What I especially don't get is when people pistol start while playing on a lower difficulty, instead of just playing continuous on UV. Why add extra challenge to a watered down experience?

Now some mapsets, like Hellbound, are clearly meant to be played continuously and designed as a single journey with loading screens rather than a collection of maps. Yet people still insist on pistol starting every map and then complaining that it's boring or grindy. I think wads like Scythe 2 or Resurgence do a good job of providing a similar experience for both playstyles with the frequent use of death exits. I've been playing Epic 2 recently on continuous and noticing how annoying the maps starts would be from scratch. Unless I'm playing a hardcore challenge wad or one where the creator clearly states that the maps are meant to be played from pistol, I usually just go with continuous as more often than not it ends up being the more enjoyable option.

[mrthejoshmon]

Probably because megawad levels are much easier for the mapper to test from a pistol start than a continued run?

I guess they could save at the exit to the prior level?

[Flesh420]

I've never went out of my way to pistol start any map unless forced because I died without saving. So generally, my maps aren't designed around pistol starts either. I find them particularity annoying unless done well.

Now weirdly, just yesterday when I was playing Doom '16 I saw a missed opportunity and was craving the option to pistol start those maps, and wished they were designed with that in mind. I didn't want to start with all weapons. No idea why the flip-flop between Doom '16 and Classic, it just seemed the option to do it felt right at the time, and it mildly sucks we can't. But....in classic I find them such a drag.

[Spectre01]

Did such an option exist in Doom 3? I don't remember if the maps supported it or not.

[purist]

Yeah, there's a lot of variables to consider if you're testing for continuous play - you have no real way of knowing how much health or ammo will be carried over or if weapons are found along the way or missed.

I don't think megawads are against continuous play. It's just assumed that if a level works from pistol start it will work continuously also.

[gaspe]

I design my map with pistol start in mind, I guess it's a bit easier to test the balance as you don't have to take in account the previous maps. But what I find really interesting about it is that you can shape the gameplay and experiment with it in many more ways, for example you can avoid to give certain weapons or mess with the order of them. I assume that if someone wants to play continuously he wants to have a more "relaxing" experience.
I played recently Epic 2 too but I did it with pistol start, it wasn't really annoying, you have to be more careful with ammo and the secret are way more valuable. Sometimes things can get a bit sloggish but I'm fine with it unless it drags for too much without finding better weapons.

Edit:

rileymartin said:

Now some mapsets, like Hellbound, are clearly meant to be played continuously and designed as a single journey with loading screens rather than a collection of maps.

Are you sure? I pistol started it and it was fine. Also I don't see how pistol starting can somehow break with the immersion of a long journey and make the maps to feel as divided things.

[Spectre01]

gaspe said:

Are you sure? I pistol started it and it was fine. Also I don't see how pistol starting can somehow break with the immersion of a long journey and make the maps to feel as divided things.

Higher tier ammo like rockets and cells are quite rare and take several levels to collect a decent amount of. For instance, map 01's secret Rocket Launcher gives you 3 shots, which seems kind of pointless if you don't carry it over. Also, you keep finding plasma ammo in the earlier maps before you get the rifle on map 06. The SSG is also a secret in several levels, and if you happen to miss it, you're in for a very bad time. And finally, the text mentions you losing your equipment, after the first death exit, due to a teleport malfunction which ties it into the story. When playing pistol start, I feel as though each map is a separate arena with it's own approach, rather than part of a single campaign. I'm not saying you shouldn't play Hellbound pistol start, but I'd argue it's more enjoyable on continuous.

[baja blast rd.]

rileymartin said:

What I especially don't get is when people pistol start while playing on a lower difficulty, instead of just playing continuous on UV. Why add extra challenge to a watered down experience?

HNTR and HMP pistol-started should not be "watered-down" experiences. That would be a result of lazy design and of inadequate testing. I'd say that UV continuous is much more likely to verge on a watered-down experience than a well designed HNTR or HMP pistol start, due to the glut of ammo carried through.

On a finely tuned pistol-start mapset, people should consider playing UV continuous ironman or with similar, softer, restrictions. (I was going to start a thread asking how many people did this, even before I learned of the Jenesis ironman challenge.) The extra resources should reconfigure the challenge to that of larger-scale endurance; since beating any single level without deaths will become much easier, the goal should be to tackle a longer stretch of levels similarly.

purist said:

Yeah, there's a lot of variables to consider if you're testing for continuous play - you have no real way of knowing how much health or ammo will be carried over or if weapons are found along the way or missed.

I don't think megawads are against continuous play. It's just assumed that if a level works from pistol start it will work continuously also.

I don't think this is a safe assumption. There's a reason Tyson or attrition levels often follow death exits.

[Vorpal]

I have a strong dislike for "continuous play" mapsets, because as already mentioned it's extremely difficult to balance pickups. This usually results in gameplay designed the drain your ammo; spent all that trouble finding 40 rockets and 300 cells? Well here's an arena battle that requires 35 rockets and 290 cells!

[baja blast rd.]

As an aside, big battles in non-slaughtermaps are often free sources of surplus ammo, even pistol-starting. The balance is generally designed around the assumption that the player will actually shoot at things, instead of calmly taking advantage of infighting. This is one of the trickier things to manage as a mapper.

[Ribbiks]

I understand the appeal of progressing through a cohesive mapset continuously, gradually accruing resources (saving now helps me later, hurray delayed gratification!). Saves seem to undermine that a bit, without the possibility of losing everything and starting a level from scratch you might as well just type "idfa" at the start of each map. Along that argument, a mapset that's balanced around pistol-starts and is hard enough for death to be a possibility regardless of player resources should be nearly functionally equivalent to a mapset designed around continuous play, ey? (let's ignore difficulty settings for the time being).

Either way, designing around the player starting from nothing is just too damn nice for the type of stuff I like to make, so I don't foresee abandoning it anytime soon. One of these days the no-fun-allowed wire is going to trip in my brain and I'll just put a death exit at the end of everything :p

[40oz]

Level Designers ideally appeal to both styles of play. I personally play from pistol starts for demo recording reasons. It's the only way to play unless I want to play an entire megawad from start to finish which could take many hours. So bite-size single maps in the order they are meant to be played are my cup of tea. I have no problems with players who choose to play continuously with saves. If that's a more exciting experience for you, then by all means go ahead!

Designing levels for Continuous or for Pistol Start only can cause problems however.

I personally don't play continuously. I don't like to have tons of save files from many different wads, so I often don't save. If I play a wad designed for continuous play without saving, I may complete 6 or 7 maps before dying, then either have to start the whole game over or play that particular map again, swinging fists and poking hell knights with the pistol. I don't need to explain why that's not fun. I definitely don't recommend going with this strategy, especially because a super shotgun near the start of the level only provides the benefit of +8 shells for a continuous player, but is a precious artifact for a pistol-start player. So give players nice weapons at the start of every map anyway even if they are expected to have it.

Pistol-start-only maps in wads can be a little tricky, because most of these wads are community projects where mappers don't always know what maps their map is going to fit between in the final maplist, so they can't design their map with any knowledge of what the player will or will not have by the time the player reaches their map. When designing maps for community projects, I often design my traps in such a way that they are far from trivial no matter what weapons you have. Designing traps in such a way that they are hard only if you have a shotgun or chaingun is kinda lame. I always assume the player has a super shotgun or rocket launcher in hand and I usually hand those weapons out pretty early in my maps.

The most accomodating thing you can do when designing a level that works efficiently for both continuous play and pistol starting is to not put too many resources that the player can carry over into the next level. Put "just enough" of what the player will need in the map. Try to level the players resources so he exits the map with basically the same amount of stuff he started with, 100% health, 50 bullets and aim for single digits of everything else. You can do this by giving player ammo items in the beginning of the map and cut off his supplies halfway through the map so he has no choice but to spend all his ammunition before exiting. Use damage sponge monsters such as Hell Baron's, Hell Knights, mancubi, large hordes, etc. at the end of the map.

I intend to focus on this during the public testing period of Mutiny so I can get an eye for how much ammo is distributed over the course of the entire map and that maps thematically connect together to appeal to continuous players just as much as pistol-start players.

[mouldy]

Its pretty difficult to balance ammo for continuous play, and I doubt most continuous players are that fussed about having too much of it (which is inevitable after a few maps). Continuous is more about the multi-map arc of weapon progression for me.

I see pistol start as a bonus challenge rather than intended experience, but then I am more interested in the continuity when I play megawads than perhaps others are. If each map is a totally separate entity then maybe there isn't much point in making 32 of them..

[kmxexii]

in my five or so years of playing doom stuff, playing through a mapset that declared that it was designed for continuous play usually felt like riding a jagged edge between sleepwalking and frustrating. i don't disagree that it can be done, but i think that authors that want to balance / design for continuous play have a lot to learn before they can make a continuous mapset that really engages me. not that they have to - if your target audience's pleasure centers are activated by merely playing something ostensibly designed for continuous play, then that's their thing.

[Vorpal]

40oz said:

You can do this by giving player ammo items in the beginning of the map and cut off his supplies halfway through the map so he has no choice but to spend all his ammunition before exiting. Use damage sponge monsters such as Hell Baron's, Hell Knights, mancubi, large hordes, etc. at the end of the map.

Heh precisely the pitfall I was outlining. If you're playing continuous, it makes a mapset feel like you're just spinning your wheels and not progressing (remember the frustration in Half Life when Gordon loses all the gear he's meticulously collected?).

Along with this fine-tuning of ammo/health balance comes the issue of how it requires the designer to spend a lot of time testing to get the ammo/health/enemy ratio just right. So it's going to be balanced for expert play (because with all the playtesting the designer is now an expert at his own map), and be totally unfun hell for the first time playthrough where mistakes are made and ammo is used inefficiently.

It saves so much time and potential frustration to just assume the player is playing from a pistol start, give them what they need and then double that to give room for mistakes, and don't "take everything away" by forced encounters before the exit just for the sake of ammo balance. Encounters should be about fun factor not grinding the player's ammo down to ensure the next map is a pseudo-pistol start.

[baja blast rd.]

Vorpal said:

So it's going to be balanced for expert play, and be totally unfun hell for the first time playthrough where mistakes are made and ammo is used inefficiently.

One feature I'd love Doom to have is separate modes which allowed you to vary the number and arrangement of monsters and items, so that mapsets could be balanced for people of many different skill levels.

[Blastfrog]

rileymartin said:

Did such an option exist in Doom 3? I don't remember if the maps supported it or not.

Doom 3 was definitely designed for continuous play. There is no pistol start option.

For example, incompatible saved games will restart the level with what you had in your inventory upon the level start (or maybe it was a preset of what the designers think you should have, don't remember).

rdwpa said:

One feature I'd love Doom to have is separate modes which allowed you to vary the number and arrangement of monsters and items, so that mapsets could be balanced for people of many different skill levels.

That sounds a lot like how Marathon's difficulty levels worked. What they did there was use the same base item placement instead of spawn flags like Doom, but it would filter which enemy types and ranks would spawn and would remove them on lower skills. Basically automating that task instead of leaving it to be done by the mapper.

[esselfortium]

Continuous balance is really hard to get right in Doom, and there's no one-size-fits-all easy answer to it. Like you said, death exits can help by resetting the player's inventory every so often.

Beyond that, if your maps aren't too massive, withholding the backpack can be a good way of mitigating the ammo excess that tends to accumulate across maps. You can also avoid the common tendency to hand players some extra health and supplies in exit rooms. Neither of these will be particularly popular decisions, but they'll help your continuous balance a bit :p

[Vorpal]

rdwpa said:

One feature I'd love Doom to have is separate modes which allowed you to vary the number and arrangement of monsters and items, so that mapsets could be balanced for people of many different skill levels.

I actually play on HMP the vast majority of the time, and rarely is there a meaningful difference from HMP to UV. And by rare I mean unicorn rare, but I -skill 3 anyway, in the hopes that I someday find one.

This is coming from someone who tries fucking hard to balance skill levels, and in the end it often comes off as "slightly different shades of UV", because of the "expert at your own level" problem.

[Rayziik]

Typically I design with pistol starts in mind, however my allocation of supplies is usually tight enough that continuous play is rather well balanced albeit a slightly easier experience on the whole. I do incorporate death exits at episode ends however, namely to remove the power weapons from the players inventory like the BFG, RL, and SSG. It also benefits continuous play to have maps that don't have any of certain ammo types, making resource management part of the game still, instead of trivializing it. Just had a map with PG and CG focus? Next map is SSG and RL focused. And usually it turns out pretty balanced.

[Magnusblitz]

There are a few advantages of continuous play that I think have made it more popular:

1) More suited for demos/speedruns/etc

2) For community projects, almost required - people will usually be making their maps independently. Sometimes there's stuff like "no BFG until episode 2" but it's really hard to get into the nitty-gritty of it.

3) Allows each map to have its own difficulty curve, and more rewards. If the player is always starting from a pistol, then there's a larger range of weapons and ammo to withhold and/or provide in secrets. Finding a rocket launcher isn't the same when you've already had one for 12 levels and you're playing continuous.

4) Easier to balance, since you only need to think of the immediate level. It's a lot easier to say "okay, the player needs enough rockets to be able to kill the cyberdemon" and just plop a bunch of boxes down. It's harder when they have to think "okay, this is level 13, how many rockets did the player have to kill the cyberdemon on level 8? I gave them some extra for bad aim, but what if he was really good? Having 10 carryover rockets vs no rockets will really change this AV battle." This is the reason a lot of people have championed the "no backpack" rule, because it makes it a lot easier to limit carryover ammo.

rdwpa said:

I don't think this is a safe assumption. There's a reason Tyson or attrition levels often follow death exits.

I may be misinterpreting purist here, but I think what he's saying is that it's easier to make it "work" in terms of "the player can beat it." If a map is balanced for a pistol start (i.e. the level contains enough weapons/ammo on its own), then certainly a continuous player can also beat it. But with the inverse, designing for continous, there exists a definite possibility that a pistol starter can't beat it because there's simply not enough weapons/ammo. Assuming that the mapmaker can only have the time/patience/ability to balance for one, the latter (impossible for pistol starters) is a bigger flaw than the former (too easy for continous players).

I suppose one can think of a situation where a map is actually impossible for continuous players (if they come into the map with super-low health and the player start is in damaging sludge or surrounded by a bunch of hitscanners or something) but those situations are pretty rare, and easily solved by placing health at the end of the level prior.

[Demon of the Well]

Looking at things as "continuous players getting the short end of the stick" strikes me as a bit of an odd conception. Apart from all the mentioned points about longform continuous balance being very difficult to pull off in Doom (not that this doesn't mean there's no merit in making the attempt, mind you), there's the simple fact that a continuous-balanced set is much more stylistically restrictive than a pistol-balanced one. That is to say, a really rigorous/tight continuous balance likely excludes conventionally manageable pistol-start play (as well as most forms of niche/challenge run) to a far more severe degree than a pistol-balance excludes a conventional continuous run. So, in that sense, it's easy to frame the trend in design as a purely practical matter rather than as one of principle, though realistically there are of course other factors at play as well (mapsets being expressly designed to have demos recorded on their individual maps and such).

What's interesting to me is that, in all my many years of playing Doom, the number of people I've encountered who regularly play the game in line with its actual systemic design--that is, using carryovers until the point of death, and then pistol-starting the map where death occurred to begin the climb anew--is so small that I can count them on one hand. Forgive me a touch of (obvious) hyperbole here, but nobody played that way 'back in the day' (and note that there are a lot more 90s mapsets that assume a continuous run w/saves than there are in any other era), and it's only fairly recently, 20+ years later, that I've seen any interest doing things that way really hit the scene, often as a catchall 'best of both worlds' approach to experiencing the differences between continuous and pistol-start play over the course of a longer mapset, which strikes me as amusingly ironic. It's just one of those little design quirks that is never going to fit entirely neatly inside of a box, Doom being an action game that did away with the arcade conceits of (conventional) scoring and lives and whatnot but that also had an unrestricted/unconditional savegame function. There's a certain conflict of design philosophies hardwired into the game in that sense, and id, in their wisdom, left it there (and bothered to balance the maps so that they could all be beaten from pistol-start) in the interest of user-friendliness and choice rather than seeing it as a demon that had to be slain.

Incidentally, I strongly disagree that the IWADs are more fun to play continuously than from pistol-starts (it's only from pistol-start that Sandy's virtues become truly apparent, for instance), but I suppose that's a different topic.

[baja blast rd.]

Yeah man, the weird pistol starts where you don't know where the fuck anything is and dozens of monsters are chasing you can be quite exhilarating. Pistol-starting Suburbs this year was one of my more memorable Doom experiences.

[Demon of the Well]

^^My first pistol-start ever was "Barrels 'O Fun", following my screwing around with a launcher and learning how to change the demos the game would play on startup if left idle. I recall it vividly because it was such a baptism by fire, heh.

[Spectre01]

I don't believe that carryover ammo makes that much of a difference when it comes to map difficulty. Shells and bullets still tend to be "infinite" on pistol start play, so that leaves rockets and cells as the balancing factor. If the encounters are difficult enough, then having 20 vs 50 rockets won't make a fight easier. My experience from playing from pistol start usually has the maps providing enough ammo to kill everything anyways, so having extra cells/rockets speeds up the initial start of the level more than anything else. And killing meaty enemies with weak weapons is more often than not tedious rather than challenging. Now my biggest issue with pistol play is when a map is designed in such a way that requires speedrunning and foreknowledge to grab the necessary loot to start killing stuff. This is a good example where copying the first 30 seconds puts you in the same place as carrying stuff over form the previous map would, but it's obscure enough for the average Joe going in blind to have a bad time in what's otherwise not a particularly difficult map.

[HIB]

I am pretty new to DOOM. When I play new .wad, I usually play it continuously on UV. When I feel that I will be able to beat some of it's maps Pistol Starting, I go for it (on UV of course). I do not dare to try Pistol Starting wads like Sunder or Sunlust on UV, because my skill is pretty low but when it comes to original iwads or easier wads, PS is the most enjoyable way of playing DOOM.
PS. SL1 run in Dark Souls is easy compared to Demon's Souls (sorry for offtopic)

[Avoozl]

Death exits used to bug me a lot.

[Empyre]

Death exits bug me a lot. You are penalizing the player for exiting.

[Sporku]

Empyre said:

Death exits bug me a lot. You are penalizing the player for exiting.

I think you're looking at it the wrong way. Death exits are a useful mechanic for splitting Doom 2 megawads into "episodes" similarly to the original Doom, or as a simple means of starting the player fresh so they aren't running around with a full arsenal throughout a full 30-map WAD.

[Spectre01]

They're a useful mechanic when the author takes the forced pistol start into account when designing the next map. But not in the case of something like Scythe where Alm makes map 11 as though there was no death exit before it, creating an unnecessary difficulty spike and making it one of the harder maps of Episode 2.