Eden

[Deadwing]

Loved this level. I've played on HMP, so I felt it was quite balanced ammo and enemy wise. I've died a lot though, especially since I'm not used to slaughter gameplay in the second half. But I liked that even the bigger setpieces allowed lots of space to walk and there wasn't many... hmmm... complicated monsters like archvilles and pain elementals lol. Of course, this on HMP.

I tried to record a demo, but since I died like 20 times at least, you probably won't find it interesting hahah

Anyway, awesome atmosphere, I loved the beautiful landscapes with all the green and blue, water and the "fountain" I guess. The indoor area were also beautifully crafted I felt this also had some sort of narrative, with the end where you put the GK so you go to the exit.

I haven't find any secrets though, I'm quite bad on finding them, so I've missed lots of baddies =x

Anyway, awesome level! :D

[bemused]

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s4fjmrpr95rmxgl/bemusedfails.lmp?dl=0 extremely late, but finally got round to sorting out a depressing fda full of death, savescumming, fight cheesing and misery.. exit with 95% kills, no secrets. Think the last 5% may have been in the BSK area which i didnt really feel like trekking back to after being hideously abused by the last room... although i did get lucky with stumbling across the cheese ledge near the end which made things way easier than i was expecting them to be :D only issue i found was there apppeared to be a missing texture on the lower inside of the HK/zerk box looking outwards.. all in all i really liked this.. especially the pinky/manc fight tucked away in the middle. felt at times armor was tight but i am pretty bad at doom and have a strange habit of saving after taking loads of damage :P

[baja blast rd.]

Ty all <3.

New version: http://www.mediafire.com/download/xw72s47t7ha8o92/Eden_B3.wad

Final big fight is buffed quite a bit, among a few other changes.

[Crunchynut44]

FDA found below

Im not a great Doomer so I dont think I got to play much of the map however so far it is absolutely wonderful! Gorgeous scenery which is truly embellished with the green trees a textures and a fitting score to go with the visuals. Game play wise whilst not my thing was well balanced and monster teleports were used well and weren't unfair nor too easily cheesed.

Ill be playing this again with Zandronum on a lower difficulty to hopefully see what the rest has to offer.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/nqfubvyszbw2eua/Crunchynut_EDENb3_FDA.lmp?dl=0

[Crunchynut44]

Just had time for a causal Zandronum playthrough on HNTR. Awesome map, and love the style that is quite prominent in all your maps.

Also dat palette

[Albertoni]

I'm really, really not a fan of removing the red hurt colors from the palette. Half of my deaths were by not noticing I was being shot from behind.

This on GZDoom 2.2pre-2123, in case they should be there.

[baja blast rd.]

Yeah that might be a bug in that version of GZDoom. Works for me in 2.1.1, and in prBoom+ and glBoom+.

[Albertoni]

rdwpa said:

Yeah that might be a bug in that version of GZDoom. Works for me in 2.1.1, and in prBoom+ and glBoom+.

Yeah, it is. Did some digging around and it seems turning on antialiasing in that version removes all full-screen palette effects. Thanks. Great map otherwise.

[Demon of the Well]

Hey, look, I'm not dead! Exaltation and peregrination in equal measures. It's been a long time coming, but as promised, I finally made some time to play and comment on Eden. Hopefully the necromancy here's not too unseemly, but the way I figure it, if nothing else having the thread bumped might give someone who missed the thread the first time around a chance to see/play the map, what with your refusal to release anything formally and all. ;)

An FDA (skill 4, saves) is here, though it's not a particularly lovely thing, I'm afraid. I believe I died twice over the duration, both vs. the big creeping mess that breaks out upon taking the green skull, generally a result of poor decisions meeting with some subtle unfriendliness in the physical environment. Usually I'm calm and at least relatively collected, but I have to admit I did get just a mite salty upon the second death, haha, leading to a very ugly/foolish minor tantrum in the third attempt, which somehow ended up being the one where I finished. As a consolation, I did at least find all 5 secrets in what seemed to be more or less the intended sequence, generally without too much bewildered wandering/humping involved.

Lots of folks mentioned Ribbiks as a point of stylistic contrast, and while I can certainly see this in the first area (which did immediately remind me in general look of m31 of Sunlust, if not quite in tone), the second is something altogether different, sector-art on the automap view aside--not like the man holds the patent on layered circles and curves, after all! The rolling expanses and long views with occasional pronounced height changes somewhat put me in mind of Darkwave0000's bespoke approach to natural/outdoor terrain, though the overall sense of scale and style of monster placement are both quite different, as your own personal style continues to take shape. Aesthetically, the sights range from pleasant (i.e. in the airy, somewhat visually understated second zone) to quite lovely in places for those willing to stop for a moment and smell the roses; I most liked the assorted views of and across the floating iron bastion from various points around the ring of peripheral islands, where the BK observatory building is usually a point of focus as it is the tallest structure in the area--the relative quiet of this zone gives one time to stop and look around, not really something one can readily do in the second zone. Given some of your emergent aesthetic pecadillos I was kind of surprised there were no sector-canoes or the like to be found, but the more representational style of detail in the peripheral area certainly shows this same interest, of course, and seeing as it dominates in one specific part of the map it sort of helps to lend that structurally sparse peripheral area its own shade of mood, in contrast to the pragmatic arena/gamespace nature of the central structure and the simple, shape-focused nature of the second zone. The lighting's pretty simple throughout, in line with the open-sky/open-area approach--I think the GK approach framed against blackness and the somewhat oddly cheery luminence of the secret twin-cyb cave were the only effects that really jumped out at me here--so a lot of the lifting falls to the texture and color schemes. Jungle green and deep Doomblue with elements of wood and metal are a tried and tested combo, of course, and so the overall presentation goes down smoothly. The custom palette is an excellent addition considering the dominant textures--it looks a mite familiar to me, but I can't quite place where I've seen it before. "Jungle Spirits", maybe? Whatever the source, the prominence of its blues helps tie together the two major areas through the shared elements of water and especially sky, important in this case since the two are otherwise markedly dissimilar.

This is something that will make or the break the experience for some folks, I reckon, leaving aside the whole tired 'slaughter' discourse. I think it's fair to say that this is one level that essentially feels like two different/largely unrelated maps dovetailed together, which the presumably deliberate 'dropped beat' of the transition between the two only underscores. Given shared elements of color and basic terrain elements, a little imagination can address the aesthetic/structural side of the split as readily as in most other PWADs--I sort of settled on the notion that the two zones are actually the exact same place, but at different points along a timeline, with the hills and caves of the second zone sleeping beneath the nameless expanse of water seen in the first (but which came first??--outro sequence is perhaps suggestive here?). Looking beneath the surface, one can see that there's also more of a conceptual gameplay thread uniting the two than it may initially seem--the element of momentum as concerns supply stocks carried over from the first area to the second (which in turn enlivens and enforces the secret-hunting earlier on), and so forth--but all that being said, for all practical intents and purposes I don't reckon one could really blame players for seeing something of a disunity between the two segments, since they both play and look so differently, and don't interact in any way that's readily apparent until well after the fact. That the first zone can be freely revisited after reaching a certain point in the second perhaps helps to address this to some degree, but realistically speaking I think most will intuitively view each of the two in a vacuum, understandable if for no other reason than that playing the first zone fully or 'properly' is balanced to stage the second as one unbroken sequence.

Earlier fights in the first zone go down more or less as I'd come to expect from your older maps, though on the whole most are a little gentler, I'd say, which seems intended to help encourage the inquisitive spirit (it's harder to feel comfortable poking around for nuances in the environment in maps with really oppressive combat balance, I find). The BK fight's a good example, there's a certain conceptual kinship to the way the encounter is staged and even to the timing of its second wave that is reminiscent of one of the two marquee sequences from "Blank Space", though again much less threatening in effect. Biggest surprise here is perhaps the running battle which opens the map, which is quite variable within the bounds of a relatively limited space and with very rigid/set triggers for its main elements (i.e. each of the two viles appear to be tied to simple triplines rather than to your signature propensity for inscrutable voodoo-mechanisms). Caco use here is a little ballsy since it's really easy for them to end up in a really distant part of the map (see: the bizarre odyssey of the last tomato I squash before leaving the area), and the balance of basic ammo here is more fragile than it may initially seem (resurrections in the wrong places or weak infighting seem like they might heavily impact early momentum), but generally speaking it all comes together nicely and showcases a sensibility for punchy little setpiece fights to complement the barely lampshaded sandbox serving as the backdrop, as well as the nascent conceit of a big hidden/optional battle, surely one of the most consistently compelling of modern gameplay tropes.

The second zone, now, was really surprising to me. It initially throws you into the deep end--a big mass of monsters compels you to move to collect ammo/powerups in the immediate area, which awakens the initial three viles, who make you move even more, potentially stirring up even more of a mob, and oh shit I just got hit by one of the viles and thrown into still another hornets' nest and NOW what can I do but run even further in and etc. etc. etc., all well and good. After getting my teeth into it for the first few minutes, though, it started dawning on me that this whole big area writ large tends to play more like oldschool/ZoI slaughter than anything, and being framed in a modern curvy/looping battlefield lends it a vibrant "something old, something new" sort of impact. The initial scramble either goes well and leaves you (temporarily) in control of the elevated eastern plane, or goes...less well....and sees you chased or hurled into one of the tributary paths, which all eventually terminate in a dead end you can clear out and work from to eventually wrest the greater area from its entrenched defenders (often representing concentrated pockets of one particular flavor of attack), with a greater or lesser degree of difficulty depending on where you ended up.

The post-GK action inverts the role of player and monsters, but otherwise maintains that same defining aspect of warring zones of control, with the player entrenched (initially) in the caves while monsters amass outside. It's not as black and white as all that, of course--the hilarious infestation of lost souls in the aforesaid caves add complexity to the scenario beyond simply hanging out to focus fire through the cave mouth(s), for instance--but in broad form this half of the map is an outing in planning, positioning, resource management, and tactics far more than in fancy maneuvering or highly conceptual choreography. The limits of my own skill were surely involved in my experience to some degree, of course, but I found that almost every time I tried to skip combat or move around without first dotting my i's a crossing my t's, I ended up getting walloped upside the head shortly thereafter--I should have proceeded more methodically, as this seems to be the way the map's balance and terrain both naturally lean. Both of the deaths in the FDA, to whit, followed ill-advised attempts to leave the caves with no real plan beyond heading in the general direction of the BFG; in both cases I brashly underestimated the strength of the enemy force and, following one evasive blunder or another, ended up with me wounded and trapped in tactically disadvantageous positions with monster meat choking the only way out, not something a BFG will simply see one through when other resources are carefully placed in guarded pockets. The heart of the game here turned out to lie in figuring out a workable route between havens (since the paths available are deceptively limited, even without considering the masses of monsters on the field), letting the enemy force slowly exhaust itself. This is not the most glamorous playstyle, I suppose, and certainly not one that is particularly fashionable in the current scene (at least outside the depths of a specific niche), but I maintain it's a valid one, and your feat of stacking enough layers of attrition and nuance atop one another to create a scenario balancing threat and flexibility over a large area without leaning heavily on headless chicken bullethell play is commendable.

All that being said, since this is still technically a 'beta', indulge me some criticism. One of the root elements of how deceptively dangerous that post-GK onslaught is has little to do with thing balance or player affordances as with the fact that the actual terrain works against many of the possible plans of movement in subtle but potentially lethal ways--a pivotal point in both of my deaths, for example, was finding that I could not actually path through the flooded central space as freely as its visual presentation seemed to suggest, exposing myself to all kinds of withering heat while scrambling for literal footholds. Most paths are one-way despite the open/visually connected flavor of the greater area, and so the space as a whole has a somewhat herky-jerky feel to navigability, all the more pronounced when it's teeming with high-level monsters and supply pockets are far between. To some extent this environmental hostility is obviously central to encounter framing--i.e. the blursphere fight only makes sense conceptually if you can't simply step back out of it, the big floods of souls are presumably used to make what would otherwise be the obviously most favorable holdout points less attractive (to say the least) by dint of interfering with movement, etc.--though past a certain point I feel like it may be making the selection of possible approaches a little more rigidly narrow than it needs to be.

Open spaces invite movement, but here are carpeted in heavy attrition (viles beyond walls of meatshielding with powerful lines of sight, walls of hitscannery cropping up all over the place, etc.), and with healing and ammo limited to small-ish stockpiles around the periphery, one is left to limit time in them to tactical runs between key points, rather than rambo-ing around in the open. This degree of limitation reads naturally enough, but when the aforesaid moving between points is also made a hassle by the way paths (and transition points between them) are laid out, a little of the joy (and apparent open-endedness) is sucked out of the proceedings. Monsters are theoretically free to move but also tend to clump up in awkward pockets which occasionally undercut their potential--i.e. the initial wave has trouble actually storming the GK cave because they can't climb over the lip of the central pool and onto the surrounding the walkway save for at one small point, the torrent of skeletons tends to get caught up in the back/exit area and trickle out slowly, the mess that appears down where the blursphere fight occurred can be safely ignored entirely by a player who knows what s/he is doing, etc. I think the last big fight would read better if some of these movement strictures were dissolved upon picking up the GK, with the level of the central pool high enough to allow players/monsters to climb onto the walkway at more points, and maybe even 'water stairs' between the BFG's position and the blursphere pit appearing, diegetically explained by further flooding. These changes would preserve most of the existing encounter dynamic (just running around in the open and letting stuff infight is not really going to work in any case, due to monster composition) while opening up a few new strategies, and making the execution of existing ones less fiddly. The possible reduction in challenge eliding from increased freedom of movement ought to be counterbalanced fairly well by increased monster mobility from the eastern/northern reaches, I suspect--you'll still be able to camp out, but will HAVE to move at some point in order to gain more resources, seems like.

I felt that the incidental encounters in the GK cave prior to taking the key were a mite throwaway in effect, and reckon they could be done away with entirely without losing anything of value--the short silence between the first and second messes this would represent would likely be welcomed by many players, in fact, also offering some diegetic value via playing up the GK as something of a sacred object, not to be disturbed. I also didn't really care for the fight(s) in the actual exit area, which I would say is the weakest content in the whole map--a wall of skeletons, a pack of viles to be teased out a few at a time. I can see the viles being humorously lethal should one happen to stumble into them at speed, but if you've done your diligence up to that point they present little more than an anticlimactic formality. My suggestion here might be to use some of your BooM magic and have the viles appear at the far end of the area (i.e. the one the player enters from) on a timer after the GK is placed on its pedestal, with the exit fountain lowering a calculated amount of time later--cue nervously throwing rockets at the advancing cabal, and then having to switch to the BFG to try to hold out with the small pillars as limited cover as they close in. Much more exciting!

Nice artsy exit sequence. Did violating the green skull's sanctum release some sort of deluge that drowned the valley (maybe the planet?), perhaps leading to its state as seen at the start of the map?

Enjoyable map on the whole. Perhaps a mite stylistically disjointed, but this is not always necessarily a bad thing, and in effect I think will mostly only affect those with a philosophical opposition to large/long maps. Also interesting to see you work with different styles of combat in discrete areas, presumably in a noble quest to find a delicate blend of incidental and setpiece combat.

Thanks for the 70+ minutes of entertainment! IW.wad is next....

[baja blast rd.]

Cool, thanks! (Glad that you've escaped from the DWMC for a month, presumably to catch up on a variety of recent community-produced stuff, too.) I'm definitely going to use that idea for making the second area more fluid, and the one for improving the end viles, which is something I should have thought of. I've also removed three viles that are ensconced within the revenant horde at the end, so that going straight for the BFG and fighting out in the open is a lot more viable. That was the approach I wanted most people to gravitate to, and it still has a strong flavor of zone-based combat, I think.

The story was intended to be open for interpretation, but I like the one you came up with. I guess that would also necessitate there being a time warp of sorts, but that actually fits, though not intentionally: the second area reminds me of a prehistoric wilderness, and most of the structural "building" elements are of an older-looking style than the wood and metal of the first area -- although there is, somehow, teleportation technology :D.

[nrofl]

Very atmospheric. Awesome!

[Ed_Deth]

Crazy map had fun but never found a single secret.  Means I'll have to try again.

[dobu gabu maru]

I finally played this, hooray (ver. Bf3)!

 

Was quite a bit of fun. Died a whole bunch. Constantly bemoaned "where's the ammooooooo?" to my computer. Got juggled by archviles. Found the BFG after the final battle was winding down. Died a whole bunch.

 

I think the craziest/most commendable part of the map is that you found a way to make excessive space extremely aggressive. Usually the rules of Doom are that the more space you hand the player, the easier it becomes for them to tackle the monsters you throw their way... unless, of course, there's archviles amidst an army in an open field or the player is dangerously low on ammo... both of which you've fiendishly mash together here. The big massive Eden party after you grab the Green Key is really awesome due to how many ways the player can arguably tackle it—I chose to hole up in the mossy caves with my 60+ rockets after taking out the archviles, confident that I could cause enough infighting to cause the horde to destroy themselves. But unfortunately—as you might've figured from playtesting—there's a buttload of mancubii that come into that tunnel, eventually gobbling up all of my rockets to the point where I started to panic (guess who didn't throw down a safety save? THIS GUY) To make matters worse there was an AV that slipped in somewhere and was rezzing corpses in the tunnel for a good 5 minutes, so eventually I had to save spam my way out of there at a meager 5% health. Thankfully nothing else on the map posed as much as a threat, though the AV finale did kill me about 10 times (I kinda like it as is, though perhaps Demon's suggestion would be fun).

 

The map is a bit... weirdly split into two parts though. There's the relatively calmer, more down-trodden beginning where—once you collect your arms and neutralize those pesky archviles—you're kinda freely exploring this weird, possibly sunken shrine. Then with little fanfare you step into the teleporter and arrive at Eden proper, the fights there not resembling the small scale stuff the player had just experienced. I personally would've liked a little more interconnectivity between the halves, but it's not something that's detrimental to the experience or I'd dock points for. I liked all the minor graphical details you tried out with each island (for as simple as it is, this one is my favorite), and the general feel of the map overall. I still think I prefer Ovum for its grotesqueness and battles more, but this map certainly had its moments; it's a very smartly designed map, a lot of things happened that got me to say "oh that's a good idea!" Nice work.

[RjY]

On 27/08/2016 at 1:16 PM, RjY said:

Sector 1172 (tag 242) is missing a sky transfer.

@rdwpa you fixed this in B3f but another one has appeared now that sector 1144 has gained a non-zero tag (269). Do they not show up for you? They're quite hard to miss!

Spoiler

(Sorry for not having tested B3f before, but having played B2 quite thoroughly at the time, I wanted to do something different)

[Phade102]

I downloaded this just so I could see the pretty architecture. I'm not a fan of slaughter maps, but this is a pretty map and I wish to consume its essence and make it my own. (I may or may not be a demon.)