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Koko Ricky

Could id have avoided the constant bottomless pits?

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Man, I died countless times trying to explore an area with a narrow path, or trying to reach an area that looks accessible, but isn't. This really disrupted the pacing for me, because I would be doing fine, then suddenly fall about 50 feet, and magically, because you'd be trapped down there forever, you just explode. There are way too many areas like that and it seems the level design could have benefited from allowing you to clamber back up to the main gameplay areas and just having a handful of pits.

Really, I think they overdid it and having them in nearly every goddamn map was just silly. I mean, OG Doom made occasional use of inescapable pits (which don't always have damage floors), but keep in mind the key word: occasional.

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It was mostly a non-matter to me, except that part in hell with the ammo sticking out side of that rock, I always hate trying to grab the little bunch of goodies.

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That bothered me a good bit too. Especially after you get pretty good, the monsters dont seem to hurt you as much. But tiny errors in judgment about how far you can jump or what you can and cant stand or climb on result in a fall with no chance of recovery. Nothing seemed to kill me more than that. Not to mention that the falling death animation doesn't even look good. Some reason you smash into pieces and the body parts bounce around in midair as if it were a flat surface.

Doom guy is pretty fast at moving upward, I dunno why they wouldn't just put a pit with a little bit of a climbing obstacle course to get you back to where you were.

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Piper Maru said:

Just watch where you're going next time.


FPS platforming is notorious for being inelegant and I think you know that.

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I'd say it's more an issue with the stage design than the core platforming mechanics, which are pretty rad. There's a lot of bits like the first level's bobble-head on the cliff where it looks like you can jump to it from around the rock on another path, but then you hit an invisible wall and die.

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I don't mind the bottomless pits, but I hate "camouflaged" bottomless pits and invisible walls that prevent you from clambering onto a platform you were trying to reach, only to drop to your death, because an unseen wall says "no go!".

The Argent Tower level has an example of the first at the start, where you can look down and see a Martian rock surface relatively far below and slightly obscured by fog, but if you drop down there, *splat!*, you're gone. Very irritating the first time you play that level, trying to find secrets.

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I shouldn't say that its unfair or that it makes the game hard or anything. But a game that encourages exploration probably shouldn't make the most innocuous obstacles the ones that have the most dire consequences.

Like in old Doom, there are damaging floors that do 5% damage, but I dont really see the purpose of 20% damaging floors. As soon as a player knows a floor hurts, he immediately flees to safety. Both floors achieve the same effect but is significantly more likely to kill. You shouldn't want to kill the player in your game.

Ive observed a few places where you just automatically die for falling outside of the play area of the game. So in places where there are bottomless pits, they read to me as part of the level that the designers didn't feel like making. Just kill the player for falling in!

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There are some nice visual queues for some of the grapple-able areas; they are in the form of these slivers of green light that are very obvious. But of course this only applies to manmade platforms and such. When you're exploring the mountains of Mars or Hell, you're kind of just hoping the area you think is accessible actually is. There are too many moments of having to assume one way or the other, instead of just automatically knowing. There are plenty of moments where this isn't a problem, and I do find the platforming genuinely fun for the most part. But really, I think players wouldn't have minded having to scale their way back up if they fell to a lower area.

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GoatLord said:

When you're exploring the mountains of Mars or Hell, you're kind of just hoping the area you think is accessible actually is. There are too many moments of having to assume one way or the other, instead of just automatically knowing.

this I agree with, I didn't take it to much to heart but it was a slight annoyence every now and again, there are some areas you can go that seems like you would die, and there are some areas you can't go or will die that look to be fine.

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It's rather a new trend, something I'v always wanted and I believe many others as well. Technology is still growing, we can only fit so many features into an engine at a time.

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AbhinandAnilDoomguy said:

Well why do you EXPLODE when you fall off a cliff on Mars??


I guess a standard "Oh I fell too far, I am dead, how tragic" animation would have looked too...boring? But at least it would have made sense. Exploding because you fell from the same fucking height as some of the sections where you jump down to lower ground is just silly.

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40oz said:

Not to mention that the falling death animation doesn't even look good. Some reason you smash into pieces and the body parts bounce around in midair as if it were a flat surface


You know what'd be funny? If it had a third person of Doom Slayer falling out of sight of the camera and then you hear a really loud exaggerated crash like you'd see on cartoons like Willie E. Coyote

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GoatLord said:

There are some nice visual queues for some of the grapple-able areas; they are in the form of these slivers of green light that are very obvious.

I had a slight problem with this because I couldn't believe Id would make "secret platforms" this obvious, so I interpreted the "green-lit platforms" as a case of "jump here if you need to get back on the 'Official' path".
Obviously, this meant that while looking for secrets, I was looking for platforms that didn't have green lights, because according to my own internal logic, it would make sense for these to be secrets.

Instead, I fell to my death because there was an invisible wall. I guess it was my own fault for adopting the screwy logic I used... :P

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Yeah, I have to admit I've ended up finding secrets because I thought I was on the straightline path. Doom '16 is great but the level design can be a bit screwy at times.

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GoatLord said:

There are some nice visual queues for some of the grapple-able areas; they are in the form of these slivers of green light that are very obvious. But of course this only applies to manmade platforms and such. When you're exploring the mountains of Mars or Hell, you're kind of just hoping the area you think is accessible actually is. There are too many moments of having to assume one way or the other, instead of just automatically knowing. There are plenty of moments where this isn't a problem, and I do find the platforming genuinely fun for the most part. But really, I think players wouldn't have minded having to scale their way back up if they fell to a lower area.


Actually, I never had this problem and was in fact impressed with how intuitive it was, even in hell.

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I now dislike Argent Tower. That one section, I kept on getting pushed through platforms and sliding across the top of them if I double-jumped at a bad time. It's also weird how you can't cancel your momentum with double-jump if you fall far enough, the game just doesn't let you input the command.

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Argent Tower is one of those levels I really want to like, because the basic concept of approaching the tower and then scaling it is really cool (and the level does look cool visually).

Unfortunately, when I first played it, I felt it was very unevenly paced between jumping puzzles and combat. Spent far too much time on jumping puzzle sections and not enough time killing Demons.
It's better now that I know the level, but I still wish they'd found a way to make fewer jumping sections, while maintaining the whole psychological aspect of building up suspense, which the jumping sections do manage to do rather well, until you reach the top and get transported to Hell.

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dsm said:

Argent Tower is one of those levels I really want to like, because the basic concept of approaching the tower and then scaling it is really cool (and the level does look cool visually).

I remember getting catapulted to death due to jumping on the pipelines leading to the secret crane room. Since then I'm always afraid of jumping in open spaces like that.

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massivefanofdoom said:

'Death due to environment' after I got my furthest so far in UNM. Ragequit and that was it, have not tried again since XD

Easily my biggest cause of death in UNM as well, which is supremely frustrating.

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I died like, once, to an actual monster in my first run of the game.

Every other death was me completely underestimating the levels' desire to kill me themselves. I got splattered by the friggin' crawlspace lift in the second level, even.

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I wonder if the difference has to do with console players vs PC players. Ive talked with people who played on PC and they said they breezed through the game pretty quick. As a console player I had trouble finding a comfortable distance to sit near my TV. While I wanted to see the whole picture in my field of view, important HD details like reading text on a computer screen or differentiating what I can and can't interact with was troublesome, which ultimately found me falling through things I couldn't stand on or meandering into danger without getting the full view of everything. I too died to pretty hilariously in the crawl space arctangent described. I dont know how I was supposed to know that was a hazard.

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Playing on Xbone here and that only happened to me once.

PS: how the hell do you people keep getting splattered by the crawlspace cargo lift on ResOps?

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40oz said:

I wonder if the difference has to do with console players vs PC players. Ive talked with people who played on PC and they said they breezed through the game pretty quick. As a console player I had trouble finding a comfortable distance to sit near my TV. While I wanted to see the whole picture in my field of view, important HD details like reading text on a computer screen or differentiating what I can and can't interact with was troublesome, which ultimately found me falling through things I couldn't stand on or meandering into danger without getting the full view of everything. I too died to pretty hilariously in the crawl space arctangent described. I dont know how I was supposed to know that was a hazard.


yeah, I'd like to believe that that, alongside most complaints they received from people thinking player speed was too slow were the main reasons behind them implementing the FOV slider on consoles as well as PC.

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Back on the original topic, I like death pits. For whatever reason, in any game, falling deaths are almost always universally funny as shit to me. I can be in a grumpy Dark Souls slog and get knocked off a cliff and lose all my souls and it still manages to brighten my mood.

I blame spacedm5. Curse and/or praise thee, Jetsonkind.

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