Level deorations

[jerk-o]

I was playing through phase 1 and thought, "Where are all the dead people that died before I got here?" I think that having dead marine corpses (with a weapon and/or some ammo) and dead monsters scattered throughout the levels would add a nice touch and possibly give players the idea that they're playing through a "story" instead of just running around a bunch of levels shooting a bunch of things.

[Voros]

IMO the story can be told using the levels themselves. Making the levels look distinct enough for the player to realize what this place is and how important it might have been before. In Freedoom 0.9 and before, the C1M1 had a "collapsing wall" which was supposed to make the player feel like he is in a volatile area, and it could fall apart anytime.

Yeah, it wasn't well executed though.

It's worth mentioning that Doom also had levels with nil-barely any corpses on levels, and people still loved it. By making a level seem clean and eerie, creates a strange atmosphere. [STORY RELATED;MIGHT CHANGE]Expecting to see corpses and corpses, you instead find nothing, just empty hallways. Add that to the fact that was no "evacuation" of any sort, you would guess the bodies are held somewhere else/monsters took em for whatever darned reason/they dissolved away or something IDK.

Say, one level can be a prison zone, and one of the doors is open. "Who could've gotten out?" Maybe some anonymous prisoner, or even you.
Or a level set to look like a secret lab with the very first teleporter machine of the game. "Where does that lead to?" Maybe to a whole new world, another planet, another facility or something else.

Possibilities are endless.

TL;DR I support making levels more story-driven, but there's gotta to be a limit to how much, else we'll probably get a 2.5D Call of Duty/Halo/Doom 3(I liked this game though, but I never felt like replaying it). Too much story-driven levels might make the the levels' replayability small. Leave some room for the player to find out whats going on.

That's just me though.