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Do you design your wads levels based on HMP or UV?

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It's interesting because many game devs always state that people usually play on Normal difficulty so that's what they base their games around and is the most balanced. I know Doom community has a many players that only UV, which is the "fair" hard mode, so I'm wondering if many WADders actually do the opposite of game designers and start on UV and work their way backwards from there.

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I always assume players play on UV. I don't even play Doom on anything less and never have. I never liked it how there are fewer enemies on lower difficulties  because it makes me feel like I am missing out.

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I like when maps have extra traps in UV instead of just double-triple the number of stuff to kill. Also I loathe the annoying cyberdemon who is only on UV and serves nothing but to camp stairs..

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Yes, but in my next mapset I'll on HMP as the default difficult, then UV will be an afterthought, so HMP players won't get an "inferior experience"

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8 minutes ago, Deadwing said:

Yes, but in my next mapset I'll on HMP as the default difficult, then UV will be an afterthought, so HMP players won't get an "inferior experience"

You better name the map PLAY ON HMP or get ready to see complaints about UV being unfair\imbalanced\too unforgiving :p.

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I start at UV and make it too hard for me (as I'm not a great player) and then remove monsters until it feels about right.  That then becomes HMP.

 

I'm not sure if it's the best way, but it seems to work ok.

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I've been primarily designing my maps around UV. I'm not great at Doom so I do my best to make UV as challenging for myself as I possibly can to push me to my absolute limits. That way the difficulty should be a good enough challenge and experience for equal/higher skilled players. Eventually I'll get around to designing HMP to be an easier but fair and still challenging difficulty, but UV will probably always be my main focus.

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Most Doom players I know play on UV, and it's the one I always start with when I'm playing a new level.  So when it comes to mapping, I design things around UV, then spend a lot of time balancing HNTR with fewer enemies, changed traps, and different amounts of health/ammo/powerups.  Then I finally balance HMP, finding a middle ground between the two.

 

When I do all of the balancing, I go by a few rules of thumb:

  • Overall, later maps should be harder than earlier maps in a WAD.
  • I expect to die a lot on UV, but can still ultimately beat the level after multiple attempts.
  • Quicksave spamming on UV is fine - I know I'm not the best Doom player.
  • I shouldn't die at all on HNTR, and I should be able to beat the level without finding any secrets and without using a savegame.
  • HNTR should take half the time or less than it does on UV.
  • I allow myself to die once on HMP, and only from a stupid mistake.  I must avoid all secrets and beat the map in an amount of time that's in-between what it takes me on UV and HNTR.
  • I can't end a level on HNTR or HMP below 50% health.

Does this work? I honestly have no idea :-P

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43 minutes ago, YukiRaven said:
  • Quicksave spamming on UV is fine - I know I'm not the best Doom player.

I think this is fine by me. Usually the first time, I'll scumbag save all the time. Mostly, I just want to know what happens in the map.

 

However, if I really want to beat the map, I'll come back later and segment the level into different parts. Then practice and try to single segment it.

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I design for HMP so it challenges me and is still fun; then I use feedback from actually good players for UV.  

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Designing around HMP and then adding/removing stuff for UV/HNTR is a good idea. I should probably start doing that to make testing a lot smoother since I make sure every major fight on UV has a good chance of killing me.

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5 hours ago, hardcore_gamer said:

I always assume players play on UV. I don't even play Doom on anything less and never have. I never liked it how there are fewer enemies on lower difficulties  because it makes me feel like I am missing out.

I guess that attitude exemplifies why so many people tend to assume 'hardcore' with 'stupid'... :P

That said, another thing I want to add here is, "Assumption is the mother of all fuckups!" :D:D

 

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I always start out with UV then I remove certain monsters for lower difficulties.  Sometimes If I really feel nitpicky ill for example remove a chaingunner and put 2 shotgunners around where he is.  I like to use the crusher map from doom2 as a difficulty reference because on UV you have a mastermind then a couple of barons then hellknights on the lowest difficulty.  

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I designed The Becoming for HMP, sure. And before that Nex Credo and Sinister Intention and Murderous Intent... in fact, I think only 900 Deep In The Dead was built with UV in mind, I've no idea why I changed my approach there.

 

"Less monsters makes me feel like I'm missing out" makes me giggle though. MORE IS ALWAYS OBVIOUSLY BETTER AMIRITE.

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I design for both to be fun. I've never adhered to that zaney "HMP isn't the One True Experience" adage. In my wads, HMP typically adds more health and ammo and only removes enemies where absolutely necessary (2 arch vile trap now has 1 vile, for example). The main difference is definitely in provided health and ammo as opposed to altering monster count.

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That's an interesting approach but rebalancing items seems a lot more time consuming that checking off a few difficulty flags on some enemies.

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Both. Suppose a trap is designed to be effective with cacodemons because they fly over certain walls and get close to the player, and I put 6 on UV. On HMP, I'll instead put 16 imps or some hell knights, so the player is pestered by more shots, but since they're at a distance, you have more time to do everything you need.

Revenant snipers become chaingunners and vice-versa as appropriate, those spectres in dark areas turn into normal pinkies...

 

It's not radically different, but there's enough of a difference. That said, the difficulty is tuned so that HMP I can finish the level without saves if I'm careful, and UV... Well, anything goes.

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The fact that so many people consider themselves to be 'missing out' on something if they play on anything less than UV only goes to show the lack of creativity on the part of the mappers of the past.

 

Modern maps should absolutely be designed with each difficulty setting providing either a 'total' experience varying on how difficult play is to execute, or a totally different experience for each setting.

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I always start designing level ls with UV in mind when I'm doing item placements. Then I add and try to balance the other difficulties. In all honesty I find my levels on UV are still somewhat easy, just with much more monsters and items. Maybe it's just me, I don't know.

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The fact that so many people consider themselves to be 'missing out' on something if they play on anything less than UV only goes to show the lack of creativity on the part of the mappers of the past.

I think it's more indicative that there are too many people in the community who would rather complain about a wad's balance than simply admit they aren't all that great at Doom and move on down to HMP. I can't ever recall feeling like a wad was "lacking" on HMP unless it was just not a very good wad to begin with. Maybe I'm just cynical, but people don't want their egos bruised and are also super picky. That's where the complaints come from. I guess you have to play through on both settings to know for sure, but "cruisy version of the same thing" is exactly what a lower difficulty is meant to be/has pretty much always been in games, right?

 

It would be cool to see someone change them from skill settings into like, different playthrough styles completely or something - ones that aren't exactly harder or easier, just different, but that's not only a difficult nut to crack but also not really what skill levels were designed for in the first place. Would still be a cool little gimmicky feature to add to a wad though!

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I think most people make a map in UV difficulty. It should be a challenge for the Mapper too even if he already knows the layout. From there you can easily make it a little bit harder for Nightmare and easier for lower difficulty's :)

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Balancing difficulty is the most boring part of the design so I don't focus on it too much.
In general I always build the map with idea of UV play and adjust the amount of enemies for lower difficulty levels. So there are just weaker enemies or lower amount of enemies. So in my case amount of health and ammo is the same for all difficulties.

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i keep adding monsters on UV until it makes me laugh how many monsters there are

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The problem that I have with having more than 1 difficulty level is that it can too easily mess up the experience. When there is one difficulty level only you can craft the experience into being exactly how you intended it to be, where as by having difficulty levels you have to force yourself to make some dumb changes just to make the map easier or harder. Take for example the final baron fight at the end of the Knee-deep in the dead. On HMP mode the pacing and mood is perfect, since you just walk towards this empty area and then all of a sudden the barons are revealed to you and you go "oh shit" and then have a boss fight with them. But on UV for the sake of making the map harder the arena is filled with a horde of specters that you have to kill first and it does nothing but mess up the pacing/gameplay of the baron fight.

 

And on the other hand, there are also other times where removing monsters to make things less hard can result in some areas feeling underpopulated which also messes up the pacing as well. Take for example the lack of zombies in the armor room on E1M1 when not playing on UV. Replacing tough monsters with weaker monsters also isn't ideal because then you also alter the original gameplay experience away from what it was intended to be and also possibly unbalance the map in regards to the amount of ammo and health needed.

 

And speaking of the lack of balance, allowing monsters to move faster and do more damage can seriously fuck up balance and it's easily the worst way to make games harder.

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E1M8 is a bad example for this imo. The specters and barrels make that fight more intense than circle strafing the 2 stupid barons, without forcing HMP players to try something that requires too much movement from them (by that time's difficulty standard). E2M8 would be a good example where all it does is add more annoying lost shits to annoy both you and the cyber.

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10 minutes ago, hardcore_gamer said:

The problem that I have with having more than 1 difficulty level is that it can too easily mess up the experience. When there is one difficulty level only you can craft the experience into being exactly how you intended it to be, where as by having difficulty levels you have to force yourself to make some dumb changes just to make the map easier or harder.

It is the mapper's responsibility (which IMO was an ingenious decision) to make each difficulty just as interesting for the range of players expected. My recommendation to anyone: if you don't care enough to playtest thoroughly across multiple difficulties, then don't implement them at all. There's no point wasting time on something you yourself don't care about. In that way, ITYTD becomes the "easy" difficulty and NM the "hard", which is better than some half-hearted effort that lacks the balance of whatever One True Difficulty you originally envisioned the map in.

 

I myself have yet to map anything, but if I were to look into it I'd probably attempt either:

  1. Difficulty that keeps all fights intact (with rare exception) but changes the weapons, ammo, and health/armor available; as well as keys and blocker things to alter progression
  2. Difficulty that changes fights in such a way that is interesting regardless of difficulty

#2 is certainly the more challenging and amorphous approach: everything depends on context, and you'd be effectively designing each layout for three different possibilities of varying difficulty. However, such design would also have more replay value, as beginners and veterans alike may easily find interest in going through the mapset at least three times.

 

It's a tough call, really. I don't think there's any shame in skipping difficulty implementation, especially if the difference boils down to how much ammo you're allowed to waste or how big the health walls are. In my book, a harder difficulty shouldn't correlate to "how much more am I willing to put up with" but rather "how much farther can I think ahead".

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HMP being the designed-for setting and UV being pretty much the same but with added 'annoyance' monsters is currently the way I do things. Hell, with the UV stuck monsters in the doom.wad IWAD, I'd say monsters for that setting were added without much thought and without (thorough, at least) testing.

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I design for UV in mind, since I like a really good challenge and make the wads as challenging as I can handle. After I've tested the map myself in UV, I add new things, or change things so they dont spawn in HMP. I have recently had someone offer to help me test exclusively for HMP, as that is the difficulty level they play on, so it should go better!

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I make the map thinking of UV gameplay, then I make the appropiate changes for every difficulty through extensive testing.

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When I started making maps for Doom, I always accounted for the difficulties, and sometimes had fun with it.

 

As of late, I don't even bother swapping out monsters or items for either difficulties. "Everyone is invited", so to speak, and I wouldn't blame anyone for dying several times in any of my maps (should they ever see the light of day that is), as I am more about dat monster placement, and extra enemy or two shouldn't be a problem nor a luxury. As of "boss fights", well, umm... Mook support and occasional enviro trap.

 

My favorite nasty trick is to have a monster closet open in front of the player with a barrel closet in back. Should the player just sidestep, he gets blown into smithereens >:D.

 

I mean, it is not like I would ever release a map, so who cares? Either way, I'll let you guys consider the option above just for the sake of discussion.

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