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Your thoughts on Plutonia

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Generally there are quite some players who could play on NM, but probably only ZeroMaster beat it in single segment.

 

BTW, Plutonia makes me want to change Revenant into not being able to fire homing missiles. (Just kidding, of course)

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27 minutes ago, Can't play on Nightmare said:

I asked the forum, not youtubers.

I'm a YouTuber...does that make my answers invalid?

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I should probably replay it as I've only played it twice; once back when I was 9/10 and again two years ago.   

I can hardly remember a thing other than I liked it much, much more than TNT.

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20 hours ago, Aquila Chrysaetos said:

https://www.doomworld.com/profile/16408-zeromaster010/

You might want to be a little less flippant with your responses.

I'm both somewhat shocked and unsurprised you don't know who ZeroMaster is.

I know Zero Master but when I asked , I meant people who are members of this forum. 

 

I didnt know Zero Master was himself a member of the forum if he was. Sorry.

 

I myself couldn't pass the first level of Plutonia on nightmare but I gave up easily considering that it was the most difficult Doom 2 game :D

 

As for normal Doom 2 ( Hell on Earth), I could go as far as the map 7 on Nightmare but it took me a lot of days to go this far. I am definetely sure map 7 is impossible for me to pass no matter how many days I spend on it.

Edited by Can't play on Nightmare

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It's like an abusive partner - it keeps on beating and beating you yet you love it all the same.

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3 hours ago, Can't play on Nightmare said:

 

As for normal Doom 2 ( Hell on Earth), I could go as far as the map 7 on Nightmare but it took me a lot of days to go this far. I am definetely sure map 7 is impossible for me to pass no matter how many days I spend on it.

I'm still trying to understand your obsession with Nightmare.  It's literally a joke difficulty.

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Played it after completing doom 2 not having played ultimate doom prior, somebody dared me to do it on ultra violence in the civvie 11 discord. Being relatively inexperienced I worried I was going to hate the experience, then I played it, and a few days ago completed it including the secret levels, and it was an oddly fantastic experience even though I spent several weeks playing it on and off. I found the action be fun, with level design that was often fair with enemy placement to coincide. 

 

Favorite level: Caged

Hard, fast paced with combat that flows well with a massive map that is never overbearing and maze like. Generally the map that for me defines plutonia at it's best, never an absolute pain to slog through with confusing levels laid over frustrating enemy placement, but always engaging.

 

Most hated level: Odyssey of noises

Plutonia at it's worst, a massive overbearing maze that is so confusing at times that when I think I'm on the right path I'm lead to a dead end where I'm legitimately convinced it's unfinished and have to check and see if there's something I missed, doom 2's city levels are better than this because eventually I finished without having to look up the layout.

 

Overall plutonia was a fun wad for me, it gets rough sometimes and there's some backtracking every now and again but whenever there is I feel like I'm making progress which about sums the game up. You can be beaten to a pulp and sent back to your last quicksave but ultimately you're always making progress.

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I didn't particularly like it. I played Doom and Doom II when they were new but lost touch when Quake came out, so I didn't get to play TNT or Plutonia until many years later. TNT feels like a larger, cruder Doom II with more monsters - I can load up any level and be confident that it will entertain me for five minutes - whereas Plutonia is just aggravating.

 

I can't tell if it was explicitly designed to be played in sequence (the exit from Map07 gives you a bunch of power-ups, so the developers probably assumed you wouldn't pistol start each map individually) but there's a bunch of maps where you have to do a precise sequence of moves at the very start otherwise you get mauled. E.g. Map10, which begins with a chaingunner behind you, is stingy on ammo, has an irritating bit with infinitely-reviving chaingunners where you can't avoid damage, and just feels like a series of steps you have to perform rather than an entertainment.

 

The difficulty curve is all over the place - Map15 is annoying, Map16 is easy, Map17 is harder (but more fun). In my opinion it gets better in the second half, when there are generally fewer traps. The two novelty levels, Hunted and Go2It, are really good.

 

It's undeniably clever and a feat of level design from such a tiny team - two men working for four months, with results that didn't have to be edited - but I don't think the quality holds up for 32 maps. At its best it keeps you unbalanced and on your toes and it's still tricky today. As with TNT it doesn't help that it looks visually plain and very blocky.

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Well, I wonder this, how would we be talking about Plutonia (and TNT) today if it were released as just another PWAD back in the day? Do you guys think everyone would still have the same reverence for it? For a mapset made in such a short time, it does hold up well, if a bit gimmicky now. 

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1 minute ago, Spladam said:

Well, I wonder this, how would we be talking about Plutonia (and TNT) today if it were released as just another PWAD back in the day? Do you guys think everyone would still have the same reverence for it? For a mapset made in such a short time, it does hold up well, if a bit gimmicky now. 

 

Good stuff is never forgotten, so I'm fairly sure it would still be held in high regard even as a regular, non-commercial PWAD.

 

TNT on the other hand... I don't think anyone would care as much as they would do about Plutonia. TNT is a pretty mixed bag.

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Plutonia would still be beloved had it been just a PWAD. Evilution, on the other hand, would just be known as a precursor to Eternal Doom and Icarus: Alien Vanguard. 

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It's been such a long time since I've played Plutonia. I remember dying over, and over, and over. I remember the invisible bridge in map02, which was strange and took me quite a while to figure out. The archvile maze in map11 was creepy. Map32 just threw every demons at you, and even had map designs that look like it borrowed rooms from previous Doom/Doom 2 maps. Map29 was an awesome level and was even more awesome with other players there.

 

I used to play survival mode during the skulltag days, and would often join the Plutonia games because it was way more fun playing Plutonia with other players than solo. I should check Zandronum and see if they still do survival runs there.

 

I was shock that I was actually able to complete Plutonia for the first time. I'm sure it's not as hard as I remembered it, but I certainly would rather play Doom/Doom2 over Plutonia if I had to choose.

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Plutonia is great, its almost a transitional piece to more modern pwads, since so many take inspiration from, and build on its concepts. It itself takes... "inspiration" from the IWADS but turns the monster count up to 11 (at least for its time). It also has one of the best dead simple clones, so there's that.

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Love it stylistically. I think it is designed for the ultimate doomer- someone who doesn't want to run around, explore and kill some monsters. I don't think it's for a first time Doomer- it's overrun with monsters- particularly Revenants. It's like a non-extreme slaughterfest megawad in a sense with some maps. Still love it nonetheless 

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Plutonia was my first "harder" WAD, so it has a special significance for my Doom biography. It was quite a jump in difficulty, even on continuous play, in comparison to the WADs I played before (the hardest was probably Helpyourselfish). I almost gave up at some moments. For example, the last room of "Abbatoire" seemed impossible to me at first, and also the chaingunner/warp-in inferno in "Twilight". After having beaten Plutonia, it became relatively easy to tackle the popular harder WADs like Alien Vendetta or Hell Revealed.

 

I often fire up Plutonia to play a level casually. Even after having played newer and harder WADs like Scythe 2 or Sunlust and managed to beat them from pistol start (well, with the exception of Sunlust's MAP32), Plutonia still requires my full concentration and precise play, and I still often die. The fights are often really well thought out, very different from the slaughter-style of HR or AV with its emphasis on monster count, and more similar to some levels in Scythe 2 or the first Sunlust levels. So I still enjoy it as a little challenge, above all to beat the levels saveless.

 

One observation is that, when pistol starting, the first third or so is often the hardest part of the maps, more so than in other WADs I know (Alien Vendetta, for example, has much friendlier pistol starts even in the later levels). Examples are MAP10, MAP20, MAP25 (the cramped HK fight) and MAP27. I think this is intentional, as the Casalis may have added always a special pistol start challenge for experienced players. Later they often provide lots of health and ammo so the final parts often become more manageable.

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