Epyo

Ok I'm here in Daedalus (some people need to learn to map, why were 8 million shotgun guys and chaingunners here in the engine core? And I'm playing on skill 1!) I need some help. I need a key to get inside the inner core, but I can't find it. I've been searching for the past hour, through sleeping quarters, kitchen, engineering. None of them have anything! (btw this wad has been 8 times the fun ever since I turned on IDDQD and IDBEHOLDS) So who can tell me where it is?

I love episodes 1 and 3. Super love them. But I despise episode 2. Every single level. OK, I can admit that E2M2 is all right. And I do adore the dark area of E2M6, I find it legitimately super tense. So I picked E2M6. Although I don't like the rest of E2M6.

That was a really fun read, thanks for pointing it out!

OH I watched a streamer play and saw a similar issue (or maybe it was a different issue) (it was not brutal doom related). There's a required tripwire you must walk through while running on the walls around the cyberdemon, but it's very possible to miss the tripwire, and get confused about what you're missing.

Oh I missed that in the readme! That sounds awesome!

Super agree with this. On the other hand, ya just can't please everyone. Watching Icarus's reaction video to Sigil, it's really just nonstop complaining about how hard each room was for him. The thing he complained about most is how each exit room has a Baron in it, but in each case he deliberately makes sure to avoid taking the exit until he kills the Baron...for no apparent reason! He says he is not playing for 100% kills, 20 minutes into the video, as he talks about skipping a cyberdemon. Which goes to show that you can't really trust anyone in general about difficulty. It depends on even more than named modes like "pistol start" and "continuous play", it also depends on little aspects of the person's play that they don't even realize they're doing. --- Here's a weird thing that can happen in E5M8, not sure if it is intended:

@Magicana @Beginner I'll be darned!! It is possible! Thank you.

Question about E5M4:

Another big change not mentioned in the patch notes in the pastebin above: E5M4 now has all 3 keys, so players won't be confused anymore about why they went through each path.

In doom, assuming you "play to win", as a player you really shouldn't be killing every enemy you see. Every fight should be thought of as a strategic trade-off. I could defeat this enemy, and the next few areas of the level will be safer, but it's going to cost me ammo, and I'm risking taking damage if I stick around here longer. Barons are one of the best cases of this, they're a huge drain on ammo. In my opinion you usually should rarely fight barons in doom in general. They're slow and easy to run past anyway. When we think about making a video game "difficult" or "challenging", we usually think about the raw skill aspect--are you able to control your character well enough to accomplish something. But there's also the concept of "strategic" difficulty--are you able to adapt your playstyle according to the varying situations you're given... There's taste involved though: I think it's totally ok to dislike a wad because it has the type of difficulty you don't like. (But also, I don't think it makes sense to say that a wad is bad for it...) A thing I'm liking about Sigil, is that early on, it tries hard to signal you that you shouldn't kill every enemy in this wad. There are at least 3 moments in E5M2 where the game is practically begging you not to fight various enemies. The entirety of E5M3 has a lot of strategic decisions as well. --- (I know, I know: not everybody simply "plays to win", many players prefer to play for other goals, like 100% kills, or speed, or 100% everything, or pacifist... But in my opinion, maps should primarily be balanced for "playing to win"; and players should expect to get creative to do the other categories--e.g., you might have to trigger some infighting. The mapper should make sure it's theoretically possible to do, and that's all they need to do, I think. No idea if Sigil has done its due diligence here personally.)

I was listening to Linguica+Dew's playthrough, and according to Dew, who playtested the wad for John, there turned out to be a surprising technical constraint that made the fast crushers a bad idea, and he had to switch back to slow crushers. I didn't quite understand the constraint though.

Oh right I can finally read this longform article about Sigil I've had open in my browser for 2 months https://www.shacknews.com/article/110199/icon-of-sin-doom-and-the-making-of-john-romeros-sigil

Y'all should consider trying just turning off the vertical part of mouselook! It feels awesome, and helps you not break levels! And, no crosshairs--you just line up the gun like real doom guy. (Once you get used to this style, and embrace the vertical autoaim, you can actually aim much quicker, and it raises your skill level quite a bit, IMO! And you're not staring at a dang crosshair all night.) (I'm just kidding, to each their own. That's just my favorite way)

Here is a detailed explanation of how to find the secret exit to get to E5M9, 'cause I don't think anyone else has mentioned it in this thread yet: And here is a vague explanation on how to find the secret exit, if you just want a hint:

Epyo: But apparently you don't need the keys or something. Or maybe I had a bug or something, 'cause I didn't end up needing the keys to hit the key-switches I noticed this too, am thinking the same as you, a bug. I noticed it after hitting the yellow switch, not realizing it was yellow coded until after I hit it so tried the red switch and same thing lol Ahhhh I thought about it, and I see what we're confused about now, it's not broken actually. Hiding my explanation with spoiler tag just out of politeness:

Oof, yeah I disagree with every single note in that review. He's allowed to dislike it of course, but every point sounded like this "Sigil does 'this' and that sucks" but he just came in with a lot of preconceptions about what a doom level should and should not be, and it seems to be a ridiculously narrow, closed definition, that wouldn't even match up with very many other people at all. Although it's possible I've lost touch with the doom community, and maybe this opinions are the collective opinion. But I don't think so. Welll there are definitely the "detail fiends" who only really enjoy the ridiculously detailed beautiful maps (a valid point of view I think, detail rules), and of course they're not going to like this fairly vanilla style, but...that didn't even seem to be one of the points of the review! Also, this has nothing to do with the review, but I enjoyed this point "Your average joe isn't gonna go download sigil after spending a couple of hours playing overwatch" heh, actually...I was playing overwatch for 4 hours right before finding out Sigil was available and went straight to it, XD

I finished it! Here is my writeup, spoilers ahead:

OMG can't wait. I get really bored on three day weekends so this will be perfect!!

Just wanted to drop in and say that this is possibly the best video game news I have ever heard, and I'm very hyped for this! I'm a huge fan of all of Romero's doom maps, and the idea of making it a hellish episode is just perfect--I've seriously always felt a weird void in my heart, because of how great his work in episode 1 is, and how much better the rest of doom 1 and 2 could have been if he contributed more to 'em. I loathe episode 2 and I like episode 3 a lot, but still believe it could have been much better... And it was clear he was good enough to make awesome non-techbase stuff but we rarely got to see it--like he made doom 2 abandoned mines, and doom 1 e4m2 right? Those come to mind immediately and those are kinda masterpieces IMO. But they're just scattered and tainted by being mixed in with much worse stuff (I might never play through the second half of doom 2 again honestly). Also, I was mostly blown away by how great e1m8b and e1m4b were. Yeah, from many perspectives, other modern doom mappers are doing better stuff, but I feel a certain unified magic from these--they look good without being extravagant, capturing the classic architecture--and they play excellently IMO, they're not extravagant with difficulty, just, every battle felt laid out in a way to capture the exact gameplay that makes doom work, the exact gameplay I don't quite get anywhere else. And then, many shockingly creative tricks that really impressived me, in both maps! Which is remarkable to see, in a game so old and with so many maps already, and with so many limitations. A lot of times I see what famous designers do years later, and I think, ehh, this looks bad, did they just get lucky with their big hits?? But those two maps really proved to me that Romero deserves his success. (Another example of this was seeing IGA's mario maker maps, the designer of most of the post-sotn castlevania games. Those were great!) So yeah, just my take. Super pumped!!

Oh I like the orthogonal blocks only! It gives a certain predictability to the gameplay, hard to put into words. I think it could use more decoration though. Well, it could use a lot of stuff =]

I love board games, been playing a lot of Lost Legacy lately (which is similar to Love Letter if you've heard of it). I also visit giantbomb and reddit way too much, and watch too many Let's Play videos on youtube. My main hobby is game development, been working very hard on a sorta action RPG in C# for a few years now:

I'm very impressed with snapmap and can't wait to try it out. The reason doom is the only game I've ever enjoyed making content with, is that it is easy to understand. Yep, it's fast, yep, it's flexible, but what actually matters is that it is easy to understand. This seems to match up with that. I just want to jump in and make a full level without watching tutorials. (And it looks fast and flexible as well? hard to tell. Bonus, if so!)

fuck everything, this is fucking beautiful

Whoa, totally on my front page of reddit right now. Just so awesome.

Twitch chat is pretty much the worst thing on the internet. A stream that has <1000 people is usually okay, but >2000 is completely unbearable. ...AGDQ chat probably has >100,000 right now