EtzelFred93

I map according to the music I want for a level. But your level has made this song stuck in my head and now I can’t unhear it while I’m mapping. Agh. Great map though, genuinely impressive .

I finished the Megawad about a week ago and enjoyed it for the most part but felt like it was missing some of the charm from Nostalgia 1. But I definitely prefer the combat in this installment. I look forward to the next one!

When I was playing through Nostalgia 1 I kept on feeling like I was yearning for more as I finished each map. Hopefully this scratches that itch! I genuinely look forward to it.

It depends on how good you want to get and how fast. Don’t save if you want to get good fast, but you also need to play alot and consistently. If you’re a relatively casual player than save based around what keeps the game entertaining for you. Personally, I save to avoid playing sections again that I feel like I’ve had a handle on or are really boring. On maps I really enjoy, I go out of my way to single segment them on the next run and might use saves if I feel like the first run has portions I’m not solid on.

I really enjoyed this mapset, the traps were exciting without being too challenging, which is perfect for a mapset this size! I also love the water sections, easily the best part of any map and quite novel. However, I really enjoy combat puzzles that are not so forgiving. We get a lot of space for most traps you spring on us once you slow down or give it a couple tries for a run. And I feel like that hurts replayability for me. The Cyberdemon encounter in Map 6's blue key area and Map 2's Caco/Cyber combo are really stand-out moments for me. They are close to the perfect difficulty level for me regarding individual encounters. But that's just my two cents, and I genuinely felt that this was a breath of fresh air! Please keep pumping stuff like this out.

I really dig the color palette you went for, a lot! But I feel like the combat is wanting. I went through the first run killing everything with the pump action and grabbing the rocket launcher in the bottom portion. This ended up neutering the more difficult encounters like the red key trap. After I grabbed the red key I went tooling around the central area and noticed the SSG. Had I seen the SSG sooner I'd probably feel more positive about the pace of the combat. So I tried another run where I rushed for the SSG first and not only was the teleport ambush more exciting, each section became much better paced. It would've been better to make the SSG more transparently available and the jump to get it easier. You can see in Helm's footage that he misses the jump the first time and for the second jump he ends up skipping over the intended ambush for it because the jump has too much momentum to it. And in Lady Mist Dragon's footage she also misses the SSG for most of the map like I did. I'm sounding negative but I did enjoy the map, I just felt like it just needed a bit of tweaking around the SSG.

Not a fan of these decorations personally, but I dig the geometry of your level so far.

I guess since Ion Fury’s roster came up I can bring up some thoughts about it and whether or not its samey. The enemies can be thought of as being hitscanner/projectile, rushdown, or hybrid enemies. Hitscanner/Projectile: Your Cultists, Greater Priests, and Liberators control space by taking angles. The angles they take become risky areas for the player to move through just by standing there. What movement they have is pretty minimal and not really the source of their pressure. Rushdown: Mechsect, Wendigos, and Diopedes rush the player down and control space by physically blocking them. Hybrid: Deacons, Bony Whoops, Treadkills, and Skinjobs shoot projectiles while also having movement substantial enough to restrict player space by taking more aggressive angles. All considered, Ion Fury does have a varied roster. However, most encounters do seem to be easily handled by letting them come into your space or peek-a-boo shooting them. (Higher level play is obviously much more aggressive, like during speedruns)

I don’t disagree with this sentiment, but the reasoning is a little off. Imps, Cacodemons, Hell Knights, Barons, all shoot projectiles in the same way aside from tempo (Cacos shoot faster I believe). All other enemies have some degree of nuance in how their projectiles work. Revenants can homing rockets, Arachnotrons have repeating blasts based on LoS, Mancubi have a set pattern on their flame balls and so on. Doom could be thought of having imp-like (single projectile thrown linearly at varying tempos) vs non-imp enemies. Dusk has a similar situation the Imp-like enemies being Cultists, Fork Maidens, and Bone Monks. All other enemies I’d argue are distinct enough to not be labeled as Imp-like (Scarecrows and Grand Wizards come close though). The issue isn’t the enemy roster, its the fundamentals of the game mechanics and level design. Dusk Dude is a lot more mobile than Doomguy. Dusk is also generally a much more open game than Doom. So an Imp is alot more threatening when you can’t jump around, and you have less space to breath in general. If Dusk were to have more interesting combat, it’d need to restrict the player space by a lot. The “upgraded” versions of Imps in Doom are also great at doing this, while Dusks don’t do as much. Hell Knights, Barons, and Cacodemons are all literally wider than Imps and restrict more space than Imps just by existing. And Cacodemons are generally used in more interesting ways than Bone Monks (Dusk’s equivalent). Dusk’s roster has potential but much like the IWADs, does not fully utilize their nuances. Dusk is set piece oriented, not combat oriented.