Solarn

And now a lot of small things make sense. I accidentally played the map in the default compatibility instead of -complevel 2.

Map 04 - Seclusion: 98% kills, 50% secrets Having arrived at the end of the tracks leading out of the cargo depot, the player now assaults an incredibly generic and linear techbase. While the visuals and layout are nothing to write home about, this map is the first in the set to exhibit a kind of proto-slaughtermap gameplay, with several encounters where progression lies beyond a horde of monsters. One important component that's missing though is a way to force the player to deal with the horde on its terms. Every fight can be easily backed out of or kited and there's always enough ammo to deal with every enemy without having to work your way past them for more. There were a few things about this map that baffled or outright annoyed me. The cave with the SSG in the beginning is marked as a secret despite being glaringly obvious. The chaingunners at the dock can be pushed off their perches and become unkillable (the reason for my 98% kills). Same with the archvile before the yellow key door. Ultimately, this was a very forgettable level. At least if I remember correctly the next one is really good.

Map 03 - Cargo Depot: 100% kills, 0% secrets Definitely a step back in both quality and difficulty compared to the previous map. The setting is a gray and brown techbase with lots of crates strewn around, befitting its name. Gameplay is extremely linear and there is none of the interconnectivity seen in the first two maps, replaced by backtracking instead. The most interesting area is the cave housing the yellow key. Enemies are mostly imps and demons, with some hitscanners and mid-range monsters added in for variety. I played this map horrifyingly loose, I was actually listening to a video in the background, and I still managed not to die once. The only time I was even in any danger and had to pay attention was in the blue key courtyard, which is a definite inspiration for a lot of current slaughtermaps. I did miss all of the secrets, but I didn't really look for any either. In all honesty, didn't like this map very much. It felt like such a drop in quality from the previous two that I'm probably judging it more harshly than I would otherwise, but that's just how it is. If you don't want bad reviews, don't follow up two great maps with a mediocre one.

Since I missed several of my favourite megawads on DWMCplays (Sunlust, Ancient Aliens, NOVA II, both Back to Saturn Xes...) I'll at least play along with this one. All maps are PrBoom+, -complevel 2, UV with a pistol start. Alien Vendetta, much more so than Hell Revealed in my opinion, is the original innovator of all of the "hard map" tricks currently in use. It may not have invented them, but it refined them into their current form. Slaughter battles, low-ammo low-health maps, tough enemies in limited spaces, monster closets and teleport traps at every point of interest, the constant need to watch your back as you're fighting, AV has it all, set to a gorgeous backdrop of... well, let's be honest here, mostly brown and red. And I love it for it. It helped me hone my Dooming skills to a great degree back when most mapsets were more interested in exploring a theme, doing new and interesting things with the engine or giving the player a spectacle. So, with that in mind, let's jump right in. Map 01 - Sunset: 100% kills, 16% secrets This is a short and fairly tame map with some nasty enemy placement as its main challenge. I think the toughest enemy on UV was the lone hell knight in the nukage pit that couldn't really do anything to me unless I deliberately let it. The aesthetic is brown bricks and metal beams, which honestly wasn't as drab and generic back in the early 00's as it feels now. The map is also one of those that received major graphical updates in the rerelease, with added lighting and some detail work that makes it feel more alive than the original. I actually completed this map twice, because I couldn't remember any of the secrets the first time around (the berserk pack totally should have been a secret though) and also wanted to see how loose I could play and still complete it. The answer is very loose. I don't know if it's my skill or the map's just that much easier than the rest of the set, but I could just run through it shooting at everything without ever retreating into cover and not die. All in all, a strong start to the WAD, even if it looks uglier now than it did when it was released. Map 02 - Rusty Rage: 100% kills, 100% secrets This is where the real difficulty starts. Monster closets releasing squads of hitscanners, teleporting Revenants, hard to hit sniper imps, and even an Archvile is present in the map, although in an easy to kill position. The map is still fairly compact, with two keys, a progression that takes the player looping back through the same central hallway (which would probably repopulate with monsters every time in a modern map, but I'm glad it doesn't do that here) and a single tiny optional area that feels much less like a secret this time. The visuals are more techbase-y this time, with STAR* walls, computer panels, crates, SLADWALL in the nukage pit and BROWN96 in the outside areas, as well as some small caves. While the entire map is very well-paced, my favourite part has to be the exit trap. It's moderately common nowadays, but I still feel like having just that little extra bit of combat right when the player thinks they're done with the map adds a lot to it. Meanwhile, I could do without the Mancubus blocking the way to the rocket launcher and the nukage. I don't particularly like the whole "door with health" meme, but that's exactly what this Manc feels like. In conclusion, another really good map. It might feel a little formulaic to the modern player, but the traps are still competently done and the layout is amazing.

Died on Map 01 by backing into an inescapable sludge pit from a Mancubus. http://www.mediafire.com/download/at20f8vdmlqcej0/ohmygod.lmp

Is it wrong that I kinda like this? I mean, it's obviously not the original track, but it still sounds good to me.

Oh no, a guy is not running his contest to your standards! Call the Doom Police!

Map 08: The basic idea for the map is cool, a cave leading into an underground black marble stronghold, but the execution leaves something to be desired. For starters, the railing in the very beginning is not impassable and the player can get trapped in the river if they try exploring. The cave starts out pretty good, but the encounters get banal very quickly. The marble areas on the other hand look really uninspired but the fights aside from the final one are actually fun. The final fight with the Revenant horde and Cyberdemons is just annoying more than anything. Favourite part: visually, the entrance to the marble parts with the invisible bridge in a giant cavern, gameplay-wise the cross-shaped marble corridor with imps teleporting in. Least favourite part: the final fight. Map 09: This map returns to the mixed themes, but as it's a Tricks and Traps pastiche, it feels more acceptable. The circular starting room open into, in order, a skin-covered corridor with crushers (including one right above you as you flip the switch that sets them off), a marble room with close-quarters Mancubi and Pain Elementals, a wood-and-brick room whose walls open to surround you with enemies, a marble maze whose walls eventually become a second floor filled with monsters, a dark metal room with hexagonal lifts and finally an underground cemetery leading into a truly enormous temple where the final battle takes place. I have a few criticisms of the map, mainly that many of the traps can be backed out of fairly trivially and the final temple area contains a lot of copy+paste, but they aren't huge issues and there are also a lot of good things about the map. The rooms escalate nicely in terms of enemies, except for the metal one which is a definite step back from the maze. The marble textures continue to be underwhelming, but the rest of the themes look really good. The final battle is absolutely epic in scale. And the cemetery bit just before it looks suitably atmospheric. Favourite part: the cemetery. I mean, just look at it. Least favourite part: that the second and third traps are too similar, with the room opening up behind you releasing enemies.

Map 06: Another very strong map, this time with a Sunder-esque visual theme with two very distinct texture types mixed in clever ways (in this case dark brick and exposed electronics). Hitscanners are used to great effect as the first wave of enemies in several fights, with Revenants and nobles following close behind. The quality stays mostly consistent throughout the map, which is a bit on the short side. One thing that bothered me was the final fight, which felt like a huge letdown after the massive slaughter just before it. Favourite part: this was a difficult decision because I loved the curvy room after the rocket launcher, but I think I'll have to give it to the very first area (second screenshot in the OP). It has the cleverest mixing of the two aesthetic themes and the close-quarters fight with a mob of enemies after the whole thing opens up is amazing. Least favourite part: the final room. Total letdown. Map 07: I feel like this map might be inspired by some of Phml's earliest maps, but TOD also used all green marble textures in some of his maps and the way you need to use infighting to open up the central arena without firing a shot feels more like something he would do. After you get outside the horde of enemies and pick up the super shotgun, it becomes more of a traditional slaughtermap, but it stays very fun by throwing perhaps the largest number of monsters at you so far. The actual map is very short and symmetrical, but feels longer due to how long it takes to fight through. Favourite part: the beginning again, which was the tensest moment I've ever had in any map I've played when I realized there were no weapons around. Least favourite part: an exact repeat of Map 05's stair fight with rockets against Revenants and Spectres? Really?

Map 04: Same as map 03, this felt like you had a pretty great idea, and then for some reason smothered it in more ideas until none of them stood out. Some pretty bland marble catacombs (marble is really hard to make look good on its own, without different textures for accenting it), then a cave, then a skin-covered room, and then a foundry. All of them (except the three small circular rooms in the marble area) could stand on their own but they had very little to do with each other. The fights were mostly very strictly partitioned apart, and you couldn't really have one fight in a particular room bleeding into another one, which made the different themed areas feel even more separate. At least they didn't really lend themselves to cheesy tactics, except for the skin room which becomes trivially easy if you just run around hugging the walls. The final battle in the foundry area could have been taken straight from Sunder and felt really well-balanced. Favourite part: the caves. Their actual layout was very simple, but the texture choice and lighting made them look much better. In general, natural areas benefit greatly from using a small number of similar but identifiably different textures and consistent lighting. Least favourite part: the circular rooms. Every single monster except the shotgunners in the first one was stuck in place, and because of the massive height variation, you couldn't really see anything. Also, please, never ever make a map again where the route forward is opened up by exploring a random side area that doesn't indicate in any way what it does. That almost ruined the caves for me, and it would have been such a shame. Map 05: See, now this is the thematic consistency I'm talking about. This is a fairly long map very obviously inspired by ArmouredBlood's New Gothic Movement 1, both in its texturing and its encounter design, both of which stay consistent the entire way through. Eventually the map turns into a sort of inverse recreation of The Hag's Finger from Sunder, climbing a tower from the inside rather than the outside, which actually still just makes New Gothic its inspiration, as that's pretty much the gimmick of Map 6 of that WAD. I haven't noticed any sort of dip in quality or annoying design elements during my playthrough of the map, it's the clear high point of the set so far. Favourite part: the fight in the yard with the fountain, where the Hag's Finger parallels begin. Least favourite part: let's see... either the fact that you have to go back to the very beginning to open up the metal barrier in the indoor area, or the difficult jump to the yellow key. Those are the only real frustrating moments I can recall.

Map 02: A short and sweet slaughtermap, I liked this one much more than the first map. The aesthetic is very reminiscent of Hollow Icon from Sunder, wood and metal with bright red detailing. The map itself is a single square symmetrical room filled with monsters that fills with reinforcements as you pull switches. The gameplay is frantic fun at first, but slows down a bit once you've killed the first big wave of enemies. I feel like it wouldn't have hurt to have a bit more monsters teleport in with the switches in the Spiderdemon rooms. Health and ammo are both bountiful, I was deliberately sloppy with my shots and still left wads of both in the map when I left, including a megasphere. This contributed to the feeling of the map winding down as I moved along, as once I cleared out enough enemies that I could move freely, the only things I had to watch out for were stray Cybie rockets. Favourite part: jeez, that's a tough one, the map is so short and consists of a single room. I'd say the corner rooms opening up and unleashing a flood of Revenants. That really made my life difficult for a while. Least favourite part: the four Cyberdemons teleporting in after the first corner switch. They're just so pointless. Map 03: This map introduces a new issue that will continue cropping up in the set, and that's a total lack of consistency in theme. While there are maps, like the previous one, that commit to a single aesthetic and gameplay theme and carry it throughout, many others have a haphazard mix of themes. This map starts off as a wood-and-brick castle interior with some clever lighting and simple but effective encounters, then the player enters a pretty ugly stock texture cave whose highlight is the bloody Mancubus lair, then a castle exterior that leads into a slaughter fight with similar texturing to Map 02, and finally a red rock cavern with a recreation of one of the first fights from Map 04 of Sunder with the crushers. Each and every one of these themes could have supported a map on their own (except maybe the first cave, which reminded me of TimeOfDeath's Slaughterfest 3 contributions) but together they just make a huge mess. Picking an idea and sticking to it is a hugely important part of mapping. Favourite part: the slaughter bits were good, but I have to go with the initial castle part, it was just so clean and well-constructed. Least favourite part: clashing stock textures only work for TOD because he makes gimmicky maps where the non-standard gameplay is the main draw and the whole ugly vanilla-style cave aesthetic has become a thing with him, a signature style sort of deal.

You used an url tag instead of img there, so your picture isn't showing up.

Map 01: I couldn't finish this, I had no idea where to go after the switch in the gray area with the second cacoswarm (no map ever needs two cacoswarms). In general, the Doom E1/Doom2 E1 themed areas in the first part of the map were pretty good, but it should have ended with the foundry battle, it was such a natural endpoint. Favourite part: the very beginning where you are dropped into a battle with zombies and pinkies. It really sets a mood for the entire map. Least favourite part: the gray area where I got stuck.

I don't know, it looks like something straight out of Sunder, and I never had any problem dodging things in that. The trick is not having lots of height variation in both directions, if it's just in one direction it's easy to handle.

A few general things I noticed before I dissect the actual maps: - You don't indicate which doors are openable and which aren't and often give the same texture to openable and unopenable doors in the same area. That's generally considered bad design because it's confusing and disorienting. - You sometimes forget to make certain lines impassable, which results in monsters clipping through midtextures where they really shouldn't. - You have a few cases where the player can get stuck on tiny environmental details while fighting, which is really infuriating. Things like thin pillars, zig-zagging wall details or small 32-high bumps on the floor are best avoided, I feel. - There's a lot of points in your maps where a switch opens something back in the direction the player came from, with no indication of what just happened. Backtracking is boring enough, but unobvious backtracking is the worst. Generally whatever a switch does should be both easily accessible and visible from the switch room.

Well, aren't you the fucking edgelord.

- I really hate when people play vanilla/limit-removing/Boom-compatible maps in more advanced sourceports. I haven't noticed it as much about Eternity, but both ZDoom and GZDoom have vastly different behaviours even in lower compatibility modes (it's especially noticeable in GZDoom where I get stuck on everything, even completely flat walls, all the time if I try to strafe past monsters the way I do in Chocolate Doom or PrBoom+) than regular Doom, and playing WADs with closer-to-vanilla compatibility in them does not give the intended experience at all.

I don't know if it has the same amount of coding or not, but my personal favourite Tormentor WAD is City of the Damned: Apocalypse. It requires GZDoom though, just so you're aware.

I enjoy KDiZD overall, but it does have some problems that even I noticed. One is that every map is a giant sprawling mess with no real landmarks or notable areas to guide the player, so you can get seriously lost. This is due in part to the fact that, as essel mentioned, different authors actually worked on parts of the same map, which is at best a forgettable gimmick and can lead to really bad mapping when done with people who aren't familiar with each other's styles. But perhaps an even bigger part of it is that they wanted every map to be a high point, so there's no sense of progression. Another issue is that despite the detailing and all the new textures, the maps somehow feel even more bland and generic than the iwad techbases. Literally every single map uses the exact same texture combinations, the exact same decorative elements and the exact same overall design. An added effect of this is that the maps are largely unidentifiable as riffs on the originals. I couldn't even identify most of the iconic areas in the maps until I saw some comparison screenshots. The monsters are a mixed bag. Most of them I like, especially the imp variants, but some of them (chainsaw zombie, satyr) feel pointless and some of them (Hell's Fury and especially the true final boss) are just plain ugly. What I dislike about them is that they not only ignore the limitations of the original Episode 1, which lacked some of the more demonic enemies (Lost Soul, Cacodemon, Baron except for the finale and the bosses), but also ignore any sense of progression of monster difficulty within the episode, pelting the player with Nobles and Cacodemons almost from the start. Oh, also no infighting. Whose genius idea was that?

No caged walkways in Map 26, -5 out of 5, would not recommend. I'm mostly kidding, but the central walkways are such an iconic and memorable part of the map that every riff on the theme (including at least one map in every Plutonia) includes them. What made you decide to ditch that design? Also, your screenshots for Map 28 remind me a lot of The Spirit Underworld from ZPack. Was this intentional or does it simply come from the fact that both are highly detailed reinterpretations of the same map?

Yeah. Also, it's kind of difficult to imagine now, but back when Insane_Gazebo made Sunder, there weren't many recent slaughtermaps around. There was Deus Vult 2 and some gimmicky maps by TOD, and otherwise slaughtermaps seemed to have died off when Death-Destiny left Doomworld in a huff after mismanaging Claus1024. A lot of the current crop of slaughtermappers got their inspiration from Sunder: Phml, ArmouredBlood, dannebubinga and gggmork all wouldn't be making slaughtermaps now if it wasn't for it.

I could easily imagine cool levels set on Earth. As someone else mentioned upthread, we're in the future anyway, there is literally no requirement to make the environments look like realistic modern locations. One thing I wish they had done differently is ditch the forced room-to-room combat with locking doors and allow for more free exploration and nonlinear paths. That's my biggest problem with modern FPSes. Even if they get the raw gameplay right, freedom of movement seems to have become anathema ever since Half-Life outsold Unreal.

So the demo I just recorded in -complevel 9 where I died on map 1 is not valid and I get another go? EDIT: doesn't matter, I just died on e4m2 to a zombieman of all things because I was panicking. -complevel 9 demo: https://www.mediafire.com/?x05lwmc79n104hm -complevel 3 demo: https://www.mediafire.com/?sbeb4f4iq0cwf1t

All right DWIronman League, get ready to be underwhelmed by my ability to die to stupid mistakes. As soon as I figure out what compatibility this wad needs. Also, how to record demos correctly in PrBoom+.

Okay, I just played through the version of my map (MAP25, Chaos Slaughter) that's in the latest release for the first time after two years on UV without too much trouble. I don't think it needs any more balancing, if anything there's a bit too much health in it now. Literally the only problem with it is a missing flat and I can't do anything about that because the only version of the map I still have is an older one. The flat was M_TILE1 from sf2013pr-tex_v2.wad, which was supposed to be merged in with the final release anyway, so I have no idea what the problem is there.