[Heretic] Mountain King's Domain (open beta)

So it's time for my third vanilla Heretic PWAD release (third that I'm planning to put on idgames, anyway). This time around I'm going to do an "open beta" here, so feel free to give any ideas if you think some last minute changes are in order.

The Mountain King built his fortress in the heart of a grim, snowy peak, thinking it to be unassailable, but his pride was misplaced and his land was overrun by horrible creatures, all the way to his mighty throne. Lost and weary, you have been searching for an exit to the caverns you were exploring when you stumble upon the ruins of the Mountain King's Domain, and they are anything but quiet...





I have vague ideas of turning this map along with updated versions of Coven and Valley of Saints into an episode of some sorts, but given my rate of output for these things seems to be one per year, it doesn't seem so likely.

Available here:
http://ettingrinder.jimdo.com/heretic/custom-maps/

Ammo is kinda tight on skill 4, especially in the beginning. After getting the backpack and hellstaff in the city's shop, it became much easier. Maybe getting into the city through its secret entrance was a bad idea on my part. Also a bad idea, forgetting to take the morph ovum until the end, as it could have been useful.

On the aesthetics side, it's a bit drab IMHO. Heretic is a colorful game, but here most of the time it's a gray cavern with buildings of gray brick. Putting some touches of color could help. There's a small section of the city wall that is adorned with GRNBLOK1 pillars, that motif could be used in the main cavern too. And the natural cavern walls could be broken by some segments with RCKSNMUD or ROOTWALL.

Thanks for trying it out. I'd already added more ammo to the start on the previous iteration, but on further thought, what I probably really need to do is swap some of the monster positions around since most of the ophidians appear early rather than later. I might try exchanging some of their positions with the knights.

I can probably find places to add more of the green block decorations and such, too.

Nice map, I liked it. Heretic is a slower-paced game than Doom by its nature, that's why gameplay tends to be easy and centered about slaying lots of lowly-threatening enemies, which would be likely found boring in Doom. That said, I give you a lot of points for those big rooms filled with monsters, they were somewhat challenging to play and rewarded fast movement and dodging (specially if I wanted to advance fast), and I've enjoyed that. Not that I bothered to kill every monster, but I thought it was a good playability for a Heretic map. I also liked the way how the blue key had to be grabbed, and the consequent trap (though that one was rather easy). There were 2 yellow keys in the map, wasn't it unnecessary? You could just allow the yellow doors to be opened without a key from inside.

Aesthetics were... well, Heretic-like, in a good way, though maybe too much grey. All those steep height differences and mixtures of "rocky/natural" and "civilized" architecture definitely made their goodness.

Thanks! Regarding the spare key, it was so the player could get back in without going back through the whole southwest loop if they went out the front gates or fell off the ramparts. I suppose it's not strictly necessary. I could experiment with having the yellow doors open and stay; Visplane Explorer indicated last I checked that the central village area is more of a danger zone than the big cave.

I've posted up a new beta, same place as before, taking into account some of the points raised previously in the thread. Monster placement has been rearranged to try to fix up the issues with gameplay starting off hard and ending easier.

Please check all manner of nitpicky potential issues if you can (alignments, VPOs, even co-op support if possible.) Also let me know if you catch anything that seems half-finished that I missed. Thanks.