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Doom 2, Odamex / Zandronum, 11 maps
In the year of several surprising comebacks from mappers of great reknown, RottKing is doing his part. The man with the Midas touch has mostly kept in R&R regime ever since Elf Gets Pissed, his 2016 Heretic singleplayer episode. You, an above-average Doom knower, may say "hold up, Rott has contributed to project X and Y", and you'd be right as usual, but those have been largely non-committal one-offs and his legendary multiplayer mapping output has evaporated entirely.
Well, that dry spell is over now and in its stead we have a set of 11 excellent deathmatch maps. Some will feel familiar, as RottKing repurposed and rebalanced three of his early 10's submissions to the 32in24 series, each featuring a strong central gimmick. There's the spacious "3D Tree Tempest" and its faux-3D massive redwood forest, now featuring an unpredictable, pace-flipping BFG gimmie. There's "Caco-Cola Factory" with a cyberdemon sniper at the center of the map, bullying players with relentless siege (remember, DM is played on the Nightmare skill). And there's 2015's "Rocketers Down Under" with an intentional center-map control point with three hallways to spam rockets into, racking up frags on the silly lemmings trying to take the power spot from you. Now featuring a slick OTEX-powered visual makeover.
Then there's "Tatami Gash", a reworked salvage from the vaporware Countergoat Initiative 2 project. It's a gorgeous japanese dojo that breaks relatively simple topdown layout with tons of clever small-scale verticality, leading to a combination of central arena SSG mayhem and some satisfying spam lines. Most of the entirely new maps exemplified by "Rockets & Rust" or "Sen's Other Fortress" are larger, more traditional FFA layouts that spread the action around the entire map without clear focal points. They force the players to put in hard but earnest fragging work instead of exploiting cheesy strats, and each can be instantly remembered for their unique theming and various quirky design choices that shape the local combat.
It's rather funny that one of the three outlier maps, the opening "Static Station" is the most traditional DM layouts in the set, something vaguely resembling a doomified Quake map that you'd easily associate with the RottKing of yesteryear and UDMX fame. "Cube Fella" is by far the most author-aggressive map here, a brutalist structure in a sea of nukage where every truly valuable pickup requires exposing oneself to enemy area denial fire - and quite likely also taking a painful swim in the bad water. The last map is a homage to Duke3D-style verticality (and Baltimore-style rudeness?), an experimental piece forcing players to hop between office windows and rooftops of several highrise buildings.
This rather detailed description of every map means to highlight the strong thematic and gameplay diversity of the set. Every one of them is easy to distinguish and enjoy, and there's no space for filler. It's amusing and admirable how much the pace and style changes when the maps are played back to back. Of course one could posit that with a decent enough layout and a bunch of SSGs, any map will be fun in Doom FFA (looking at you, GreenWar), but Rott!Zone is more than that. It's daring and often times outright innovative, yet also finely balanced. This fact has been highlighted center-stage as the mapset's premiere coincided with this year's Take The Crown event - in Team Deathmatch mode. The set proved itself fantastically and allowed top-tier players to employ smart strategies, teamwork, item control and denial, but also balls-out mindless heroics. And such casual-pro duality of a wad is a true hallmark of a future community mainstay.
- @dew
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Insanity Deathmatch - @Kaapeli47
Doom 2, Zandronum
How unconventional, a weapons mod winning a DM cacoward. In actuality, Insanity DM is a partial conversion that touches up player properties, items and weapons, but it is the latter that provides the meat of the project. And let's say there's a butcher shop worth of them.
Generally speaking, I believe weapon sets are done greatest justice with maps that target their meta from the moment of conception, creating new equilibrium that feels "most right". A great example would be Eon Weapons and the multitude of Mechanix Union mapsets centering around the mod, whereas applying it to Dwango would be... tacky. Yet there's an alternative approach, one that simply drowns players in a vast arsenal of beefed up guns so that any idea of traditional Doom meta gets thrown out of the window. Oh what's that, you think the new balance doesn't quite give justice to this carefully built DM layout? Sure honey, but while you were formulating the thought, you fell behind by 10 frags. It is not meant to feel entirely fair, it is meant to be enjoyed in high player count games that envelop you in frenetic action and relentless carnage that inevitably goes both ways.
The kill/death ratio is an aspect that sets Insanity DM aside from other popular mindless FFA scenarios... say, Brit10 or 2DMmaps. The carnage may seem similar, but there isn't that sheer domination by top dogs who figured out the formula. The cornerstone of Insanity is that the new weapons are all at least slightly overpowered, yet balanced in their totality. Every weapon slot gets several replacement variants of roughly the same strength, but often wildly different behaviour, and they replace the original weapon placement in a map via scripted randomness. Even if the original map gives you all SSGs and chainguns on spawns, you'll end up unpredictably using a lot of different guns like a very precise AK, a nailgun, the riot gun from Shadow Warrior and more. Rocket launcher spots get expanded with grenade launchers or heat-seeking variants. There are ammo-consuming super-plasma variants galore.
In effect a new balance is established, one that greatly emphasizes the glass cannon qualities of Doom deathmatch. It is so easy to frag other players that the SSG looks like a downright mundane option, yet it is equally trivial to get taken down in an instant, making sustained map/frag control nigh impossible. There's always someone who will negate your devastating explosive spam with long distance AK or railgun. Kaapeli spent a lot of time tweaking the weapon balance, as absurd as it sounds for such a kitchen sink project, so spawning with one of the super-devastating weapons is often a pyrrhic victory, since their use is quite slow and awkward and easily countered by a hitscanner. Well, except the BFG-alikes, which are all intentionally absurd. But we don't talk about the Meowitzer, or any of the other memeguns. They're to be experienced, not described.
"So how do I use this mod", you may ask. I recommend a mid-to-large FFA mapset, since further intensifying the slaughter on tiny maps would be absurd. You want to work for frags, not hand them out. The aforementioned Mechanix Union mapsets are a great start, but check out this year's other DM awardee, or UDMX, or Greenwar 2. Then gather as many friends as you can, fun should start intensifying quickly from 6 upwards. Leave your brain in the other room. Then finally, enjoy being out of control and just go with the flow of blood and guts.
- @dew
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Strife Coop Patch Project - @Nash
Strife, GZDoom
Among the flurry of mod releases this year, one of the most pleasant - and, if I may, long overdue - releases has definitely been Nash's Strife Coop Project. You see, when Rogue Entertainment released Strife all the way back in 1996, the only official multiplayer mode supported was deathmatch, as the game did not support cooperative play, unlike its idtech 1 peers. The poor schmucks unfortunate enough to try to experience Strife coop for themselves in modern source ports would discover, to their horror, that all the exits were blocked off by unavoidable pillars, leaving them with no choice but to vent out their frustration in a bloody round of Strife deathmatch - at least that worked! And is also fun, by the way.
But such dark days are now finally behind us, as through rigorous research and skilful usage of the excellent ZScript language, Nash's compatibility patch finally allows would-be adventurers and revolutionaries around the world to unite their struggles in overthrowing the oppressive regime of the Order. Naturally, doing so required much more than just removing the aforementioned pillars, for the very nature of Strife precluded coop compatibility from many different angles - the existence of multiple player starts suggests it was at one point considered for inclusion, but as development continued, it fell off the picture. Thus there are many things that had to be addressed, from correctly assigning quests and rewards to multiple players, to fixing player starts in the levels and removing intrusive deathmatch-only actors, to sharing keys necessary to progress, and most importantly reworking the dialogue system which, normally, would pause the game entirely when utilized, an obviously unsuitable system for multiplayer. Now, whenever a NPC is talked to, they will address the specific player, and only once that conversation is over may other players talk to them also, but because of the voice acting in the game, everyone may listen in on the conversation at once, or just go off and do other things in the meantime - about as elegant as a solution as one could hope for.
But thanks to Nash, whose output this year further confirms the thoroughness and diligence he has long been known for, what we have here isn't merely a collection of miscellaneous fixes but also one of quality of life improvements for coop players. Not only does the mod support four players at once, but it will also correctly synchronize any session should any player join after the initial maps are already complete. Given the hub-based nature of Strife, going off into different maps now will only occur if all players are standing near the exit, preventing frustrating situations in which one's actions would get suddenly interrupted by a single player departing the area (but for the masochists out there, this feature remains optional). And for the cherry on top, the project supports not only for the original Strife IWAD but also the Veteran Edition re-release of the game!
All in all, this may not quite be the year of Strife, but it certainly is the year in which it has never before been more convenient to join the online revolution and break the shackles of our oppression. Whether that oppression was being caused by the Order or by those damn pillars in the way of the exit, you decide.
- @Dynamo
