Death in Excess (slaughterwad)

[NoReason]

This is an 18 map slaughterwad that I threw together because I felt like it, there are difficulty settings implemented so don't forget that if a map is too difficult on UV. Build time was about 7 months, not including minor changes for difficulty settings. There are some things still left to do before I even think about idgames (like properly testing those difficulty settings, status bar, level name patches, etc.) although some of those might not happen since I don't know how to create one that fits what I want.

 

Info you might need / want to know:

Format - Boom (use complevel 9, preferably)

Tested with Prboom/Glboom+ and Gzdoom

IWAD is Doom 2

Map slots are 01-16, 31 and 32

Intended for singleplay / pistol starts only, you can try coop but I wouldn't recommend it, especially for the maps that have 7k+ monsters

UV playtesting: Bridgeburner56, TheLoneliness and Nevanos (and myself, obviously).

Infinite BFG was taken from Slaughterfest

All textures used are from OTEX, which is a texture pack created by Ola Björling (Ukiro)

 

Music credits:

Spoiler

Title - "Tribal New World" by Immorpher
Intermission - "Truth" by Immorpher
- Map01: "30,000 Machine Symphonic Notes" by Immorpher
- Map02: Map13's track from Hell Revealed 2 (Don't know the name atm)
- Map03: "The Sea of Mystery" by Eris Falling
- Map04: "Accelerator" by AD_79
- Map05: "Battle of the Gods" by Knightrider of Doom
- Map06: MIDI rendition of "The Patriot Virus" by Darkest Hour (taken from the DoomMidiMetal pk3)
- Map07: "Stardust" by Eris Falling
- Map08: "Reach Within" by Jimmy from the TVRmidi pack
- Map09: "Gargoyles" by Jimmy from the TVRmidi pack
- Map10: "Unearth" by Alfonzo from the TVRmidi pack
- Map11: "Infimum" by Ribbiks from the Plutonia midi pack
- Map12: "Hell's Furnace" by Eris Falling
- Map13: "ad35_c" by Ribbiks
- Map14: "Rompi" by Ribbiks
- Map15: "Gestation" by Immorpher
- Map16: "The End of Summer" by Eris Falling
- Map31: "Inhumanity" by Immorpher
- Map32: "The Final Judgment" by Eris Falling

 

Screenshots:

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WAD is now on idgames: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/megawads/die

Edited November 26, 2019 by NoReason
(posting idgames link)

[RonnieJamesDiner]

Damn, screenshots look beautiful. It never ceases to amaze me how slaughtermaps always tend to have this completely different, highly abstract, detailed and other-worldly quality to them that you just don't see much in classic gameplay style maps. Maybe that's just me, though.

 

I'm not very good at slaughter wads, and generally don't play them much, but I might check this out! Looks awesome.

[Tango]

at last! looks awesome, cant wait to give this a whirl :D

[galileo31dos01]

Holy good shit, congrats on the release!. There goes another title in my list, of stuff to check before I grow white hair only.

[42PercentHealth]

I must stream this.

[Gothic]

3 hours ago, NoReason said:

Thanks doc

 

Those shots look gorgerous. That's all I can say, I suck at grand-scale slaughtermaps.

[General Rainbow Bacon]

^ Map 03 is actually somewhat beatable by mortals and really fun actually.  Until you get past the yellow bars and I even found those fights not to be too hard until near the end.  

 

Great looking maps.  Gonna see what I can do in here.  

[seed]

This goes on my list.

[amackert]

Looks good! Will definitely give it a shot.

[Arbys550]

woah I didn't even know this existed until now! I enjoyed DR so I'm sure I'll love these too. Downloading now

[Arbys550]

Made it to map05 so far, and man these maps are awesome! The only issue is my laptop crapped out completely on map05. I was really disappointed because I really wanted to play the rest of the wad. I idcleved to other maps and just standing there my laptop was running at like 1 frame per second due to the thousands of monsters.

 

One of my main gripes with Disparate Realities is that it seemed you relied too much on archviles and the fights ended up a little samey as a result. You seemed to have fixed that here! The fights have a ton of variety and the visuals are awesome. I haven't had this much fun in a doom wad in forever and that includes sunder, my favorite wad! I'm gonna skip around and see if I can pick out a few more maps to play.

[NoReason]

1 hour ago, Arbys550 said:

I was really disappointed because I really wanted to play the rest of the wad.

 

Yeah, unfortunately some of these maps are really unfriendly for laptops (especially 16 and 32 with monster counts over 10k). Maps 07, 09, 11, 13 and 14 may actually work relatively well though. Glad that you're enjoying it otherwise.

[mArt1And00m3r11339]

I will try this wad out at some point. It's too bad that the textures weren't merged into the wad file. When I design wads, I merge textures into the files so that players would not have to click and drag multiple files into the Doom engine.

 

Edit: Never mind, the textures will eventually be imported after reading the OP.

Edited November 10, 2019 by mArt1And00m3r11339

[kaleb.]

14 hours ago, Arbys550 said:

Made it to map05 so far, and man these maps are awesome! The only issue is my laptop crapped out completely on map05. I was really disappointed because I really wanted to play the rest of the wad. I idcleved to other maps and just standing there my laptop was running at like 1 frame per second due to the thousands of monsters.

what port were ya using? GLBoom+ should give you decent performance hopefully

[Arbys550]

21 hours ago, kaleb. said:

what port were ya using? GLBoom+ should give you decent performance hopefully

 

Yeah it's just my crappy laptop. I use glboom+

[mArt1And00m3r11339]

6 hours ago, Arbys550 said:

 

Yeah it's just my crappy laptop. I use glboom+

That's why I use a desktop to play the levels. I also recommend NVIDIA GeForce. It is a great graphics card and you can also use the software for recording and streaming gameplays (you would have to create an NVIDIA GeForce account to use those features but it shouldn't be too much of a hassle). You will need at least 4 GB of RAM to be able to use the features. 

[mArt1And00m3r11339]

I beat level 5. I will have a video of this level up at some point in the near future.

0dierc1_05.zip

[mArt1And00m3r11339]

I beat level 1. The demo is tool-assisted.

 

[mArt1And00m3r11339]

Here is level 5.

 

[Arbys550]

Okay. I've played through all the maps that my laptop could allow (I had to skip 05, 08, 10, 16, and 32).

Overall I thought it was an enjoyable experience and most of the fights were fun and seemed well thought out. As far as visuals go, this is one of the greatest looking wads I've feasted my eyes on in a long time. However, I do have some comments that I think should be considered.

 

Map07:

I think you should find a way to work the BFG into the progression of the map. When I played, I went up the lift to the right first instead of going left to grab the bfg and I got hopelessly stuck in that corridor with the four or so viles from behind and the huge hk swarm in front. I had to noclip out and grab the bfg. This problem, turns out, happens a lot in this wad. More below.

 

Map10:

I could barely play this one due to frame rate issues, but I got a little far, only to run into the same problem above. I went down the ssg path first and got to a fight where there were TONS of rockets, but no rocket launcher? Seriously? I tried to ssg everything, but there was no way I was gonna get out of there alive. I started the map over and went to the bfg arena first, but the frame rate was too bad so I skipped to map11. I don't know if your intention was that you had to know what was coming ahead of time, but if so, that's pretty cheap in my opinion. It's essentially a softlock if you choose the ssg path first.

 

Map11:

Same thing here, but this time it's not really your fault. I went to the bfg arena first a bunch of times and got locked in, but the pockets that I assumed were lowering switches weren't lowering. Instead of finding the shoot switch, I just assumed you made a mistake and started over the map. I ended up finishing the whole map with just plasma gun and RL and only found the switch when I came back to see what was up. Again, I feel like you should somehow force the player to do the bfg fight before tackling the latter half of the map.

 

Map12:

This map had my favorite fight of the wad: the cyber+PE+rev staircase. Great stuff!

this map had the same deal with the bfg, except I was smart enough to check what both switches do before continuing. I think other players may make the mistake of thinking both switches are required to open the path ahead and not realize that one of them opens the tower. This could cause them to miss the bfg for the rest of the map.

Another thing is you can run out of a window and into this lava pit:

And it is not damaging, causing a softlock.

Also not a complaint, but DAMN the archvile horde at the end was tough. It was WAY beyond my abilities and I had to end up running around them and exiting.

 

Map14:

Same BFG problem, but I was curious enough to get it this time.

Also this whole entire hallway thing is damaging, even though it's not textured that way:

And this is just my opinion, but this was by far my least favorite level in the wad. It literally had all of my worst pet peeves wrapped into one map.

Extreme resource starvation at the start causing you to run past monsters? Check.

No armor for a majority of the map? Check.

Obnoxious teleporting monsters? Check.

Obnoxious damaging sectors? Check.

Sorry if this is harsh, I really did enjoy the rest of the maps!

 

Map15:

This was probably my favorite map in the wad. I usually don't like gimmicky maps, but this one was cool! The only fight i didn't really like was the arachnotron hell knight thing at the end of the ssg path. I ended up just whipping out my bfg and 600 cells from earlier. My only issue was with this one platforming jump:

This one stupid jump is REALLY REALLY hard for some reason. I'm not sure if it was intentional, but it took me like 20 tries to get it. If it wasn't intended to be this hard, I suggest changing it, and if it was intentional, then you are absolutely sadistic.

 

One more comment overall: I thought some of the fights where a second or third wave are suddenly revealed are kind of misleading and sort of underhanded. I think you should somehow cause a major change in the geometry of the arena before the next wave is unleashed so you can show the player that something is happening.

Also with the one fight in map12 towards the end where there is a wave of 10 or so archviles that spawn in the center of the room, I though the fight was over before then. During the fight previously, I had accidentally bumped into 2 of the megaspheres, so I had to face the archviles with no megaspheres left, and I had really low armor. I ended up having to load an old save and replaying some of the level so I could save some megas for the viles. I think you should move 2 of the megaspheres somehow so they don't become collectible until the av wave starts, so the player gets 2 for each fight of the room. This would be fine, except all the action stops before you hit the switches, causing the player to think the fight is over.

Also I didn't really like the beginning of map13, but that's just because I hate incidental combat.

 

It may seem like I didn't really like the wad from this post, but quite the opposite! Everything I didn't mention here i loved. My favorites were maps 01, 12, and 15, my least favorites were maps 14, 13, and 03. I look forward to your next release!

 

[Firedust]

Had this on the backburner for a while, will dive in this weekend. As some people have already mentioned itt, screenies look gorgeous. Nothing beats highyl detailed slaughterwad macrostructures!

[NoReason]

4 hours ago, Arbys550 said:

a lot of words

I appreciate the detailed feedback here, some of these issues are known and will be fixed, like that damaging hallway on map14, and that ssg section in map10 which I have tried to fix before as the intention there is for every section to be doable with their respective weapons, having something else is just an option. As for the issue with the BFG placements, that's understandable but I really do not want to change those.

Edited November 22, 2019 by NoReason

[CrazyDoomguy]

I tried look on doombuilder. Overall no texture...

[Arbys550]

55 minutes ago, CrazyDoomguy said:

I tried look on doombuilder. Overall no texture...

You have to load otex with it.

[NoReason]

Updated the OP with the idgames link, the textures have been put inside the wad itself now so no need to load them separately.

[mArt1And00m3r11339]

Levels 4 and 10 are up. Level 10 is a tool-assisted demo.

Level 4:

Level 10:

 

[mArt1And00m3r11339]

I wonder if there is a clear strategy on how to get through this room because this room is what is giving me a hard time. I've been wanting to tackle level 32 ("Extirpation").

[baja blast rd.]

I watched a couple minutes of your map04 vid (centered around 1:30) and I'd suggest playing on -complevel 9 so that infighting happens properly. 

Edited December 21, 2019 by rdwpa

[Arbys550]

Finally got a new laptop, so I'm gonna get to work on the maps I couldnt play on my first playthrough. I'm sure I'll like them as I tend to absolutely love massive maps with thousands of enemies.

[mArt1And00m3r11339]

I guess no one is going to offer a strategy on how to get through that room in level 32.