[Boom, Single Map] Misanthropolis - 1.0 Released

[SCF]

After having only used OTEX for my first few maps, I wanted to try my hand at a map with just vanilla textures. I also wanted to make something larger and harder than my previous maps. And so, welcome to Misanthropolis, a hell-themed castle level. You have to collect all three keys to exit, but you're free to choose the order in which you get them.

 

Difficulty

This map is significantly harder than my previous ones. I've played it so much in testing that it's hard to gauge the difficulty myself, but it's definitely meant to be a challenge for experienced players. Not "end of Sunlust" level difficulty, but probably comparable to the hardest levels in something like Eviternity. That was the intention at least.

 

The map was designed for UV difficulty, but other settings are available. HMP is very similar to UV but some of the harder fights are toned down a bit. HNTR is noticeably easier and hands out more items.

 

Length

About 45 minutes, if you know where to go (and not counting reloads)

 

Tested with
GZDoom 4.2.4 (Used for development)
PrBoom+ 2.5.1.4 (Did one playthrough to make sure nothing is broken)

 

Screenshots

Spoiler

 

Download

Misanthropolis v1.0 Download

 

 

 

Edited January 22, 2021 by SCF

[TheNoob_Gamer]

What's with all these people cramming out quality, long maps out of nowhere? There's Archi-Tek earlier, now this. 

It was a blast playing through this - I see you have done the visual work well. The gameplay for the most part is fine, though there were some instances where I think it's a little bit unfair (on UV which I played). When I have more time, maybe I will try to point out the issues in full.

[ElPadrecitoCholo]

Misanthropolis

 

Ultra-Violence mode || GZDoom || Final Doomer+

 

Status:

*Deaths: 24 (I will not detail any deaths, I will only divide the places where I have died as follows: 13 deaths in the zone with the yellow skull key; 10 Deaths in the final Battle; 1 death from accidentally hurting myself in the final battle...)

*Saves: 5

 

This was tolerable (Area with the blue skull key)

 

This was disgusting (Area with the red skull key)

 

This was complete garbage (Area with the yellow skull key)

 

This was absolute shit (Final Battle)

 

This undoubtedly was an intense map, really screwed up wherever you see it, it is a map that, as the description says, has a high difficulty, I don't know how the hell mappers do to do their tests lately but that they don't have at least an approximation of making it known how difficult the developed map can be, it seems stupid to me, the fact of just putting that the map is "difficult" or that the map "is made for UV difficulty" is not that very helpful to take into account the real dangers that are made within the map itself. Anyway, I continue with what is my comment about the map.

 

The map is interesting, interesting only in the visual aspect, the structure with which it was formed was really a visual pleasure, how the red colors of the walls were implemented correctly, the wood textures in some areas, as well as some other decorated with brick walls and others that had floors in the form of charred lava, not to mention the many occasions in which there were rivers, lagoons, and even waterfalls of blood throughout that strange castle where the Marine goes. exploring little by little, in addition to that in areas outside there are rock structures that look like hills and really strange landscapes but that somehow work well, the fact of also adding areas with bars or cages makes the castle more credible where you walk, as well as including areas with platforms to cross without requiring the jump and only supporting yourself by the speed of the marine's own feet to achieve crossing Perfect way, everything seemed very good to me, the whole structure from the beginning to the end was really impressive, although there were some things that did not fit much with the design that the castle had, it is not that they affected the map so much, so which, you did well to use these kinds of environments throughout the map.

 

Now it's time to talk about the difficulty, it is in this part where the map really stands out, and in my humble opinion, it stands out in a bad way, since, throughout the map we run into all the enemies of Doom 2, without any exception, Therefore, that already leaves with a high expectation that the map will be really screwed, and indeed, I can affirm that the map is really hardcore for some areas that are really a bit unfair, since, in this map there will be places with a lot of slaughter, and enormous pressure beyond measure, and it is due to the fact that, from the beginning it is revealed that the battles will be really complicated, in principle we see 2 mancubus on different platforms, 3 revenants also on different platforms (I think one was caged), to several imps and zombiemans around the area where we went down the waterfall of blood at the beginning of the level, and I think there were also 2 Hell Knights on 2 other different platforms, the point is... we only start with a a shotgun, a green armored vest and only 16 shotgun rounds that are only enough to kill 2 mancubus without missing a single shot. I mean... things really get raw in the beginning, it is not surprising that both in the middle of progress and until the end, everything will be a headache, hands, back and teeth for trying to win all the map without making a constant abuse of saves, or wasting ammunition in encounters that can be easily skipped, if it were not for the fact that it has some item, ammunition, or even a weapon that helps you progress on the map, And that if, the map is full of traps left and right, in no area will you feel safe, everything looks like a minefield, I am not surprised to know that considering that the map has more than 800 enemies, and that many of The traps are only based on putting enemies with greater resistance, attack and health to make the fighting more complicated, and if not, they are placing enemies that drain health a lot based on consecutive shots or that make new and annoying enemies appear (Pain Elementals and Lost Souls ), among many of the traps I will mention are the following: Trap that is activated in the area where you only see two Chaingunners on a floor full of blood - by activating the huge switch on the wall where those two Hitscanners were, in the next room that is revealed, only enemies that drain health quickly appear, Hitscanners, Revenants, Pain Elementals, and after all that, only bigger problems arise than I prefer not to reveal; Trap that is in the room in front of the small room where you see an Archvile with a Soul Sphere - In this room only two things should be taken into account... Many Revenants and Mancubus placed in places that are only a hindrance, here if you can't find the switch that enables the doors to escape, you're going to have a really bad time with all those bony bastards; As the last example of traps that the map has, you could not miss the ones that get the most recognition for being totally shit, and those traps I am talking about are the areas that contain the 3 keys necessary to go to the final confrontation... Each trap more stupidly ugly than the last, and if I went into more detail, the traps with a little less risk, at least for me, would only be the areas with the blue key and maybe... the area with the key Red, only those two, because the area with the yellow key is the worst of the 3, and it is not difficult to know why it is, first of all, the blue key presents you with a Spider MasterMind in front of the marine, and several enemies back, among those that can be found, would be the Imps, Pinkys, Hell Knights and Barons of hell, I could say that it is not as bad as it seems if you manage to quickly kill the boss that is ahead of you using the Rocket Launcher, or in the case more extreme to use the Super Shotgun, and thus manage to escape through the door that is behind the boss in case the enemies become too much for a fair fight, with the red key, the thing is really different, to gain access to this key is very complicated if you only have the Cell as a strong weapon gun, because in this area, quite a few enemies appear everywhere, starting with Pinkys and Revenants, then making Mancubus appear in hidden areas, then a whole group of Imps, and to make matters worse, several Chaingunners appear at the sides ready to fire without braking at any time, and like the icing on the cake, if you take too long to kill these enemies, 1 or 2 Archviles will appear (I really do not remember well) in the center of combat to resurrect them and then they will try to kill the marine with an instantaneous shot of fire (although there are pillars to take cover but they will not be of much use if there are enemies that are chasing you in the area), Although it is very true that this will only happen if you are not equipped with the BFG 9000, which can be unlocked in that room of the castle with only two types of keys, but it would be more advisable to have the blue key and the yellow key to achieve this confrontation, and this is when we enter the worst... and that is, to access the yellow key, we need to protect ourselves from 5 or 6 Archviles that are located together each on the two opposite sides of the rooms, having as the only defense 2 switches positions on the different sides of the room, which when pressing one, will allow to lower a kind of wall that will prevent the Archvile from achieving its attack against the marine, the problem comes when suddenly too many enemies appear on the screen that prevent us from being able to press both switches For the marine to defend himself from the Archviles, the very horrible thing about this is that it starts with 2 Arachnatrons, then the Pinkys follow, and finally the strong enemies, who go Hell Knights, Barons of Hell and Revenants, and I think they make 2 more Arachnatrons appear, face all this while avoiding dying at the hands of the Archviles in a period of time that would be more or less equivalent to 5 minutes of pure torture until a platform arrives above the Archviles to crush and kill them, leaving you only the rest of the remaining enemies in the area without much trouble, and do you want me to tell you something? Maybe the place with the red key is really ugly, with a bad fight, but at least you don't feel as much pressure as the area with the yellow key is... ugh, forget it, fuck the areas with the red and yellow keys, the area with the red key for having enough Revenants, Hitscanners and Imps, and the area with the yellow key for having those damn Archviles on each side, and for the stupid form of defense against them, since the Pinkys get in the way a lot by wanting to press the switch to lower the wall and avoid be g spotted by an Archvile, not to mention the other enemies that show up, I didn't really enjoy any of those parts beyond the area with the blue key, which was the most tolerable for me. To end this torture, the final battle, after having collected all those keys, having suffered a lot both with the area of the yellow key and with the area of the red key, now it turns out that the final battle far exceeds the stupid Difficult that was the part of the yellow key, a cruel and hopeless slaughter, really a total shit wherever you see it, 3 Cyberdemons, enemies that total the 300 and more that were missing to complete 100% in kills and no return some to the place where the Mega Sphere was, although you manage to return again with the 3 different switches that are behind the 3 different Cyberdemons that are on different platforms, something that not even with the BFG 9000 will you be able to survive too many impacts that you will have in everywhere, only strong enemies appear here, from the Pinkys to the Barons of hell, with the exception of the Archviles, who appear already in the last moments of the battle, being more than 4 or 5 that appear in general, and also the Pain elementals appear in a total of 5 or 6 (just imagine how much Lost Soul will spit out each one of these damn monsters in just a matter of seconds...), the ending really surpasses itself sending a lot of shit that only makes things very complicated, there is almost no cell ammo for that last confrontation, and taking down 3 Cyberdemons without being bothered by the other monsters is a titanic task that not even two Soul Spheres that are on the sides will achieve save the marine from a consecutive death because of all this garbage.

 

To sum up all the text, the map is really cool, fantastic, great and visually incredible, but in the playable way, despite being very entertaining, the way it presents you with its difficulty is total shit, with very few exceptions and almost nothing redeemable than it was to play all that hell without being able to feel safe anywhere, not to mention also that sometimes it becomes tedious to have to go back to previous places just to look for ammunition that is not enough on the map For so many battles that arise, there is not even a single backpack on the entire map to carry more ammunition, which makes the situation even worse because it means that there will be too much wasted of ammunition in battles, and what also means that the weapons will be emptied of ammunition very quickly without being able to have more for future encounters, indicating a very poor supply management for a large map without the existence of any backpack with which to carry more ammunition that can be found in various parts. Being honest but at the same time being frank, I don't give a damn if the difficulty is made for the Ultra-Violence mode, and that there are more difficulty modes if this is too much, and that is, the one that is designed for the ultra-violence mode does not mean that you have to put enough garbage to make the gameplay more widespread in terms of how you present the mechanisms of each trap or the things that you add to these traps, also including certain confrontations throughout the map, and even worse if they arrive to present these cases in very narrow places or that appear to have no escape whatsoever, to all this add the fact of not being able to jump or crouch to avoid certain attacks from the enemies in these kinds of areas, and despite having used a mod, the map was not easy at all, now if I had played it in vanilla default, my opinion about the map would have been even worse than everything I'm saying in this post, so... as a last word, I approve this map on the visual aspect and the structure that was implemented, but with the gameplay, the wad totally lost me, I didn't enjoy almost anything about the map, and it really was all disgusting, I could hardly survive all that massacre if it weren't for some ideas that I could do with the character, with which, for me, how this map is played is the worst, I did not like it, and hopefully I hope not to run into this kind of thing in future maps that you do (although that is not my decision to after all, but I am not going to try another map that brings me those defects).

[SCF]

First of all, thanks for the response. I'll try to address some of your points.

 

Quote

This undoubtedly was an intense map, really screwed up wherever you see it, it is a map that, as the description says, has a high difficulty, I don't know how the hell mappers do to do their tests lately but that they don't have at least an approximation of making it known how difficult the developed map can be, it seems stupid to me, the fact of just putting that the map is "difficult" or that the map "is made for UV difficulty" is not that very helpful to take into account the real dangers that are made within the map itself. Anyway, I continue with what is my comment about the map.

 

It's hard to estimate the difficulty of a map, especially if you made it and have already played it for tens of hours. And what's difficult for one player might be trivial for someone who's been playing Doom for 25 years. I included comparisons to other well known WADs to give a general sense of what I was aiming for.

 

When I said the map was "designed for UV", I just meant that UV is the difficulty I designed the map around, and easy/medium were derived from UV and only tested a couple times. It wasn't meant to indicate anything about the overall difficulty by itself.

 

Quote

Now it's time to talk about the difficulty, it is in this part where the map really stands out, and in my humble opinion, it stands out in a bad way, since, throughout the map we run into all the enemies of Doom 2, without any exception, Therefore, that already leaves with a high expectation that the map will be really screwed, and indeed, I can affirm that the map is really hardcore for some areas that are really a bit unfair, since, in this map there will be places with a lot of slaughter, and enormous pressure beyond measure, and it is due to the fact that, from the beginning it is revealed that the battles will be really complicated, in principle we see 2 mancubus on different platforms, 3 revenants also on different platforms (I think one was caged), to several imps and zombiemans around the area where we went down the waterfall of blood at the beginning of the level, and I think there were also 2 Hell Knights on 2 other different platforms, the point is... we only start with a a shotgun, a green armored vest and only 16 shotgun rounds that are only enough to kill 2 mancubus without missing a single shot.

 

This is definitely a design failure on my end if it came across that way. I never intended never for the player to fight all those enemies with just the shotgun, but to run through this room in search of safety or a better weapon, leading you to the room with the key door and berserk. When you come back later through the upper path, you'll at least have the SSG and it's much more manageable.

 

I'm not sure how it could best be redesigned. I could move the shotgun, so that you have nothing but a pistol when you drop down (which would hopefully tell the player they're not expected to kill these mancubi and revenants). Alternatively, I could just tone down this room in general so clearing it with the regular shotgun is feasible. That would at least prevent this kind of frustration, and I could spawn in new enemies when you come back around through the top.

Regarding your other comments, I'm sorry you didn't enjoy the fights. I don't think I can address this without completely redesigning the map, and while some of the ones you mentioned I wasn't sure about, others I was quite happy with, so I'd like to get more feedback first before changing anything. I will say that I tested all key paths to make sure they're beatable without weapons from the other routes, and that the skull key fights can be done even if you get there with no ammo.

 

 

[ElPadrecitoCholo]

44 minutes ago, SCF said:

First of all, thanks for the response. I'll try to address some of your points.

 

@SCF You're welcome, and thanks for taking them into account at least.

.

44 minutes ago, SCF said:

Alternatively, I could just tone down this room in general so clearing it with the regular shotgun is feasible. That would at least prevent this kind of frustration, and I could spawn in new enemies when you come back around through the top.

 

I quite like that idea, as long as you don't put Archviles there, and the enemies don't exceed the number of bullets the player will have by the time he gets there, everything will be fine and the change will be better.

.

.

.

 

This is all I will say for now...

Edited October 27, 2020 by ElPadrecitoCholo

[Salmon]

I played this on UV with GZDoom.  I did not count saves or deaths but there were lots of both.  I played across multiple sessions over two days, just my preference for long maps.  100% kills and 4/5 secrets in well over an hour of playtime.  I was hoping for UV max but I couldn't figure out the last secret--the computer map, I'm guessing?  I'm going to look at it in the editor later.

 

First off, I gotta say it's gorgeous.  I feel like it might benefit from more border textures in a few places but otherwise it's great.  It's obvious a lot of work went into it--the atmosphere is consistent and compelling.  Lovely use of vanilla textures and some very cozy lighting.

 

I took some notes as I played since my computer is too old and creaky to make videos (and I think videos are what you really need for feedback with a map like this.)  It's hard, for sure, so I played it really cautiously.  Early on I would just alert enemies, retreat around a corner, then wait until I could chainsaw or berserk punch them to death.  I was really glad I had played some wads recently that made me get comfortable punching stuff!

 

I was hyper-aware every time I used ammo.  I've not played Sunlust but am currently doing my first Eviternity playthrough--I'm on map 15 which is probably not far enough for me to have experienced the wad's full difficulty so the comparison is lost on me.  I'm a mediocre player who always plays UV in an effort to improve and I found this difficult but doable.  I mostly had fun but there was some frustration.

 

It took me one death in the opening area to realize I should just get out.  I died once trying to do so (blocked by enemies) but got out on the second try.  Noped out of that outdoor area real fast when I didn't immediately see lots of ammo and headed inside.

 

I took the left path here.  It was nice, honestly--it was the first place where I could get something of a foothold but I still had to earn it.  I skipped the plasma gun since I assumed there would be a trap associated with it (I had low health) and kinda regretted it after getting trapped in the lower blood floor area.

 

After this, I took my time exploring all the main paths of the central loop, killing things as I had the ammo to do so, punching and chainsawing where I could, triggering infighting whenever possible.  I picked up the plasma gun and the trap wasn't as bad as I feared--it's pretty easy to hit the switch to get out and fight the cyberdemon with more room out in the hall.  A lot safer, there can be a lot of splash in that room.

 

A lot of the difficulty in the central loop of the castle seems derived from not having the ammo to deal with the ambushes/encounters.  Usually I don't like it when ambushes are easy to escape, but I was glad I could with these--I might have given up if I couldn't run away and corner punch enemies.  Forcing infighting was usually easy, too.  This wasn't bad but seems more niche in terms of audience appeal.

 

When you start getting to the arenas and larger open fights is where the map was (for the most part) a joy to play.  You've got more weapons and ammo by then so you can rely less on infighting and punching, although they remain helpful and you have to monitor ammo usage.

 

Overall there was more health than I needed (the last fight was the only one where I used all health available.)  Since I played cautiously and used saves, I'm tempted to say health balance is good as is.  Always best to have more with difficult nonlinear maps, I think.  I probably picked up most of the ammo in the map until the later parts.

 

I never encountered any bugs or soft locks.  Never noticed any major texture issues.

 

Did I have fun?  Well, yeah, for sure.  There are some fantastic fights in here.  There were enough rushes of adrenaline to make me accept the slower, more tedious parts.  And the way you reconfigure your hubs for multiple traversals is really slick.  I'm not the best player but I enjoy difficulty and was able to complete this using lots of saves.  I'm really impressed!

 

Random thoughts about specific fights:

•  I liked the rocket launcher ambush with the revenants and the mancubi but it felt a little luck-based for someone at my skill level.  Too dangerous to force infighting, so if you catch a few high-rolling seekers you're toast.
•  My reaction to finding the yellow key arena was basically just "..............."  Insanely clever fight.  Very readable and appropriately difficult.  When those crushers came down I was at 15 health and had like 6-8 revenant seekers on me.  Surviving that was just Doom in its purest form.  Highlight of the map for me.  Incredibly memorable fight.
•  I used the secret megasphere for the red key fight but it was still rough because I was almost out of rockets and bullets.  Things were tricky when the plasma ran out.  Having the SSG in front the switch here seemed bad--I hadn't picked one up yet and the forced weapon switch kinda cut that path off for me in the fight.  Good stuff, though.  Pesky archvile.  Chaingunners might make things a little foreknowledge heavy but they aren't too bad.
•  Blue key fight is a good concept but I feel like a few more rockets or a little more plasma in the lead-up might help.  Sometimes I just had to dash into the Spiderdemon's line of sight and hope it didn't randomly decide to shred me.  Nice design though, I like rocket launcher fights with multiple directions of pressure.
•  I did not really care for the last fight.  It's at the edge of my skill level, certainly, but it felt random and too multi-directional.  I died here more times than in the entire rest of the map.  There's not quite enough plasma to cut through everything (didn't notice you could get more on the cybderdemon pedestals until after the fight, though.)  I was doing my best to dodge and use infighting, carve through stuff with the BFG when I had to, but it's easy to get stuck on a wandering cacodemon.  When the archviles and pain elementals came out, I found it very hard to manage them both.  Just lots of sightlines to think about and so much to get stuck on.  It's certainly possible better players than me will like it more, though.

I'd be happy to take a look at a future version of this.  It's very impressive work.  I'm hoping you get lots of feedback--this is a strong effort that deserves to be played.

Edited October 28, 2020 by Salmon

[tourniquet]

Played this last night unfortunately i had to give up, visually it's really well done, fights are interesting some traps maybe a bit douchy but overall enjoyable.

The one mayor problem i had was the lack of ammo and or health, which made some of the later traps really tedious to play and ultimately caused me to give up.

 

misc stuff

 

- the PR/Cybie trap is alright but should have more cell ammo, in the end i wasted all to kill the Cybie 

- where is the RL? i found a fair amount of rockets but no RL in both branches, would have been useful in some of the fights where i struggled with ammo

- the trap with the 3 viles near the Megasphere secret definitely needs more ammo, due to the amount of mobs getting revived

 

here's a demo of my playthrough

misanb1_FDA-TNq.zip

 

Overall this is a really good effort i'd certainly give another spin, considering you'd apply some changes

Edited October 28, 2020 by tourniquet

[SCF]

Thank you very much for the detailed comments. I will definitely be revising the map, but making it took a lot out of me so I'm taking a short break before I get back to it. That will also help me look at it again with a fresh point of view. In the meantime, I continue welcoming comments and I'll still be reading them.

 

20 hours ago, Salmon said:

100% kills and 4/5 secrets in well over an hour of playtime.  I was hoping for UV max but I couldn't figure out the last secret--the computer map, I'm guessing?  I'm going to look at it in the editor later.

 

Ah, this is interesting. I tried not to make the secrets too obscure, but I was actually wondering if I'd made them too obvious instead, and that went especially for the computer map secret. It's always hard to judge when you already know where the secret is.

 

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I was hyper-aware every time I used ammo.  I've not played Sunlust but am currently doing my first Eviternity playthrough--I'm on map 15 which is probably not far enough for me to have experienced the wad's full difficulty so the comparison is lost on me.  I'm a mediocre player who always plays UV in an effort to improve and I found this difficult but doable.  I mostly had fun but there was some frustration.

 

I think maps 14 and 15 is when Eviternity starts getting challenging, and once you get to 32, that one has some fights that are on a similar level as what I was going for, so I'm curious how you fare there in comparison. If you have an easier time with it then I've probably overshot the mark.

 

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I took the left path here.  It was nice, honestly--it was the first place where I could get something of a foothold but I still had to earn it.  I skipped the plasma gun since I assumed there would be a trap associated with it (I had low health) and kinda regretted it after getting trapped in the lower blood floor area.

Yeah I definitely intended for players to get the plasma gun there, but I also tried to make sure the next section is still beatable without it. When you were trapped in that area, was it because you were already low on health and/or ammo, or was it just too many enemies to handle with just the shotgun and chaingun?

 

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A lot of the difficulty in the central loop of the castle seems derived from not having the ammo to deal with the ambushes/encounters.  Usually I don't like it when ambushes are easy to escape, but I was glad I could with these--I might have given up if I couldn't run away and corner punch enemies.  Forcing infighting was usually easy, too.  This wasn't bad but seems more niche in terms of audience appeal.

My previous maps also got the feedback that ammo was scarce, so I'm still having to learn to ration it properly. At the very least there should've been enough bullets/shells that you weren't forced to rely on melee. If that's not the case I'll have to add more of those.

 

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 I liked the rocket launcher ambush with the revenants and the mancubi but it felt a little luck-based for someone at my skill level.  Too dangerous to force infighting, so if you catch a few high-rolling seekers you're toast.

 

I think that room might need some work. Unless you immediately go for the switch and escape I don't know if it's 100% reliably beatable with the right strategy. This was actually one of the first rooms I designed back when I was just sketching out ideas, and when I tested it at the time I'm pretty sure I had a strategy where I would kill one of the mancubi and then hide in that corridor while having the revenants/mancubi fight each other, but in the final version that doesn't really seem to work anymore, at least not most of the time, since there's always one revenant that doesn't want to shoot and runs up into your face.

 

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 My reaction to finding the yellow key arena was basically just "..............."  Insanely clever fight.  Very readable and appropriately difficult.  When those crushers came down I was at 15 health and had like 6-8 revenant seekers on me.  Surviving that was just Doom in its purest form.  Highlight of the map for me.  Incredibly memorable fight.

 

Haha, so that's two completely opposite reactions to that fight already. To be honest, it's one of the rooms I was the happiest with, and (with the benefit of knowing exactly what enemies te;eport in) I can beat it reliably with just the rockets in that room, so I'm quite confident that it's at least fair.

 

Spoiler

 I used the secret megasphere for the red key fight but it was still rough because I was almost out of rockets and bullets.  Things were tricky when the plasma ran out.  Having the SSG in front the switch here seemed bad--I hadn't picked one up yet and the forced weapon switch kinda cut that path off for me in the fight.  Good stuff, though.  Pesky archvile.  Chaingunners might make things a little foreknowledge heavy but they aren't too bad.

 

I hadn't even considered getting screwed over by weapon switching there. I could move it a little so it doesn't block the switch... although that would also ruin the nice symmetry. At least hitting the switch is not required to beat the fight (if anything it makes it slightly harder).

 

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 Blue key fight is a good concept but I feel like a few more rockets or a little more plasma in the lead-up might help.  Sometimes I just had to dash into the Spiderdemon's line of sight and hope it didn't randomly decide to shred me.  Nice design though, I like rocket launcher fights with multiple directions of pressure.

 

I like the concept of that fight, but I'm not that happy with how it plays out in practice so I'll probably change it.

 

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 I did not really care for the last fight.  It's at the edge of my skill level, certainly, but it felt random and too multi-directional.  I died here more times than in the entire rest of the map.  There's not quite enough plasma to cut through everything (didn't notice you could get more on the cybderdemon pedestals until after the fight, though.)  I was doing my best to dodge and use infighting, carve through stuff with the BFG when I had to, but it's easy to get stuck on a wandering cacodemon.  When the archviles and pain elementals came out, I found it very hard to manage them both.  Just lots of sightlines to think about and so much to get stuck on.  It's certainly possible better players than me will like it more, though.

 

Yeah, it's very chaotic, maybe too much so. I'm thinking about adding more cover and seeing how that plays out. Originally enemies only spawned behind the cyberdemons and not on the castle side, but it was too easy that way. Now it might be a bit too much.

 

12 hours ago, tourniquet said:

Played this last night unfortunately i had to give up, visually it's really well done, fights are interesting some traps maybe a bit douchy but overall enjoyable.

The one mayor problem i had was the lack of ammo and or health, which made some of the later traps really tedious to play and ultimately caused me to give up.

 

misc stuff

 

- the PR/Cybie trap is alright but should have more cell ammo, in the end i wasted all to kill the Cybie 

- where is the RL? i found a fair amount of rockets but no RL in both branches, would have been useful in some of the fights where i struggled with ammo

- the trap with the 3 viles near the Megasphere secret definitely needs more ammo, due to the amount of mobs getting revived

 

here's a demo of my playthrough

misanb1_FDA-TNq.zip

 

Overall this is a really good effort i'd certainly give another spin, considering you'd apply some changes

 

I haven't had time yet to look at the demo, but I'll check it out for sure. One of the branches has a rocket launcher in the middle (shortly after the plasma gun room), and another has one in the key room.

 

Similar to my question to Salmon, when you say you ran out of ammo fighting the archvile, do you mean just plasma or also shells/bullets? I specifically added more of the latter to that room as a safeguard, but again it may not be enough. I don't want the player to run out of shells/bullets at that point in the map, so that you always have something to fall back on. Plasma is more limited, and I added some cells when the room opens up, but they might be a bit hard to see against the green floor.

 

 

Edited October 28, 2020 by SCF

[plums]

Hey, I played this on HMP just now. Made an FDA with saves if you want to watch. Final playtime is about an hour and that doesn't include deaths, though there weren't *too* many until the last fight. If you don't want to watch it that's fine, I'll try to leave some more detailed comments tomorrow. Overall I liked it quite a bit and it felt the right difficulty for me, up until the last area at least.

 

misan_plums_hmpfda.zip

 

Quick summary, specific things I liked:

 

* The general interconnectivity, level area reuse, and nonlinearity was all done very well. I got kind of lost at the end but figured my way around eventually. I ran from the very start of the map, and it was nice to see that I had to go back and deal with those monsters later.

* The yellow key fight was great, very creative, one of the most memorable parts of the map.

* Good visuals and atmosphere with stock textures.

 

and didn't like:

 

* The last fight in general was a pretty steep ramp up in difficulty and took me quite a lot of tries (I suck at slaughtermap fights lol). I didn't mind so much but I think you could tone it down on HMP some. I settled on trying to knock the cybers halfway over the ledges so they were stuck, which eventually worked, but maybe isn't something you want people to be able to do.

* Seemed like there was some infinite-height caco annoyances in places, like the last fight but also some smaller rooms.

* Before the YK fight, there were some cacos that I knocked way back and had to wait for them to come back into range. You could fence off the area they can fly in a bit with block monster lines maybe?

* The music is great but the low drum in the right channel only kept making me think there was some moving platform briefly :p

 

I found one or two very minor bugs, you can hopefully catch them in the demo but if not I'll point them out later.

Edited October 29, 2020 by plums

[plums]

15 hours ago, tourniquet said:

the PR/Cybie trap is alright but should have more cell ammo, in the end i wasted all to kill the Cybie

I think the right thing to do in this trap is to ignore the cyberdemon entirely, and come back when you have the BFG, if at all. I tried killing it the first time and died, and then on my second try I thought "why not just leave him there?" More ammo would help if you choose to kill it, but might be too much for people that just run (though maybe not).

[ElPadrecitoCholo]

15 hours ago, tourniquet said:

- the PR/Cybie trap is alright but should have more cell ammo, in the end i wasted all to kill the Cybie 

 

What you could have done in the Pinkys' trap with the Cyberdemon, is to use the Super Shotgun a lot, since there was enough shotgun ammunition in the whole map, besides that there were only 8 Pinkys, which would only use 16 bullets, and With the rest of the ammunition, the Cyberdemon could have been shot along with a bit of the Cell weapon, thus saving much of the Cell weapon's ammunition, at least it worked that way for me.

[Noiser]

On 10/26/2020 at 10:33 PM, ElPadrecitoCholo said:

the way it presents you with its difficulty is total shit

I think it's counter-productive to write such a long essay about gameplay balance if you are playing it with gameplay mods. Just saying. It will be more difficult for him to find the right balance.

Edited October 29, 2020 by Noiser

[ElPadrecitoCholo]

30 minutes ago, Noiser said:

I think it's counter-productive to write such a long essay about gameplay balance if you are playing it with gameplay mods. Just saying. It will be just more difficult for him to find the right balance.

 

If with a mod it was difficult for me, imagine in Vanilla, the comment would be double or maybe triple the length of what is already written up there. Also that I leave it specified in all the text that I have written.

Edited October 29, 2020 by ElPadrecitoCholo

[Noiser]

Are you sure the mod only make it easier all along? Don't get me wrong, I love gameplay mods but they tend to alter a lot of values that can change the combat in very unexpected ways. It was a long time since I played Final Doomer though, so take that with a grain of salt.

[ElPadrecitoCholo]

44 minutes ago, Noiser said:

Are you sure the mod only make it easier all along? Don't get me wrong, I love gameplay mods but they tend to alter a lot of values that can change the combat in very unexpected ways. It was a long time since I played Final Doomer though, so take that with a grain of salt.

 

Yes, I have it well in mind, although that does not remove the fact that the map really has very bad areas, to the point of looking stupid, but well... it's just my opinion after all.

[Salmon]

6 hours ago, SCF said:

Ah, this is interesting. I tried not to make the secrets too obscure, but I was actually wondering if I'd made them too obvious instead, and that went especially for the computer map secret. It's always hard to judge when you already know where the secret is.

 

I looked at it in the editor.  It's a fair secret, I just missed it.  Overall, I don't think the secrets are hard to find, but I also don't think that's bad for this map.  There's enough going on that some not-too-difficult secrets act as little breaks from the action.  They're fun.

 

6 hours ago, SCF said:

Yeah I definitely intended for players to get the plasma gun there, but I also tried to make sure the next section is still beatable without it. When you were trapped in that area, was it because you were already low on health and/or ammo, or was it just too many enemies to handle with just the shotgun and chaingun?

 

If I recall correctly, I was low on both health and ammo.  I did have enough chaingun/shotgun ammo to deal with all of the immediate threats and get out, though.  I just left some of the enemies above the blood floor alive until later to preserve ammo.  Thinking about it, I probably would have only used a little plasma in the specter trap and none out in the blood floor area.  I wouldn't suggest any changes to the area on the basis of my experience.  It was doable.

 

6 hours ago, SCF said:

Similar to my question to Salmon, when you say you ran out of ammo fighting the archvile, do you mean just plasma or also shells/bullets? I specifically added more of the latter to that room as a safeguard, but again it may not be enough. I don't want the player to run out of shells/bullets at that point in the map, so that you always have something to fall back on. Plasma is more limited, and I added some cells when the room opens up, but they might be a bit hard to see against the green floor.

 

You didn't ask me but I'll answer anyway!  I thought there was enough plasma for the archviles but I also noticed the extra cells and picked them up during the fight.  I could see how you could miss them, either because of fighting or corpses.  Pretty sure I was low on bullets then, but I also used the chaingun to pick the imps off from up above before the archvile fight.

[Scotty]

Decided to check this out, recorded a blind demo for it, attached (very long though!).

 

First i just want to say that "this is bad simply because i found it difficult" criticism is ignorable rubbish, to be blunt.

 

Some food for thought from me:

- Nice job with the layout, lots of instances of being able to see into areas you cannot get into yet, paths feeding back into previous sections, areas opening up to create new gameplay spaces, etc etc

- Yeah, ammo is tight (smart move to include an early berzerk, i used it a lot), although i never actually fully ran out myself, and health was pretty scarce for the most part. Additionally there is some pretty dickish hitscanner placement at off-angles that can shred you if you don't know they are there. This combination led me to feeling like i was straining at the leash to an extent, playing slowly so that i did not lose all my health - although i do personally like to play aggressively. This is not a criticism per se, more an observation, as it is up to you how you would like to pace the map - oppressively slow paced gameplay can be a very powerful atmospheric tool... although most people will find it frustrating. Sometimes giving more rockets and cells doesn't necessarily change the difficulty of a map but merely makes it less grindy.

- With arena type slaughtery fights it is important to consider the shape of the area, where enemies are going to attack from and how they are going to bunch up. The red key and final fights are basically just square/circular type arenas that lend themselves to circle strafe abuse (which you can see in abundance in the demo). I feel like you therefore placed the random viles in these fights just to make the fights reach the difficulty level you were aiming for in these specific instances, ie not be underwhelming. The problem with doing this is that these fights always just boil down to realising that viles are in play, probably dying to them, restarting, then playing just to weed out the viles from the pack - and then the fight just plays out the same as if they weren't there in the first place. The yellow key fight worked nicely because you needed to move in a considered way to deal with the threads, rather than just running around and around mindlessly. Worth noting that both the red and yellow key fights, for me, seemed to end up with harmlessly grinding down a bunch of revs, so maybe some fine tuning on the enemy composition could be good there.

 

Overall, some annoyances, but a really good effort for a newer mapper, kudos.

sco-misanb1-fda.zip

[ElPadrecitoCholo]

21 minutes ago, Scotty said:

"this is bad simply because i found it difficult" criticism is ignorable rubbish, to be blunt.

 

Bruh moment.mp4

[tourniquet]

16 hours ago, SCF said:

when you say you ran out of ammo fighting the archvile, do you mean just plasma or also shells/bullets?

 

I literally ran out of everything, i tried playing as ammo conserving as possible, using berserk/chainsaw in some of the fights prior yet it wasn't enough.

Guess i'll give it another spin on HMP just to see what i've missed on my first run.

 

 

[SCF]

It's been a month, but I'm back with a new update:

 

Misanthropolis Beta 2 Download

 

Once again thanks to everyone who gave feedback. The demos were also very useful to see how people approached the level. I don't expect to make any more major changes to the map, but I may still tweak health/ammo/enemies depending on the response.

 

General changes:

• More ammo throughout the map
• More health in a few places
• Enemy composition changed in several areas, including the red key battle. Some of the more annoying chaingunners have been removed.
• Redesigned the final battle. There's now more cover, much more cells, and a slightly different progression.
• Replaced one of the rooms entirely (the one before the blue key fight)
• Made a few changes to try to guide players better and avoid things like missing the way forward or trying to get to a door that can't be opened from that side.
• Fixed some minor mapping bugs

Ammo in particular has been difficult to balance. Since I never ran out myself (knowing the map inside out) I don't know how much more is 'enough'. There should be way more bullets and shells, and a few more rockets and cells.

[SCF]

I was going to bump this topic a while ago to try to get more responses to the second beta, but then I ended up being busy with other things instead. Since I don't have much of a desire to return to this map again, I'm releasing it as it is, which means the new "1.0" release is identical to beta 2. If there are any bugs or major issues with the map I'll probably fix them, but otherwise I'm considering it done. Overall I'm pretty happy with it, and I think the feedback helped improve some of the weaker fights. There are still some structural issues with the overall layout that weren't apparent until I watched people play it, but that's something I'll just have to keep in mind for next map.