Single level wad recommendations

[bb2731]

I've been wanting to play more single player wads to play so what would you guys recommend? I've already played doomsday if uac and unhallowed.

[Pseudonaut]

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/m-o/miasma

[liPillON]

I frequently replay Demonastery

[Pegleg]

@bb2731

 

Here are some single maps that I have played and enjoyed. They're listed in no particular order, and all of them are for Doom 2 unless otherwise specified.

• Jade Earth
• Warlock's Hearth
• Criticality
• Viscous Realms
• Songs of the Damned
• Brood of Hatred
• Outpost 21 (Doom 1 version and Doom 2 version)
• Wicked be the Ways of Men
• Crossing Acheron (Doom 1)
• The Vrack Trilogy (Vrack 1, Vrack 2, and Vrack 3 are all single maps that are independent and unconnected, except for having similar themes and being made by the same author)

[NiGHTMARE]

A few more good single level wads:

 

Brigandine

Chord_G

Chord 3 (there are other Chord wads, but the others are just ok whereas these two are great :))

Don't Turn Your Back On The City

Vanilla Sky

 

Also, if you enjoyed Pegleg's suggestion of Crossing Acheron, don't forget to check out the author's previous level Dante's Gate

[Nightmare2989]

https://www.moddb.com/games/doom/addons/e1m1-hangar-remaste

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Cp-nK8inP4WSuG51W77nAuofe1oSqtJz/view?usp=sharing

Crater Revisited V3 addon - Brutal Doom mod for Doom - Mod DB

Lunar mining project revisited V2 addon - Brutal Doom mod for Doom - Mod DB

Underground complex addon - Brutal Doom mod for Doom - Mod DB

Nukage processing revisited V2 addon - Brutal Doom mod for Doom - Mod DB

UAC's deadly sins addon - Brutal Doom mod for Doom - Mod DB

Corrupted Refinery addon - Brutal Doom mod for Doom - Mod DB

Cats and Mouse addon - Brutal Doom mod for Doom - Mod DB

MAP24: The Mucus Flow by B.P.R.D

 

[Andromeda]

13 hours ago, Pegleg said:

• Crossing Acheron (Doom 1)

 

3 hours ago, NiGHTMARE said:

Also, if you enjoyed Pegleg's suggestion of Crossing Acheron, don't forget to check out the author's previous level Dante's Gate

 

I also suggest to check out the latest versions of these two wads, since they feature the new Doom II monsters and the super shotgun:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/a-c/achron22 (Crossing Acheron)

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/d-f/dante25 (Dante's Gate)

[Kyka]

16 hours ago, Pegleg said:

@bb2731

 

Here are some single maps that I have played and enjoyed. They're listed in no particular order, and all of them are for Doom 2 unless otherwise specified.

• Jade Earth
• The Vrack Trilogy (Vrack 1, Vrack 2, and Vrack 3 are all single maps that are independent and unconnected, except for having similar themes and being made by the same author)

 

Jade earth and the Vrack trilogy were my first thoughts when I saw this thread. Superb levels that I hope stay in the Dooming consciousness for a long time to come. Thoroughly second these recommendations.

 

 

6 hours ago, NiGHTMARE said:

A few more good single level wads:

 

Brigandine

Chord_G

Chord 3 (there are other Chord wads, but the others are just ok whereas these two are great :))

Don't Turn Your Back On The City

Vanilla Sky

 

Also, if you enjoyed Pegleg's suggestion of Crossing Acheron, don't forget to check out the author's previous level Dante's Gate

 

Props for anything Malcolm Sailor. :)

[Misty]

Remnant by Aurelius.  I had fun with it, even if it took me hour and half to beat it.

[Xyzzу]

Nice Egyptian tomb level using only two textures/flats and has a spooky atmosphere:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/m-o/nightomb

 

Enormous puzzle map with no monsters, only lore:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/s-u/thegiven

 

Black and white puzzle map also with no monsters, way harder to solve:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/m-o/moonlght

 

Black and white regular map with cool visuals and a neat final fight:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/a-c/candlemass

 

Harsh map with a nice shoreline aesthetic I've never seen anything quite like:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/s-u/saltwatr

 

Atmospheric progression puzzle, has an alternative version for weaker machines (has an entire forest as a layout!), one single guide-dang-it moment, though:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/g-i/grove

 

Nostalgia-driven Windows 98-themed exploratory map with multiple endings:

https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/s-u/st98

Edited September 21, 2022 by Xyzzy01

[Pegleg]

@bb2731

 

I'll return Nightmare's favor. If you enjoyed Nightmare's suggestion of Brigandine, also look at Breach, which was an unrelated single map made by the same author.

 

There are some other single maps that I forgot about, but that I also enjoyed when I played them.

 

Blinded by Fear

Sprawlbase

Siteline (Doom 1)

Drip Feed (by the author of Songs of the Damned--personally, I liked Songs of the Damned better, but Drip Feed is good, too)

The Wailing Horde (Doom 1)

[Roofi]

Bury my Heart Knee-Deep, maybe one of the best stand-alone maps I've played recently. It's a huge tech-base featuring metroidvania kind of progression and more than 60 secrets. And it's also vanilla compatible !

 

[Herr Dethnout]

Good time for a shameless self promotion...

[Kyka]

I've bookmarked this thread, coz so many great wads being suggested.

 

I have wondered often how do we keep more wads in the collective Dooming consciousness, over and above the usual suspects: The cacowards winners, the NEIS's, the BTSX's, the Eviternity's, the Scythe's?

[Dusty_Rhodes]

4 hours ago, Kyka said:

I've bookmarked this thread, coz so many great wads being suggested.

 

I have wondered often how do we keep more wads in the collective Dooming consciousness, over and above the usual suspects: The cacowards winners, the NEIS's, the BTSX's, the Eviternity's, the Scythe's?

It's an interesting question that I honestly have no answer for. List like the 100 most memorable maps or the Cacoawards keep things relevant for a long time. A new comer wants good wads? Point them to these lists. And that's a great thing but it's really difficult to keep playing smaller wads that others haven't heard of. Vanilla Wafers was a great wad that was new when I joined the site - I've played it like for times but I've never seen others talk about or discuss it. 

[Kyka]

I have often thought about the idea of having a third tier every year in terms of great wads. Obviously the top tier wins a cacoward, and the next tier down gets honorable mentions in the cacowards, but a third tier of say, 50 great wads released each year, decided by popular vote from a list of everything released that year. It probably wouldn't be that hard to do, (or probably it would be hard to do, idk,  I know nothing about maintaining a website like this one,) but that way, every year there is this big additional pool of wads that otherwise can slip off the radar. Stuff like Lunar Catastrophe, Three's a crowd (3IAC.wad), Khorus'SpeedyShit megawad etc etc.

 

I would love to see that happen, but heh not up to me, which is probably a good thing. :)

[Shepardus]

1 hour ago, Kyka said:

Stuff like Lunar Catastrophe, Three's a crowd (3IAC.wad), Khorus'SpeedyShit megawad etc etc.

For what it's worth, Three's a Crowd won a Cacoward and Lunar Catastrophe was a runner-up in their respective years.

 

Oh, and since I'm posting in this thread, go check out some WADs by Lainos and Death-Destiny. (Can't decide what to pick? Try 5till L1 Complex and Comatose for the former, and No Chance and Disturbia for the latter.)

 

Some other single-level PWADs in no particular order:

• Saturnine Chapel
• Man on the Moon
• Travelling to the Moon
• Breathless
• Entropy
• Cosmogenesis MAP05 (maps 1-4 are just MAP05 split into four parts for better performance, so I'm counting it as a single level)
• Ar Luminae
• Bifrost
• Diabolus Ex
• dead.wire

Edited September 22, 2022 by Shepardus

[baja blast rd.]

1 hour ago, Kyka said:

I have often thought about the idea of having a third tier every year in terms of great wads. Obviously the top tier wins a cacoward, and the next tier down gets honorable mentions in the cacowards, but a third tier of say, 50 great wads released each year

 

Some thoughts on how to do that:

 

Caco alone has like three meaningful tiers in it, because there is a bigger difference in an absolute sense between "all-time great" (9.7+/10 on a really stingy rating scale) and "very good, one of the best releases of the year" (probably would go down to 8.7/10) than between that and most of the smaller mentions (probably would be more like 8.0/10 on that scale). That's because of how the bell curve works ('pretty good' is super crowded any year, but frequency will start to drop as you ascend to 'all-time great'). If the Cacos were an actual "tier" where everything in it was closer to even, there would be like 2-4 Cacowards a year and maybe 20-30 runner-ups. 

 

But the upshoot of all of that is the "third tier" you are referring to doesn't actually "end" in a neat way lol. If one could somehow measure it, the 100th best wad in a year would probably be as close to the 20th as the 20th is to the 1st. 

 

What that means is you should pivot away from quality distinctions once you get into like t50/t100 (because you'll be splitting hairs over things that are sometimes 0.05/10 apart in theoretical quality lol) and instead fill niches. That also means a popular vote would probably be literally the worst way to do that because all the existing "signal" would be "how many people heard of this in that year" of wads that are near-tied. But that is a pretty poor measure of anything. (For example FCFF was so obscure that no one even mentionated it in its year.) Current popularity in the sense of "how many people have heard of this right now" is not even a good predictor of future popularity in the sense of "how many people would like this in 3-5 years if they knew about it." 

 

So what I'd think of is what are all the meaningful niches, and then try to find what seems to be the best wads in each (as long as that "best wad" is probably t100 overall -- because you don't want a niche whose best representative is a bad wad lmao), and maybe have like 5-10 "free" spots because niches can't be perfect. That leads to the issue of how to define niches. It's easy to double-count some but omit some. It's also not clear what niches should be and requires a lot of knowledge about the Doom scene overall to do that. "Best remaining wad with an offbeat, atypical architectural style that doesn't follow the normative architectural styles" or "Best remaining wad that has opaque and weird progression" are examples of niches that seem highly specific and probably would not be "voted for" if a group picks them because of that, but are probably good candidates. On the other hand, "best techbase wad" or "best [insert any one theme] wad" are really awful ways to divide the pie yet might seem like reasonable niches to more people.

[Kyka]

@baja blast rd.

 

Thank you for sharing such detailed thoughts. Yes I agree with what you have said. Bell curves do not conform to linear quality assessments, and popular votes are not a great way to judge the genuine merit of a wad. But surely something is better than nothing? Even something as simple as a list of all the nominations each year is better than nothing. And it would provide something sort-of-close to my point of keeping more wads in the collective consciousness, which even if done imperfectly, is better than wads just drowning and beingt lost in the huge piles of shovelware and terrywads.

 

@Shepardus Thank you for the clarifications. I just chose a couple of random great-wads-that-weren't-as-popular-as-Eviternity-but-were-still-awesome as examples of my point. Didn't realise that I had added cacoward winners and runners up. lol a poor way to make my point. :D