Speedtraps for the Bee Kingdom

[baja blast rd.]

FWIW, I know there has been "controversy" in a certain place related to this map, but I do take shitty posting in my threads personally, so if you're just here for lazy memes or to extend that convo or to regurgitate YT talking points, do not show up. I'm starting this thread to talk about highly specific things in this map because I find the map interesting, not anything related to that convo.

 

I'll be posting in multiple (dozens of?) posts over some time, because I think that's an interesting format to try out, instead of writing thousands of words before I post anything.

 

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I love this building in the opening area and the surrounding scene: the subtle claustrophobia of the ceiling hanging down over you if you decide to go through the center first (in a way, the ceiling makes the encounter itself feel architecturally foreshadowed). The "overlap" style architecture there in general. The shading of the different textures that are used to make it. The fact that the beating heart marble is used effectively as a decoration (the heart itself is a striking color contrast), but also not in more cliched marble structures. The skyhack play going on with the height of the facade compared to the height of surrounding buildings, which is not really gratuitous or showoffy, either; it's done more to make it feel like the building and the environment is made of slabs of material rather than sectors/linedefs. The rocky cliffs have their own baked in jagged, alien-like otherworldly feel, very much unlike the smooth curly rocks (or eccentric sharp shapes) that are more typical these days. Thing props do a lot of lifting in this scene, actually, when it comes to putting on the final touches, but with good thing props that's not immediately what you think of when you look at the scene. Even for BTSX e2, the atmosphere here is weird, surreal, and disembodying, but more on that at some other point.

 

 

A bit later on (by the way: because of the map's nonlinearity, I'll be jumping back and forth in chronology over different playthroughs), the blue skull key fight is probably one of my favorite in the map. It looks way more intimidating than it actually is. The first time I played it, it was certainly hectic and panic-inducing, like it just looks impossible not to get swarmed by all those goats. But if you keep cool and rocket down one side of goats and then dart through a gap, you can even do this whole encounter without taking damage. The mix of hell knights and barons creates interesting tactics. For example, a fun counterintuitive "prioritization" tidbit is that with the rocket launcher specifically, you often want to focus more on barons because the splash damage will take care of, or pile up on, the squishier targets around them. (An archetypal example would be a baron with a few chaingunners nearby at its sides.) With other weapons the reverse would often be true, but splash damage changes a lot around sometimes.

 

 

[baja blast rd.]

The setting of Bee Kingdom lives as much in me -- in my imagination -- as I did in it when I was playing. It's kind of odd, because I had pretty different opinions of the two major "biomes" when I was playing. 

 

The lifeless subterranean cavern might be my favorite setting in the megawad. It's just so expansive, so gray and lifeless, but also so majestic. It consumes you. In a megawad whose aesthetics are generally really vibrant, this cavern is basically the opposite of that, like a space that is a ghost, sapped of all color but what amounts to a rainbow starscape of torches, projectiles, and powerups. At first I wish it was even more unpopulated, even more hollowed-out, even more colorless. When I pause the game and the music stops, I hear in its place a track with no momentum whatsoever, the bass gone, the driving pace eroded, maybe strings and the music box and little else. Something that is creaking and dead and sickly. 

 

 

 

 

 

The mountain / beach / noodle soup restaurant theme, on the other hand, left me wanting as I was playing. It's pretty, don't get me wrong, but for me at least it doesn't have the transporting emotive force of the the cavern., and it also doesn't have all the interesting touches of craft that hold my interest when the design is all minimalist abstraction that is light on concept, and light on ideas for more than its shape and layout. So it mostly kind of exists, which is not the worst thing in the world here because scope is part of the map's worldbuilding, but I really wished there was more to the individual parts of it. 

 

 

 

  

 

But when I reimagine it, all the pretty views combine into something more than the sum of its parts -- and then I can imagine why you would want to design such a space. The act of creating it (or in my case recreating it in my imagination) is very compelling in itself. And for that reason it has grown on me since that first (re)play. 

 

A little note: this "overlap" is, uh...I really like the technique in general but it's so superfluous here that it made me laugh. 

 

 

The way the two themes play off one another is cool. It's such a big map yet the overall structure is easy to parse, like you have the caves and beaches on one side like a crescent, then deep within the earth in the middle of that, there's this giant hollowed-out scar of the cavern, then in the north near the starting spot, you're higher up in the mountains. Sometimes levels come along and you feel like their layout would be better described by a world map than the usual mazy overlay, and this is one of those. 

[baja blast rd.]

A bunch of uninterrupted gameplay footage because why not.

 

 

There is a free secret GFB in this map. The fact that it's unguarded and sort of in a closet secret is probably one of the most "classic" things about this map. In modern pwads, a secret BFG feels like it has to be the reward for an extensive sidequest or secret hunt or brutal optional fight. But nope, you can just find one sitting in the caves.

 

Knowing that, I made it a point to try and beeline for it early here.
 

It doesn't defang the rest of the map, though. Chaingunners and close-quarters revenants are precisely the monsters that punish the long wind-up time of a BFG shot. A lot of the bulky midtier-heavy monsters suit the BFG anyway, making it feel like a normal weapon the map has. There is this standard tradeoff where to use the BFG you have to get close, where you can often lob rockets and plasma from afar, so when getting close to heavy-hitters is sometimes dangerous and optional, a completely free BFG doesn't automatically throw a wrench in the map's balance.

 

Beetrap's gameplay without BFG suits evasive playstyles a lot better than full clear ones. Post-BFG is only time I even considered clearing out all the inhabitants of the cavern. It's kind of a shame I think that people associate "running past monsters" with "running out of ammo because the map isn't balance" and "being bored," because evasion can be fun and exhilarating in the right map.  

 

I don't think this map really has a conceptual or cinematic knockout of an encounter, the sort of encounter that makes "best fight of the megawad" lists. (Conceptual as in the idea behind it. Cinematic as in the way it looks.) That does seem like a missed opportunity, since a few areas here have the structure for that. 

 

*

 

Beetraps is an example of "biome"-style design, which is when the setting sort of shapes what the gameplay is like within it. For example most of the arachnotrons live in the void cavern, as do a huge chunk of the map's cacos and pain elementals. The cute wood pagodas are habitually stuffed with revenants and archviles. Chaingunners are on cliffsides and in the stone mausoleums. 

 

This seems incidental, like certain areas tended to have certain dimensions so monsters that worked with those dimensions were usually used there. Like with the spiraling rocky cliffs of the inner caves, you probably do want revenants if you're going to use a low number of turrets in a very vertical area: revenants are efficient high-angle projectile snipers because of how homing missiles don't loft over the player's head. And if you design a box-shaped stone arena, it's probably going to have a setpiece in it... 

 

But pairing gameplay theme with location intentionally is a good idea I think! Idk, imagine a map that is: 

 

- moon

- forests

- restaurants

 

And the moon parts have lots of rocket-hurling, fodder-heavy gameplay. The forests are quieter and more mysterious and have lots of secrets. The restaurant has a lot of wacky gizmos that get used during fights, and all the arachnotrons and masterminds are there because they have been sprite-replaced to wear chef hats. And these themes all sorts of mesh together in the map, so you can sort of know what you're getting when you enter a theme, which shapes how you navigate the map. (Like: don't go in region A right now because we're obviously unprepared for it.) I'd be curious if there are many wads that play around with this to that level of intentionality.