The (simple) fun of difficult wads

[baja blast rd.]

When hard wads are discussed I see some people bring up Masochism(TM) and Challenge(TM) and assume that's the only reason you'd ever play them.

 

Sometimes when people do that it's because they are taking the qualia of their own direct experience (pain, suffering, CBT) as a given, sort of like a constant, and then assuming others' experiences are dominated by the same ones but people who enjoy it anyway find completely different reasons to enjoy it in spite of that, some of those reasons being abstractions, like "challenge-seeking," or that they are masochists, or whatever. 

 

But something a lot of people miss is that core, visceral experiences can differ hugely. In my experience, I like hard wads first (a) because they are fun to play in a very simple straightforward sense (doing the fights is exciting, enjoyable, and all those other positive descriptions), and second (b) because of that whole problem-solving, "challenge" element. Usually it's a heavy mix of both, but a without b is fine, where b without a would probably make me want to IDCLEV. 

 

But I do realize that not many people talk about their direct, visceral experiences maybe because they seem so obvious and self-explanatory (even if they aren't). So, fair, I guess; the lack of discussion there does leave people to only guess. 

 

So I'm going to run through some "hard gameplay" through the lens of pure fun.  

 

The YK crescent of Maelstrom (Sunlust map28) is one of my favorite stretches in the game. 

 

 

Juicy imp rocketing; for some people, that's Fun Doom 101. The initial space restriction makes plowing your way out of the horde of imps feel very satisfying to do. It's super easy to just plop open a STARTAN box and dump in lots of imps and zombies and give the player a RL, and such a setup would be minimally fun at least. But a lot of the secret sauce of good "fun fodder" design is porting that to contexts that are more well-rounded and have other attributes going for them. There are several ways to do that I know of. Here, the threat element (the against-all-odds swarming of the imps and the manc projectile hell) lampshades the fact that it's a big box of imps to blow up with the RL and makes you feel like you've "earned" your fun, which makes it feel stronger. Idk what's going on in Scientific terms but that seems a lot like it.  

 

The cyb fight is enjoyably tense regardless of what poison you pick: having to fight it among all the pillars, or juking past it and allowing it to maybe back you up into the next fight earlier than you want. The bumpy floors require you to have a good handle on moving in small, controlled ways, which I find very rewarding and tactilely pleasant to do (it kind of feels like a finger relaxation exercise). Naturally, cyb rockets whiz right past you when you do this -- but they aren't actually that dangerous. But that still gets at the core of what makes it enjoyable: doing something that looks scary, but you feel very in control of. 

 

 

The double vile-chaingunner wave fight is maybe my favorite smaller fight in the map. I love it. The basic 'atom' that makes it so enjoyable is that you nearly always want to be overaggressive with the viles and gun them down with rockets without heavily relying on the static cover, which is exciting in itself, because taking out a vile with a flurry of rockets before it even attacks and hoping it doesn't stop to attack is really fun. But you still want to read what's going on and react and not just tank all the vile blasts offered up. So that requires you to sometimes quickly differentiate between "okay this vile is attacking me but it's near-dead I'll just fire 2 more rockets at it" and "I have to hide from this attack" and then pivot back over behind the pillar, often starting way out of position (because being reliably aggro against the viles demands you get closer). So that's a pretty fun dodge to pull off, backpedaling with more or less just spatial awareness of where the pillar is (since your attention is focused on the viles). And on top of that, the crews of chaingunners on the opposite side hard limit how much time you're allowed to take to dodge, so you have to dip behind the pillar with a small timing window, which is fun to pull off, like a precise improvisatory dance move. Sometimes you can do a full loop behind the pillar without stopping by choosing the right movement speed and kinda estimating when you'll be behind the pillar, which again feels badass. 

 

Those chaingunners are also satisfying to nuke with flurries of rockets. If you get here lower on health or tank a lot of damage during the fight, somewhat unnecessary medkits are given to let you to make panic runs for health while the chaingunners whittle you down.

 

Two viles is also the perfect number to let you not rely on cover. (Something that a lot of people who don't play difficult wads mistakenly assume is that Difficulty is the #1 point of difficult wads, but if that were the case everything would be harder than No Chance.) Difficulty is often just a way of creating specific tactics/strategy dynamics and and "tuning" where the enjoyment of the fight is from. So while the two viles goes down kind of easy, that's...sort of the point here!

[baja blast rd.]

WH's (and Roofi's) solo/collab 180mpv maps are imo on par with something like the Stardate wads -- they are basically a episode-length collection of some of the best difficult gameplay around imo.

 

I mentioned Stardate, and the way I'd describe a lot of WH's fights (or co-made fights) is that they look clearly SD20x6-inspired with their structure, but are way more of a deliberately engineered chaotic mess, rather than the clean "technical" setups that SD20x6 tends to use more often.  

 

 

The main elements in this battle are: slightly awkward visibility and navigation, messy 'clutter' (PEs that are not actually a huge threat on their own, even to ammo, but really can get in the way with their souls and get the cyb to behave in wild, unpredictable ways that you need to keep track of), a shitton of rev missiles. All that and more combines into the joy of this setup: it's just so good at constantly forcing me to 'read' whatever is going on and act and move accordingly. 

 

I love playing with movement speed variation -- an important tactical idea which means not zipping around constantly at SR40 speed (constant full run / SR40 is kind of an oversimplified take on "mobility as defense" that actually hurts more than it helps), but rather mixing slow, medium, and fast movement where needed. Again it's really pleasurable to do in a tactile sense, and I guess feels cool to do. This setup is perfect at rewarding it, because you constantly should be slowing down to avoid running into revenant missiles, but also you do need to quickly reposition yourself sometimes because a lot of unpredictable things can happen.

 

It's also a really stimulating fight in that there's a lot going on and a lot of information to process, and keeping track of all that is fun! The more common pleasure of observation is amusement -- something like watching a cyb nuke imps -- but in a lot of good setups, information processing is enjoyable in itself. And I'd guess that what makes that work is that all the information is likely to be relevant. I'm not sure what I can ignore here, except sometimes the PEs.

 

Enjoyable hard fights often allow you concessions feel 'easy': the chaingunners could be way worse but if you start lobbing rockets over when the top row becomes visible, you can clear them out surprisingly fast. Fun to do. 

 

(There's a way of cheesing this fight but I try to avoid cheeses that are just depriving myself of enjoying something.)

[Catpho]

15 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

WH's (and Roofi's) solo/collab 180mpv maps are imo on par with something like the Stardate wads -- they are some of the best difficult gameplay around imo.

Can you forgive the lack of insight at the moment (I need to sleep) just so I can say that I've been waiting forever for people to say a statement like this. French crew rocks.

In exchange, I promise some write-ups of Nine Inch Heels' maps, whose levels are underrated imo (and too little of them exists anyway). Maybe some ArmouredBlood & Grain of Salt levels too, since I've been going through the canon of the "old guard" of slaughter that I haven't played too much from.

[LadyMistDragon]

To speak generally, I really like something such as the relatively early Deus Vult 2. While not being full slaughter in most maps, sudden traps, combined with some seriously impressive landscapes, stand out in a way that was ahead of its time. And it's not even like Sunlust-style abstract voids are especially present. There is enough of an emphasis on natural landscapes, with some surreality mainly reserved for secret areas, thrown in every now and then.

 

Although this is really about combat, so I'll just go ahead and say I really like how teleportation of enemies is implemented generally. Oftentimes, there'll be little room to move but there's real skill displayed in how hordes of enemies are often shove your way at certain points. Although perhaps in Map 03, this gets a little annoying when they are teleporting all around you and your movement is hindered by trees, it's not too bad in most of the other maps. I can't necessarily comment on Arch-vile usage without further thought, but safe to say their placement was almost always moderately inconvenient at the least. It's like, place 4 of them surrounded by tons of other baddies, and place an Invulnerbilty Sphere nearby so you can get at them, but at other times, let's just hope the sadistically-overused hitscanners don't tear off excessive amouns of your health.

 

Having said that, hitscanner placement feels fairer than that in TNT. They really blend into the environment but at the same time are never placed a million miles away or anything like that. Are they still abused? Probably, but it's also not that bad, comparatively speaking.

[Catpho]

As promised.

 

Context for how I play challenge maps if anyone cares:

Spoiler

Keyboarding with a lot of saves. I can't go saveless as my actual dexterity sucks on long runs, plus I tend to play aggressively at the expense of reasonable decisions, but enough experience about how the game functions mechanically + sensible saving patterns means "hard" maps can be of enjoyment to me.

 

The level that kick started my NiH fandom was her collaborative effort in Mayhem 19, but the details are not with me right now owing to my last playthrough being so long ago, and it hasn't felt like the right time for a revisit (I feel if I replay levels without being in the right mood it will result in diminishing returns). So have this instead:

 

NoYe map 31

 

Platforming maps have a slightly paradoxical existence. They (tend to) remove so many other recognizable elements of "normal" (insert your mainstream perceptions here) Doom that requires readjustments on the player's part, yet they also rely on its audience being completely at home with the game's movement and physics, so in a sense they are the most pure Doom maps out there. The peculiar part about Doom platforming is that is more about failing with style and hoping that the game registers that you are "on" a platform; add the responsive, instant 0 to 60 speed of Doomguy's movements & controls, and the fact that Doomguy's stiff neck can allow for intuitive spatial puzzles of blind jumps, it makes Doom platforming a weirdly precise and focused activity, with a tremendous reward factor for keeping track and making sense of spatial information and making these dexterous inputs to realize your thoughts. A close analogy would be when you play sports: there's a real click in the brain when your analysis and body work in tandem. 

 

This kind of reward can be found in spades in NiH's map for NoYe, a collection of assorted Doom esoterica and unknown pleasures. The level consists of nothing but movement based trials, so it's as distilled a way to access the platforming "feeling" as possible. There's two parts to this level: the pure movement parts and the rocket "jumping" parts, each with much variety so the level is constantly exciting pacing wise. The pure movement part leads with a thin, squigly low-friction bridge, so there's a lot of tiny taps to keep Doomguy in check. In fact, the theme of the first part is decisive tiny motions, so the effect is that you're constantly stimulated whilst keeping track of your landing/approach point. I think in a past post rd talked about the satisfaction of pulling off these small movements during the heat of combat, and this level just takes that easy to take for granted part of your Doom habits and gives it a bit more to do. The rocket jump sequence was the real highlight though. Rocket jumping almost never happens in more casual play (and in the majority of Doom maps if you are not speedrunning, for that matter), so it can be real interesting to work with (at least for me, a non-speedrunner) a mechanic that you could happen in theory or have done in accident. The joy of this section is quite similar to what I described above, so let's discuss a specific moment:

 

The place where you want to land is blocked by an inconvenient tower. Hell, you can't even see your landing unless you open the automap. Your savior is a wall (offscreen) to the left, where you can run towards, fire a rocket, and let the explosion throw you on the other side. Many things are happening at once after you've found the solution: you "calculate" the distance so you can place a rocket on a specific position of the wall. That's the cerebral stuff. The aesthetic part is when you do it, and in the split second you are in the air, see the world in great velocity. Then you land, as if your sheer will, your sheer superhuman dexterity and strength (in game of course) has allowed you to nimbly fly and make the tower irrelevant. The involved mechanics, the flashy visual of your motions contribute to an aesthetic experience you'll be hard-pressed to find somewhere else.

 

Magnetic visuals in this one as well. I wanted to lead with "gorgeous", but it feels too posh for a level as free-spirited as this one, so "magnetic" seems better to convey a sense of personality. I think it's pretty neat that NiH picked the most eye-popping colorful selections of the stock set, and shaped it into something that honestly feels very light hearted. She also took advantage of the rather unchained nature of the shapes in a platforming map to create a dazzingling void playground, one that must by necessity be interesting to analyze so as to create the best jumps.

 

Yes, I have pictures:

 

 

More to come if I can find another 1h30 mins to squeeze for a post :)

 

P.S. I never figured out how to go to the secret exit. Watching 4shockblast's demo didn't really give me any insights, so any tips and hints would be appreciated.

Edited October 28, 2022 by Catpho

[Captain POLAND]

Considering that one of my favorite maps is Okuplok, I would agree

[Nefelibeta]

2 hours ago, Captain POLAND said:

Considering that one of my favorite maps is Okuplok, I would agree

Not sure if you like Okuplok because you genuinely enjoyed it or you like the monster count. If it's the latter, there already are maps that outnumber it.

[Captain POLAND]

3 hours ago, Nefelibeta said:

Not sure if you like Okuplok because you genuinely enjoyed it or you like the monster count. If it's the latter, there already are maps that outnumber it.

 

I know and I've played a lot of them. Holy Hell Revealed is honestly kind of ugly, there are missing and mismatched textures, and it suffers from 'where the hell do I go' syndrome so badly that I actually had to noclip a few times just to continue because I couldn't figure it out. The progression in Okuplok is natural and easy to follow though. I recently played a map called Oreo Cake Massacre which had over 1000 more monsters than Okuplok, but it was kind of a ripoff, with many areas clearly inspired (not directly copied) from Okuplok, so I just kept thinking 'I've totally seen this before...' Then you have joke maps like 100,000 Revenants, IDDQD Arena, and Zambies which obviously aren't as fun.

 

I'm going to try Cosmogenesis soon though, so maybe that one will be my new favorite...

[Azure_Horror]

Re: why play difficult WADs

 

I like when interesting/unexpected events happen in Doom maps. Even more so, I like when I am the key actor in this events. This is why I love maps like Eviternity Cryonology, Going Down Insanity, Ancient Aliens Leave Your Sol Behind or 3 Heures d'Agonie 2 Safe Zone.

 

And it turns out that difficult maps often cause interesting events to occur natrually. With difficult encounters, there is always a question: "What is possible here?".

- Sometimes the answer is boring. For example, "It is possible to bring 10 more rockets from a secret, and after that everything will be easy" (grumble, grumble, Fractured Worlds Map02 rocket launcher fight)

- But often the answer is very intersting. Dance between columns to avoid both Homing Missiles and Archvile Zaps. Rush the scary enemy crowd early, before it spills all over the battlefield. Find an advantageous position and fight the monsters from there. Switch to the rocket launcher in close combat to clear monsters fast enough. That kind of thing.

- On top of that, brainstorming difficult encounters can lead to another question: "Can the limits be pushed a bit further?". Yes, my previous attemp to save BFG ammo ended in a disaster. But maybe I should be even more agressive with rockets? Or maybe it is possible to lure the monsters away from my preffered hiding spot? Or maybe there is a great infighting opportunity, which I am missing?

 

So there is that thing:

Difficult setups tend to cause intersting events. But it goes even further. When mappers aim for high difficulty, they are less worried about making stuff "too extreme". Essentially, the mappers have less limits in those maps. And with less limits, the mappers can create more intriguing scenarios, which, by design, lead to interesting events during play. Of course, sometimes the mappers use their powers in a boring way, like adding yet another huge crowd of revenants. But they also can create some extremely intersting setups, like @Nirvana's Cyber-Noble-Cyber super-collider from Fractured Worlds Map02.

 

TLDR:

I play difficult maps because they often have interesting setups and situations.

This does NOT mean that difficult = interesting!

There are easy, but interesting maps, and there are hard, but boring maps. Nevertheless, high difficulty often allows for more complex and interesting designs.

Edited October 29, 2022 by Azure_Horror

[4shockblast]

On 10/28/2022 at 4:35 AM, Catpho said:

P.S. I never figured out how to go to the secret exit. Watching 4shockblast's demo didn't really give me any insights, so any tips and hints would be appreciated.

Great writeup. Reminds me of the platforming thread also started by rd. :) I still want to contribute some more writeups there, heh.

 

For the final RJ on that map, I think once you understand the general concept of it increasing your speed away from the explosion and the fact that it does not boost you in the z direction, the main thing to keep in mind is how to combine strafejumps and movement with effective use of the explosion. For this, I highly recommend use of DSDA-Doom's coordinate display, at least for practice to understand what I mean.

 

Basically, people tend to start by doing RJs backwards, because it seems more natural to have the explosion behind you, but this has a lot of drawbacks. For one, a backwards RJ means it's pretty tricky to time the RJ at the same time you have the most speed; if you try doing one from standstill off a wall, you will notice your speed maybe jumps to like 23 if you check in slowmotion, which is a decent increase, but it's not that much above regular strafe50, whereas if you were already moving at top SR50 speed or close, you could go up much higher (though keep in mind the theoretical maximum speed in any cardinal direction is 30 due to MAXMOVE). Second, even if you time the rocket well, you will immediately start losing speed from the maximum back down to max SR50 as you approach the edge of the platform you are jumping off; as such, one of the main things to keep in mind WRT to RJs is you should aim to do them either mid-air, or as close as possible to being mid-air, because you will be able to exit the platform at top speed or close to it. In general, this applies across the board for movement; you want to aim to do any actions that may increase or decrease your speed at the right moments, often tied to bein mid-air; if you are RJing, you want to RJ as early as possible but not too early to get as much speed across the jump distance while not losing it to SR50ing while you are on the platform. If you need to turn for movement or an RJ, it's also best to do so mid-air, as turning and movement keys have no impact on your movement since Doom has no air control.

Because of the above, it's a good idea to practice RJing forwards, but here the key is to get the explosion to occur at the right moment. Obviously, you want it to be behind you, but just running forward and shooting will often make the explosion end up in an inopportune place, since if you face too far into the wall it will end up behind you and if you face away, it will end up in front. Separately, you also want to make sure the explosion boosts you before you smash into the wall, as colliding with the wall will result in decreased speed, and in general Doom collisions are highly unpredictable in terms of where they push you and how much they affect your movement. This works because not only are you timing the RJs to be behind you as mentioned before, but also the explosion will naturally be in the direction of the wall, so you will end up gaining some speed away from the wall as well, avoiding the collision.

 

So, applying this all to the ny31 exit RJ, you need to time your RJ(s) there such that

1. You start gaining speed as early as possible, so your first shot should be early in the jump.
2. You rocket the wall after you fall off and gain a lot of speed, so you boost yourself to as high movement values as possible.
3. You rocket the wall at such angles that the RJs are behind you and reasonably close so you gain as much speed from them as you can.
4. You don't rocket too early or too late so you don't collide with any wall or end up gaining no benefit from an explosion.

The other element here is the FIREBLU pillars on each side that make avoiding collisions trickier. But in principle, that's basically what my run relies on; I start an RJ by running diagonally towards the left wall (but not too close to perpendicular), I time the RJ as close to before the collision as possible that I can avoid the collision and gain a maximum boost in the direction of the jump (with an angle that makes the explosion hit behind me instead of in front or to the side), and I repeat for the other walls so I don't collide with them.

 

But notice, I said RJ(s) above; actually, you don't even need to do the strat, it's sufficient to just get one RJ here. As I mentioned above, Doom's movement speed is limited by MAXMOVE anyway, so this RJ couldn't really be that far that you need to do multiple RJs. With just one, it should be even easier mechanically; just start from about the edge of the staircase or just past it, strafe50 somewhat into the wall, and time your first RJ early enough and well enough that you immediately go up to as high speed as you need to clear the rest of the gap. Of course, you'll still need to make sure that RJ doesn't push you away from the wall too much so you don't collide with the pillars or the other wall, but hopefully this method will make this easier to get this jump at least once, especially as a keyboarder. :)

 

Sorry for hijacking the thread a bit. :^)

[Catpho]

3 hours ago, 4shockblast said:

Sorry for hijacking the thread a bit. :^)

Above and beyond. Big thanks for the post, I'll try to digest it and see if i can achieve rocket jumping ascension.

[Nine Inch Heels]

On 10/28/2022 at 7:35 AM, Catpho said:

A close analogy would be when you play sports: there's a real click in the brain when your analysis and body work in tandem. 

Probably among the fundamentals of what it is that drives people to play progressively harder games/maps/mods - besides fun - is the sense of competence. Everybody loves to feel competent - incompetence is inherently painful to some degree, while competence is akin to a drug in terms of how the brain responds, and it just might be the healthiest drug of them all, if your gaming habits aren't entirely out of control, I suppose...

 

The reason why I prefer harder maps over the same old same old, and the "straightforward", is because the harder maps are "competence checks" which still result in a "click" for me when I emerge victorious, or at least "alive". I don't get that in easier maps, unless there's some other stimulus involved that happens to check a different box in my brain.

 

Tangential ramble:

I'm competent enough to beat the old id-material practically without fail, and therein lies the reason why I gravitated towards stuff like slaughter. It was really great, back then, when I beat DoomII for the first time ever, that made me feel "accomplished" (not to be confused with competent), it didn't come easy to me at all. The previously impossible was "only" quite difficult all of a sudden. Then, I beat the game a few more times, felt "decent at it" - the difficult became "pretty manageable". After that, I became "competent", and beat the game several times per weekend, if I felt like it (all on UV difficulty, no saves, no deaths)... And, just to squeeze just a little bit more life out of the game that I liked as much as I did, I started a playthrough on NM difficulty shortly thereafter, but I also allowed myself to save at the start of each map. Once that playthrough reached its end in the shape of a dead IOS, I had done everything I ever wanted to get done in doomII, and the formerly "nigh impossible turned easy game" was out of stuff that would keep me interested. It went from easy to mundane, and from there to "so boring, I didn't fire it up for months, if not years"... and then, after some time, I discovered speed of doom, and suddenly the entire game made sense to me again, until I discovered the secret maps - those made no sense to me at first. And once I conquered those, I grabbed all WADs containing maps which were mentioned in the intermission text from map 31 to 32, played those secret maps, then came sunder, and the rest is history...

Edited November 2, 2022 by Nine Inch Heels

[BedrockCastle]

On 10/28/2022 at 4:41 PM, Captain POLAND said:

I'm going to try Cosmogenesis soon though, so maybe that one will be my new favorite...

Cosmogenesis is fantastic. It's difficult - very difficult - but also one of the best slaughterfests I've had the fortune of playing. The map is gorgeous, and it's full to the brim with interesting and creative combat encounters.

Edited November 14, 2022 by BedrockCastle
Unnecessary "there"

[Maribo]

I had to dig this thread out of the Doom General abyss so I could blog about a map that has sunk its claws into my brain and will not let go:

Map20: Your Empty Junkie Eyes by lunchlunch, from Temporal Tantrum is one of the best instances of a "total clusterfuck" style of slaughter map that I have ever had the pleasure of playing. There's something touching me deep inside my soul, and I think it comes down to the way you have to tackle the map: the density of the imps (and later revenants) means that you have to juggle carving through them with the two best tools at your disposal: rocketing them to death when you need many things to die very quickly, and cutting an ocean in two with the plasma rifle when you need to get through and can't afford to potentially splash yourself to death. Oh, and there are Archviles everywhere. Turret viles set around the map centerpiece to keep you moving, along with roaming viles (and cybers!) to put pressure on you and keep you from mindlessly rocketing hordes of monsters with no thought. It gets even better when you properly release the horde of revenants as well, because it pulls the classic "teleport a bunch of archviles into the map and have them start resurrecting everything you just worked so hard against", and it works so well when you're playing this map to make it as frantic as possible. That aforementioned centerpiece is a hot bed of corpses, the way you have to move around the map makes it so that there are plenty of corpses around and that you've likely not rid yourself of the turret viles either, so you still cannot stand in the open and rocket them to death slowly with the splash. You've got to move somewhere and funnel the skeleton crew + clusterfuck viles + remaining cybers into a manageable area so you can cull them down to a manageable amount, and this means doing your best to nail the viles with direct rockets (or as much splash as possible) while dodging revenant missiles, the zaps that the viles will inevitably try to hit you with, and keeping the remaining revenant flood at bay. And finally once you get a grip on it, you can clean up everything left, which is probably the turret viles and a bunch of turret imps at the exit. All of this is choreographed to a rendition of Dead or Alive's You Spin Me Round (Like A Record).

 

Beautiful map both in how it looks and plays. I personally love being put under such pressure while at the very core of the map, I'm doing the same two things: rocketing things and cutting my way through blocks of enemies with plasma. The joy in playing Doom comes from being able to transform its relatively simple arsenal and monster roster into complex and engaging experiences, and Your Empty Junkie Eyes plays directly into that for those who love feeling like they're in a total warzone.

 

Various screenshots, if you so enjoy: (ignore any with stuff like Game Speed at the top, I took them from some demos during playback because screenshotting while playing is truly impossible)

Spoiler

 

 

 

Edited April 6, 2023 by Maribo

[Helm]

On 10/27/2022 at 7:38 PM, baja blast rd. said:

The bumpy floors require you to have a good handle on moving in small, controlled ways, which I find very rewarding and tactilely pleasant to do (it kind of feels like a finger relaxation exercise).

Speaking of qualia, I'd like to highlight that getting to the point where you can lightfoot around in doom like that and have it feel good and in control we are talking about concentrated amounts of hard work playing the game for hundreds of hours. Even if not conceptualized as hard work and practice but instead as fun playing hard videogame the experiential is that of training a foundational FPS movement skill.

All this to say that your argument for the raw fun of the experience of having to move like that, shoot like that is totally solid but for one to appreciate the beauty of gliding softly amongst the chaos they have to be already a little bit of a monstrous doom movement player themselves. The argument can only be felt as aspirational, behind a wall. Easy example: a lot of otherwise rounded and solid doom players put in front of a difficult platforming challenge. Immediately everyone says to stream, says to themselves, says to god some variation of "hehe, I'm in danger". 

So from the frantic fits of self preservation of the average player in the imp pit sunder situation to '[precise movement] feels like a finger relaxation exercise' there is an ocean of mysterious qualia.

edit: to make a contribution instead of just commentary. I wanted to talk about fighting the rev/baron fight in the beginning of sunder03 like this. Not because it's the best way to do it but because I had to do it this way because every other way I tried was getting me killed 90% of the time. Speaking of 'skill checks', this fight certainly felt like that to me. This is why it pushed me to try to capture that platform early and to rocket the ledge while I dance around those revenant fireballs. Those are what I wanted to talk about, actually. It doesn't show up so much in the video but if you go try it you'll see it a lot: the elevation and layout make it so those revenant missiles that curve around you make pretty dna strand-like patterns. 

I only got to witness this because fighting them on the level was just kicking my ass. If you try to grind a difficult map to get more skill, you will have strange little experiences that you remember that do not mean anything to anyone else until someone actually asks. That's an experiential benefit of deepening an appreciation for something, not just getting more skill in the end. 

This fight still kicks my ass btw and I still mostly go and dance around up there for the revenants like an idiot. It works 50% of the time now which is better than 10%. But I also go up there and do that to get the dna strands. 

I understood much more about this fight when I realized Sunder was made and tested with free aim.


 

 

Edited April 7, 2023 by Helm

[baja blast rd.]

On 4/7/2023 at 7:10 AM, Helm said:

Speaking of qualia, I'd like to highlight that getting to the point where you can lightfoot around in doom like that and have it feel good and in control we are talking about concentrated amounts of hard work playing the game for hundreds of hours. Even if not conceptualized as hard work and practice but instead as fun playing hard videogame the experiential is that of training a foundational FPS movement skill.

All this to say that your argument for the raw fun of the experience of having to move like that, shoot like that is totally solid but for one to appreciate the beauty of gliding softly amongst the chaos they have to be already a little bit of a monstrous doom movement player themselves. The argument can only be felt as aspirational, behind a wall. Easy example: a lot of otherwise rounded and solid doom players put in front of a difficult platforming challenge. Immediately everyone says to stream, says to themselves, says to god some variation of "hehe, I'm in danger". 

So from the frantic fits of self preservation of the average player in the imp pit sunder situation to '[precise movement] feels like a finger relaxation exercise' there is an ocean of mysterious qualia.

 

I'm writing from my perspective now -- but back in 2015 when I was pretty bad I'd routinely throw 40+ attempts at encounters that were too hard for me, while being a much more clumsy player, and not be frustrated/annoyed at all with failure.

 

I still speedrun sometimes, where if you're doing it right for record times, success % should be something like 1-2% per attempt (succeeding on 10%+ of attempts simply means you're leaving time on the table and can take more risks to shave off more time), and don't get annoyed at dying/resets. In fact it's pretty zen, especially with the runs that are only going to take 2-3 hours to get a desired time. (I can't speak to grinding high-effort runs, like Sunlust D2ALL UV-Max, because I don't do that sort of thing.) 

One of the most fun, exciting things to me is to be in an FDA (or casual playthrough of a hard map) and then get killed in a very dangerous fight where I put up a really valiant effort at surviving but end up getting killed. That's probably the #2 best type of event in an FDA for me. (#1 would be surviving of course.) 

 

I'm guessing people are wired differently and some people might have an ingrained habit of "dying = bad" and reacting with negative emotions to getting killed, no matter what. 

I suspect that a lot of people who casually throw around the term masochism have that "dying = bad" wiring and can't possibly perceive it any other way so assume it's that way for everyone else too. Seems like people overstate the universality of their experience sometimes. 

[KeaganDunn]

49 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

I'm guessing people are wired differently and some people might have an ingrained habit of "dying = bad" and reacting with negative emotions to getting killed, no matter what. 

I suspect that a lot of people who casually throw around the term masochism have that "dying = bad" wiring and can't possibly perceive it any other way so assume it's that way for everyone else too. Seems like people overstate the universality of their experience sometimes. 

 

This is indeed a problem I've been seeing lately. Some people act like if they die in Doom, it's the worst mistake in the world and they're a failure and will never amount to anything in life. Even if they're using saves.

When people playtest my harder stuff (ie Violetshift), and they aren't a speedrunner/UV-MAXer who can handle the best of the best, I can feel their frustration rising and patience deteriorating with every little death. It makes me feel guilty as a result. But it shouldn't.

 

There have been plenty of games out there, including Doom (2016) and Doom Eternal, that emphasize how with every death, there is something to learn. No matter how good you are at the game, you're not a failure if you keep dying - you're learning as you're playing. Especially if it's for the first time, and you have no idea what to expect or how to tackle a setpiece.

 

Some people have that mentality of how Doom should always be push-forward combat in small maps with obvious progression and no sense of challenge whatsoever, and the map is badly designed if otherwise. If that was the case for every PWAD out there, I would have moved on from Doom years ago. Tons of other people would have as well. I do firmly believe challenge (and creativity in that department) is part of what's kept this community alive, as well as the mentality of dying=learning.

Edited July 14, 2023 by KeaganDunn