What Makes a Map Fun to Play Without Quicksaves?

[MrMean]

Hey all! Playing through some of Tarnsman's Projectile Hell's early levels and some of the maps from the old First-Try Demo contest has left me thinking a lot about what I find makes a fun to play without saves, and I figured I'd make a Doomworld account to expose those thoughts to the greater dooming collective. Additional methods for making a map fun to play without saving, examples of maps that you find find to play without saving, and even critique on why one of the methods I've listed might not be a great idea are all welcome! Please quote whatever section you respond to, since this post is long, and I may edit it later in response to feedback.

 

Goals

Players should be able to die and redo the start of the map multiple times without the experience becoming repetitive.

Players should be able to play a map multiple times with different playstyles

Methods

Allow For Expressive Encounter Tactics

Saveless players will need to redo fights that they have already survived when they die in a later portion of the map. Add room for encounters (especially ones early in a long map) to be optimized for speed using strategies that are more challenging than those required for basic survival.

• Allow the player to exit an encounter after taking out just key hit scanners and body blockers rather than requiring that they wait out a timed lock in or clear out an enemy packed but low threat choke point. (Ex. Bourgeois Megawad, Ancient Aliens, Down The Drain, Baker’s Dozen Map01)
• Allow the player to make an encounter more lethal for all parties involved via optional threats such as crushers, telefrag setups, or running multiple encounters together for infighting. (Ex. Disintegration Muffin)
• Allow the player to optimize non-combat sections of the map via corners that can be cut, turns that can be optimized to SR40 through large chunks of the map, simple platforming that can be taken at full speed with enough skill, and incidental enemies that can be sprinted past at full speed. (Ex. TODO)

Allow For Expressive Routing 

In saveless play, the number of times the player needs to play through the first encounter of the map is the sum of all attempts needed to finish the encounters after it. This means that a challenging map with a traditional layout that is linear and increases in difficulty with each encounter will ensure that the first portion of the map is a miserable, trivial slog by the time the player even reaches the last encounter.

• Allow the player to attempt any difficult encounters in the map near the beginning of the map in whatever order the player chooses, so that saveless players can face the encounters in whatever order goes from least consistent to most consistent for them. (Ex. TODO)
• Allow the player to save any encounter that can’t be optimized much beyond whatever is needed to survive (read: some lock-in encounters) until the end of the map. (Ex. TODO)
• Allow the player to enforce their preferred playstyle via mutually exclusive weapons. For example, choosing between a chaingun with more than enough ammo vs a berserk and a few rockets lets the player decide whether they want to be methodical and avoid as much pressure as possible or speedrun taking out key enemies at the cost of needing to play more aggressively and likely leave more enemies alive. (Idea from This RD Post[TODO: add link once I am able to]) (Ex. Disintegration Muffin)

Long Levels

In addition to making the above methods harder to consistently implement, increasing a level’s length decreases the margin for error exponentially. For instance, a player facing a map with 5 encounters that they are 80% consistent at will take on average roughly 3 attempts to finish the map, while a map with 10 encounters will take around 9 attempts, and a map with 15 encounters will take around 28 attempts.

• This can be countered by avoiding encounters that kill the player from full health in favor of resource attrition with a limited supply of health pickups, where encounters that take an above average amount of health and encounters that take a below average amount can cancel out. (Ex. Down The Drain Map 11)

[LadyMistDragon]

34 minutes ago, MrMean said:

 

Long Levels

In addition to making the above methods harder to consistently implement, increasing a level’s length decreases the margin for error exponentially. For instance, a player facing a map with 5 encounters that they are 80% consistent at will take on average roughly 3 attempts to finish the map, while a map with 10 encounters will take around 9 attempts, and a map with 15 encounters will take around 28 attempts.

• This can be countered by avoiding encounters that kill the player from full health in favor of resource attrition with a limited supply of health pickups, where encounters that take an above average amount of health and encounters that take a below average amount can cancel out. (Ex. Down The Drain Map 11)

 

 

This is definitely a topic that could invite some discussion. Generally, it seems like long maps tend to be frowned upon unless they lean towards the slaughtery end of things and that's really because of consistent combat flow more than quality necessarily. But also.....I feel like most people don't really like to play long maps generally speaking and if they do, it's probably more for the challenge than anything else. As such, the idea of someone demo-ing something like The Last Sanctuary which was a submission for the First Try Demo Contest seems patently ridiculous because there's too much empty space in that map. It just seems like when maps that aren't even that long get tagged with "magnum opus syndrome," that may be a sign that the larger encounters just go on for too long. Which is a problem of time management, come to think of it, and isn't exactly an easy problem to solve. Personally, I have a broad pallette so it's fine, but I feel as if though exploration-based maps aren't exactly good to play saveless unless there is a fairly large percentage of worthy encounters. But even then, excessive traversal will really drag things down. And the ironic thing is that I find a number of so-called "magnum opus" maps to be much better ones to demo in comparison.

 

As for the rest, it's all excellent observation that was clearly the result of some study but I have nothing else to add at this time.

[TheSlipgateStudios]

Long to huge levels are an almost savescumming tactic

[Jacek Bourne]

41 minutes ago, TheSlipgateStudios said:

Long to huge levels are an almost savescumming tactic

I don’t understand. Can you explain what you mean?

[No-Man Baugh]

2 hours ago, Jacek Bourne said:

I don’t understand. Can you explain what you mean?

I think what Slipgate meant was; longer levels almost necessitate mid-level saves or even mid-fight saves in the case of long slaughermaps like Okuplok or Profane Promiseland

[Naarok0fkor]

I don't use quicksaves...

Edited March 2, 2023 by Naarok0fkor

[Mr. Alexander]

I tend to play with saves, only recently started redoing even successful encounters to achieve consistency, and only VERY recently started recording casual demos of levels as part of an effort to improve at the game. Excessive length really kills my will to play levels over from the beginning. I record demos to improve, but also to have a good time, and while I'm content to lose ten or fifteen minutes to a successful run of a Doom map, each minute over twenty increases my desire to bail out and just play with saves like a normal person. 

 

The OP points out the tedium that sets in over an initial fight that a player can beat in only one or two ways, but I would imagine the tedium could extend much further beyond that if you tried to make demos of gigantic slaughter maps with many discrete battles, or no discrete encounter design at all.

 

I'd love to see more examples of the OP's points where TODOs stand right now. It looks like a pretty good start.

Edited March 8, 2023 by Mr. Alexander
Wanted to fix a grammatical problem.