Why I will no longer tag my secrets, and You Shouldn't Either: An Essay

[stewboy]

I haven't had time to look at the responses in detail as I went to sleep and now have to work, but I do want to ask this quick hypothetical:

Let's say the original Doom didn't have secret tags. You still had secret areas - e.g. every E1 soulsphere is still there, looking at you with its creepy face - but you no longer get any indication at the end that you 'missed' any of them. How would this have affected your experience?

And let's say a modern doom port was then invented that had a new 'secret' sector tag, and something called a 'secrets count' at the end of the level. After the initial flurry of experimentation, could you say for sure that this was something that we should all adopt? Are there any obvious advantages to it, if we had already gotten used to Doom without it?

(I will admit that the sound that plays and the message that displays when you find one is pretty nice. But is there anything apart from that?)

[IncompA]

4 minutes ago, stewboy said:

After the initial flurry of experimentation, could you say for sure that this was something that we should all adopt?

This same thing could be said for your originial idea. Your point is?

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

7 minutes ago, stewboy said:

I haven't had time to look at the responses in detail as I went to sleep and now have to work, but I do want to ask this quick hypothetical:

Let's say the original Doom didn't have secret tags. You still had secret areas - e.g. every E1 soulsphere is still there, looking at you with its creepy face - but you no longer get any indication at the end that you 'missed' any of them. How would this have affected your experience?

And let's say a modern doom port was then invented that had a new 'secret' sector tag, and something called a 'secrets count' at the end of the level. After the initial flurry of experimentation, could you say for sure that this was something that we should all adopt? Are there any obvious advantages to it, if we had already gotten used to Doom without it?

(I will admit that the sound that plays and the message that displays when you find one is pretty nice. But is there anything apart from that?)

If the end level tally wasn't there, we'd be better off, I think. 

 

Edit: yes, including kill count and par time, and everything. 

Edited April 4, 2023 by Sneezy McGlassFace

[IncompA]

6 minutes ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

If the end level tally wasn't there, we'd be better off, I think. 

 

Edit: yes, including kill count and par time, and everything. 

I want some insight into why you think this. Crack the skull open and let the thoughts flow out.

[Kinsie]

My philosophy is that marked secrets should contain items of benefit to the player, while unmarked secrets should be kept to dumb Easter eggs and injokes that don’t change the player experience too deeply.

[IncompA]

Ah, finally someone I can agree with in this thread.

[thiccyosh]

Guys, guys! Can you believe it? People actually have preferences and can decide during gameplay if they want to hunt down secrets or not! Holy shit! Doomworld is not a collective brainless hivemind!

 

Shout outs for Doomworld completely deleting my 2 page draft after clicking on "go to new response" by accident. Thanks! I am in severe pain, but don't want to sound dismissive about this post.

 

Let me give you the short version: Nobody is holding you at gunpoint for missing arbitrary goals such as secrets or items (and if yes blink twice stewboy). Enjoy the game how you want, use cheats if there are obnoxiously placed secrets you don't care to find. This stupid elitism á "UV Max or die" has warped the minds of everyone in the Doom community here to the point where every custom map feels like one big virtual dick measuring contest about who can keep up with [insert famous Doomtuber here]. So why do you care so much? Some seek a challenge and some just want some fun.

 

The ideas you've presented here are at least worth experimenting with, though saying to never use tagged secrets is a bit bold for my taste. Since untagged secrets will also be hunt after like tagged secrets. Secrets can also be used as beacons, to tell the player that there are hidden supplies which may decide over life and death in certain maps. Which also encourages exploration, to perhaps show more of the map and to reward very nosy players. 

 

These are my two cents. I wanted to add more but thanks to Doomworld, you get to save two and a half minutes by not reading another essay.

[stewboy]

35 minutes ago, EliDoesStuff said:

This same thing could be said for your originial idea. Your point is?

I wrote a 1500 word post attempting to justify removing secret tags. I'm wondering if there are similar justifications for inserting secret tags if they're not there already.

[Omniarch]

As a descriptive claim, this post would have just been an interesting read - one with which I would partially agree, having considered the effects of secret / kill-count tallies on my own experience of the game. As a prescriptive statement, though, I categorically disagree.

 

To jump straight to the root of the issue: mappers are under absolutely no obligation whatsoever to cater to the needs of players, especially ones who engage to the point of their own frustration. Doom wads are not products, players aren't customers; no money changes hands, and the ability and / or motivation to engage in deceptive marketing on the part of mappers is almost nonexistant, as are the consequences of such on the player.

 

Tangent: I despise exploitative mechanics as much as anyone, but a little score count at the end of a level is not even in the same category as, say, a skinner box, differing as it does in both intent and effect. Given the time period in which the game was made -- an era which emphasized replay value due to the relatively high expense of software -- I think it is fair to assume that the scores at the end are mainly informative, letting players know that there's content they have yet to uncover. It's only in the modern, hyper-consumerist and over-monetized gaming space that such extrinsic "rewards" (if you can call a score tally that) take on a sinister tone.

 

Back to the main point: IF and only if mappers wish to please the completionist segment of their audiences specifically is this prescription applicable, as in: "given that you want to cater to this crowd, as you are free to do, then here's my advice [prescription]". Otherwise the statement encoded in the thread title comes off as a moral proclamation, which, in this context, would be quite silly.

 

 

While I'm at it, I might as well comment on the Doomtuber part of the equation.

 

On a personal level, I enjoy and respect the output of both decino and MtPain (those two being the most well-known and influential DTbers around here), and generally consider both to have a positive effect on the community by exposing the hard work of mappers to a wider audience than otherwise possible. Annoying -- or, more charitably, unacclimatized to forum etiquette -- as younger players can be, the influx of new blood is overall a boon. Hell, I discovered Doom through a Karl Jobst video (though YMMV on my pretentious presence being a net positive, heh).

 

However, if a large enough proportion of mappers start to take on the design priorities implicitly or explicitly favoured by folks like decino or MtPain, then I will have to reevaluate this position. The idea of "Doom mapping influencers" is one so utterly repulsive that it pains me to consider it, elevating as it would the opinions of a handful of people to undue heights, and indirectly imposing upon waddom restrictions born of the pressures of YouTube content creation. A Doomtuber's insight is no more intrinsically valuable than anyone else's, obviously, but their status can cause their preferences to be reflected in the public consciousness as "good design", since the followers of such figures are often quite young and impressionable.

 

Some degree of the above is inevitable, of course, and doesn't really differ qualitatively from the usual mechanism by which ""good design"" conventions* are established, though to me personally the idea of wads becoming more "YouTube friendly" is vomitous beyond words, especially since that would mean catering more to viewers than players. I am not terribly concerned about this trend, though: the kinds of maps that I tend to enjoy most are made by mappers who don't seem to care much about public approval, judging by their design choices *cough* No End In Sight *cough*. That said, I do believe that mappers would be better off disregarding common wisdom and creating what pleases them most, cheesy as that sounds. That's the only prescription I would be comfortable making, at any rate.

 

^{*I am not referring to genre conventions, such as those introduced by Scythe 2 or whatever, but instead to the mess of contradictory ideas held mostly by non-mappers about what constitutes 'good design'.}

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

1 hour ago, EliDoesStuff said:

I want some insight into why you think this. Crack the skull open and let the thoughts flow out.

The tally screen has heavy implications that getting 100% of everything and beating the par time is the correct way to play. If it was somewhere in a menu instead, I wouldn't object. This is more like "you only got 50% secrets? Tsk tsk tsk. Start over and hump more walls."

This is a bit of a tangent but I see it similarly to games Platinum-style grading of combat. If I wanted to be graded on performance, I'd go back to school. Let's say I survive a fight, I'm happy about that but then I get a C on rating screen and all the good vibes are ruined. It doesn't make me want to try harder next time, it makes me hate the game. If all the grades were in a menu with my performance stats, it'd be fine. 

 

Back to doom, I made a more nuanced comment earlier in the thread, in case that got missed. 

I would love to see how you experience a map l that's more of a choose-your-own-adventure. I can't remember which one it is in btsx e2, theory of broken circles? Essentially, you take one of three or so paths, each takes you on a ride, and dumps you at the exit. If you're adamant on 100%ing it, it must be a pain. But design-wise, that sure wasn't the intention. So the tally screen goes against the map design. You get about a 1/3 of everything on each go-around. Do you go through the map to the end, then all the way back, choose another path, get to the end, then all the way back and choose the third path? I can't imagine that being fun or satisfying. I'm not saying you're playing it wrong but it's a shining example of how the % tally messes with people. I played it, and had a blast. Then the tally said I didn't do enough. 

 

Edit appendix: also, I want to be surprised while playing. Start a map not knowing how many monsters and secrets there is. That's more immersive for me. And I value that more. 

 

Appendix 2: the more I think about it, the more backhanded acknowledgement of victory the tally screen feels. 

"You beat the level, congrats. Except, you only have 98% kills, so you didn't *really* beat it, did you"

Edited April 4, 2023 by Sneezy McGlassFace

[PKr]

11 minutes ago, stewboy said:

I wrote a 1500 word post attempting to justify removing secret tags. I'm wondering if there are similar justifications for inserting secret tags if they're not there already.

It's not a 1500 word essay, but my reasoning why you actually still should keep tagging secrets is that:

 

-There are two separate audiences - those who prefer to know the secret count beforehand, and those who don't want to know it.

-If you keep tagging your secrets, those who don't want to know level stats beforehand can turn it off via source ports options, and vice versa.

-If you won't tag your secrets, unlike in previous case only the half who doesn't like to know level stats will benefit, but others will be "left out", since you can't "turn on" stats for non-tagged secrets.

 

In other words, if you tag secrets it solves the problem, if you don't it introduces the problem. At least that's how I see it.

 

But tbh I think you have come to the wrong conclusion to begin with, and the problem is actually this:

The more important point here is that those people who play with level stats always on should question themselves more consciously whether they actually want to know level stats before hand or not. I don't have any ocd nor am I a completionist, but even then knowing level stats negatively affects my perception of wads (as mentioned in that other thread), so that's why I play with stats off personally. But in the end it should definitely be an option for the player.

[cannonball]

Honestly this feels like a set of solutions to someone else’s problem. I think my view on this has already been well summed up by @Omniarch and a few others.

I personally never intend to 100% a map and if I don’t, then it isn’t a big deal. What I love is to play a map again and discover something new, this is the experience I have got from playing virtually every 90s era fps (from Doom to Half life etc). I see no reason to not do the same for pwads.

In short, there is nothing to fix in the way people do secret areas, of course there are ways we can mix things up. But overall the way secrets are done is absolutely fine. If people have a bad experience based on a set of “non-essential criteria such as 100% every aspect of every map” then that experience is purely on them unless there is a genuine error from the mapper (missing sector tag, misplace item etc).

 

In short Stewboy, make the maps the way you want to and always have, there is nothing to change in regards to this.

Edited April 4, 2023 by cannonball

[Tristan]

Make maps for yourself, not other people!

 

I understand the sentiment in the OP, however... stewboy, I think it's fair to say your music was pretty divisive once upon a time. It always seemed to me that your generally mellower style always got the brunt of the pushback against the wave of "non-Doomy music" that started to crop up around the start of the last decade - we all remember the "gay mexican soap opera" comment about BTSX E2 right? You (fortunately) didn't really change your approach to writing music to appease the people who just want metal all the time, so why do the same for maps?

[Gez]

2 hours ago, Omniarch said:

To jump straight to the root of the issue: mappers are under absolutely no obligation whatsoever to cater to the needs of players, especially ones who engage to the point of their own frustration.

Yes. The problem isn't that finding secrets is frustrating, it's that it's frustrating to people who put deliberately put themselves through self-imposed arbitrary challenges that make the game more frustrating, such as doing blind run + pistol start + completionist + saveless because they need the bragging rights or have a crowd to please. Who said you have to find all secrets first try on a blind run?

 

The problem then is, if we drop secrets because some people feel that they need to find every last one of them on their very first playthrough, why wouldn't this apply to monsters as well? Who hasn't read people ranting about having to waste like 10 minutes looking for the last two imps that had escaped, or some cacodemon that failed to teleport from its holding pen into the actually-playable game area? Maybe not just lost souls but all monsters should lose the MF_COUNTKILL flag. Or perhaps boss monsters only could keep it. That would certainly cut down on the angry comments about cliff-side imps...

2 hours ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

The tally screen has heavy implications that getting 100% of everything and beating the par time is the correct way to play.

However, it's usually not possible to get both 100% of everything while still being under par time. For example, E1M1's current UV max record is just barely under par time (26 seconds out of 30); while E1M2 is not under par (1:35/1:15). And UV max is only maxing kills and secrets. It ignores items. I really doubt it'd be possible to go for 100% KIS in E1M1 in less than 30 seconds, as you'd need to add going into all those corners and through the hidden corridor overlooking the zigzag nukage room. I'm sure it'd take more than 4 extra seconds even with a TAS.

Edited April 4, 2023 by Gez
DSDA has a better record than Compet-n for E1M2, still above par though.

[SCF]

I learned very quickly that I don't care for secret hunting. It's satisfying when you notice a hidden switch and get rewarded for it, but spending 15 minutes running circles around an empty level just to get that 100% is not my idea of fun, so I stopped bothering. And when I watch a video of someone doing a blind UV-Max run, I usually skip through those parts.

 

But even from the perspective of someone who doesn't particularly like secrets, there's a good reason to tag them. Sunder, for example, has no secrets at all (besides the hidden exit in map15, which doesn't matter anyway since you can always just idclev). When you open a map and see a secret count of 0, it kind of lifts a burden. It tells you that you can focus entirely on the combat, and not have to worry about finding that one differently-colored torch somewhere in this giant map. More importantly, it means the resources that are in plain sight are all you get. If you struggle to get past a particular fight, the answer is always to get better at it, and not "just find the hidden invincibility".

 

If I were playing such a map, and it turns out there were hidden powerups and they just weren't tagged, I'd feel pretty annoyed. Obviously this only applies to the type of map where challenging combat is the main focus, but in general I appreciate knowing that I don't have to look out for secrets at all.

[SiFi270]

gist of this post: I am me and I don't know how many of me there are or what percentage they form, but maybe there's just one of me and maybe that's for the best

 

I'm the kind of person who wishes Marathon and Strife and other games had official secret counters so the paranoia of what I could be missing out on doesn't literally kill me

 

I'm the kind of person who, if I go too long without managing to find official secrets, will admit defeat and just look it up on the wiki or Youtube or the editor as a last resort, and then when I get to them for myself I think "oh a rocket launcher, that would have been handy for that one part, oh well"

 

I'm a big fan of this guy on Youtube called raocow, who is a big completionist type but doesn't worry himself too much. For example, he plays a lot of Super Mario World romhacks, and if one of them has a way of tracking whether or not he got all five of a level's big coins, he'll get them, but if it's just like it is in vanilla SMW, he won't bother. That's not what I'm like but I do find it pretty enviable. Lately it's been looking like classic Doom is somewhere on the horizon for him, and I may end up eating my words but I feel like he'll want to use a suitably faithful port that keeps track of secrets before you finish the level. I just hope if he does he'll impose some kind of "if you haven't found them by now, look it up" time limit on himself like I do.

 

I'm the kind of guy who sometimes thinks "my hand is itchy. if I cut it off, it won't be itchy any more. HMMMM." but doesn't actually cut off his hand.

[IncompA]

1 hour ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

The tally screen has heavy implications that getting 100% of everything and beating the par time is the correct way to play. If it was somewhere in a menu instead, I wouldn't object. This is more like "you only got 50% secrets? Tsk tsk tsk. Start over and hump more walls."

This is a bit of a tangent but I see it similarly to games Platinum-style grading of combat. If I wanted to be graded on performance, I'd go back to school. Let's say I survive a fight, I'm happy about that but then I get a C on rating screen and all the good vibes are ruined. It doesn't make me want to try harder next time, it makes me hate the game. If all the grades were in a menu with my performance stats, it'd be fine. 

 

Back to doom, I made a more nuanced comment earlier in the thread, in case that got missed. 

I would love to see how you experience a map l that's more of a choose-your-own-adventure. I can't remember which one it is in btsx e2, theory of broken circles? Essentially, you take one of three or so paths, each takes you on a ride, and dumps you at the exit. If you're adamant on 100%ing it, it must be a pain. But design-wise, that sure wasn't the intention. So the tally screen goes against the map design. You get about a 1/3 of everything on each go-around. Do you go through the map to the end, then all the way back, choose another path, get to the end, then all the way back and choose the third path? I can't imagine that being fun or satisfying. I'm not saying you're playing it wrong but it's a shining example of how the % tally messes with people. I played it, and had a blast. Then the tally said I didn't do enough. 

 

Edit appendix: also, I want to be surprised while playing. Start a map not knowing how many monsters and secrets there is. That's more immersive for me. And I value that more. 

 

Appendix 2: the more I think about it, the more backhanded acknowledgement of victory the tally screen feels. 

"You beat the level, congrats. Except, you only have 98% kills, so you didn't *really* beat it, did you"

As cliche as it may sound, a lot of these complaints sound like a you problem.

 

First thing: Video Games created in the time of DOOM were designed with replayability in mind. This is why end tally screens were implemented into almost all of these games.

Now to the "you problem", I personally don't find things like end tallies and performance metrics to spit in your face like you so describe it. I find it more like "Hey, you. Yeah, you. You missed some stuff. Come back and try again. But beat the rest of the WAD first."

My reaction to this usually isn't dissapointment, or anger, but rather intrigue. "Oh wow, I missed that much shit? I'll have to do this later."

 

Unrelated to my points, but I've seen that a lot of posts in this topic are preaching their opinion like it's the gospel. I detected this mood in your post as well and the truth is, it isn't.

Everyone has their own opinion, own playstyle, own pet peeve, whatever. I'm here to share my opinion and educate others as to why theirs may be objectively wrong. But when the topic is filled with these so called "gospel posts", it becomes hard. People posting around and refuting other opinions like it's the black plague. I could have done the same thing, but I didn't. I was constructive and attentive to others opinions, which is clear that's something that doesn't happen around here often.

 

I apologise for the rant of sorts at the end, but I think the denizens of Doomworld could learn a thing or two about fitting into someone else's shoes.

Edited April 4, 2023 by EliDoesStuff

[heliumlamb]

i would first like to allude to two neighboring sector-based fps games from the same time period, albeit ones with a slightly different structure: marathon 2 and infinity.

 

they have maps made of sectors too, with many "unnecessary" areas worth a player's exploration, they also have secrets! absolutely none of those secrets are accounted for, and most are hardly telegraphed in the same sense as most doom players are accustomed to. there are parts of many of those maps that could be considered secret, yet without any "reward", unless you consider filling out the automap to the best of your ability its own reward. other secrets in the later 2 marathons, may yield extra supplies, or terminals. in marathon 2 you can get one WSTE-M5 a few maps early, but you could also miss it entirely and still play the video game. the secrets in marathon 2 and infinity do not yield, and do not need to yield any numbers going brrrr at the level transitions. a player could not be aware, or even need to be aware of any secret, or if any area they stumbled across was indeed a secret, and still finish the video's game.

likewise, unreal, another singleplayer first person shooter has plenty of secrets, either items or things to receive on the universal translator, all without telling you if it or isn't a secret (if my memory isn't failing me)

while not fps games, in king's field (1, 3 and 4) and armored core, you can easily and blissfully go through the entire game without ever being made aware of the existence of the triple fang and karasawa, respectively. if you consider not acquiring either of those hidden items a form of "punishment" by the designers, it's 100% not the game's fault for having an item hidden.

for a different vibe, many arcade games (in arcades or inspired by arcades) will have secrets found through observing skilled players player experimentation, trial and error, that in many cases could be considered mandatory for getting the most out of your credit (ie: garegga's flamingos). and it's not like merely notifying a player of a secret is a bad thing on principle.

(doom again, but the idea of a "secret" with regard to video games has a broad application)
 

i prefer to look at the Immersive Simulation Of Some Cute Demon Friends Exploding as an exploratory zone foremost, but never exclusively. ideally doom sits somewhere between a dungeon crawler and arcadey game, either through astute balance or wavering crescendo. because of this, the implementation of the "secret" and its many degrees of obfuscation is highly variable. a perfectly aligned hidden door is no less valid of a secret than a timed switch/trigger puzzle, platforming finesse, the expected "huh this wall lookin a lil weird.." etc. sector tag status notwithstanding. however i feel when coming across any of these is what cements its status as a secret.

ultimately, whatever is presented to a player is fine, because the player is not in charge of design. a player may like it, a player may not like it. Preferences. as a designer, make the map. tag some secrets, tag all secrets, tag none secret. it's a video game. when i play video games, i set a very strict, heavily intertwined set of restrictions that i, as a player, must never once deviate from: if i'm enjoying it, i will play it. if i'm no longer enjoying it, i will not play it, or (most often at a later time) ruminate on whether or not i should or should continue to play it.

in most aspects of my life, i've accepted that i'm fine with late-stage neo-FOMO: the freedom of missing out. i'll prefer the regret of unawareness, over the regret of misguided compulsion almost unanimously. of course, each approach may have consequence, positive and/or negative.
 

 

Edited April 4, 2023 by heliumlamb

[Shepardus]

I feel that it's worth pointing out that you don't have to use secret tags as "secrets." In the context of speedrunning they're not really "secrets" anyway because anybody doing a practiced run should already know where they are. They're more like "additional challenges" and serve as the differentiator between certain categories such as Nightmare Speed and Nightmare 100S. I enjoy seeing the differences that arise as a result of having secrets to go for. A level that might take just a few seconds for NM Speed could be significantly more involved for NM 100S. It's also a cool routing challenge when there are a bunch of secrets in a nonlinear map and you have to think about the order in which you want to visit them.

 

Comatose is a great example of this; a UV or NM Speed run is pretty much a straight shot to the red key and then the exit, and can be done in less than a minute, which is almost a shame for such an expansive map. There are 23 secrets scattered all over the map, however, so a NM 100S is way more of a challenge and IMO does the map more justice (or it would if I actually had a demo to show for it). There's still plenty of stuff to explore in the map that isn't tagged as secrets, too! Incidentally, the map that prompted this thread, Ancient Aliens MAP31, might be another good example, though there currently aren't any Nightmare runs on DSDA. For something that actually has good runs, look no further than Zero Master's NM Speed and NM 100S runs through Doom II. The difference between those two is what's enabled by having secrets tagged throughout the levels.

 

With the knowledge that "secret" sectors aren't really secret, think about how else you can use them. Maybe use them as progression markers. Maybe mark optional challenges with them. Or maybe just pick out a nice DSSECRET lump and treat the players to some ASMR as they run up a long staircase tagged as secrets.

[Helm]

What this discussion highlights the most is the FOMO/Gotta play 'em all and 100% 'em all aspect of the psychology of the average video game player that also happens to be a wad enjoyer. There is an extra wrinkle, it's not just the identity of the doom player playing wads but also that of the doom content consumer intermixing. Especially vis a vis a hyperconnected social media reality around a game that otherwise is out of the market. The only currencies getting spent here are social currencies, and this is a discussion of how some of this social economy generates consumer trends that are not aligned with how people actually play doom in their privacy for fun for decades. Frictions ensue as people try to figure out if their self-confidence needs to be shook because they save/load or because they didn't find secret, after all all these important youtube/stream people are teaching us how the game is best approached, like chess analysts do for the game of chess online, fighting game commentators teach us the values and morals of the fighting game community on stream, etc 

But doom is ancient, and privately people play it in wildly divergent ways, to the point of fetishism or perversion (I say this with 100% love in my heart :)  ) so of course people are sensing falsehoods and projecting on top of this nascent main stream.

My data point is I remember when doom didn't tell me all my stats and that I stumbled through Doom 2 terrified as a little 10 yr old often with godmode/idkfa on and just marveled that it could even exist. I thought it was a game about survival. Being good at doom being a necessity to get a deeper experience didn't even occur to me until I saw stuff like Sunder. And even then, early on it didn't even occur to me that people play these huge monstrosities in a vanilla manner, actually. And I think in the early zdoom era people *weren't* mapping, or playing said maps with a purist mindset. I understood this material as community material, sandbox building blocks to combine as you desire -- decades later many Doom enthusiasts still mostly play the meta of gameplay mod + appropriate mapset.

It would be many years after the game came out that I understood people play vanilla competitively and have all along and that speedrunning is a thing for videogames and it kind of started with Doom etc etc. All this is osmosis in the culture now, but I experienced these things step by step and they changed my relationship with the game as well. Coming on to this old game with all that knowledge front-stacked would create expectations that the Doom experience is clear, simple, delineated across categories and that everyone kind of has arrived to same strategies of play, like say, the game of pacman or tetris.

However Doom is a fully immersed 3d experience and movement in that game explodes into chaos immediately. Your motor control in a 3d space explodes all potentialities, *nobody* plays Doom exactly the same. But speedrunners by virtue of optimization can appear as if they play the game the same way from an untrained point of view.

I think there is a subset of the playerbase that sees playing/making doom as an creative endeavor foremost, but there is another that plays to challenge their skills and see the sights. That part of the playerbase is ancient, nothing to do with UV Max trends on youtube. However there is a more recent audience that heavily trades in this kind of wad content tourism that *also* has the skills and mind to 100% everything, and because it's a younger audience with an internet-grown brain, they encourage this hyperconsumption on all levels, and this leads to an impoverished view of the less tangible / hierarchical / archived aspects of the doom experience.

A person sitting to map something may be thinking in the innocent part of their hearts 'I'm gonna make such a great level that people are going to, even if just for a moment get totally immersed in this space as if it's the only doom space they've ever been in' and then they get instead 'this map sucks it has so many secrets I can't 100% it on my first blind run, I HAVE MAPS TO PLAY, MAN'. It's a clash of mentality about what value signifiers something as difficult to pin down as a 'map set for a 30 year old retro game that nonetheless changed the world' can hold. These signifiers are not inherent. We only observe them from a vantage point informed by multiple oral histories. A younger player / doom social content enjoyer will inadvertently broaden their vantage point by spending more time with the game and in the community.

[Klear]

This is a really interesting topic. I've only joined this community - and started mapping - very recently, so I'm still in the process of absorbing the unwritten rules and good practices arising from the decades of Doom's existence. Turns out even with a game and community this old, things are not quite as set in stone as I'd expect them to be.

 

Personally I fall in the camp of not giving a damn about secrets at all. Ages ago I found all secrets on Entryway (mainly thanks to playing Deathmatch) and that's where my ambition ended. To this day there's only a handful of secrets in the iwads I reliably get. A nice bonus is that I get to keep rediscovering the secrets over and over again.

 

So when I started mapping, my instinct would be just not to make any secret sectors at all, but I eventually sprinkled a few around, suspecting other people might enjoy finding them. They tend to be kinda meh for the most part. Having read through this thread, I think most of the secret sectors in my maps should be unmarked, only using the tag for the few good ones.

 

One thing I've been doing is testing my maps while ignoring all secrets. IMO a map should always be beatable even without the extra goodies, although perhaps not necessarily with 100% kills.

[IncompA]

1 hour ago, stewboy said:

I wrote a 1500 word post attempting to justify removing secret tags. I'm wondering if there are similar justifications for inserting secret tags if they're not there already.

I hate to be that guy, but the first 40% or so of your post wasn't even talking about why secret tags are demon-spawn created by Spider Masterminds. So that's about 950 words actually dedicated to talking about the point in hand.

 

Someone out there could probably write a 950 word topic about why secret tags are holy creations, but I'm not the guy to do it, as I'm one sleepy guy right now.

[Sneezy McGlassFace]

21 minutes ago, EliDoesStuff said:

Unrelated to my points, but I've seen that a lot of posts in this topic are preaching their opinion like it's the gospel. I detected this mood in your post as well and the truth is, it isn't.

Genuine question, what do you mean by this? 

[Biodegradable]

2 hours ago, thiccyosh said:

Shout outs for Doomworld completely deleting my 2 page draft after clicking on "go to new response" by accident. Thanks! I am in severe pain

 

For future reference, Yosh: While the forum software usually does a pretty good job at remembering your drafts, it's definitely something you shouldn't rely on. If you find yourself writing a particularly large post, copy-paste it onto a word processor to help prevent losing everything you wrote.

Edited April 4, 2023 by Biodegradable

[Maribo]

25 minutes ago, Klear said:

This is a really interesting topic. I've only joined this community - and started mapping - very recently, so I'm still in the process of absorbing the unwritten rules and good practices arising from the decades of Doom's existence. Turns out even with a game and community this old, things are not quite as set in stone as I'd expect them to be.

You'll find that there are memorable experiences on both ends of this spectrum. 30 year love letters to Doom and the way it originally played, gradual refinement of traditional gameplay feel, aesthetic and visual tribute to id's vision of demon killing and entering hell itself to keep killing // wild experimentation, puzzle-solving and slaughterfests, expanded/reimagined monster and weapon rosters, esoteric art pieces and trauma work. Doom is a canvas and it can be beautiful in so many ways. Follow your heart.

[IncompA]

33 minutes ago, Sneezy McGlassFace said:

Genuine question, what do you mean by this? 

Which part of my post is confusing you?

[baja blast rd.]

25 minutes ago, EliDoesStuff said:

Which part of my post is confusing you?

 

Please post better and cool it on the aggression (including your first post that you edited to sound more enraged). You have made the most posts in this thread by a huge margin, but combined they have less substance than most other individual posts, and I have gotten complaints.

[IncompA]

1 minute ago, baja blast rd. said:

 

Please post better and cool it on the aggression (including your first post that you edited to sound more enraged). You have made the most posts in this thread by a huge margin, but combined they have less substance than most other individual posts, and I have gotten complaints.

Had a feeling someone was going to find my latest post aggressive, that was not my intention. All apologies.

[DoctorNuriel]

Perhaps a good middle ground would be to have a small number (3 or 4 max) of fairly obvious/easily reached marked secrets, as well as more deviously hidden unmarked ones (for maps that aren't too large to check for the marked ones)?

[TheLippyServer]

This seems like bending over backwards to try and appease people who just aren't your target audience, in my humble opinion. AA as a whole for me is sort of hit and miss, but I quite like map 31, and I am pretty darn OCD about finding all the secrets in maps I play. I suspect that a lot of people would simply switch to complaining that the secrets aren't marked - especially if there are items or monsters in them. I really wouldn't worry about it; I think you should absolutely be proud of Grey Dwarf.