Nostalgia 2 - now on idgames! [32 Maps] [Doom 2 Format] [Limit Removing]

[DoubleCakes]

I'm having a good time. These levels are snappy are full of atmosphere. The music selections have been top notch!

 

There's a lot of archies, though. It seems like every time a group of enemies spawn in, an archie comes along with them.

[WorldMachine]

After playing a good bit of it already, I like the direction you took with this one! Nostalgia 1 felt more like DOOM 1 with some sprinkled elements of DOOM 2, especially when the city levels felt like early attempts of making a city level in DOOM 1. The mapping in general felt very akin to DOOM 1's mapping style and DOOM 1 style maps. Nostalgia 2 takes the iconic browns and greens of DOOM 2 and makes the whole experience better (because DOOM 2 isn't that great level wise). And while it might seem more dull than Nostalgia 1, I love the charm of just taking DOOM 2's style and rolling with it! great stuff Myolden, maybe a Nostalgia 3 can take place in DOOM 64, lol! I joke of course but I'm all here for any future projects of yours! Awesome work!

[tinotormed]

Enjoyed this mapset a lot to the point I have made the demos for each map.

 

All of them on UV-Max with no deaths, saves and loads, and pistol starts.

 

Will be uploading all of them at Personal Best demo thread soon. 😊✌️

[50milliarden]

Now in the right thread...

 

Loving this megawad! One fun thing I noticed: in map 24 there's an alternative way to reach the soul sphere secret.

 

Spoiler

From the start, at the right side of the gate, you can easily step over the right flaming barrel that's supposed to obstruct the path, then walk around the building, going south through the narrow alley and arriving in no man's land. Going all the way west and then north, into another alley at the east side, the north and east till you reach the gate again from the "wrong" side. The building with the soul sphere can be accessed through the window, using the sidewalk and left flaming barrel as stepping stones.

 

myolden already confirmed it's not intentional, but it works so perfectly that it could count as a cool easter egg.

[EtzelFred93]

I finished the Megawad about a week ago and enjoyed it for the most part but felt like it was missing some of the charm from Nostalgia 1. But I definitely prefer the combat in this installment. 

I look forward to the next one!

[ApprihensivSoul]

 Finally got a chance to start this. Blue room in the first map I lowered the trap wall in the process of trying to lower the trap wall. Myolden, you are a creature of habit, but a habit I find endearing. Only had time for one map so far, loved it immensely.

[Laughados]

I really enjoyed the action-packed bite-size maps, but somewhere around map12 or so, it just had way too many sudden archvile traps. They felt like a crutch, and it became really repetitive.

 

But as far as map layout and looks, I really, really loved it all. I loved the use of verticality for such small maps!

[behemoth_667]

This is next in my list

[Pechudin]

Very good mapset, fairly vanilla and (up to MAP21) slightly below or just at my competence level. How long did a map on average take to complete?

[myolden]

13 minutes ago, Pechudin said:

How long did a map on average take to complete?

 

I didn't really track development time so I have to go off of my notoriously bad memory. Some of the maps (especially the early ones) probably only took 2-3 hours each but the longer ones maybe shot up to 6-8 hours per map, mostly because I spent a lot of time waffling with ideas and doomcute stuff. 

[Pechudin]

2 minutes ago, myolden said:

 

I didn't really track development time so I have to go off of my notoriously bad memory. Some of the maps (especially the early ones) probably only took 2-3 hours each but the longer ones maybe shot up to 6-8 hours per map, mostly because I spent a lot of time waffling with ideas and doomcute stuff. 

 

I'll need to analyze your mapping style, as I've noticed my own getting a bit stale. Combat is very enjoyable and very tight in places. Layouts are really well done. What influences your thought process with layouts? How do you think of the maps?

[myolden]

9 minutes ago, Pechudin said:

 

I'll need to analyze your mapping style, as I've noticed my own getting a bit stale. Combat is very enjoyable and very tight in places. Layouts are really well done. What influences your thought process with layouts? How do you think of the maps?

 

These are great questions that I wish I had satisfying answers to. My layouts are usually not planned in advance and I just kind of doodle in the editor until I stumble on something that I think works. 

[DreadWanderer]

4 hours ago, myolden said:

 

These are great questions that I wish I had satisfying answers to. My layouts are usually not planned in advance and I just kind of doodle in the editor until I stumble on something that I think works. 

 

As someone who had "learn some mapping" as a new year's resolution, I'm quite fascinated with this answer in the sense that your work makes it look so easy and natural, yet I'm sure it's not like that for a completely clueless person like I am. If I'm being optimistic, this is actually encouraging.

[EmoLevelDesigner]

Megawad contains small levels ~5-10 min of playtime each where even though they sometimes tend to look the same, provide enough variety of environments and combat situations to keep you interested.

 

Well-written story works very well, you keep fighting and wonder what would happen next. 

 

In episode 3, from caverns to underground buildings and lava falls, with each level you feel that Hell is getting closer and closer. Here's a video of it.

 

 

Episode 4 is the most amazing so far. A town in Hell which is a twisted version of our own reality. Excellent use of Doom2 content for very realistic locations. I'll post a video of it soon.

[EmoLevelDesigner]

Finished Episode 4. I'm very impressed.

 

Doom2 can do it too! Immersive city locations like in Duke Nukem 3D, fleshy organic locations like in Blood.

 

The idea of showing a city in Hell allows to write off weirdness of Doom2 contens as Hell's twisting of reality.

 

Great atmosphere where we enter what looks like an ordinary apartment, until we open the fridge and get reminded of what the place is.

 

Level of details in interiors is extremely high. Very small sectors are used to show cut meat and vegetables on the plates, forks, knives and spoons, books on the tables, glasses with water, computers with keyboards and mouses.

 

 

[baja blast rd.]

1 hour ago, EmoLevelDesigner said:

Finished Episode 4. I'm very impressed.

 

Just a little note from the map list, but you've been referring to episode 5.

 

Spoiler

Quote

Episode 4: Hell Caves

Map 16: Blood And Thunder

Map 17: Ember To Inferno

Map 18: Tonight In Flames

Map 19: Fault Lines

Map 20: Purification By Fire

 

Episode 5: Hell City

Map 21: Going Through Hell

Map 22: Funeralopolis

Map 23: Never Purify

Map 24: Eighth Lock

Map 25: Anti-Anti-Christ

 

 

[EmoLevelDesigner]

37 minutes ago, baja blast rd. said:

 

Just a little note from the map list, but you've been referring to episode 5.

 

  Hide contents

 

 

I didn't see the map list and perceived it as "when there's an intermission screen, an episode ends".

That's why first levels on Earth are Episode 1 for me, medieval levels are 2, caves are 3, and city is 4.

[NightFright]

Statusbar ultrawide edition

 

nost2_uwide.zip

Edited January 4 by NightFright

[ryiron]

I finished playing through this and wanted to write some thoughts on it.

 

First of all, the maps look great. Even with a heavy dose of vanilla textures and simplified geometry each map manages to convey a strong theme. The limited texture selection in each map helps here. In just the first three maps there is a weathered brick techbase that wouldn't look out of place in Doom 1. The clean, bright blue waterfalls make a stark contrast against the rusted corridors. The second map drops into a sewer (it's tradition), with green walls against slimefalls, trimmed with metal and pipes and a smattering of brick. The third map gives more of a dilapidated space-station vibe. Grey textures are highlighted with pops of fire and red rock. Lighting is clean and effective, overhead beams cast shadows, lights and computer panels spill light into an area. Nothing revolutionary, but its done consistently well through the entire set. The maps are all topped off with the fine detailing: computer panels sunk into walls, trimming on staircases and decorative objects abound, often brightly lit or blacked out against a bright background.

 

It's quite interesting to compare the opening of Sunlust's map01 with Nostalgia 2. They both start on a bridge facing a door surrounded by a rocky terrain. The Nostalgia 2 version is more compact, the cliff faces less intricate, and no sign of synchronized glowing lights, but it still gives that same sense of place. The player is transported to some hostile alien place. Behind them are impassable ridges, leaving the the door in front the only way forward. Nostalgia 2 demonstrates that you can create interesting places with environmental story telling, without needing Sunder levels of architecture and detailing.

 

There's a fair amount of doom-cute littered through the maps, but it really picks up in episode 5 around map21. Myolden is up there with Mouldy in doom-cute mastery. There's the classic beds, fridges and ovens. But there are also books with individual pages, meals with full sets of cutlery, and even a cash register, drawer open, with stacks of money inside. Most of the maps confine the doom-cute to small areas to keep the focus on the gameplay. Occasionally the focus shifts towards the styling though, and I'd find myself bouncing off walls trying to navigate narrow halls and doorways, or stuck between a desk and chair. Map24, Eighth Lock (alternative title "Prison Song"?), is where style over substance tipped over for me. The map looks fantastic. Every single detail is perfect: the guard station with the controls for the armoury, the secret with the marine who died trying to tunnel their way out, the exercise area complete with weight benches, guard towers and a basketball court is a slam dunk. Even the enemy selection tells a story. A revenant mans the guard station, lower tier enemies are incarcerated, and hell knights patrol the wings. I got a genuine laugh at lunch-lady-mancubi. But the gameplay fell by the wayside in this map, largely becoming a corridor cover shooter.

 

Map24 is a rare outlier though, because the gameplay is generally excellent. The maps are short and punchy, often with low enemy counts. The maps make great reuse of space with the player often traversing back through areas after raising a bridge or collecting a key. Clever monster placement makes maps feel like there are more enemies than there really are. A perched sniping enemy will be able to hit you from a courtyard area, but running for cover in an adjacent room will find a window allows the same enemy to target you there. The encounters are varied and interesting. There's a good mix of more classic '93/94 game play, Plutonia inspired tight encounters with handfuls of higher tier enemies, and even some mini slaughter encounters later in the set. Fights often have the player being assaulted from multiple directions giving decisions on which enemies to prioritise. Often there is the choice to just rush for the next area, which may be more or less safe. The re-use of space means that you'll probably be heading back through the room you bailed on at some point. There are a handful of lock-in fights scattered through the maps, but they are often very organic feeling. Dropping down into an area will require the player to clean out monsters blocking a switch or teleporter back to the rest of the map. Episode 4 in the hellish caves makes the best use of this, coupling it with the lava floors to give an added time pressure.

 

The maps use verticality well. Perched enemies and flyers descending from above keep the player on their toes. It's also cleverly used in giving the maps a sense of height. Often the player will start in a lower area where there are cut away sections of higher platforms that can be traversed. Later the player will end up on top of the platforms, jumping across the cutaways. It's a simple, but effective way to break the confines of Doom's limited 3D space. Although the maps flow really well, I would occasionally hit the problem of: "I have a red key, where was the red door again?". This was most noticeable in the caves of episode 3, where the door was often across the other side of the map with nothing to really lead me there. 

 

Optional areas and secrets reward the player with bigger weapons earlier. The secrets were enjoyable to find (I think I found all of them without having to refer to the editor). Players who are nostalgic for Sandy Peterson off-colour torches will find plenty of pay off. The maps play well for first time play-throughs, and taking the time to hunt out the secrets will make some of the tougher encounters survivable even if you don't know what's coming. The secret maps are also loads of fun, with nostalgic space references and twist on map01. I love the little beep-boop guys.

 

A few maps feel a bit heavy on the resource starvation. Occasionally I'd get stuck super shotgunning a bunch of hell knights because I'd run out of rockets, or playing duck and cover in a doorway chaingunning to converse ammo. I also found the use of spider masterminds in the set a bit hit and miss. I think Nostalgia 1 leaned more heavily on cyber demons as a boss monster, but Nostalgia 2 switches it up for a number of metal mamas. Sometimes they work well, the pair in the centre of map25 can be your best helper friends. But other times I got left tediously gunning them down, sometimes even after they had eliminated everything else in the room for me. The awkwardly placed cyberdemon returns from Nostalgia 1, though I think fewer of them this time round. He can be found standing on some narrow ledge making him hard to get in-fighting or hit effectively with BFG tracers. The difficulty also spikes around a lot in the final two episodes. There'd be an incredibly tough map, followed by an easy breather map (map23 - 24 is probably the starkest contrast). Breather maps are welcome, but they don't need to quite be every second map. 32 maps is a lot to playtest though so its understandable for a few of the maps to feel a bit less balanced than others.

 

The maps do feel formulaic to an extent. I think myolden has nailed a set of design principals that create these small, high paced, engaging maps. But the formula is execute so well and so consistently that it never feels stale. I would totally recommend these maps as a master class for newer mappers to study how to design simple, but effective architecture, create flow and re-use of areas, and put together engaging combat encounters.

 

That's probably enough rambling. For anyone interested:

 

Demos: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2755534

Commentated uv-fast playthrough: 

 

 

 

[Maribo]

I've been playing a lot of experimental and/or super elaborate Boom and MBF21 trickery-based stuff recently and ended up pivoting into this thanks to a desire to play something a bit more grounded. As a big fan of the first Nostalgia: this was on par with it, and I think I might actually like it a bit more because of the increased theme variety (I'm a very big fan/advocate of Scythe 2-style "mini episodes" or Sunlust's little 3-4 map theme jumps). My highlights were the non-hell cave episode (excellent music choices by the way), the flesh hell episode, and surprisingly the hell city episode. Normally I'm not that big on traditional city episodes but I think there was something pretty novel about seeing a bunch of apartments and places like parks or a prison in a hell setting, and I got a good giggle out of this shower curtain when I stumbled across it. The hell cave episode felt like it had some faint shades of Deus Vult in a couple of places, which I thought was neat. All in all it was a breezy experience, very few super long/elaborate maps and not many frustration points at all.

 

Big fan of the secret designs in this WAD as well, I particularly liked the maps where finding the computer area map would show little sector arrows (and occasionally instructional sector text) on how to reach the other secrets. Very adorable.

 

A full set of blind casual UV playthroughs, -dsdademo format, plays back on v0.27.5 - nost2-maribo.zip

 

Thanks for the great sequel, I think I'll try OBZEN again soon since I bounced off of it at the time due to not being in a very plutonic mood.

[SP_FACE1]

Such a wonderful collection of maps! Fast-paced action, pleasing visual style, lots of doom-cuteness, delightful secrets and... oh, hi Mark!

Spoiler

Didn't expect to see the rooftop from The Room! (or maybe I did)

 

[DreadWanderer]

36 minutes ago, SP_FACE1 said:

Such a wonderful collection of maps! Fast-paced action, pleasing visual style, lots of doom-cuteness, delightful secrets and... oh, hi Mark!

  Hide contents

Didn't expect to see the rooftop from The Room! (or maybe I did)

 

 

AHAAHAH....what a level, Mark!

[Xeogred]

I just finished up Nostalgia 1 and had a blast with it. I loved the small city levels and it's cool to see more here, along with 5 themes this time, that all look amazing. Might hit this one up next soon!

[eharper256]

Just did a playthrough video for Walpurgis on this. Short and punchy scythe-like is my favourite type of megawad, and enjoyed your first pack. Great stuff!

 

Edited February 1 by eharper256

[Xeogred]

I beat the first "episode" of maps myself now and loved it. The water stylized techbase is such a cool look. I'm also not sure if others specified how the combat feels a bit different than Nostalgia, but I can feel it too. Not better or worse, it's just cool how coming straight off Nostalgia, these maps still feel awesome and creatively fun to me. I continue to like that the secrets aren't always too tough to find.

 

Also have to say this trend of me hearing Shinobi III/Genesis remix midis in wads lately... never stop! It's so perfect.

[Xeogred]

Finally beat this wad and had a blast with it, no weak map in sight. The second to last set of levels setting wise was a nice breath of fresh air from the norm. I'm always a sucker for vanilla Doomcute and both Nostalgia's did that well. Eventually 2 still evolves into the usual hell final levels, but they were awesome and the IoS level was really solid too.

 

I have to say the caves in the middle of this wad, while at first I thought they looked the most uninteresting in ways, I loved how the deeper you got into that chapter, the more lava and detail started to overflow the areas. But above that, the combat was absolutely amazing in these maps. Most of the cave levels seemed like they were fairly nonlinear with different routes you could take on a run. Everything from rad suits, to ammo, health, the monster respawns in repeat arenas, felt so meticulously balanced and fair. Was never choked for items but you couldn't waste anything either. These levels maybe weren't my favorite in the aesthetic department compared to the rest of Nostalgia 1-2, but yeah, the combat was just freaking amazing these maps. Might be my biggest takeaway from this one.

 

Could definitely see myself replaying both megawads down the road and if myolden makes more, I'm definitely there. Really cool to get some highly consistent quality megawads of short/punchy maps with a lot of detail and great balance.

Played blind on UV, PS, maybe a few saves per level at points, time was around 3h33m or so.

Edited March 17 by Xeogred

[bioshockfan90]

Okay I beat this after promising to like half a year ago. I was gonna beat it much sooner, but a certain set of city levels got me sidetracked.

 

Yeah, it's good. A lot more of the same, but it's all really solid, this is like the megaWAD equivalent to a 'Coffee Break' mapset, I can't think of many people that would find reason to complain about this.

 

I guess probably Obzen next? I'm putting that further down the pipeline though as after D2ICO as far as my WAD playing goes, I have 2 wads in particular I need to check out but consider it part 2 of this Myolden saga. 

 

Thanks for the fun! ^^

[pampoo79]

ok just one thing, why the teleporters before the exit, I've searched everything for a hidden exit. What if not a hint to go back to the map and search is this?

[myolden]

1 hour ago, pampoo79 said:

ok just one thing, why the teleporters before the exit, I've searched everything for a hidden exit. What if not a hint to go back to the map and search is this?

 

I have a habit of making sure the player is always able to backtrack to the rest of the map after finishing it. If they're not able to walk back to the start of the map because of a drop down or a one way teleporter, I always add a teleporter just before the exit that lets the player go back to the start in case they missed something like secrets, kills, items, or even extra ammo/health for continuous players.

[pampoo79]

23 minutes ago, myolden said:

 

I have a habit of making sure the player is always able to backtrack to the rest of the map after finishing it. If they're not able to walk back to the start of the map because of a drop down or a one way teleporter, I always add a teleporter just before the exit that lets the player go back to the start in case they missed something like secrets, kills, items, or even extra ammo/health for continuous players.

strikes me as sadistic tbh because to me this is a hint for a hidden exit