Vitriol

[LouigiVerona]

You are stuck in a room that overlooks a hall filled with monsters. Can you survive?

 

Expectations management. This map requires patience and may not be for everyone. It has elements of a slaughter map, but I wouldn't characterize the whole map as such. Save often to prevent heartbreak.

vitriol.zip

[RataUnderground]

I don't know what kind of gameplay you were hoping to create, but after twenty minutes of peeking my head around the corner every so often to see if the 500 or so monsters in the first room were killing each other, I lost patience, did IDDQD and saw the invulnerability orb that no player who has played without cheats could possibly know was there.
Just advising you that next time I think the map will be more enjoyable if you don't force the player to guess this kind of things.

[Nikku4211]

What source port? Vanilla? Limit-removing? PrBoom+ -complevel 9? ZDoom?

 

I assume the IWAD is Doom 2, right?

[LouigiVerona]

4 hours ago, RataUnderground said:

I don't know what kind of gameplay you were hoping to create, but after twenty minutes of peeking my head around the corner every so often to see if the 500 or so monsters in the first room were killing each other, I lost patience, did IDDQD and saw the invulnerability orb that no player who has played without cheats could possibly know was there.
Just advising you that next time I think the map will be more enjoyable if you don't force the player to guess this kind of things.

 

The idea is that you patiently dispense with the monsters, then, when the room is more or less free (you don't have to wait, btw, you can kill them as well, there are several methods), you then begin venturing outside and discovering what's out there. You don't need cheats for this. I also assume that twenty minutes is an exaggeration, it definitely takes less to be able to move to the second phase of the map.

 

You need to save before you do that, because after you enter the room, a whole army of revenants comes out. So you have to look around and be ready to die several times while doing that, planning your strategy. Because you have just a short window to do what you want to do (pick your rocket launcher, decide if you want to pick invulnerability, etc. There are actually 2 of them, btw.)

 

The map is supposed to be a kind of puzzle. I personally sometimes like maps like that. Oblige can be configured to create maps where you need to patiently dispense with a large room in front of you. It can be bad, but sometimes the architecture and the kind of weapons/monsters work out well.

[LouigiVerona]

2 hours ago, Nikku4211 said:

What source port? Vanilla? Limit-removing? PrBoom+ -complevel 9? ZDoom?

 

I assume the IWAD is Doom 2, right?

 

I tested in prboom, but to be honest, I think this will work in vanilla just fine. I don't see anything there that should break in vanilla.

[Tangra]

Visually, i like the map. It's simple and classic, but there's something cool about it, and if it was a little bit more traditional gameplay wise, i would've enjoyed it for sure.

 

Unfortunately, my experience was similar to @RataUnderground. Even if it doesn't take 20 minutes to enter the first monster room, it's still tedious waiting for the monsters to infight. Infighting can be fun when the player is part of the action, with spaces to dodge attacks, maneuver around the horde, and being able to crowd control. Here you don't have that. I'm sure you know the term "Door fighting" and why it's disliked in some cases. Well, you have a giant room with a narrow entrance, elevated by a steep staircase that clutters the monsters right in front of it, and you're supposed to peek, shoot and hide around the corner with an SSG, slowly chipping away at this massive horde, because there's nothing else you can do. It gets repetitive fast. Why does the rocket launcher need to be out of reach? Why not give it right away? That secret platform with the soulsphere makes up for a great vantage point for firing rockets, but for the SSG that platform is not useful at all. That still won't solve the door fight problem, but at least you can have some fun blowing stuff up from above. You already give 100 rockets in the starter room, why not throw in the launcher there as well? You say there are several methods to kill the monsters in the first room, but you don't say what are these methods? You only have two weapons, both of them shotguns, and one entrance that gets cluttered by monsters, so i only see one method - waiting for them to kill each other and shooting at everything that comes through the gap for what feels like an eternity.

 

Furthermore, i don't see a single armor in the entire map, at least by looking at it in the editor, or running around the map with no monsters. You have hundreds of hitscanners and revenants to deal with, and no armor. When i see a map with no armor and 750 monsters, all thrown in one arena, most of which revenants and hitscanners, the first thought that comes to my mind is "this map was probably never tested, and the author forgot to add necessary items as a result". If that's not the case, and it's an intentional design choice, then i'd like to see your reasoning as to why there's no armor. 

I much rather have a megasphere somewhere alongside the two invulnerability spheres and at least one green or blue armor in the starter room, right from the get go.

 

After spending at least 10 minutes in the starter room, unable to do much, i finally made it to the rocket launcher and the first invulnerability sphere, and saw that the rest of the map is basically more of the same. It's just a massive monster clean up with rockets and no breathing room. Once you collect the rocket launcher, there's no real reason to stay and fight out in the open, because once the invulnerability runs out, the only sensible thing to do is to run back and hide in the starter room again, and chip away at the monsters, atop of that same staircase. I lost patience at this point.

[LouigiVerona]

Ah, interesting, I never connected armor to the amount of monsters. I am playing Doom for decades and I still don't feel the effect of armor much. Maybe it's there, but in my mind it sort of never translated to a bonus that is truly meaningful. I am very probably wrong about this!

 

As for the map - the very best I could do was warn that this is not for everybody. Maybe what you are describing is that it is really not for anybody :D

In that case, I apologize for posting it and wasting everybody's time. I promise, not all maps I put out are like that!

[LouigiVerona]

@Tangra And, btw, thank you for playing!

[Tangra]

There's no need to apologize, you didn't waste anyone's time. From what i'm seeing here, i can tell you're a good mapper, capable of designing interesting architectures and visuals. You just have to be a little more patient about posting maps, and do extensive playtesting first, or even request it from active playtesters here on DW and get their feedback. It's not about the map being for everyone or not, it's about making it beatable, balanced and fair. Hey, i get it, i understand the urge to release a map once it's done, and i always get tempted to do it, because for me playtesting my own maps is the most boring part of the mapping process and i get more tired of it with each new map, but it has to be done, there's no way out of it.