Balancing maps for pistol starts and having stuff from previous levels?

[Murderous Owl]

So while testing some of the levels I have done in my megawad I noticed that while the maps are balanced for pistol starts, when the player has items from previous levels it's somewhat easy, and while for earlier levels it's no big deal, but once the player gets more powerful weapons like the rocket launcher or the plasma gun, it gets super easy. While I don't want to necessarily have the wad be difficult I also don't want it to be too easy, what are some ways I can keep the gameplay from getting too easy even when the player has powerful weapons, while still also allowing the player to complete it with a pistol start?

[kalensar]

You're dealing with the same conundrum that the OG Doom IWADS dealt with. Basically yes, they will be easier during continuous play, and you are carrying on the long time tradition of being Pistol Start capable. There's no easy way of making them more difficult other than adding more monsters or making the maps more progressive with less weapon types inhabiting the maps IMO. The best examples are the OG Iwads for understanding how the weapon progression works, particularly Doom 2.

[RataUnderground]

Or you can kill the player at the exit when you want to reset its inventory. Many wads do that. 

[Jayextee]

My method of dealing with this is to make the map possible on pistol start, but incredibly tight. It's my opinion that the game was designed originally for continuous play and as such my mapsets are also this way. But at the same time, if someone wants to play saveless and start over with the pistol upon death, the game shouldn't fuck them for this (like a few maps of Wolfenstein 3D did...). So yeah, it's possible; even if perhaps it ain't pretty*. It's also for this reason I've become a big fan of exit rooms loaded with medikits for a fresh health start upon starting the next map.

 

^{*; unpopular opinion perhaps, but my designing 'for continuous play' means that some of the pistol start-balanced ammo is definitely in hidden caches. Players can whine about this all they like, but at the end of the day the base game had saving for a reason; IMO you were meant to play continuous! Pistol start's like a challenge mode in my eyes, not the de-facto default.}

[Ravendesk]

1 minute ago, Jayextee said:

It's my opinion that the game was designed originally for continuous play

According to Sandy Petersen doom maps were designed to be played pistol start. He also mentioned that because id playtested maps pistol start, some fights/bosses ended up being very underwhelming in continuous play (spider mastermind).

[Jayextee]

The maps themselves, I have no doubt that they were designed to be pistol-startable. Which isn't what I said. The game as a whole was IMO designed with continuous play at least in the back of id Software's collective mind; in any case why would saving and reloading be a thing, and why would the game retain player weapons and supplies at the start of a new map were this not the case?

 

There's also the question of Sandy's memory, known to not entirely be 100% accurate. But then, neither is the supposition of whether or not any of his remembered 'facts' are correct or not, so I won't speculate there.

[Red Recluse]

If you have equivalent ammunition for a stronger demons from the past maps, break without any effort crowd revenants.

[Pegleg]

I’ve heard Romero talk about pistol start, and he said that they developed pistol starting upon death as the punishment for dying during a map. It was their solution to removing “lives” from the game (Wolfenstein 3D had them). Being able to keep your gear from the previous map was your reward for not dying.

 

Now, since you pistol start upon death, if a map becomes virtually impossible to finish if you’re killed and you start over with just your pistol, then you’ve effectively put a block in your game that will cause the majority of your players to rage quit if they die. Therefore, it’s a good design practice to make a map that can be finished from pistol start. That doesn’t mean it has to be easy to complete from pistol start, just, as Jayextee wrote, that it has to be possible.

 

@Murderous Owl

Yes, continuous play has the potential to be easier than pistol start. Don’t let that discourage you. People that want to pistol start will do that anyway. If you are worried about making future maps to easy, this is how I suggest dealing with it:

Do your best to minimize the amount of extra ammunition the player has on hand at the end of a map. This is tricky to do, and requires a lot of effort, but it will help limit whether the player is bristling with weapons and ammo going into the next map.

For example, if you test the map (from pistol start), and you tend to end up with 70-80 bullets, 5-10 shells, a few rockets, and 40-80 cells, then at least the player would come in with only a small advantage from playing continuously. Obviously, you can’t account for all play styles, but this would at least be more likely to keep the player from entering the next map nearly fully stocked and being able to mow down enemies without worrying about ammo.

[slowfade]

One -- probably bad -- solution is to make some maps start with a huge number of imps and a ton of bullets. Most players will spend all their rockets and plasma getting rid of them rather than using pistol/chaingun, whereas pistol starters have to use pistol (or chaingun if available) on the horde.

[Faceman2000]

I just try to limit the power weapon ammo in each map to the bare minimum needed to beat the encounters balanced around those weapons. So playing continuous, the player may be overloaded with shells and bullets, but they won’t have enough rockets or plasma at the end of each level to make encounters in the subsequent map trivial (before obtaining more rocket ammo of course).

Edited November 2, 2023 by Faceman2000

[magicsofa]

Yeah, tightening up the ammo is the key. Have someone who is at least slightly frugal with ammo play your map, you will notice that they get a lot of mileage out of their ammos. Whereas when you playtest your own map, it's hard not to remember in the back of your head how much you placed, allowing you be a bit lazy and wasteful. I experienced this with one portion of a map where I trapped the player in a room with a bunch of pinkies and barrels, and a couple barons. In my own playthroughs I would just whip out the PR and be done with it. Then Clippy played it and solved the entire room while barely firing a shot. Yes, he waited for the barons to infight via the barrel trick and everything. Of course you'll never be able to completely prevent stockpiling without death-exits, but it is helpful to see how people can solve your map with less.

[Noiser]

I think the best tip to give is to avoid backpacks. Backpacks increases ammo capacity until the end of the episode (or the entire game, in the case of Doom 2) so it's incredible easy to break later maps made for pistol start. I generally reserve backpacks for situational moments or when it's close to the end of an episode. Reminding you can also make "episodes" in Doom 2 by using the Romero's head enforcement.

Edited November 3, 2023 by Noiser

[Stabbey]

56 minutes ago, Faceman2000 said:

I just try to limit the power weapon ammo in each map to the bare minimum needed to beat the encounters balanced around those weapons. So playing continuous, the player may be overloaded with shells and bullets, but they won’t have enough rockets or plasma at the end of each level to make encounters in the subsequent map trivial (before obtaining more rocket ammo of course).

 

Indeed, the Plasma Rifle in particular is strong against everything. For that reason, I no longer place Large Cell Packs (100 cells) in my maps without very good reason. I only use the small Cell Charges of 20 cells, and I drip-feed those into the map. This allows the player to use the PR in short bursts, but overusing it will deplete their supply.

[Doomy__Doom]

Other than already mentioned stuff:

 

For high end ports there's the option of adopting something similar to Elementalism's "semi-continuos playthrough" - directly strip away strong weapons and/or ammo beyond some threshold. Players get to keep their health/armor/backpack and basic arsenal for peace of mind, but not the big problem solving boomsticks. Or they keep boomsticks, but only a fraction of ammo to deal with a few immediate threats.

 

A universal, if design-warping, option is to drastically limit ammo/pickup capacity - think Struggle: Antharesian Legacy. Even if you can carry 36 shells over, that's not solving much beyond some starting combat as soon as mid-tiers start being regulars. I'd love to see more wads that experiment with built-in natural hoarding prevention without significantly reworking the arsenal along the way.

 

For Boom-MBF21 stretch there's a high effort option of abusing chainsaw a) being a non-repeatable pickup b) capable of tripping generalized walkover doors flagged for "monsters: yes". You can directly detect a continuos playthrough by forcing a chainsaw onto player at some point and then having one move through a voodoo doll at the start of subsequent map(s), tripping whatever map adjustments you desire: saw_continuos.zip - try warping vs exiting to map02.

Sane version of this would be spawning extra enemies with scripting on advanced ports depending on player arsenal.

[LoatharMDPhD]

// I'm a proponent of the Original method of upon player death, map restarts on pistol. the way it was built to be.

// or like has been mentioned, telefrag a barrel and kill a romero head on a non map30 level and presto, no scripting needed for an inventory reset.