General thoughts on the Spider Demon/Mastermind?

[stylo]

the only doom monster that kinda creeps me out 

 

i don't even have a spider thing, idk. pretty good body horror. brain horror 

[mouldy]

The mastermind is an enemy that destroys your health if you walk into its line of sight, but has limited mobility due to its size. As such it is essentially an environmental hazard, which means the environment itself becomes the boss fight. Its strength or weakness is pretty much in the hands of the map maker.

 

That goes for any fight in doom really. The 3d space was pretty revolutionary when doom came out, and using the scenery to your advantage was intended to be a key aspect of the gameplay. What made the mastermind fight in doom 1 so shocking at the time was that suddenly you had no scenery to use, and you needed it. The fact that you can blast it point blank with a bfg feels like a design flaw, and it probably is, but when you first encountered that boss, running right up to it was not an intuitive option.

[Yagacaw]

54 minutes ago, mouldy said:

The fact that you can blast it point blank with a bfg feels like a design flaw, and it probably is, 

 

I remember Sandy Peterson speaking about the final fight of Doom in an interview, I believe he said the design flaw in question was all the levels were designed to be played from a pistol start, but the narrative and gameplay elements of doom encourage the player towords continuous play.

 

I remember BFGing the spider mastermind in my first playthrough of doom and being underwhelmed, but I have found a new appreciation for the Original IWAds since I learned how they were intended to be played by the original designer, plus DSDA source port makes it real easy to hotkey pistol restarts.

[Li'l devil]

It was probably said here before, but I think a good use for SMM is to make it a distant turret that would quite successfully chip at your health, making certain areas dangerous to traverse. Ancient Aliens did something like this in one of the later maps.

Edited February 6 by Li'l devil

[DynamiteKaitorn]

My issue with the Mastermind is just that GIGANTIC hitbox. Quite often I accidentally cause in-fighting with her and other enemies just because I'm running around trying not to get blown up by revenant rockets. From a mapper's POV, I almost never use her since she's WAY too large, making it much more frustrating to work around such a gigantic hitbox for my maps. Arachnotrons, whilst fairly chunky themselves, are mercifully much smaller and easier to implement (plus they ARE my favourite enemy ^w^).

[Stabbey]

I tried carefully crafting an environment to fight her in my "More Tricks and Traps Than You Require" WAD, a single encounter in a room where she had good sightlines and the easiest cover to use was slowly sinking into the floor, making it a bit of a timed fight, and the health was mostly in the middle of the room. I was pretty happy with how it turned out. Even then, though, I still had to modify the map to make the plasma rifle unlikely to be accessible before entering.

[yakfak]

? i just use the spider mastermind in multiples lol

anyway she's the funniest enemy... sometimes she kills you immediately, sometimes she clears out several heavies for you, other times she dies to a hell knight and three demons and that rules

yu can put her in hard to traverse areas and have another one teleport to where she's standing on death, like... fuck arenas, make it so you have to CLIMB to bfg her. put several masterminds in the dark at slight disconnects from each other and try to make them kill each other? or set up an intentional BFG the mastermind gauntlet, or put her in places where you have to tempt barons to her location to cause an infight, or whatever... you can use the mastermind in infinitely different scenarios as long as you don't want them to pan out the same way every time. just let her remix your encounter design on the fly, it's better than the thing you want about half the time

 

[mouldy]

4 minutes ago, yakfak said:

you can use the mastermind in infinitely different scenarios as long as you don't want them to pan out the same way every time. just let her remix your encounter design on the fly, it's better than the thing you want about half the time

 

This is what i love about the mastermind, the absolute chaos it can cause

[Fonze]

44 minutes ago, yakfak said:

yu can put her in hard to traverse areas and have another one teleport to where she's standing on death

 

This is a fun idea. You can also use the newly tp'd monster to activate monster walk triggers the smm couldn't hit on her perch from being too big. In a way it's funny that you can make a fight where you absolutely do not want to kill the smm using this, but in my use case idk how well I was able to communicate the interaction to the player. It is a very unintuitive, if rather out-of-the-box and fun, setup.

[mrthejoshmon]

They're pretty cool looking and in theory pretty badass however in actuality they're kinda shit.

 

I had a plan where I wanted to make a level about a bombed out warzone where Spider Masterminds would chase you down like Half-Life 2 striders but when it came to execution the fuckers fought themselves more than the player and also would get stuck on every little detail on the map, making it a complete bust.

Edited February 6 by mrthejoshmon

[magicsofa]

On 2/4/2024 at 7:55 PM, bejiitas_wrath said:

I saw a Spidermind surrounded by Pigs once and bitten to death. She is vulnerable to melee in the right circumstances.

 

This is because of the way monster movement and collision works (or doesn't). Basically, she can easily get her hitbox crossed with another monster and become immobilized, refusing to attack. Also this allows the demons to actually get a successful bite in which would almost never happen without her being stuck.

[Grain of Salt]

Spiderdemons are fine. Free your mind of these foolish, second hand thoughts.

[Stabbey]

2 hours ago, mrthejoshmon said:

They're pretty cool looking and in theory pretty badass however in actuality they're kinda shit.

 

I had a plan where I wanted to make a level about a bombed out warzone where Spider Masterminds would chase you down like Half-Life 2 striders but when it came to execution the fuckers fought themselves more than the player and also would get stuck on every little detail on the map, making it a complete bust.

 

I have/had a plan for a map "Spider and Web" where you start out on a megasphere in a toxic pit which slowly lowers so that by the time it hits the bottom, you're nearly dead, and you end up in a cavernous underground facility with boxes scattered around and as you enter a SMM is revealed and you need to dart from cover to cover getting the rocket launcher, single rockets and small amounts of health, chipping away as the Spider chases you as you scramble for more ammo or health. I only have the first room for proof of concept, though.

 

I've also got an idea for a citadel overlooking an open field with trenches, with spiders and arachnotrons in alcoves so they can't hit each other, forcing you into trench-hopping to reach the base. This one's just an idea, not at design stage.

 

 

[Astar]

I think that she's kinda cute.

[_memyself]

10 hours ago, Yagacaw said:

 

I remember Sandy Peterson speaking about the final fight of Doom in an interview, I believe he said the design flaw in question was all the levels were designed to be played from a pistol start, but the narrative and gameplay elements of doom encourage the player towords continuous play.

 

I remember BFGing the spider mastermind in my first playthrough of doom and being underwhelmed, but I have found a new appreciation for the Original IWAds since I learned how they were intended to be played by the original designer, plus DSDA source port makes it real easy to hotkey pistol restarts.

If that's the case, why didn't they keep Pistol starts? It's so wierd of an aspect to not include.

[Lucius Wooding]

If I had to make a boss battle 1v1 against the spider demon, I'd just implement destructible cover and make a cargo bay full of crates.

 

Depending on the complevel you could make the map itself out of shootable line specials that could be triggered by her and disappear, or just make the crates a shootable thing similar to a commander keen, though it would not block line of sight in that case. Just enough to hold up for a couple seconds of fire from her. Then you couldn't pick a single spot to peekaboo shoot her and you'd have to keep finding new spots to hide. Some crushers and moving sectors or the like might be useful to ensure the player can't camp. Maybe you could have some narrow poles that are wide enough to block line of sight and stop her firing for a few seconds, but not wide enough to actually fight from.

 

And that's all you'd need basically. You get some semblance of protection, but the anxiety would build as you piss it away piece by piece and that chaingun can kill you if you're exposed. You could even give the player a supply of cells and a BFG, but keep them at long range (maybe a large pit surrounding the boss so you can't rely on tracers) and limit them to a single shot per hiding spot. It'd take 8 or 9 hits on average and you'd be very preoccupied with moving around. Furthermore your own BFG tracers would wipe out cover spots if you're not careful. Finally, extra bonus points if you use the commander keen specials and wake up a monster spawner when the arena is cleared out, so that all the spawned enemies can infight to finish her off.

[DiceByte]

It’s a cool idea for a final boss, but was executed horribly. It should’ve encouraged you to take cover more by making it’s chain gun more dangerous, and it should’ve had more HP. It should’ve been more aggressive, and it should have a really dangerous melee attack to encourage you to NOT get close to try and use the BFG. I don’t know if 2016 made it harder or not, I just used the “BFG and slow down time with weapon wheel” trick to deal insane damage easily and kill it.

[idbeholdME]

Giving it 0 pain chance would help a lot and would be a pretty easy thing to do. That'd make you think twice whether bumrushing it with the BFG is worth the risk.

[zokum]

I think it would have been interesting if her gun did more damage on closer range, making up close BFG very dangerous. Your best bet would be to keep your distance, that would make it feel a lot more scary. Your best strategy would be to run away, far away, whenever you saw one coming...

When it comes to an arena, you could make one with several mr teleports and strategic monster triggered lowering platforms and blocking lines you could easily make her teleport to a location where she has you in her sights.

[Kinsie]

I've made a few attempts in my gameplay mods at making the Spiderdemon more interesting to fight and scarier to face, but given the confines of the character's placement and usage in Vanilla/Boom format levels, I can't say for sure that I've succeeded.

[Faceman2000]

10 hours ago, Kinsie said:

I've made a few attempts in my gameplay mods at making the Spiderdemon more interesting to fight and scarier to face, but given the confines of the character's placement and usage in Vanilla/Boom format levels, I can't say for sure that I've succeeded.

Playing Redemption Denied with MetaDoom was certainly a wildly different experience since the two Masterminds wouldn’t infight anymore. It made for a really intense and fun fight.

[Kinsie]

59 minutes ago, Faceman2000 said:

Playing Redemption Denied with MetaDoom was certainly a wildly different experience since the two Masterminds wouldn’t infight anymore. It made for a really intense and fun fight.

That's

a.) Not actually intended

b.) Probably breaking some other map somewhere

c.) Kinda cookin', not gonna lie. Might keep it if I can get away with it.

[Donowa]

the mastermind is kinda dry to me since you can't dodge its fire, it isn't blast resistant, and it comes at the end of the episode where you get the weapon that can three shot it

also, dis is a really crappy map that has barely any cover and only 4 enemies

a slightly weaker version of the motherdemon would make a much cooler fight in vanilla doom

either that or giving the spiderdemon some projectile attacks that are stronger than the cyberdemon

[Donowa]

7 minutes ago, Kinsie said:

Might keep it if I can get away with it.

put it under potential map breakers, that'd be good

[idbeholdME]

4 hours ago, Donowa said:

it isn't blast resistant

It is, same as the Cyberdemon.

[QuaketallicA]

The Mastermind doesn't take only 3 BFG shots to go down...

 

...he can go down in a single BFG shot! ;)

 

 

 

The level's more challenging from pistol start, as you can rely on monster in-fighting to distract the mastermind long enough to pump it with rockets.

 

In all honesty, it's not like a single Cyberdemon with plenty of cover, rockets, and soulspheres is considered much challenge anymore anyway. Doomers more experienced than I would even laugh in the face of Plutonia's Super Secret Level.

 

Monsters don't always have to be challenging to be good. Both bosses are memorable. That's what matters more to me.

 

Spoiler

However, my favorite id game final boss has always been and remains the Doom II Icon of Sin, and not just for the Romero easter egg. The whole encounter is just so unique and far more interesting than just "keep shooting the aggressive bullet sponge till he dies." The monster itself is just a giant head, so you can only imagine how massive the rest of him must be, especially when you read about its thrashing tentacles devastating miles of hell. The true menace of this creature is left to your imagination. He's more impressive in that sense in Doom II than in Eternal when you can see his entire body.

 

[QuaketallicA]

On 2/6/2024 at 5:08 AM, Stabbey said:

I tried carefully crafting an environment to fight her in my "More Tricks and Traps Than You Require" WAD, a single encounter in a room where she had good sightlines and the easiest cover to use was slowly sinking into the floor, making it a bit of a timed fight, and the health was mostly in the middle of the room. I was pretty happy with how it turned out. Even then, though, I still had to modify the map to make the plasma rifle unlikely to be accessible before entering.

 

I  love the level "Tricks and Traps," MAP 08 I believe of Doom II. I'd love to give your wad a try if it's anything like that map.

Edited February 8 by QuaketallicA

[magicsofa]

I propose that we go through the "Easy with BFG" + "You should Pistol Start" cycle at least five more times just to make sure we got it

[DaliVinci]

On 2/5/2024 at 1:46 AM, _memyself said:

I beat the Spider Demon the other day and I felt SUPER underwhelmed, since it literally just took a few shots from the BFG9000 to kill it, which I was surprised by, since, well, it's the FINAL boss. Somehow, the Cyber-Demon would've been a better final boss.

Because it WAS the final boss back in development. They changed it very late in the dev cycle for unknown reasons. It was originally Phobos to Hell to Deimos.

[_memyself]

5 hours ago, DaliVinci said:

Because it WAS the final boss back in development. They changed it very late in the dev cycle for unknown reasons. It was originally Phobos to Hell to Deimos.

THAT, is wierd.