The DWmegawad Club plays: ConC.E.R.Ned & Draft Excluder

[cannonball]

E4M7 - "Dungeons and Demons"
I guess I wanted this map to play a little differently to the other, so I made this one more a series of large ambushes rather than the mix of exploration and scattered encounters of previous maps. It also made sense to create a dark and eerie setting before unleashing various hordes on the player.
I must have been out of form as this map killed me many times. Though the BFG makes the second half of the map much easier, that said the final room is tough to handle even with the BFG (there is a secret which can aid with that room.

The exit was supposed to be different with a standard doom exit door with a lift to take you up to the upper level, but for some strange reason I managed to save over it with a previous version of the wad.

[driftyloon]

Almost time to wrap this up but I have not played 6,7,8 yet but anyway.

E4M4 - "Nuclear Jellocide"
A well-rounded map with some diverse usage of monsters. Quite a few barons although this seems to be the thing for most of the levels. Was hesistant at the end to see so much nukeage as I was at low health but was relieved to find it was lime flavoured jelly(lol).

E4M5 - "Life Support"
I felt this was an extremely hectic map(but fun nonetheless). I was constantly being ambushed by monsters and so found my health bouncing up and down like a yo-yo. The fight at the end was a nice change of pace although I found it was kind of easy if you just go back through the main door and fire rockets from outside through the grill.

[dobu gabu maru]

E4M7: This is better than the last map, but not by much. After the red key door it is REALLY easy to miss the berserk, which drains you of your ammo in the following fight. The RL is also pretty easy to miss which is detrimental if you go into the finale without it or the BFG. I can’t completely dislike it though, as the lost souls + specters are an interesting combo and I really like the big optional blue key arena. The final battle is also vicious without being relentless, as its too hard to escape until the pinkies are dealt with.

[Capellan]

e4m8
I'm not a fan of the visuals at all, though that's not because they aren't capably executed. I get the feeling cannonball may have set out to make this a deliberately ugly map, and he's certainly succeeded in quite garish fashion.

The gameplay has a similarly bombastic, in your face style, at least for most of the map. You're swarmed with enemies, including multiple roaming cyberdemons, right from the start. On HMP cannonball is nice enough to give you an invuln early on so you can get your bearings, but it doesn't look like UV offers any such leniency.

Structurally it's simple enough: a central zone of chaos with monsters boiling out all over the place, and two side-annexes with set piece design where you get the red and blue keys. Together, those unlock the yellow key, which releases the spider masterminds into the map: kill those and the route home unlocks – albeit in a rather damp squib fashion. Where's the massive blood red tower descending from the sky and the final onslaught of Hell? Instead a small barrier drops and we face three barons in a wide open space. Blah.

If ever there were pointless end room barons, these are them. After running around a complex packed with monsters – including multiple cybers and spiders, the latter of which must be killed to end the map ... why bother with something as desultory as this?

I'm probably going to go with e4m9 and e4m5 as my favourite levels from Draft Excluder.

[TheOrganGrinder]

E4M7: Dungeons and Demons

The decision to tuck what must be almost half of the map's monster population behind one particular secret is certainly a bold one, and I appreciate that the WAD is trying new things, springing new tricks on the player, even at this late stage. Aside from the enormous, open secret area, this level feels lower-key than the preceding few - intended as a breather, perhaps, between the intensity and scale of E4M6 and whatever climax awaits us in E4M8? Once I was done with the secret area, however, I found the map somewhat struggling to engage me; the rest of it doesn't quite to seem live up to that early (and entirely optional) promise, and without the secret sector, I might have found myself wondering if this was perhaps an a much earlier map by the same author, redressed for this episode, or even if I'd wandered into another WAD entirely; it's just so different to what's come before in Draft Excluder.

[mouldy]

E4M7 - "Dungeons and Demons"

This map felt a bit shorter than I remembered it, even though a large part of it is a secret area. Or maybe its because I discovered the secret area early on, so that I had access to the BFG for the later battles. I remembered the yellow key trap and the final fight being a lot tougher without it. Saying that, the final fight is still pretty harsh, I'm sure there is a better tactic than the one I used: bfg spamming one of the cybers at point blank range and hoping he died before the other one shot me in the back.

That secret zone really adds an interesting flavour, at least on pistol start, since if you find it early on you have the choice of trying to deal with the caco cloud while you aren't equipped for it, or coming back later with more firepower. I like having that choice. I guess if you are swift you could even nip in there and grab the key, and go get the BFG to deal with the red swarm. Interesting map.

[Demon of the Well]

E4M7 -- Dungeons and Demons - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA
Bit of an oddball, this map, and in more ways than one. If I had a heart, I would wholeheartedly approve of the massive secret side area with half of the level's population hanging out inside. As I'm sure I've said on more than one occasion in past DWMC threads, I feel that the best rewards of all for players that uncover secret areas are not guns or ammo or powerups or whatnot, but real additional gameplay/experiential content--optional battles, secret sights/vistas, markedly different angles on a map's mandatory encounters, things of that nature, and this map certainly delivers in that regard, as the area not only contains exclusive, fully fleshed-out action in its own right, but also ultimately rewards the player with the key to the BFG, which drastically changes the flavor of later encounters on the main route (some might even argue too much so as far as the UV skill level is concerned, although I wouldn't personally agree).

Most importantly, the secret area here is a lot of fun to play in, too, housing a straightforward but nevertheless quite engaging battle against a cacoswarm that dwarfs the one from E4M3 in its numbers, as well as a fresh variation on the Baron-mosh encounter that appears in different forms at a number of other places in Draft Excluder (including once later in this level, along the main route). For all its simplicity, the cacoswarm fight is surprisingly flexible in regards to how it can be handled, while the main virtue of the aforementioned Baron-mosh is its high potential to bleed into/overlap with the cacoswarm fight, especially considering how tempting that plasma rifle in there looks to a pistol-starter. Incidentally, in my somewhat homely FDA of the map I did end up getting myself killed a couple of times early on. Once, because I foolishly bit off more than I could chew and was overwhelmed after causing the two main encounters in the area to collide too early (waaaay too many cacos still alive while I was trying to negotiate the Baron trap), and once because I tried to be a clever dick about that first red key trap--I had assumed the second Baron would teleport down promptly after his brother (I have decided that most/all pairs of powerful monsters in Draft Excluder must clearly be siblings, since after all, the episode's plot is essentially just Deliverance without the levity of a banjo scene)...and, well, he just didn't. Don't ask me why I tried the exact same thing on the third attempt (and went down to 5% health as a result), I really don't know.

On a bit of a down note, though, it probably is true that the secret area outshines all of the mandatory stuff in this case, and I'm not sure that's really for the best. The second encounter in the grey dungeon halls (where the central braces collapse and turn loose a motely assortment of demonic security guards and infernal civil service workers) and the suitably frantic battle with the cyberdemon triplets at the end are enjoyable enough, but the initial specters/souls flood has far too glaring a loophole to be effective, and the Baron-box in the bloody square just doesn't compare in spectacle or pressure to its counterpart in the secret area. Since the whole level is essentially comprised of setpiece battles, it's probably not really ideal from a pacing perspective that the best fight comes early on (even if it's optional/hidden), this tends to make a lot of the main level feel like a formality. Maybe I'm not being fair...if this were a more exploratory-type level (ala E4M4 or E4M5) I probably wouldn't consider the marquee fight showing up early on to be an issue precisely because it's in a hidden area, but so it goes.

While it's hardly a bad-looking level (again, it contains more attention paid to lighting by itself than entire episodes of ConCERNed were able to muster over their full lengths), apart from the scope/scale of the secret cavern it seems to be much more purely pragmatic/understated in design than most of the rest of the episode, particularly pronounced in those grey dungeon halls. On the whole, I appreciate that the map tries to do something a little bit different as a preamble to the furor of E4M8, and it certainly has positive aspects, but something about the arrangement of the various parts feels just a little awry.

[Magnusblitz]

E4M7: Dungeons and Demons
100% kills, 3/3 secrets

Unlike ConCERNed, which generally had large, sprawling adventure maps as their penultimate levels, this one is a more laidback, 'calm before the storm' type map, with a large part of the enemies tied up in a (large) secret area and traps which are more about dealing with big enemies in asininely tiny spaces instead of hordes of demons.

The best part for me was the secret area; I agree with DotW that the cacoswarm battle works because there's a number of different ways to handle it. For my part, I circumnavigated the entire chamber before grabbing the plasma gun and getting the hell out of dodge, eventually using the cavern to help funnel down the cacos to be easily dealt with rockets (and the barons were nice enough to walk down and gather on one of the ledges where they too learned about "splash damage"). Onward to the rest of the level!

Which unfortunately, isn't that good - it's got a poorly-designed middle segment, and a few dick traps around that. Both the red key trap and the yellow key trap feel like "die once, easily defeat next" in that the only difficulty really stems from being caught unawares; once the player knows what is coming, it's easy enough to retreat (or prepare the BFG, etc.) I'm not really a fan of these traps because they just feel a bit cheap, but also because they're very bimodal - either the player knows its coming and beats it, or the player is caught unaware and dies, with no real other outcomes in-between. Compare this to the hundred imp ambush in ConCERNed's E3M8 - even once the player knows what's coming, it still takes a lot of effort to figure out the best way to beat it, and skill to actually pull it off. The final battle with the Cyberdemons is a bit better in this regard, but still feels like more luck than planning/skill.

The spectre/lost soul battle (and the follow up with the medley of monsters), unfortunately, has a fatal flaw that keeps it from being fun like the blue key battle in E4M4. Namely, that the stairs leading into the area from the red door are too deep and thin for spectres/demons to traverse them (there's not a block monster line, the cacos float over them just fine). Because of this, the demons/spectres will all run up and gather at the bottom of the stairs, blocking the other monsters, giving the player free reign to dispatch them easily.

It's not all together bad, but a bit weaker than what I had been hoping for (especially after the great E2M7 and E3M7 we got in Concerned).

[Never_Again]

@driftyloon: check your PMs. If you're going to use Doomworld's messaging system at least turn message notifications via popups or email.

Sorry for the OT post, folks.

[TheOrganGrinder]

E4M8: Palace of Destruction

So here we are, then, in the gleaming red building spied in the distance at the end of E4M6. Visually this map is luridly, overwhelmingly red, with chunky architecture that looks like it should stand up well to the kind of firepower that gets thrown around here; the scale of it accommodates the fights well, giving even the biggest hordes plenty of freedom to roam.

I don't generally enjoy end-of-episode maps as much as what comes before, but this felt like a satisfying and tonally consistent conclusion to Draft Excluder, with a fat pile of cyberdemons and spider masterminds to wade through and enough 'filler' monsters of the imp, demon, and cacodemon variety to keep things ticking over between the crescendos of combat action. Most of the map functions as a multi-level arena with plenty of cover and opportunities to lead monsters around (or to be outflanked); crop the southern branch and the pit areas to the east and west, and I suspect this would make for a fun deathmatch arena.

Good times were had here. :)

[mouldy]

E4M8 - "Palace of Destruction"

So many cyberdemons. Its tempting to leave them all alive for the final onslaught, but thats a bit too suicidal for me. So luckily there is a ledge where you can stand in relative safety and pick them off, once you have scrounged enough ammo. This leaves me a bit low on cells and rockets for when masterminds and co appear, so its a bit of a juggling act. Fun though it is to get stuff infighting, it can take a while and I usually end up getting chipped down to zero health by stray spider bullets, so i ended up zapping the caco swarm with bfg and throwing whatever I had left at the masterminds. Even when I'm down to shotgun to finish them off there is still a load of barons wandering around, so I guess infighting is expected of you. I'd still like a little bit more ammo, especially considering you will not be able to exit if you run out. But maybe thats part of the challenge, to manage your resources. I can't complain too much since I managed to do it. First time I played it I got very lost before noticing a switch to access one of the side-quests, not sure why that is so hidden. Once you know its there the point of hiding it is lost.

But anyway, great finish to the episode. I can kind of see why cannonball didn't want to tack this on to concerned, it feels quite different in many ways, and seems to belong on its own. I don't think I ever played so much doom 1 as I did this month. Can't say I missed those archviles..

[Surreily]

Warning: Massive wall of text incoming! Get your hard hats on, folks!

E4M3: Ravine of the Damned - 100% kills, 100% secrets
One of my favorite textures, SP_ROCK1, is used to create a beautiful map featuring a river of blood and some twisting caves. It manages to provide a good challenge without using cyberdemons, and features far fewer ambushes than usual. Overall, a great map.

E4M4: Nuclear Jellocide - 100% kills, 100% secrets
A huge tech base and marble hybrid. Again, no cyberdemons, but the spider mastermind does show up near the end (though I didn't have any problem with it). The secrets are very well hidden, and unfortunately I had to cheat to find one of them (which I believe has no clue to identify it as a secret), but I didn't take any of the items from it for I didn't deserve them. The layout here is interesting, with each key opening multiple doors. There are many windows that overlook the slime (which for some reason doesn't inflict damage). Another fine map.

E4M5: Life Support - 100% kills, 100% secrets
Here we have a collection of unique rooms connected together in a way that reminds me of Pandemonium again for some reason. Each room is different and houses a unique challenge. Finding the yellow key (by the way, nice effect with the stepping stones) and entering the locked room allowed me access to an invulnerability sphere, making the epic finale much easier (but I still got splattered by the cyberdemon a couple times).

E4M6: Temple of the Forbidden Gods - 100% kills, 100% secrets
In this map, a pair of cyberdemons followed me around, causing all sorts of trouble. I really liked this one - the twisting passages filled with traps, the unique challenges involving the cyberdemons, and the huge scale of the map in general all made this feel super-epic. The mixture of green marble with REDWALL1 looks awesome! The ending area was cool, but I think it could have involved fewer cyberdemons and more regular monsters - that huge starting hallway would make an awesome place for hundreds of enemies to slowly advance while I blast them all away with my rocket launcher. Probably my favourite map so far (and that's including both WADs)!

E4M7: Dungeons and Demons - 100% kills, 100% secrets
I don't know about this one, it felt rather different. Pretty much every encounter in this map is an ambush of some kind, and I am not really a fan of those. Then there's the massive cave area which I found rather tedious with all those cacodemons. Despite this, I still enjoyed it, though not as much as the previous maps.

E4M8: Palace of Destruction - 100% kills, 100% secrets
It's the epic conclusion to Draft Excluder, and the cyberdemons are out to get me! This is one of those 'oh crap where the hell do I go' kinda maps, where I run around in circles, die, try again, die again, until eventually I find that switch that opens up the next part of the map. Yeah, I am not good at these kind of maps. Anyways, it's certainly nice to see a final map that isn't another Icon of Sin for once! After the initial cyberdemons were dead, I found the remainder of the map to be easier - the spider masterminds were easy peasy with the BFG. Congratulations, Cannonball, you created a final map that I liked!

And now for the great final conclusion. The maps in these two WADs tend to follow the style of the Ultimate Doom IWAD. and several maps even borrow elements from them. I never found any major bugs in any of the maps, and I was always able to obtain 100% kills and secrets (aside from one in E4M4 due to it being extremely well hidden). It's a shame Cannonball wasn't able to use Doom II monsters here, as I'm sure he would have used them in innovative ways. I look forward to playing more from him sometime in the future!

[cannonball]

E4M8 - "Palace of Destruction"

Well the final maps of Concerned were either very short or very long, this one I intended to be modest in size.
So the visuals and gameplay is pretty much in your face. I think the difficulty is pitched well enough. The lower difficulties house a couple of invulnerabilities to help you out.
I had great fun replaying this, carnage pretty much describes it really. Cybers chasing you around the arena until you grab the BFG. Many a cyber were sent flying as I tried to two shot every single one of them (with varying success).
I should have removed the barons at the end (replace them with a zombieman because..... yeah :P)

[dobu gabu maru]

E4M8: Yeeeaaahhh! I was a bit concerned for the ending of Draft Excluder given the two disappointing maps prior, but this finale is on fire. You’re hopelessly outgunned, lost inside this horrifying crimson complex with cybers hounding your every step, and every path leads to a ball-buster battle. The cybers are really intimidating here, and not in a “let me shell this tiny walkway you need to use” E4M6 use but in the sense that you have to keep your eye on them or risk getting surrounded. The weapon arenas are fun to puzzle out (loved the lost soul use in the RL side!) and the way the central arena floods with enemies after each key is a brilliant move. There’s a lot of carnage at the end and it can be extremely hard to grab the BFG considering its positioning (plus unlike mouldy, I was intentionally leaving every cyber alive), but I have to confess that each death only spurned my desire to complete the level more. My only complaint is that I wish the cybers could make it up the stairs to where the exit is as it’s extremely hard to get them to infight with the perched masterminds (which is smart placement for them as they won't get 1-shotted), but its a small setback on an utterly action-packed finale.

Overall: ConC.E.R.N.ed and its companion episode come together to form a really entertaining Ultimate Doom megawad. It’s a bit strange as it serves as a timeline for Powell’s improvement, with Draft Excluder being one of the best E4 replacements there is, while E1 was... merely entertaining. Powell always struck me as a guy that made really reliable, fun maps back when I played some of his stuff in 2012, but with this, his NOVA II maps and his DWMP14 masterpiece, he’s definitely climbed up the ranks to become an absolutely outstanding mapper—I can definitely understand and agree with all the Draft Excluder praise now. Excellent stuff!

Favorites:
E1M6
E2M6
E3M3
E4M8

Least favorites:
E1M1
E2M9
E3M7
E4M6

E4 > E2 > E3 > E1

[scifista42]

E4M8 - "Palace of Destruction"

Simply good compact layout + tough challenge with numerous well-used dangerous monsters, but I've basically just cheated through with "resurrect", because I don't enjoy repeated dying and retrying on slaughter-spam-style maps like this, not my taste. The aesthetics weren't literally beautiful, but not bad at all either, and I've generally felt epic-ness from the architecture (and music). It's a more than alright ending for a hard wad, just not my preferred style of playability.

---

Overally, cannonball's maps were mostly good (up to great), although some were rather idealess or repetitive or too slaughterish for me. But I'm glad for the experience if only for the greater maps. My favorite ones were E2M7, E3M1, E3M5, E3M7 and E4M1-M5.

[Magnusblitz]

E4M8: Palace of Destruction

After getting immediately splattered by a rocket after the first teleport, it's time to start running around this... really, really bright red palace. A nice frantic start, and I suppose there's ammo and weaponry to eventually deal with all the cybers if you like, but it quickly became apparent to me that it would be quite easy to simply run and leave everything in the dust. Because of that, I agree with Capellan that the map ends pretty limply, being able to leave the Cybers behind some block monster lines and taking out the last two SMMs from afar before dealing with the PCorf baron trio. Better than E2M8 I guess.

[Demon of the Well]

E4M8 -- Palace of Destruction - 96% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA
Very ugly demo this time, with four deaths before a very clumsy/unattractive success, but it's not as long as you might think, and has some entertaining moments in it. From this alone I can tell that the map does something right--dying more times in the big finale than I did in all this month's other 35 levels combined says to me that an anticlimax was soundly avoided!

Anyway, the look of this level is, in a word, "absurd", with big, chunky coliseum-style architecture that resembles nothing so much as a collection of titan-sized LED lights, with bits of marbface and fireblu here and there for accents (Mt. Erebus, eat your heart out). I.....can't say I'm really onboard with the specific aesthetic (for one reason or another I kept thinking it all looked like running around in some kind of nuclear Jell-O mold or the like), although I can appreciate it on a conceptual level. I always say that the final map or climax of a WAD is one of the best places to let loose something that's thematically/atmospherically really out of left field, and 'Palace of Destruction' certainly does that, neither looking nor feeling like anything else in Draft Excluder (or in ConCERNed, for that matter). I was also pleasantly surprised to hear one of Rich Nagel's tracks from Eternal Doom, it certainly complements the core theme of the action itself quite well (e.g. the thunderous marching of cyberdemons). Come to think of it, I do wonder if the use of this track in conjunction with the general look/shape of the start room might be some kind of subtle reference to "Dominion" (Eternal Doom map 29)....

As far the actual proceedings go, the expression that springs to mind is "As it was in the beginning, so it shall be in the end." Yes folks, this is yet another central square (although it's not so open this time) bounded on all sides by what is essentially an access corridor, with discrete setpieces at the four cardinal points (and, once again, the exit is to the north). The eastern and western setpieces are largely divorced from the rest of the level (not divorced enough to save me from a cyberdemon in the second of my four deaths, though....he basically dropped a rocket on my head like an ACME anvil or something while I was scrambling in the eastern pitfight), and by this point in the WAD are not particularly remarkable in design, although the imp gallery + cyb setup to the west was obnoxious enough that I initially skipped it on my successful attempt, and then forgot to finish it off at the end, hence the 96% kills. The northern prong is also essentially offlimits to most monsters that don't spawn into it directly, although I saw an imp up there once and I suppose the level's relatively small complement of flyers could theoretically pursue you up there as well. Most interesting is the southern prong, not for the setup itself (which again is fairly straightforward after all we've seen this month), but because once open it essentially forms one long fire-corridor that cyberdemon rockets can travel down unhindered from almost the other side of the map, making entering it and leaving it more tricky than it may initially appear to be (behold my hilarious third death in the FDA, had to laugh at that one).

Tricky because of the legion of cyberdemons stomping around the joint from beginning to end, that is. Where E4M6's cybs were carefully positioned to harry you along a series of carefully designed obstacle courses, in the Palace of Destruction they simply roam freely and try to squash you at almost every step of the journey, like a nightmare version of the Baron varsity squad that roughed me up waaaaay back in E1M6. The layout is just complex enough and, at any given moment, littered with enough smallfry monsters and other distractions to make navigating through it without being cornered or caught in a nasty crossfire by the cyber-squad nontrivial, and this accounts for most of the enjoyment to be had. While the actual goal of the map is to kill the four spiderdemons that can be made to appear by hitting switches sealed away by the yellow key (which itself can only be had after completing the two side wings to score the other two keys), which in turn makes the exit (and its bafflingly pointless PCorf baron "guardians") accessible, in actual fact it feels like the real goal is to eventually get your hands on the BFG and a big pile of ammo so that you can finally exact your vengeance for the way they'll have been bullying you around up to that point. Once they're gone, taking care of the rest of business perhaps feels a little too much like a formality than it ought to (especially the two turret-spiders who can only be engaged from afar), but from a pistol-start the real action likely lasts up until the last 3-4 minutes or so, and so I didn't feel like the bit of cleanup at the end was too much of a letdown. A rollicking conclusion to a very enjoyable episode.