The DWmegawad Club plays: Sunlust

[Demon of the Well]

Map 08 -- Oneira - 104% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA, 1 death
Stepping onto the small slipgate sheltered in the dead heart of the ancient command bunker, you hold your breath in anticipation of the characteristic pulling sensation that accompanies time-space travel....but nothing happens. What now? The dysfunctional gate was the only apparent way out of this festering cesspit. Nonplussed, you lower your eyes, pondering your next move, gazing inwards. An unexpected cold breeze interrupts your palaver with yourself, and you look up to see that you're in a different place, at the foot of a brooding stone citadel rising from an unknown ocean, a solitary titan bather in a vast basin of lacrimae mundi. With little other recourse, you step forward into the fantastical realm. Somewhere out at sea, thunder rolls.

Many have compared this next block of maps to Ribbiks' Swim with the Whales in terms of visual style, and it's easy to see why, given the dominant color scheme of deep blue highlights on a base of dark grey stone/metal. The end impression's a little different for me, though, I find myself most reminded of castles and fortresses of Eternal DooM, no doubt a function of the prominent use of the heavy stone masonry and the omnipresent dour, bruise-black sky; a lot of the encounters herein depend on space restriction to function, and yet there's usually a feeling of being outside in the open air. 'Oneira' proper is geometrically much simpler than the ornate curves and spires of SWTW, essentially comprised of a series of rectangular chambers arranged in a compact terrace formation, where barriers between areas usually take the form of maddeningly modest drops and rises, rather than gates or doors. Deceptively simple in terms of architecture and layout (particularly by this author's standards), I nevertheless find the level quite aesthetically appealing. Stylish shapes and complex 2.5D layering are wonderful things, to be sure, but texture choice, color scheme, and lighting design can go a long, long way as well. Lovely music piece, as well, I could have happily listened to it over the whole of this 3-map block.

In gameplay terms, 'Oneira' is a short but perilous engagement, most notable for debuting the cyberdemon via three different congested setpieces, each showcasing him in a different role that he will regularly fill as we move deeper into Sunlust: gatekeeper/guardian (in the pinwheel pool housing the blue key), juggernaut/pursuer (the BFG melee in the southern junction), and turret/overseer (the final battle on the seaside terrace). When the cyberdemon comes out to play, space management becomes even more complex, as simply dodging projectiles may no longer be sufficient to avoid damage, and the monster's huge pile of HP means that slugfest tactics are largely taken off the table, even for a BFG-toting marine. While he will often be a high priority target, smart players will avail themselves of every opportunity to harness the cyb's bottomless reserves of destructive energy for their own ends moving forward, a high-risk/high-reward strategy than can pay big dividends: the final cyb on the terrace can easily distract the company of knights to allow you to take out the PEs, and the blue key guardian can (and should) be made to wipe out most of the room's other occupants while you keep your silence.

Where map 07 conspicuously lacked a plasma rifle, 'Oneira' conspicuously lacks a rocket launcher, perhaps to underscore the potential of the cyberdemon's own mode of attack. Excepting the chainsaw, all other armaments are present and each is legitimately useful (even the chaingun, so often denigrated in modern high-density/high difficulty maps), a design model that Sunlust pistol-starts will tend to follow for most of the game. As in Neo Gerouru, there is again a forked choice of routes to be followed here, as either the blue key path or yellow key path can be undertaken first, but unlike in that map, the initial difficulty of each seems quite different--on first attempt I went to blue key path to the south first, and was sorely outgunned without the SSG acquired early in the other path (uncertain if the plasma rifle is specifically a part of that path, or simply becomes available at the halfway point of the level regardless). That some available paths are 'right' and others are less so will be a persistent design choice in later levels; I can imagine some sensibilities finding this objectionable (e.g. a manifestation of 'artificial difficulty'), but for the most part I prefer to think of it as a facet of the combat-puzzle/strategy aspect of the WAD's gameplay.

Embarrassed I didn't think to telefrag the last cyb, even though I stared right at the teleporter to do it with moments before engaging him in battle.

Map 09 -- Saquasohuh - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA
Hmm, not as much of a fan of this one, excepting the final battle in the ritual cave foreshadowed at the start, which I found to be more fun. As is for the most part henceforth the Sunlust norm, 'Saquasohuh' poses a series of setpiece battles protecting keys and important weapons. Comparatively speaking, the majority of these actually seemed rather tame, even a little dry or static (lots of clearing out perched/turret monsters of limited efficacy), perhaps a coincidence eliding from the level's unique approach to the mapset's characteristic 'modular' non-linearity: the main fights on both the YK and RK paths can actually be entered from two different points, one where you drop into the thick of them and cannot immediately retreat, and another, more conventional entrance that allows you to assault and clear the room at your own pace. As fate would have it, on my playthrough I ended up going through the safer entrance in both cases, making for some simplistic encounters that felt a bit makework. As far as the level design goes, the catch here is that both of these safer entrances have to be accessed in a more roundabout way that requires you to break out of the pickle Doomguy finds himself in at the start (whereas the dropdown entrances can be accessed easily from the outset without having to confront that first situation), but doing this is no great feat--just goose a revenant's bony shanks and juke him when he wheels around in outrage, and voila, you're sprung.

The cyberdemon guarding the switches that presumably lower the bars into the exit cave is a bit of an unusual inclusion, he is essentially a non-factor unless you totally stop paying attention when making your brief trips to and fro across the outdoor junction southwest of his position, as he can't even hit you when you're down in the sinkhole he overlooks, and will eventually be crushed to death to save you the trouble of putting him to bed later on (maybe this crushing only happens as a result of one of the secrets, though?). Most of the main-route setpieces come off as unremarkable; once again, most of the interest in the level progression comes from the non-linearity and hidden stuff, e.g. the optional BFG gated by either of the required keys, and the hidden blue key which unlocks a bit of useful bonus stuff. I also found myself getting caught on some invisible object on the stairway into the yellow key room, probably an artifact of aesthetic trickery, not the last time in the mapset beauty will come with a practical price.

The nastiest jab the level offers is actually the chaingunner ambush in the chicken-run surrounding the BFG's yard, and even that only hurt me so badly because I was being a clever dick and ignoring the blursphere being freely offered to me nearby. There is a lesson to be learned right here: In Sunlust, the authors don't offer you pickups without good reason, so if you see something lying on the ground--a big pile of rockets, for instance--take it as a sign that rockets are the ideal weapon for the upcoming brawl, even if you have a lot of cells or other ammo you can choose to use instead. It's a brutal and unforgiving mapset, but very seldom does either author attempt to troll you by offering you items or ammo in situations where they will be more a liability than a help (although players struggling with some of the in-secret fights may beg to differ, I suppose). On that point, as aforesaid I did like the final battle more than the rest of the level, a very effective use of pain elementals (with noble support) making a good case for Dobu's assessment that PEs are Danne's 'signature' enemies. Even if you find all of the secrets and come in nicely tooled up, the supplies in the cave are portioned out such that you won't be able to simply win through blanket-fire, you'll have to keep circling and dancing and picking the PEs out from the crowd. Though he is often known for largescale slaughter scenarios, which tend to have less of a constant association in the popular consciousness with a very tight resource balance, I think that one of Danne's most persistent virtues is how well he handles resource balance (particularly ammo balance), so often lending an extra layer of strategy and nuance to his bloodbaths.

Aesthetically, this fits in naturally enough with the 'fortress on the sea of dreams' theme of this block, and in some places I think it actually looks closer to the oft-mentioned SWTW theme than either of Ribbiks' maps does, likely a function of the much taller vertical scale in areas like the exit cave or the revenant-piston room. Excepting the much more organic contours of the mystic blue cavern, in shape it is almost exaggeratedly squarish in aspect, to the point where this seems like an aspect of the visual design the author was actively trying to underscore, rather than as a matter of practicality. As in map 08, I personally think it looks good, again largely by dint of the strong texture/color scheme, and some small details that it may be easy to miss if you're in a rush (is that dead guy....following me?). I did not feel like the music track fit well at all, however, I recall while I was playing I just IDMUS'd back to map 08's track at some point.

[Ribbiks]

insightful comments, particularly so because you're writing after having seen the mapset as a whole. the thoughtfulness is appreciated!

some misc fun trivia:

- m07 theme seems rather abrupt because we opted to replace the other maps in that "cluster" with the space-station-in-the-middle-of-nowhere m05/m06. check this out to see the maps that used to live there.
- m08 was indeed meant to be a "cyb introduction" map in the fashion you described, good catch! We almost undermined that by having a cyb encounter in m04, but it was panned rather dramatically by playtesters so we removed it
- also the layout for that map (which I also describe as pieced together rectangular rooms) bears extremely high resemblance to the layout construction of a few D-D maps, notably DR2008_m11 and Grime (the starting area with the 5 pillars was directly ripped inspired from grime, actually)
- one aspect of danne's mapping that I kept pointing out over the past couple years was his fondness for diagonal symmetry, m09 is a perfect example :D

[Demon of the Well]

Ribbiks: Now that you mention it, I totally see the D-D similarities. It's been about forever and a day since I played 'Grime' and so it's no surprise I didn't notice the reference there, but I really should have noticed the similarity with 'Lich', as it is easily my favorite map to come out under the Death-Destiny moniker (as opposed to more popular selections like Disturbia or Grime)--swap all of that peaceful blue water for offal and snakeskin, and the keep itself even looks kind of similar. So too with all of the drops between areas, redolent of the horrifying descent into the damp spider-nest near the end of D-D's map.

Map 10 -- Maru - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA, 1 death
Looking at this one again, I reckon the SWTW similarities are definitely more pronounced here than in map 08, most specifically in the cobalt 'layer cake' columns inside the entrance of the western keep, and more generally in the eerily smooth, whimsically detailed curves of the pools and wind-hewn rock formations of the central hub area. More than any other aspect of Ribbiks' visual/construction style, I feel that it's this stylized curvature that is his most unique calling card. At times the idiosyncratic approach leads to some constructions that are so farfetched they almost seem to break the 4th wall--the southwestern RL/barrels secret, viewed on the automap, looks like nothing so much as a Hostess brand 'Zinger' snack cake--but as of yet there is no one else in the present international community (or the past community, for that matter) who draws shapes in quite this way. That being said, the overall visual aspect still screams 'Eternal Doom III' at me (not a bad thing in any sense, in my eyes) in a big way, what with the looming, hulking, decidedly 'Coleurian' keeps of basalt blocks that dominate most every view of the neat tri-corner layout outside of the more limited view from within the southerly waterfall cave. The climactic battle overture-style BGM also suggests something in the ED vein, though the actual track has quite a bit less of a 'martial' feel to it than most of Rich Nagel's ED soundtrack. Again, I'd also like to compliment the lighting choices--there's a striking contrast between bright moonlit exteriors and the shadowy keep interiors at play here, lends a lot of feel to the outdoor scenery, a good compensation for the rather spartan interiors (although the final keep does have quite a nice layered shoebox chiaroscuro scene around the exit gate).

As for combat, it's more Sunlust and more setpieces, this time with no real 'easy mode' available to soften the blow for most of them. The setting is the citadel pinnacle, dominated by three stone keeps, the smaller two each containing a key used to unlock the descent to the final battle in the depths of the third (actually, the RK seems to only unlock the BFG, but said weapon is so indispensable in the final fight as to be nearly mandatory). Once again, there's a definite element of non-linearity at play: after a greater or lesser degree of prepwork in the main hub, you can theoretically tackle any of the three keeps in any order (including the battle in the foyer of the north/exit keep), and the eastern keep even has two entrances to choose from (or three, if you count the slick cat-burglar alternate method of reaching the northern waterway entrance), depending on how tantalizing you find the plasma rifle just behind the player start point (I smelled a nasty trap and so didn't go there until later on). It's a compact layout, and there's a fair bit of redundant weapon placement (e.g. two SSGs, two RLs, etc.) to smooth over severe balance spikes between routes, but the options thus created are appreciated nonetheless.

Turret/artillery emplacement monsters play a big role in a lot of the action in this one, from the static snipers initially locking down much of the outdoor hub area to the blanket-fire ambush protecting the blue key to the stationary cyberdemon bouncer-triplets who effectively eliminate a cowardly cut/run approach to the final fight. The lone cyberdemon lording over the outdoor area is vastly more effective than his colleague in map 09--he doesn't have an especially commanding view over the area in total, but the many other supplementary snipers do, and he is able to soundly deny the player easy use of the positions best suited to eliminating them, as well as making the backdoor exit to the waterfall cave quite a risky proposition. Ironically, after missing the easy/obvious telefrag of the last cyb in map 08, I lucked into telefragging the big guy here, quite a turn in my favor as the ammo investment required to kill him conventionally (or the risk of repeatedly ignoring him) likely would've made the rest of the map quite a bit more difficult (I can envision a Twilight Zone horror-story scenario where the player subdues the final encounter but lacks the ammo to kill the bouncer triplets, and is thus effectively trapped forever).

Not all snipers and positioning though, I suppose, the arch-vile tagteam seguing into the imp/baron-rush in the waterlogged eastern keep was actually my favorite bit, I believe that's the first and only time I've seen Ribbiks weaponize explosive barrels in the player's favor (cheeky that he turns them against you in one of the secrets, no?). The aforementioned final fights marks a more complex, multi-front fight of a sort that will become more common later in the mapset; to reiterate something I said before, when you come upon a setup like this where the monsters are all turned away and the onus to begin the action falls solely on you, wise to avail yourself of the opportunity to carefully examine the scenario and develop a 'plan A' and ideally at least a 'plan B'--in the FDA I messed up the execution of what I wanted to do, but I still ended up surviving, pretty much solely because I had that backup plan in place.

[baja blast rd.]

rdwpa said:

I've been searching for some truly difficult maps (SWTW map03 tier, let's say) where most of the combat is direct and the typical tropes like extreme austerity and extensive damaging floor use are avoided, just for variety's sake.

It struck me just now that considering resource restriction a trope is sort of like considering "plot" in fiction a trope. It's kind of silly because it's a very low-order variable. You either restrict resources or hand them out gleefully or something in between. How would one of those options possibly be a trope?

Philosophical crisis averted.

I don't like it that damaging floor in Doom is usually always a liquid of some sort, however. I guess there are easy ways around that. Just have to make sure to introduce the new damaging floor early on in a more harmless setting, instead of "Thought you could puss out of this fight? Well, this light texture is actually an inescapable deathpit hahaha nowurded!" halfway through the map. More tricky would be staging a platform level on a series of high rocky cliffs or something, where the idea is that the player can't simply drop down into the rock-textured "canyon". Maybe those crackly textures would work. Or a black "void" texture signifying darkness. Or whatever.

[Cynical]

rdwpa said:

I don't like it that damaging floor in Doom is usually always a liquid of some sort, however. I guess there are easy ways around that. Just have to make sure to introduce the new damaging floor early on in a more harmless setting, instead of "Thought you could puss out of this fight? Well, this light texture is actually an inescapable deathpit hahaha nowurded!" halfway through the map. More tricky would be staging a platform level on a series of high rocky cliffs or something, where the idea is that the player can't simply drop down into the rock-textured "canyon". Maybe those crackly textures would work. Or a black "void" texture signifying darkness. Or whatever.

Deus Vult II map 21 spammed the hell out of a custom "fire" midtexture on its damaging floor areas.

[Steve D]

Finally got to DotW's Map04 FDA. That was one of my fave maps because it's so gorgeous, plus the gameplay had some teeth even on HNTR. UV didn't look so much more crazy, and it was nice to see DotW have some close calls.

[Steve D]

Another episode of DotW Cinema with Map05. This is the first one that looks way nastier on UV than HNTR. I had to face-palm over how lame I was at secret-finding. DotW did his usual awesome job. Great dodging of the Revvie fireballs, too. Was nice to see DotW get greedy fighting an HK and take some slime, leading to the aggravated mouse-waggle. Been there. ;)

I hope to get back to playing very soon, maybe this weekend.

[baja blast rd.]

For when you watch map09:

Spoiler

That part somewhat early on where he almost enters the chaingunner buttfuckery tunnel sans blursphere with like 14% health or whatever and then turns away at the last moment. Pretty hilarious. I was thinking, "Wait, he didn't say "1 death" this time, so how the fuck did he survive this?" And then of course the sixth sense kicks in. Extra funny because of how close he got to death later on with 1xx% health.

[Steve D]

rdwpa said:

For when you watch map09:

Thanks, I look forward to it. I wish I had DotW's sixth sense. Instead, I just blunder into traps and get killed. ;D

[baja blast rd.]

For the authors: what did So69 maps 01, 02, and 06 used to be in Sunlust? I guess 2 looks like it could have been the old map 05 or 06. 1 is some fusion of map01-02 and map07 and map11-13 aesthetics. 06 looks like secret-level zaniness; lol that cyb sequence.

[Ribbiks]

I think it's in the metadata somewhere (dehacked strings maybe?), but here's what I recall:

01: used to be m05
02: m06
03: m04... (we really did a number on this stretch of levels)
04: m21
05: m24
06: the future?!! it turns out the future is the 80s.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 11 -- Cave Culture - 106% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA, 1 foolish death and a whole lotta close calls.
You awake from a nightmare of drowning in endless blue, the thunderous echoes of a strange cry resounding in the back alleys of your subconscious even as the echoes of another cry that can surely only be your own reverberate off of the canyon walls around you. Wait, canyon walls...? As your vision clears you see that you are standing in a mossy defile near an unwholesome-looking veridian stream, the light muted by the heavily overcast sky overhead. So, the slipgate from the old shelter was functioning after all...? You appear to be on the same world as before, albeit some distance away from where you were before your mind began to....to wander. Were you simply mistaken about the gate's condition, or is there something more unknowable at work? "Meaningless questions", you think to yourself as you begin the hike out of the defile. "This is a one-way road either way."

Danne kicks off part II of Sunlust with this, a fairly humble yet deceptively bloody little adventure in spelunking. Vaguely Plutonian in air, with hints of the sinuously cozy mossy cavern complexes that served as connective tissue between larger arenas in a number of his previous releases, 'Cave Culture' fields the heftiest monstercount to this point in the mapset in the context of one of its most spatially congested settings, contributing to a pronounced sense of density in its combat--at points you feel not so much like you're shooting monsters as like you're using bullets, buckshot, and blast radius to carve your way through advancing layers of demonflesh before you are subsumed by them (imagine the odor). In a pattern that will be repeated in many of Sunlust's more densely-populated maps, the lion's share of this bodycount is actually comprised of weak enemies who will attack en masse in a couple of marquee encounters--the stinking flood of undead that seemingly oozes out of the cracks and crannies in the walls of the southern cave complex and the mass of imps who will try to overwhelm you near the exit--though early on this is of course difficult to predict. This particular type of monster deployment is rarely the most challenging fare Doom can offer, but I would say it is perhaps one of the most versatile--whether you're in a choreography-heavy challenge-oriented mapset like Sunlust or a much more leisurely, exploratory affair, it's always fun to mow down thick tides of weaklings, something a mapper can employ to infuse a scenario with a sense of intense action without actually elevating stress/difficulty to high levels, and with relatively little risk of saddling the combat with a debt of 'cleanup' work to paid after the main thrust of an encounter has been beaten.

So, pretty fun, but not an especially challenging map by the set's standards (indeed, I feel like I got away with quite a lot of rather poor play in this one). Not to say it's without teeth, though, the impromptu arch-vile 'Hunt' encounter in the northern tunnel complex can be quite harrowing, and thus exhilarating. Whether this encounter is intended as a little wink/nod to Plutonia or not (the visual theme of the level proper leads me to suspect that it is), it does exemplify the most important aspect in making a 'Hunted'-style encounter entertaining and memorable, that being to forego the guard-rails and security tape and other adulterating safety measures--it's a small area, there are several viles, and they can move as freely as you can (which may in turn force you deeper into the tunnels, which will ultimately cause the situation to snowball to unmanageable levels), so there's no meta-gaming this encounter. Conveniently enough, I'd contrast this encounter with the 'Hunted' tribute map in Plutonia 2, which those members of the DWMC who have their shit together more than I do are playing this month--that map is visually appealing for sure, but a welter of monster-blocking lines and other decisions totally hamstring the viles it uses, meaning that it's a fairly dull map from a gameplay perspective.

Also of note in my experience with 'Cave Culture' and this section of the map in particular is that this is the first (but not last!) time in the mapset where I picked an 'inoptimal' fork in a given level's branching, modular sort of non-linearity (read: no SSG for practically the entire map), and thus had a markedly different/more difficult experience than someone taking a different path on the same skill setting might have. I imagine to some sensibilities this might be viewed as a balance/design problem, but to my mind it adds a lot of interest to the process of exploring and then eventually 'learning' a map. That a non-linear map might be practically impossible to survive in unless a player takes a very specific path through it (and thus is arguably not genuinely non-linear at all) IS a valid point of criticism, I think....it's just that my experience has shown that those who most often raise the point are often far too quick to label something as 'impossible' when it's not even close to being so. ;) I picked a bad path through Cave Culture and had quite a rough time as a result, but I was able to survive (after that one dimwitted early death, I mean) it without having to resort to any pronounced metagamery or the like, which speaks to how finely balanced it is as a whole, which, again, is something Danne excels at.


Oh, and unrelated to this individual map per se, but map 11's relatively understated cave/ruins setting is also the start of what I felt to be a very intriguing/satisfying thematic arc in the mapset over the course of its second episode (so, 11-20, with 31-32 included), and probably what I would call the mapset's most consistently engaging/enthralling stretch of levels as well (whereas E1 feels more like a fairly traditional/restrained sampler/warmup episode, and E3 is more characterized by spikes and troughs).

[Demon of the Well]

Map 12 -- Dangeresque - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA
"Ribbiks does Skillsaw", eh? That's a description succinct enough and fitting enough that I don't feel the need to expound upon it at great length, it says a lot about what the map does well and also how it fits into the greater mapset's difficulty curve (read: it's violent and fast-paced, but also pretty easy when you get down to brass tacks). While the map is visually quite identifiable as a piece of Ribbiks' work for someone who knows what to look for (especially on the automap, where all of the curves and circles and swirls and whatnot come to the fore), it has a different feel to it than a lot of his other recent work, not just in terms of texture/color scheme (a more mixed 'natural' approach, in contrast to the starkly two-tone 'black/brown + shades of another color' approach for which he is most known) but also by dint of being brighter and featuring a more upbeat, arcade-style action track for BGM. If I wanted to really stretch the shit out of the Skillsaw comparison I could probably try to make something out of the way the different battles are arranged in a roughly catty-corner formation around the central space (thus meaning the player tends to run around and progress in diagonals a lot, rather than in the cardinal directions), but that's so nebulous an angle to take (and probably a trait evident in a lot of Ribbiks' maps that I've just never noticed before!) that I don't think I'll bother. ;)

In action terms, other comparisons can be made--the relatively low-stress thing-balance (here expressed more through a plentiful supply of powerful ammo relative to the opposition one faces than via lots of health/armor pickups), the heavy skew towards ledge-born snipers who attack from all over the map (including the comically overstaffed imp battalion to the northwest), which of course was one of the main talking-points about the design of Valiant on its release, etc.--but in these specific details it's probably pretty easy to miss the main point, that being that this feels so different from a normal Ribbiks map (enough so to make comparisons to another, very stylistically different author so convenient and inviting) because it consciously eschews a design element so deepseated in his main body of work: in the author's own words, this is a map where he decided to "stop being such a control-freak", at least for a few minutes. So, like in many other Sunlust maps, you are still given license to pick the order in which you tackle the encounters in this one (incidentally, I don't do it in the demo, but I'll bet turning the imps/spider loose as early as possible can have hilarious results for the rest of the map), but unlike in the majority of them (particularly those by Ribbiks!), you also enjoy just as much freedom to run away from them at any time, to camp them out, to pit all of them against each other, whatever you like to do--so it's not so much a sequence of combat-oriented puzzles or shrines to particular battle techniques as a toybox full of bits and bobs to be played with as you see fit.

This change in design philosophy accompanies some interesting changes in structure which may or may not be purely coincidental--for example, while a great many of the monsters are perched on high, the actual playspace is functionally very flat apart from little hops/climbs to keys after the battles guarding them have already taken place, in contrast to many of the author's other maps in the set, where height variation is more prominent (including as a recurring means of segmenting off different battles, tellingly)--but there are still some aspects that let you know who it is behind the curtain, ala the one meat-gate which prevents you from easily fleeing the blue key trial (incidentally, if in the demo it looks like I smelled that out before it actually happened, it's not due to some special sixth sense, but rather to some neighborly skeletons who wandered up there beforehand and obligingly pointed out the monster-blocking line to me before the fact, at which point I only had to put two and two together ;) ). A hesitation to let an efficient player have TOO much stuff to work with is also evident in the anomalous gating of some powerups, presenting players a binary choice of gimme items but denying them use of the full suite of supplies on a given run (incidentally, a blue armor is almost always a better choice than a soulsphere, guys!). Nevertheless the change in pace is appreciated, certainly; every long mapset needs breather maps, and the hands-off attitude towards micromanaging the player's experience turns 'Dangeresque' into very much a breather/destressing map, even if its (potentially) frenetic pace may not make that immediately clear. Generally, I feel like Danne made many more forays out of his 'comfort zone' in his mapping for Sunlust than Ribbiks did (whether purely for the sake of doing so or because he felt compelled to for the sake of balance/arrangement I won't speculate), but it's good to see that latter can do it too, when he wants to.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 13 -- Ruins of Skania - 109% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA
Somewhere earlier in the thread, Danne implied that he doesn't really know how to make a 'normal' map. Well, this is a pretty respectable try, I think, enough so that it does seem to have a markedly different pace from the stuff that's around it, be that the fast and abjectly arcade-flavored action of map 12, the textbook Ribbiksian map 14, or the somewhat more conventionally 'Danne' map 15. Note that I take the term 'normal' in this context to mean a map that plays more or less like an IWAD map, in which there's a roughly even focus on moving through/exploring the environment, skirmishing with the locals along the way, as on staged/choreographed battles (or on highly conceptual puzzle-solving/platforming bits, for that matter). There are points where one sees placement decisions that could be interpreted as the result of the author's relative discomfort/unfamiliarity with this style of mapping--the almost completely ineffectual/pointless mancubus and revenants perched on the big boulder in the yellow key's pond spring to my mind as the best example, but the enemies in the pools around the small western shrine or the lonesome arch-vile behind the blue door are others--but in all fairness I reckon he was in a bit of a tight spot as far as including a map like this one in a mapset like Sunlust goes, where trying to meet the overarching midgame difficulty curve without having large parts of the map seem unduly underpopulated or slowballed could arguably be something of a catch-22.

Regardless, in this ruined husk of Skania, the larger setpiece battles (most notably the spiderdemon/imp cavern) are spaced out with a goodly amount of general map traversal, and from a pistol-start the weapons (and the backpack, for that matter) are ladled out in a more traditionally measured way where gaining strength of arms is a steady aspect of progression over the duration of the whole level, in contrast to the approach many forthcoming maps will take, where the player will receive powerful weaponry very early, and then be tasked with using them cleverly in order to survive from the outset. Monster density is still fairly high, and as is generally Doom's wont major points in level progression (keys, new weapons, etc.) have major encounters tied to them, but these more often take the form of credible ambushes or heavy repopulation of previously cleared ground, as opposed to being framed as obvious arenas purpose-built for a highly specific battle to take place in at a heavily telegraphed moment. Pain elementals (& lost souls) were definitely the enemy MVPs in my time here, I did poorly against them pretty universally throughout the map, much credit to the author for consistently diabolical placement of these bastards--they generally only appear a few at a time (3-5 bodies, say), and yet they were able to repeatedly wreck my shit, from getting swamped/smothered by the ambush in the little gully leading away from the western shrine, to totally throwing me off my game with a blindside assault vs. the arch-viles in the aftermath of the spider/imp cave, to nearly costing me my life against the final cyberdemon in the narrow ravine via some truly dickheaded deployment. Thrilling encounters all, and while I did enjoy the imp/spider fight and the struggle against the nested hordes behind the red door, it's probably these desperate fights with clouds of flaming skulls that I'll take away with me--sometimes the most memorable setpieces of all are those which are not transparently framed as setpieces, if you know what I mean.

Aesthetically it fits in neatly with this arc of the game, appearing very much a natural continuation of Danne's caves/ruins theme from map 11, this time with a little more emphasis on the ruins (we can easily imagine that map 12 took place in an underpass or the like between the two sites). The BGM track didn't quite feel right to me at first (incidentally, I don't associate this track with Dobu's 'Immundum', my experience with that map was a very early version where it used something else), but it did grow on me by the end. The prominent addition of slate-grey to the previously tan/green color palette is a welcome addition to help add visual depth to a layout that's more complex than that fielded by the last few maps--in keeping with the theme of this being a more 'conventional' modern map, future areas are often foreshadowed early on through windows or other peepholes, and rather than moving from one-off battle venue to one-off battle venue the player repeatedly loops around and through the central caves and other areas through a variety of paths. I found the final ravine, which is both very narrow and very tall, with the grim grey cloud cover showing through apertures high up on the walls, to be a particularly striking bit of scenery--one gets the impression that in these recent maps one is climbing higher and higher through the inways of a great mountain, towards some unforeseeable revelation at its summit.

[Capellan]

Ooh, Demon FDAs. Time for me to DL Sunlust :)

[baja blast rd.]

Demon of the Well said:

the almost completely ineffectual/pointless mancubus and revenants perched on the big boulder in the yellow key's pond spring to my mind as the best example

All of the platforms lower, even the ones without stimpacks, so I think you're supposed to trigger the YK ambush and then make all of the monsters infight. (This is a type of "fan service" encounter that I'm fond of in easier levels.) It would have been nice if the whole Zimmer structure lowered to facilitate that, because it seems like that strategy is unnecessarily risky for non-speedruns as is. You'll probably find it amusing that the turreted monsters are dutifully weakened as you descend skill levels (revs to imps on 2/3, manc to HK on 2).

[baja blast rd.]

More mapper profiling: I think Danne is the one of the pair more likely to go for overt comedic value in setups, especially in breather maps. It's probably a bit like, "Wait, you're telling me I have to make a map that isn't bone-crushingly difficult? Zzzzzz. Fine, might as well amuse myself in the process." So you see with greater prevalence things like trooper/sergeant/imp spam and the imp-mastermind setup in map13 where the spider gets stuck at some point with 100% likelihood. Ribbiks's setups tend to be more sternfaced, even the easy ones, where humor doesn't really seem to be the point if it exists. And in the truly easy maps (like Crumpets map02), the monsters are placed in ways that complement the atmosphere, not get a chuckle out of you.

I think overt comedy is surprisingly rare in Doom mapping, outside of jokemaps of course. Going Down was a high-profile example, and skillsaw has his moments, but there's a lot of potential for creative silliness that has gone untapped.

[Cynical]

rdwpa said:

I think overt comedy is surprisingly rare in Doom mapping, outside of jokemaps of course. Going Down was a high-profile example, and skillsaw has his moments, but there's a lot of potential for creative silliness that has gone untapped.

The amazing boss fight at the end of Plutonium Winds map 17 (I think it's 17? The Grime tribute that was the last map in the original release) is another good example.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 14 -- Troglobite - 103% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA
You guys, I fucking LOVE this map! Words hardly seem sufficient, but as per usual I'm full of them, regardless. Set in an expansive cave complex partially flooded with poisonous overflow from a cursed stygian river, the pervasive gloom and sense of foreboding at work here are thick enough to cut with a knife. Between the languid shadows, cold downcast music track, and persistently cruel snares set by the mountain's demonic denizens, one gets the palpable sense that the journey is ill-fated, the struggle is ultimately futile, and that the story will most assuredly not have a happy ending. And I wouldn't have it any other way!

The observations that this looks like a map from Crumpets are quite well-founded, I think, even if the overall sense of scale is a bit larger, and the mood is significantly more grim. The dark brown mottled rock worn (or shaped?) into eerily smooth curves is there, the nested and terraced pools and streams of liquid are there, the heavy, somehow somnolent shadows are there, the skittering tracers of light and other bits of odd bioluminescence are there, and the crumbling masonry and other skeletal raiments of some unthinkably ancient ruins are there, including a fossilized wooden pier complete with rowboat, suggestive of bygone dark journeys into the mountain's black heart (incidentally, this counts not as Doom furniture but as a Doom vehicle, which is another order of kitsch altogether ;) ). All told, despite being very thematically understated--it's really just a big, brown, toxic cave when you get right down to it--I found this level to be aesthetically entrancing, a testament to the powers of structural shape and scale, skilled use of dark/dim light levels (you GL acolytes have no idea what magnificent realms of contrast-simulated magick you're missing out on!), and also the importance of a fitting BGM selection.

Engrossing atmosphere aside, perhaps it will come as a surprise to hear me say this right after I just finished expressing my affection for the map, but I don't reckon that the assortment of setpiece battles which dominate its combat landscape are especially noteworthy by the standards of the greater mapset (though perhaps I wouldn't say that if I hadn't already seen the rest of the mapset), being mostly smallish encounters that are dangerous more by dint of limited movement space and inhospitable terrain than as a result of a merciless enemy onslaught (the total monstercount for the level is one of the lowest in the second episode, incidentally). The nastiest of these by far is the chaingunner/fatso/sorcerer clusterfuck in the northern patch of ruins, where target prioritization protocols will all fail you because this is a scenario where there is no right answer, just some that are less wrong than others. You realistically need either sheer idiot luck (~thank you, ladies and gentlemen, thank you) or some measure of foreknowledge to get out of this one alive (more on that in a bit); the hidden cybertwin melee is tame by comparison, as using your wits just a bit will vastly/reliably improve survivability in that one. My favorite fight, as fate would have it, is actually one of the simplest of all, that being the two-stage pitfight near the pier; in terms of choreography it's a straightforward space-management challenge in a matchbox, but the setting itself, perhaps with a bit of an assist from my own clumsiness, made it tense and memorable.

But, no, where the map really shines is not in its discrete fights, but in its capacity for intrigue. Something like half of the map is completely optional (and it's probably more like two-thirds if you already know where you're going), and that's just accounting for the stuff that's not hidden in any way. The yellow skull key is used as a tantalizing hook to get you to wonder what you've missed when the exit shows up with little fanfare after you complete the first of either of the two 'mandatory' legs of progression (the ruins fight to the north or the pitfight to the south), but the dour, inhospitable environment does not invite casual exploration. Some have commented disapprovingly on the lack of a radsuit anywhere in the map, but in this case I think it was the right decision--to fully experience this map is to plumb its secret depths purely for curiosity's sake (the actual material rewards are counterbalanced largely by the risks involved in reaching them), and leaving crutch items around to try to nudge players towards the correct path would undercut this. As it is, this is a map where you feel like you've found something truly hidden or out of the way as you make deeper discoveries, and interestingly enough knowledge of these discoveries will open up new ways to approach the map as a whole, as in the case of the V-sphere reached by opening one of the yellow locks, which is essentially a get-out-of-jail-free card for the encounter of your choice (its best use is probably the fight right where the sphere itself is located; I ended up using it in the least ideal way possible during my first run, the price I had to pay for poor play in the pitfight earlier on). All told, the secrets in this map are the best sort of secrets--they reward you with gameplay depth and new sights and experiences, rather than simply a pile of extra goodies.

Really great stuff, this one.

[Demon of the Well]

rdwpa said:

All of the platforms lower, even the ones without stimpacks, so I think you're supposed to trigger the YK ambush and then make all of the monsters infight. (This is a type of "fan service" encounter that I'm fond of in easier levels.) It would have been nice if the whole Zimmer structure lowered to facilitate that, because it seems like that strategy is unnecessarily risky for non-speedruns as is. You'll probably find it amusing that the turreted monsters are dutifully weakened as you descend skill levels (revs to imps on 2/3, manc to HK on 2).

Hmm, yes, monsters that are only relevant if you go out of your way to make them so are always a gamble. In the UV placement only the nearest revenant to the key (if it's even still 'alive', which it may well not be given that skellies here will infight with the manc at the drop of a hat) is liable to be relevant, the rest will likely get bogged down in the midst of specters and knights which appear there. I didn't interpret this as a speedrunning thing so much as a slack punishment for very lazy/impatient/sloppy players, as I don't reckon most speedrunners appreciate it when a mapper takes pains to set up momentary roadblocks just to slow them down a second or two, purely for spite. As for monster changes on lower skill settings, it seems that an imbalance (real or perceived) between settings was one of the main criticisms of the WAD coming out of the DWMC playthrough. You played some of the mapset on UV and some of it on HMP (and Steve and Dobu have both seemingly experienced some of the individual maps on a number of different settings), do you feel like there was too much of a gap, or that different maps handled the different skills in really inconsistent ways? Complaints that a mapset lacks a ton of complex/thrilling combat coming from players who selected skill 1 or 2 for the entirety of the playthrough are not something I'd personally be inclined to take very seriously (I reckon you largely opt out of the joys of tension and pressure when you willingly select 'easy mode', that is a setting for players who would prefer to enjoy exploration and sightseeing without being harried every 20 seconds), but a severe gap in intensity between UV and HMP is something that seems like it'd be much more of a concern.

Map 15 -- Strength and Anger - 101% Kills / 50% Secrets - FDA, 2 deaths.
Death #1 here is perhaps my most glorious in the whole of the FDA set.

You emerge from the tenebrous maw of the drowning caverns, slightly more wan and pallid than when you went in, to find yourself immersed in crisp night air under a cold moon and a buckshot canvas of uncaring stars. You are nearly at the summit, but one final high mountain pass stands in your way, its byways and throughways littered with fragments of decaying architecture on an increasingly cyclopean scale, like half-buried corpses of giants. All looks dead and still from your vantage point, but in those moments when the alpine wind dies down you can just hear a somnolent murmur of many alien voices and a faint clattering of innumerable cloven hooves on damp stone from within the tunnels ahead, countless nighted pilgrims absorbed in hateful meditation. Time for some black anger and midnight strength.

This is something of a 'now shit gets real' map, though in truth there is still far worse to come later on. Here, Danne really turns loose the hordes for the first time, with nearly every major encounter being founded on eyeblink assaults by one or more waves of ravening damned. Monstercount is significantly higher than at any prior point in the mapset, and while the demonic complement of 320 bodies or so is little more than a drop in the ocean in comparison to some of the forces pre-Sunlust Dannemaps have mustered, overall monster density is still quite high, by dint of consistently 'economical' use of movement space you will have to struggle against them. Things start off slow with a loose pack of imps and some commando spoilers in a tunnel system, but this is little more than a cruel tease before the other shoe drops; as soon as you're kitted out, you're promptly thrown into a harrying struggle in the southerly torch-pyre cavern, where you're torn between the need to stick close to the base of the pyre's great brazier in order to avoid being consumed by evil fire-magic and the need to not be gutted like a fish by one of the crowd of hell nobles milling around it, all while bullets scream through the air from all directions, courtesy of the undead soldiers who emerge from their upright tombs after a cruelly brief delay. The margin for error in execution is slim in this fight, with you needing to time your ducks and dodges with pinpoint accuracy in order to buy time to weed out the viles and ultimately win the day.

While this first real fight is arguably the most complex and demanding in the map from a purely choreographic standpoint, the tactical kernel at its core remains paramount throughout the rest of the duration: don't hesitate, don't hold back, don't try to turtle up, or you're dead. Each of the later fights operates on the same basic principle of swamping you with powerful enemies in a tight space, requiring you to create your own indispensable running lanes on the fly via the instrument of intense violence--try to camp these fights out for more than a daring moment or two, and you'll be trampled into gory paste. You're provided with the full suite of Doomguy's weaponry early on in order to facilitate this, but true to form, Danne has ensured that you won't be able to simply use the BFG as a constant crutch, with cells only available sufficient to power a handful of blasts per slaughter, so you'll need to make strategic use of rockets to bore through walls of weaklings and disciplined use of shells for cleanup and delivering the periodic coup de grâce in order to keep up enough momentum to see you through (the chaingun is generally of only very limited use in this particular type of combat). The trick in most of these fights is not dying in the first 30 seconds; if you can last long enough to thin the crowd even a little, maneuverability (and thus your array of options) will greatly increase in no time flat. Easier said than done, of course; one of the defining characteristics of this type of close-quarters horde deployment is how damned intimidating it intrinsically is, but that's the rub. Suffice to say that this type of combat is going to show up again later, so best learn to swallow it now. My favorite bit here was the tidal wave of pig-demons and other assorted horrors near the yellow key, though there is something admirably ruthless about the twin-cyb tango in the shockingly tight spire which closes out the action--to reiterate yet again, if you're going to have success in tough maps like these, one of the things you absolutely must be able to do is avoid panicking at the drop of a hat. Again, easier said than done, of course. ;)

Again, somewhat thematically understated on the aesthetic side--more orange-brown caves, more vines and mud, some ruins here and there--but again I think it's quite effective in presentation, the atmospheric BGM, new sky texture, and some of the peripheral diorama detailing that shows aforesaid texture off add a lot to the whole. The map's also fascinating in its layout; while progression through the level is pretty rote by Sunlust standards (read: discrete setpiece after discrete setpiece, with some kind of basic binary fork in the path at some point to add variability between playthroughs), the way in which areas connect to one another both visually and in terms of vertical adjacency is subtly disorienting, especially after the transformation/descent of the initial tunnel system--I lost all sense of where the earlier, higher parts of the map were at that point, and found the 2.5D illusion of a true 3D space particularly convincing as a result.

[baja blast rd.]

Demon of the Well said:

(I reckon you largely opt out of the joys of tension and pressure when you willingly select 'easy mode',

I think easy maps can be "quasi-hard": presenting the veneer of difficulty while being forgiving of all but the worst blunders. (Much of Skillsaw's stuff is like this, for example.) They can also have "clever easy play": imagine an encounter that lets you weaponize an arachnotron to kill a bunch of fodder, or whatever. I guess we can also include "spooky play": for example, Scythe2 map02 (I think) has a two-caco warp-in that's non-threatening but nevertheless scared the crap out of me, mostly through good staging. Relatively harmless AV setups are a combination of quasi-hard and spooky. (I hope I'm never trusted to invent terminology for anything.) But all of that generally requires that encounters are (re)designed with those aims in mind, instead of purely nerfed from a hard state.

I actually think Sunlust's HMP and UV were fine. On first playthrough, for me, HMP was suitable for purely saveless play, and UV for saving-before-the-tough-encounters play (map07, map 08, map 11 and maps 14-19*) or purely saveless play, depending on the level -- although the latter set of levels are within my one-shot-on-UV-after-learning-them range. I'd never willingly play a map I'd have to savescum (which I define as saving before every encounter, or multiple times per encounter) to beat, so if map20 and map29 are as hard as people say I might play them on HMP. (I'm taking a break from hard maps atm and will probably continue my playthrough much later than planned.) But a few of the HMP encounters did have the typical "Wait, that's it?" feel of an encounter that had all of its character stripped by nerfing a key element, leaving a generic fight behind.


*Map07 because the RL ambush wasn't within my skill range back then; map08 because I was too big of a doofus to pacifist-troll the obvious pacifist-troll room; map11 because back then basic revenant stuff still gave me trouble, and the last encounter took me too long to figure out (ignore the imps and kill the chaingunners first duh); the rest because they are hard.

[Cynical]

rdwpa said:

*Map07 because the RL ambush wasn't within my skill range back then; map08 because I was too big of a doofus to pacifist-troll the obvious pacifist-troll room; map11 because back then basic revenant stuff still gave me trouble, and the last encounter took me too long to figure out (ignore the imps and kill the chaingunners first duh); the rest because they are hard.

TBH, 17 is easier on UV than HMP, provided you know how to get the secret BFG.

[Ribbiks]

Cynical said:

TBH, 17 is easier on UV than HMP, provided you know how to get the secret BFG.

heh, I'd still argue against this. the BFG fight perhaps requires a more specific strategy on HMP, but it's more reliable imo. and the other 2 big fights are definitely more of a pain on UV

[Cynical]

Ribbiks said:

heh, I'd still argue against this. the BFG fight perhaps requires a more specific strategy on HMP, but it's more reliable imo. and the other 2 big fights are definitely more of a pain on UV

Yeah, but, for me at least, if you know where the secret BFG is, the non-secret BFG fight is by far the toughest thing in the map (the giant HK/PE clusterfuck can be neutralized easily with the BFG, and the and the little cramped fight at the end is just a "stand and use the BFG well" situation; honestly, I don't even think that one is noticeably harder on UV than HMP), and it's a real bitch on HMP if you don't come up with the one proper strategy, whereas on UV you can just get it all infighting, grab the Cells, slip out the back, and then fight it from the other side at your leisure.

[Steve D]

Ah, the moment I've been waiting for, DotW's FDA of Map15.

It's cool to see DotW forced into playing his best. I really enjoyed his aggressive attack at the red key fight. This was very campable on HNTR, but maybe not on UV with the extra Archies. I can't afford to give away as many health points as Demon in order to get close and land the telling shots. It's one of those things where you have to know your limits and act accordingly. One thing I noticed is that each time he re-fought the battle, he was more aggressive than the time before.

The BFG fight was another good one. Demon gets nailed at the end charging Herr Cyb for the BFG blast. Whenever he does that in one of my maps, he ends up surviving with 1% health. Every damn time. :D This fight was interesting insofar as subsequent attempts handled the Cyb a bit more cautiously, finishing him off with the SSG. The most impressive part to me was the dodging of Revvie rockets at the start, when he was stuffed into that small area and had very little room. Cool shit.

But y'all know I was waiting for that big, nasty Revvie fight. First try, he goes down to an absolute wall of homing missiles. It's like he was a big-wave surfer who got wiped-out by the clean-up wave. That happened to me at least 10 times when I fought that room. Second go was simply amazing.

I agree with DotW that the Pinky Horde was the most cinematically impressive flood of the map.

This is still my fave map so far, but I have a long way to go. It was nice to see an expert dismantle the map that totally ruined me, but made me like it. ;)

[Demon of the Well]

Map 31 -- Birds of a Feather - 107% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA
Hmmm.....not what I might've expected, this map, though I suppose it makes sense in a lot of ways. Many players commented on seeing/feeling some significant degree of Deadall/Eternal influence in this, and this was indeed my thought as well; Ribbiks has said that the aesthetic influence is there (Eternal's 'Gravity' WAD is what most readily came to my mind, perhaps a result of the wood/metal texture scheme and the various delicate spires), at any rate. I reckon gameplay similarities exist, as well--a tight ammo balance (from pistol-start) is the most defining characteristic of the actual combat, and progression through the level is handled via a fairly complex sequence of switch-hittery and thing-gettery (with bits of whimsical platforming and the like occasionally required to reach the next switch/thing in the sequence)--although if you think about it these qualities are pretty well entrenched in Ribbiks' main body of work, wholly apart from considering any outside allusions or obvious influences. The main stylistic departure that makes this map feel so different from most of his other Sunlust maps (or his other maps generally speaking) is more a matter of emphasis than of form, I think.....in 'Birds of a Feather', the real challenge the level poses is in figuring out how to smoothly navigate it and ultimately how to leave it (am I correct to conclude that the only exit out of this map goes to map 32, rather than to map 16?), with monster encounters being largely sideshow affairs that only muster any real resistance early on, before the player has had the opportunity to build up much in the way of health/ammo stocks (incidentally, this and map 23 are the only maps in the set where the berserk pack seemed like a really relevant weapon to me); another way of looking at this might be to say that the optional/secret-finding aspect of many of Ribbiks' other levels is the focus of main progression here, while the demanding, complicated/claustrophobic monster encounters take a backseat for a few minutes.

For my part, I did find the map to be a pleasant place to visit and to explore (I am quite a fan of Eternal's work, incidentally), though the combat aspect felt more than a bit ungainly to me, and at its worst seemed to bog down the map's main focus more than it contributed to it. As aforesaid, the low-resource nature of the map's balance accounts for most of its teeth; there is no rocket launcher, and bullets are by far the most plentiful ammo type, so realistically speaking there's bound to be a lot of chaingun-tapping going on here (the berserk pack being of occasional use to let you build a stock buffer to not have to metagame your way through every later encounter), not necessarily a positive thing considering the slant of the monster placement--former human commandos are probably the most characteristic enemy type (and of course it's often meet to make heavy use of cover/camping tactics versus chainner squads), but outside of them it's mostly mid-tier meat, often either perched as stationary turrets or teleported away to approach the player from a distance. The other recurring theme seems to be tasking the player with breaking line-of-sight with the periodic arch-viles via hiding behind one of the assorted no. 2 pencils that serves the delicate architecture as 'support' columns. Very deliberate in tone, I suppose, but also very hesitant/restrained, and it seems like the amount of time you spend fighting doesn't quite jive with the level of involvement the fights actually require. I'm wondering if maybe making this an unrepentantly easy map, with most trash monsters and the like, might've been preferable, or alternatively perhaps using a very small number of very powerful monsters at key points instead. As it is, it sort of feels stuck between ideas/genres, and uncommonly artificial in pace.

As aforesaid, the exploration aspect of the map is fun enough, though. People have commented on my secret-finding abilities in the past; to the limited extent that I find a higher number of secrets than many other players do, it's because I make a point of looking for them, and I make a point of looking for them simply because I enjoy the search for its own sake. There is only one secret in this map (the BFG, which again is cell-starved enough not to be a particularly relevant inclusion as far as the combat goes), but the main progression itself, touching again upon the 'trinkets as actuators' concept we saw as early as map 05, is complex enough and requires enough lateral thinking and spatial awareness that much of its content feels like unraveling a web of secrets, as well. Stuff you might do to find bonus/hidden areas in other Ribbiks maps--poking around in little out-of-the-way crannies, cat-burglaring around on top of bounding walls when the opportunity arises, etc.--is stuff you'll be expected to do to open the exit in this one; I generally enjoy the author's approach to secret areas, and so this design decision is fine by me, a chance to take in the scenery without the constant tension of slavering death waiting to burst forth and claim my soul adding a dark/uncomfortable tint to every scene. And, as per usual, it is very nice scenery, in this case sort of inverting the author's characteristic 'organic main shapes with complex geometric detail' approach, instead favoring 'regular/geometric main shapes with delicate organic detail.' Extremely pleasant music, as well, I could happily listen to it for hours. Also, for my part, I much prefer the deep blue/black Eternal sky to the hi-res bright sunburst sky that GL users will see here, seems much more fitting of the mood to me.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 32 -- Postcoitus Doom - 95% Kills / No secrets - FDA, 3 deaths.
Talk about waking up in an awkward situation...

By all accounts this map is apparently intended as a bit of a raunchy joke, pitting the player against a small (but deadly) selection of discrete encounters expressly designed to defeat 'conventional' play, from a platforming/straferunning obstacle course where you're under fire from a nearby cyberdemon to a ridiculous fountain of skeletons that spawns directly on top of the ammo you desperately need in order to deal with them, to a two-cyber tango where extremely inconvenient speleothems make standard BFG usage more than a bit of a to-do. And of course, there's that final cavalcade of arch-viles primed to pour over you like the inevitable wave of regret after waking up to an 'uncomfortable' bunking situation the morning after an ill-advised bender. As a final middle finger to high society 'ludic' design philosophy, the level's 'non-linearity' is essentially entirely illusory--you can go to several places from the outset, but there's only one path that will not end in a horrible (and somewhat comedic) death, full stop, and no way to know that this is the case outside of trial/error exploratory play.

All that being said, if you've played far enough into Sunlust that you've run up against this level, I reckon you ought to know by now that conservative, conventional tactics are often not going to cut muster on this journey anyway, and that being the case, once you resolve to take your medicine this level's really not so unreasonable. It's very short, for one, so even spots of poor luck (like my third hilarious death) don't really set you back much, and the early encounters are all more or less rote as soon as you figure out what you're meant to do, which is usually quite straightforward (e.g. don't hold back with the BFG versus the revenants, so you can keep collecting cells and thus keep holding down the trigger). The arch-viles at the end are still a bit of a tricky proposition--probably pretty difficult to reliably avoid all damage there--but if you grit your teeth and stand fast you'll find that Danne throws you a bit of a bone at the end, allowing you to escape for a breather about two-thirds of the way through the fight (careful not to leave with empty bandoliers, though, else you're fucked!). This is a map where the intimidation factor of what you face is very real, but once you get over that and settle in to look for efficient ways to meet encounters on their own terms, you'll find that victory can come in surprisingly short order.

Incidentally, it certainly is true that this map trolls the player a bit (or more than a bit), and I suppose some sensibilities will find this objectionable....but to this I say, "just troll it right back." With knowledge gained through early failed attempts, you can start putting together a plan to take a bit of the edge off of the big 'problem' encounter with the viles, not only by realizing you can take advantage of being able to leave the fight partway through, but also by 'softening' them a bit with some tactical sniping before the encounter even begins (as mentioned much earlier in the thread, in a return playthrough I also tried weaponizing the cyberdemons against them, but found this tactic to be largely unworkable, albeit entertaining). Look at it this way: Sunlust writ large does everything it can to make your life difficult, including by removing or precluding most obvious ways of 'cheesing' most encounters, yes? But if you're clever you'll find it doesn't always plug up EVERY leak, and with some ingenuity and foresight (or, more realistically for most of us, the benefits of hindsight) you can often gain an extra edge in many marquee encounters. It's my interpretation that the WAD's designers are well aware of this, and indeed, that this more abstract tactical aspect to fight management/level progression is part of the fun, part of the depth of the WAD (they will surely correct me if I'm wrong, of course), which may not be an intuitive feature for all players given some of the social 'baggage' attached to camping/cheesing in less extreme/challenge-oriented mapsets. Again, I cannot stress enough: success in this kind of difficult mapset is, contrary to some 'casual' assessments, not simply a matter of pure twitch reflex and rote pattern recognition, but also of tactics and strategy, and the mapper and player constantly attempting to outwit one another is a part of that dynamic.

[baja blast rd.]

My death count prediction was on point for those two. Predicting zero for map16 (I'll wait till the usual write-up to confirm the guesses). On what level did you start using saves? That'll probably make the predictions pointless.

[Demon of the Well]

I think I switched to -cl -1 in anticipation of using saves of as map 18, but I didn't actually start using saves until map 19, and there were at least a few of the E3 maps where I didn't save at all (and one where I did save but never died).

Using savegames sort of invalidates a given recording as a feat of skill, of course, and so the deathcounts in those .lmps are not very meaningful barometers of difficulty (since you have to figure that in long grueling maps you won't realistically make it back to where you last died on every subsequent attempt starting from scratch), but for the purposes of these threads I figure that some save-using files are preferable to 3-hour long DNFs or the like, and I also hope they might demonstrate the process of planning/learning from mistakes in a given encounter (something I've been harping on about incessantly in all of these writeups) more conveniently than a more chivalrous series of one-shots might.

[NuMetalManiak]

replaying Sunlust again...



there's this conspicuous light visor in MAP04's red key area on a rather high ledge. any normal means of reaching it?