The DWmegawad Club plays: Hell Revealed

[T-Rex]

Exactly. The Casali Brothers had already been making maps that were far more difficult than anything that was made at the time, so that was before they even started developing Plutonia, which considering the development time, started on September 1995. I'm sure they got the timestamps mixed up with the development of Plutonia.

[j4rio]

If it was a wrong year stample, it would make other statements in that interview completely contradictory.

[Jaws In Space]

j4rio said:

If it was a wrong year stample, it would make other statements in that interview completely contradictory.

But there are other know mistakes in that interview, such as the comment saying that Milo & Dario did 16 maps each. When Dario later gave the level design credits it turned out to be 18 maps made by Milo & 14 maps by Dario.

[T-Rex]

Jaws In Space said:

But there are other know mistakes in that interview, such as the comment saying that Milo & Dario did 16 maps each. When Dario later gave the level design credits it turned out to be 18 maps made by Milo & 14 maps by Dario.

I find that strange because, Maps08, 13, and 25 looked surprisingly like Dario's maps while Map28 seemed like Milo's, considering the stylistic differences between the two.

[PsychoGoatee]

Just to give my general impressions, overall Hell Revealed wasn't for me.

The first level starts off promisingly, fun vibe. When they throw a million monsters at you in that tiny room though, I couldn't move, woops.

In general even in the early levels to me there are often just too many monsters haphazardly thrown around the map. It's a bit of a slog to me, and that's not even the slaughter part of the WAD.

By map 6 even it's really hard with lots and lots of dying on continuous HMP for me by the way. I had heard it was tame until the teens or something, but that doesn't seem to be the case.

And for example map 6 has a small room just filled with 10 zombiemen crammed in it. I never understand that in maps, why have a room full of enemies completely pressed together so they can't move? Doesn't make sense, doesn't feel like natural monster placement to me. 126 monsters in a pretty tight small map, not my thing.

By map 11 we have 310 monsters on HMP. I'm glad other people enjoy it, and I can respect the work put into it especially in 97, but it's just not my thing.

(edit: to be fair, at least on HNTR the monster count is lower. Though still a bit much for me later on)

[Demon of the Well]

Map 26 -- Afterlife - 111% Kills / 100% Secrets
A possible candidate for my favorite map in the set, though as with so many other of these levels I suppose that's largely predicated on my knowing its ins and outs and how to get the most out of what it offers. I imagine the biggest stumbling block for many first time players (or UV pistol-starters, at least) will be that, barring an early exploit via vile-jump, until the very last fight it is a map fought almost completely with buckshot (you can pick up a chaingun from a zombie at some point, but bullet ammo is not 'natively' placed in the level at all and will come only from other corpses). Coupled with the fact that this is one of the mapset's most monster-rich maps, this can of course make for quite a long campaign, but I think an interesting contrast here with many of Yonatan's earlier maps is that it's something you can play aggressively and legitimately succeed at--the whole 'trench warfare' thing is still viable as ever but is less mandatory in this case (the 'astral highway' segment notwithstanding), though again I guess that's only really evident once you know the map.

I would say that this relative fluidity and flexibility is a result of this likely being Donner's most mature map; at very least it's certainly his most ambitious and most concept-heavy. Over its span it encompasses one or more examples of pretty much every trick he has up his sleeve, both open playground-type battlefields (central void-yard) and tighter setpiece-based arenas, which gives the map a lot of potential for pace variation throughout. The aforementioned astral highway segment has more of the trench warfare flavor from earlier maps going on: there is no really efficient way to pound through the various perched snipers (the cyberdemon in the northwest corner is particularly egregious, as using the basic shotgun to plink away at him from a position where he cannot retaliate is really the only sensible thing to do), meaning that this segment ends up being something of a pace-killer on a maxkills run, though if you're not concerned with keeping score it's fairly easy to simply ignore all of them and move into the infight-void behind the highway, as the spiderdemon on the ground level is surprisingly ineffective as a deterrent (the 'secret' the snipers protect is not very relevant to mapflow this time). The torchlit marble shrine, on the other hand, plays like something much more modern, with waves of monsters rapidly encroaching on your space with no easy way to put your back to a wall dominating (though you still do some rather superfluous shotgunning of arch-viles through windows at one point), quite a contrast with the more deliberate nature of many of the set's other marquee challenges.

The tail end of this marble segment also segues into the first of the map's two ghost-based scenarios; here some spectral imps appear along with a corporeal Baron, who can effortlessly tear them apart in melee if his ire can be redirected towards them. Upon conquering the Afterlife's other challenges, Doomguy returns to the starting area only to be beset by a motley swail of demonic haunts, who can be banished either with splash damage from the finally-available RL or simply fled from (the latter being easier if you thoroughly cleaned up here early on, of course). I remember these ghosts made quite an impression on me 'back when'; at the time I already understood the ghost-monster phenomenon (and HR was by no means the earliest PWAD to make deliberate use of them), but the notion of using them on purpose for cinematic effect or to create a very unusual fight was something quite revelatory to me at the time. It is of course a heavily concept-driven map in general, but Yonatan really went the extra mile here, not only with the variety and ingenuity seen in the combat setups but also as regards the setting itself. Again, Donner was not the first author to use the now well-established 'bright architecture against a black void' aesthetic trope (for instance, Paul Schmitz did it a year earlier in his 'Welcome to Hell' WAD, just off the top of my head), but I do believe he had quite a hand in popularizing it for posterity with this map (which is another of the most obvious thematic inspirations for much of what we see in the later parts of Kama Sutra, incidentally).

While perhaps not quite as fluid/flexible moment-to-moment as some of the earlier 'warzone' maps, with a little know-how this map's nevertheless a blast to play, one of few instances in HR where a cavalier playstyle really shines. My preferred method is to grab the SSG ASAP from the chessboard room, turn the cyberdemons loose in the central area, and then just gallivant off to the two side-areas without dealing the clusterfuck in the astral 'forum' until the very end, when the arrival of the ghostly legion turns it into QUITE the revel. In all, it's a memorable engagement in a very whimsical setting, a fitting curtain-call for Yonatan's solo contributions to the mapset. Incidentally, time was that the game essentially ended here, as far as many of us were concerned....

Map 27 -- Cyberpunk - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
.....but of course that attitude's not really in the spirit of the way we do things here.

Despite the number of times I played Hell Revealed in my youth, the only thing about this level that has ever managed to stick in my mind is the cyberdemon maze, which is easily the nastiest contrivance of Haggay Niv's short mapping career, and again one those few notable moments in HR where the price of hanging back is not simply stalemate, but death. Of course, this kind of thing looks much less formidable these days, where players of a wide variety of skill levels all understand the concept of the Two-Shot Tango, but back when it was contemporary I'm sure this shit was downright terrifying, especially since many players will probably not find the secret BFG (though it occurs to me that in those days play with carryovers was the overwhelming majority choice, which I'm sure Niv was probably aware of).

The rest of the map is frankly not worth remembering. I think it's fair to say I've shown Niv's designs a lot more charity than most other Club players this past month, but there aren't a lot of excuses or labyrinthine rationalizations I can make about what we see here, which is homogenous monster-blocks that appear with very little semblance of rhyme or reason, and almost wholly without the ability to levy any kind of threat. I woke up and paid attention for a couple minutes during the cyber-maze, but for the rest of the proceedings I was sleepwalking through it. Damned if I could tell you even now what happens between the spider mastermind and the maze; I spent most of that time on autopilot wondering if it was my imagination or not that the formation of the (pointless) sergeants in the blood-pit seemed to be in the shape of some definite character or symbol (perhaps the letter H ?).

Not exactly a leading light for the mapset.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 28 -- Top Hell - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
This is quite an easy map, which is in this case almost entirely to its detriment, unfortunately. Quite easy to miss, but there is in fact a sort of weak gimmick or concept at play here, that being that the map uses only 'boss' monsters (loosely rather than technically defined, that is). So, it ought to be tough, right guys? Right?

Wrong. The enemy placement style here uses the zone of influence philosophy that I spent all of February prattling on about--i.e. concentrated groups of preplaced monsters that occupy set vantage points or patrol areas with the aim of keeping the player suppressed through sheer firepower or strength of numbers--but the ratio of space to monster presence is heavily imbalanced on the side of space, with the level's 130 or so monsters dwarfed by the size of the battlefield and unable to muster anywhere near enough blanket-fire to pose a credible threat to any reasonably mobile player. A solid arsenal is afforded the player at the outset (with the BFG available in a fairly obvious secret that can be easily accessed within seconds of mapstart once its location is known); there seems to have been some mind towards drawing the player into the sparsely-spread enemies' fields of fire by having ammo spread out somewhat evenly over the playspace, but again, the space:population ratio is skewed enough that this design choice barely registers as a factor. Controversial or no, it may well be the case that an austerity-fueled weapon-hunt style (ala map 11 or the like) might've been preferable here. Well....that, or a much greater monster population, though I imagine many players might view that as equally unfavorable in this case. As is, outside of the concentrated pocket of viles in the north-central kiosk and the similar short-lived stampede of cyberdemons from inside the silly inverse Tricks and Traps room, there is very little combat here that feels like a particularly relevant aspect of map progression (and again, particularly for players with no interest in scoring maxkills); indeed, as was the case with the strange imp-horde in map 27, a huge chunk of the monsters here practically beg you to ignore them, those being the totally extraneous perched spectators in the exit room.

It is at least a fairly visually striking map for the time period, with the long views, high ceilings and rows of large ceramic braziers running down the midway of the main hall being suitably evocative. The deeper reaches of HR in general have of course tended to use a lot of largescale spaces as a matter of necessity (got to fit all of those small armies of monsters somewhere, after all), but here you get a real sense of macrotecture as an aesthetic or artistic element, as opposed to a purely practical one. I reckon that in this case one would probably be simply reaching too far in trying to draw any kind of direct connection between what we see here and the cyclopean stylization of certain strains of more modern slaughterstuffs, but it is interesting to see the general similarities, nonetheless.

[T-Rex]

PsychoGoatee said:

By map 11 we have 310 monsters on HMP. I'm glad other people enjoy it, and I can respect the work put into it especially in 97, but it's just not my thing.

(edit: to be fair, at least on HNTR the monster count is lower. Though still a bit much for me later on)

At least HR on ITYTD/HNTR felt more like Doom 2/TNT on UV. HMP, while it's tough as nails, is at least fair, for the most part. UV, yeah, it's gonna be one heck of a ride, but even so, if difficult wads like Plutonia and HR aren't your thing, that's fine. They're not necessarily for everyone, despite the fact that I like it a lot for being frustrating, yet challenging, and having plenty of moments where you need to think outside the box, which makes it addicting for me and others, not to mention the music, being a huge fan of RotT and Apogee as a whole. Besides, HR is pretty tame compared to Sunder and Combat Shock, both of which are in a completely different niche altogether.

[Crusader No Regret]

Map 16 on HMP:

Lots of high HP monsters to grind through with SSG. There is a larger supply of rockets and plasma available as well so this makes for a fun casual romp. Damaging floors abound to restrict movement but also plentiful radiation suits. Still creates a sense of urgency. Most likely places to die are the mancubus gallery or taking too many revenant missiles in the open area where the red key switch is. Otherwise not particularly dangerous: one is more likely to waste shells from the many boxes of shells lying around than die to the other monsters.

Fun to be had here without needing to be some sort of Doomgod. Good luck finding the secrets though (I used an editor)

Revisiting map 20 on UV:

Another later HR map I could complete from scratch on UV without saves as a keyboarder: must be easy, eh? Seems like this is very much a product of the era it was created. Maybe back in 1997, single shotgunning multiple barons, hellknights, and mancubi was considered challenging. In this day and age, many would call it tedium. Ammo distribution is similar to map 13 with lots of shells and limited quantities of everything else. Monster blocking lines trivialize the yellow key setup. There are some threatening AV setups beyond the yellow door; otherwise losing focus when grinding down cybers creates the biggest danger of dying. Map hasn't aged well and could be argued it wasn't that great back then either.

[Paul977]

I'm sure that many of you have played them both. What's the most difficult HR1 or HR2 (on UV) ?

[Budoka]

Easily HR2 for me. In fact, I've never gotten very far in it.

[Magnusblitz]

FINAL THOUGHTS

Well, at the start of the month I was expecting something bog-filled that I wouldn't finish, but aside from skipping the two secret maps and not finishing MAP18 "Hard Attack," I was able to make my way through all of it, so that's a positive.

Going through each level at a time, I'd say there's some fairly large patterns that can be seen. The first 12 levels (except MAP11) are pretty much crap - my feelings on them ranged from "bland" or "too short to matter" at best, to downright garbage at worst. MAP13 really ups the ante, but I still found it to feel like an early effort, being overly blocky and needing some refinement (and more weapons). Things hit a high point with the MAP14-15-16 run, as each map is a fun 'puzzlebox' which requires the player to plan out his approach, figure out where things are, and giving him the freedom to run around like crazy in a large area while trying to do so.

Mixed bag after that. We get some meat boxes where the enemies are crammed into too small of areas to be fun (MAP17, 18, 20) or linear assaults with nothing really interesting gameplay-wise (MAP19, 21). MAP23 has some moments but also lots of rough moments, MAP24 is a classic, MAP25 is a bit too easy (though it makes for a nice breather), MAP26 is confusing but stands out. Then it's a decline back into maps that feel somewhat amateurish with the final run (and an easily forgettable IoS map). I thought it might be the difference in authors, but Donner made my favorite maps here along with some clunkers, though I will say that all of Niv's left me pretty underwhelmed, with his best map being... MAP28? MAP10's house map? Bah.

I'm not a slaughterfan and I'm not up on my Doom history, so won't have much to comment on that... but I will say that there are still some interesting ideas from the 'puzzle boxes' that can be drawn out of the mapset, so it has my respect for that reason alone.

Favorite Maps: MAP14, 15, 16, 24, 26

[T-Rex]

Paul977 said:

I'm sure that many of you have played them both. What's the most difficult HR1 or HR2 (on UV) ?

Definitely HR2. It's a whole different beast altogether, as some have said.

[Salt-Man Z]

Just throwing my $0.02 in (I may have earlier in the thread, too, but whatevs) even though I didn't play along this time:

I definitely see how HR is an iconic and influential mapset. And I more or less enjoyed my initial play(s) of it. (I played through the first 10 maps once, then the whole thing again later on.) In fact, the first 10 levels are fairly easygoing fun, my kind of maps. I played on HMP (continuous with saves), and "Afterlife" is the only level that really gave me absolute fits (I ran out of ammo often, never saw the "chessboard" section, never saw the ghost monsters, and somehow exited without realizing what I was doing.) But I'm very glad I played it; I'm just not sure I'd ever want to go through a number of those later levels again (and certainly not at the one-a-day Club speed.)

I see HR and Plutonia compared all the time, but to me, there's nothing similar about them. In my mind, Plutonia maps (generally) have elegant layouts with a consistent and competently-executed visual theme; what sticks in my memory is often individual shapes: the starting arches in "Onslaught", for example, or the underground canal in "Bunker". By comparison, later HR maps seem built around a single arena or concept, and the architecture is simpler, blockier, but also more imposing. Gameplay-wise, Plutonia to me is all hitscanners and revenants and archies, while HR specializes in big walls and waves of ammo-devouring meat. I easily prefer the former to the latter; Plutonia on UV is far easier—and more fun—than HR on HMP.

[T-Rex]

Salt-Man Z said:

I see HR and Plutonia compared all the time, but to me, there's nothing similar about them.

There's some similarities, though Plutonia's Go 2 It seems to have been one of the influences for many of the maps, especially Resistance is Futile. The architecture in HR leans more towards that of Milo Casali as his geometry is slightly more simpler than Dario's, although Odyssey of Noises outshines all in Plutonia. Even though I may agree that Plutonia has a more modern look in architecture than HR, and even though I prefer HR over Plutonia, both of them can't top Alien Vendetta. That megawad just nukes them completely.

Still, the soundtrack selection and addiction factor of HR gives it an edge over Plutonia. I deem this megawad underrated and underappreciated.

[Demon of the Well]

I think that the vast majority of players would find HR2 to be more difficult than the original HR (and I am one of them), although the original does have a handful of maps that are extremely intractable for certain inflexible playstyles. Worth repeating that HR2 is often difficult in rather a different way than HR, mind.

Map 29 -- Temple of Fear - 101% Kills / 100% Secrets
Bit of an odd one, this, in that it seems like a pretty ordinary map for the time. Oxymoron or no, I do reckon that the most defining characteristic of "Temple of Fear" is that it almost seems like something out of a different mapset, or at very least a misplaced expat from HR's E1. Many players have commented on how easy this last palmful of maps has been, and that's certainly in evidence here, almost to the point of distraction--breather maps are one thing, but it's quite another to run into something as casual as an early-game map in slot 29 in a megaWAD touted for its difficulty, especially considering that the trope of late E3 maps being the toughest a given set could offer was still very much in effect back then (seems like it's something that's only just beginning to become a little less set in stone quite recently, TBH).

In this case it's not that the map plays like an anaemic version of HR's characteristic gameplay style ala map 28 before it, but rather that said gameplay style has been more or less hucked out the window in favor of something a lot more, shall we say, 'traditional.' You'll still see the occasional clot of hell nobles crowded into a chokepoint here and there, and rather casually-placed arch-viles are very much a thing, but for the most part this plays more like a standard base-crawler with a lot of incidental combat and an ambling pace, with a subtle sort of kitsch to the overall arrangement of its encounters--hell, it begins with the 'ol "collect chainsaw, chop down horde of pinky demons" bit. And it ends with a largely pressure-free fight against TWO (gasp!) cyberdemons....on a big pentagram! Is it Niv's loveletter to PWADs of his early days in the scene? Hard to say, but the end result is something where combat and exploration interact in a different way than in the majority of the mapset, playing out as more of a standard key-hunting/dungeon-sounding outing than as the sort of turf war between Doomguy and the hellspawn that one might've reasonably come to expect by this point, complete with mum's-the-word backtrack-heavy progression and all (the red key bit always strikes me as particularly strange when I stop to think about it, almost like he'd planned something else but then didn't follow through with it). The fairly casual pace means you can again play in a more cavalier fashion than in many of the other maps, moving along without necessarily being very thorough about clearing every chamber you move through; the smaller scale of the fights means you tend to get a bit more of a standard-issue heterogeneous 'monster salad' impression in comparison to Haggay's characteristic monotyped monster placement (and the optional isolated dark room setpiece seems to even be actively built around the concept of concentrated infighting chaos), although as aforesaid you will occasionally hit a random one-species block you'll have to grind through for no particularly good reason.

The very different air of the level is quite evident on the automap, too. Writ large, Hell Revealed is largely a mapset comprised of arenas (or the more open, quasi-sandboxy settings I seem to have begun referring to as 'warzones') and the corridors connecting them, but this is not really the case here. To our (somewhat pampered) modern sensibilities, I reckon the layout here could be described as somewhat "stringy" in that different objectives tend to be found at the terminal points of different branches, but the whole being comprised of a number of junction-points (not all of which are 'open' at the outset) with different paths leading off of them represents a noticeably more complex form by set standards, as does the presence of a bit more truly optional content (e.g. the dark room mentioned above). While I've referred to 'maze-y' filler segments in a number of Donner's earlier maps, ironically the mapset's only bona fide maze is found here, that being the pitch-black hidden labyrinth concealing the first secret, which is also the most in-depth hidden area in the mapset by far. In more purely aesthetic terms, here we also see Niv playing a lot more with non-box shapes, cosmetic height variation, and extraneous construction in general (esp. redundant staircases), in the contrast to the all-business nature of the vast majority of the set's maps. What's strange to me is that while it would seem intuitive to conclude that these features suggest this is Niv's latest/most developed map, this is apparently not the case, with the much more simplistic map 27 being the most recent.

It is a mostly inoffensive map, but not one that makes a very visceral impact. Its contrasts with the majority of the set's other maps are interesting, but ultimately it's not what this mapset has ever been about, and certainly not one I'd play the set for. Quite a strange choice for slot 29, the more I think about it.

Map 30 -- Hell Revealed - 68% Kills / No actual secrets
And here's the capper, a capsaicin-strength but otherwise very traditional/straightforward IoS setup, with nothing really notable in its presentation or concept. The rub here is that the monsters initially inhabiting the final yard make it something of a to-do to quickly ride the pogo-post and pump rockets into the big bad's brain, which can be more than a slight problem given that the Icon spawns new monsters at a greatly accelerated rate (something like 4-5 at a time), meaning that you really have to win as quickly as possible before the situation becomes unmanageable. I like to immediately kill the two viles perched in the small gazebos but otherwise largely ignore the preplaced monsters and try to kill the boss as quickly as possible (often the cyberdemon will obligingly take out some of the perched revenants for you); since my fetish for hanging around and having a bit of an endurance/survival round is simply untenable here, and the general tableau doesn't offer much of interest, I see no reason to draw the matter out.

I like an interesting IoS setup. This isn't one of them.



*************

While it is certainly timeworn and weatherbeaten, Hell Revealed remains legendary. As with all legends, there are a lot of relatively unsightly realities poking around the edges that somewhat spoil the pristine splendor of the fairytale--it really is quite obvious that a big chunk of the WAD's 32-map span is a clumsy 'my first levels' collection when you get right down to it, for example--but I think the WAD still does a pretty good job of getting its point across, establishing a certain mood all its own as well as a unique style of gameplay that is still instantly distinguishable in its handful of modern direct descendants. A lot of players struggled and grew frustrated at various points during the playthrough, which pleases me in a way....it seems the tactical puzzles of HR are still puzzling, not to be swept away so easily by the ever-increasing level of twitch-skill wielded by the average community player as time marches on. To the extent that this is true, then, the WAD has not really lost its place, even if by this point the majority of its influence is felt as the echoes of a certain general attitude (i.e. to constantly up the ante on what a 'reasonable' combat setup is) rather than in terms of specific execution.

My top 5 maps, in no particular order:
Map 22 -- Resistance is Futile
Map 24 -- Post Mortem
Map 25 -- Dead Progressive
Map 26 -- Afterlife
Map 16 -- The Path

(sorry Haggay)

[T-Rex]

Demon of the Well said:

(sorry Haggay)

Heh, not even I could find a Haggay map that really stood out. I guess that's why I likened Yonatan and Haggay to John Romero and Sandy Petersen respectfully, cause in Doom, there isn't a favourite map of mine that is by Petersen, whereas most of my favourites are by Romero. There's some Petersen maps that I do like, but they're all revamps of Tom Hall's contributions.