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Welcome to Nova IV! I have been given permission from Scotty to be the head of this new project. If you are a new or intermediate mapper (or midi maker) looking to get your name out there, and improve your skills, then this project is for you. The project is MBF21 compatible, and uses OTEX for textures (no stock textures allowed). Up to two maps per mapper. While the goal is to get 32 maps, if the project ends up with less than that, than that is okay. The idea is quality rather than quantity. The episodes (and their skies) are: Episode 1 (maps 1-8): Heaven under Construction (uses OSKY45) Celestial areas under construction. Like the building of the Tower of Babylon. Episode 2 (maps 9-15): Electric Swamp (uses OSKY13) Swamp and tech-base aesthetics Episode 3 (maps 16-22): Haunted (uses OSKY29) Spooky settings Episode 4 (maps 23-30): Frozen Hell (uses OSKY43) Hell frozen over Episode 5 (maps 31-32): Party! (uses OSKY46) Let’s celebrate :) Some of the basic rules: NO Icon of Sin stuff. Map orders may change after time to ensure more gradual difficulty curve, though there will still be a breather map or two in the later episodes. Difficulty settings will be implemented. No taking map 30, as is that is going to be Megiddo IV, where I and a few other mappers will collaborate. Also no using the map 07 specials, just to keep things easier. Also, absolutely NO copyrighted music, even in MIDI form! I don’t want videos and streams of the project getting taken down. Maps must end up of a certain quality to make the final cut. HOWEVER, this should not dissuade you from sending in your maps, even if you are a beginner! My team and I are here to guide you in your progress. Thanks to Huntingr2d2, we have a Dehacked monster for the secret levels. For those who want to join the Discord, DM me. Overall, let’s have a fun and wholesome time making maps! The deadline for submitting is Jan 1, 2025. After that, we will take what we have and compile it. Map slots: Episode 1 1. DoctorNuriel 2. DeafPixel 3. Mancubian_candidate 4. Andrea Rovenski 5. DankMetal 6. OniriA 7. HiMyNameisChair 8. SpaceCat_2001 Episode 2 9. Amiga Angel 10. Beubeu 11. Somniac 12. EagerBeaver 13. Stephyesterday 14. Pancrasio 15. EPICALLL Episode 5 31. Hebonky 32. Brendondle Episode 3 16. Jmac 17. Stochastic 18. MtPain27 19. MiniMedals 20. Alephany 21. Bochnik Chleba 22. Demonic Meatball Episode 4 23. HiRon 24. Russin 25. JackDBS 26. Monsieur E 27. Vanilla+Unicorn 28. DoomGappy 29. Novaseer 30. Megiddo IV (Obake, Tartlman, Nights108, MFG38, and DJVCardMaster)

-DON'T run any mods alongside Astral. It replaces everything, any type of mod will break it -Comp level default -Requires GZDoom 3.6.x or newer -Requires Dynamic lights, models and 3D floors to be on -Requires Hardware rendering -Requires jumping and mouselook to be on Astral Abstraction is an atmospheric 5 episode total conversion that aims to advance the formula of Doom's gameplay, bringing it more in line with the modern entries in the series. The vertical aspect of gameplay is expanded and more fleshed out, and the pace of gameplay is faster. October 8th, 2050. An unforseen threat has infiltrated Earth. The official channels of defence are letting us down and you decide to take matters into your own hands. Find the source. Astral Abstraction adds some new mechanics https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YKS104fnkwKhPdKRzk722tX4ACvVtkPP/view?usp=sharing

Thrilled to see this project materialize! The Nova series has produced three of the most interesting grab-bag style megawads I’ve played, and I have been secretly hoping to join a potential Nova IV for some time now. If we’re picking maps slots, I’d like MAP 17, but I’d be happy to take any slot in the Haunted episode. Can’t wait to see what everybody comes up with :)

I was watching Dean of Doom's video a few days ago and thought "if there is Nova 4 I should probably try my hand at it". Now I see this thread and go "ah, so there was Nova 4 already", then realize the thread is 2 hours old. UMAPINFO and infinite slots petition starts here!

Finally reaching the finishing line, last of 30 maps done bar tweaking/ammo checking/texture aligning etc. This one's called Against The Tide. Not sure if bothering with midi's yet ( I don't compose music) but we'll see. Thanks for your interest ;-)

Mancubus mixed with Tormentor from Wolfenstein RPG don't worry, he doesn't bite

Harpoon gun concept in action Spriteset will be done in future

Very WIP map for DMP2024

learning to use stone textures. hope it looks ok.

E1M5 UV-Max 2:06.34 E1M5m-206.zip

"map08" by Bri (keeping that to poke fun at myself) Won't play every map for this but felt like jumping in a few times... MAP08 - "Oblation" by Bri Cozy map. Someone described this theme as having a "tropical" feel, and yeah, it's very bright and sunny -- but the tone also differs quite a bit from the bright, cheery beaches of wads like Ray Mohawk 2, which is what this set of natural landscape colors and the overall brightness reminds me of. "Oblation" is bright, but I wouldn't call it cheery; it's more decadent and ostentatious. Borderline garish, even, thanks to the sheer number of highlight colors. (Not in an ugly way.) It goes to show how much new custom textures can create fresh twists on familiar themes, and it wasn't until I ran into this cluster of Eviternity 2 that I realized how much the familiar "ancient America" themes could benefit from a shake up like this. After a treacherous map06, and a consistently action-packed map07, "Oblation" is more laid-back in its pacing. It has some dangerous moments, but it lets the calmer phases breathe and doesn't pull too many tricks. From what I've played (up to map25), Eviternity 2 is pretty good at avoiding stretches where consecutive maps all play and feel like each other. Much of Bri's recent work is more chaotic and heavy on "fodder slaughter," and this is not. I usually try to acknowledge whenever people's work doesn't follow their most common approach, because I think there's a natural tendency in criticism to want to lump creators into specific, narrow niches. That makes it easier to make sense of the hundreds of authors out there, but it does end up missing a lot of people's flexibility and the diversity of most authors' interests. The major combat zones in "Oblation" reward pressing forward and unleashing a bit more of a mess before you've finished killing everything that is currently alive in the area -- which tends to get a lot of infighting going and is fun to do. This ends up becoming a gameplay theme in the set as a whole, at least outside of the hardest maps.

re: "This post has lots of likes, it can't possibly be an unpopular opinion" and similar statements This thread serves little more purpose than to act as a containment thread for low effort Hot Take(tm) discourse, so it's not surprising that the (increasingly rare) well-thought out posts get a mountain of likes (even if they're not actually "unpopular") in comparison to the 1000th expression of "I actually like E3" or "E1 is boring" or "Slaughter is all looks and no gameplay" or "Platforming in Doom is terrible" or "Sandy is actually a good mapper" or "I don't like modern Doom". Most of those regularly expressed "unpopular" opinions aren't unpopular either, as would be evident from a few minutes of research, but it's way more important to pump that post count and insist that Doom That I Don't Like Isn't Actually Doom, or whatever. Anyway, something halfway on-topic: it would be cool to see more mapsets created with the specific intention of being played with gameplay mods. This is really only a thing with Supercharge and there's also a handful of loose Brutal Doom / Project Brutality stuff floating around, but I don't think I've seen people make stuff for like... High Noon Drifter, or specific Final Doomer classes. Maybe these exist and I'm just unaware, though.

All the best to you mappers who absolutely devoured those slots! Bring the heat! I’m cheering for y’all!

Note to self: don't go to sleep...

TIL Doom II has only 31 maps because Map 10 has over 250 enemies.

MAP10 - Incinerate - Dragonfly (96%K/100%I/66%S): This was somewhat of a boss fight, short map, where you will have to get your guns and hit some switches before you can face the big menace: A cyberdemon guarding a red skull key. But he is not alone, he has new friends to the party. The new enemy we are presented to, is a grey mancubus that has three different attacks, and holy fuck the rate of fire of this beast, one attack fires a fuck-ton of bullets, spraying and praying for your death, the other one throws a lot of green bullets, the purple one, throws similar fireballs to the green ones, but these ones bounce off of walls. He telegraphs you by changing its color before shooting each gun, and better not find them in packs. The first one appears from a portal, and you can easily hide from him behind walls. But then, when the arena opens for you to mow down every single enemy, 3 of them will appear from higher ground, and will destroy you. This added to the fact you will need to remove fodder in your way, and even dodge bullets from flying enemies, or rockets from the cyberdemon at the centre of the stage. Hard fight, this takes the award of hardest fight from the one at the end of MAP08, for sure, but I'm afraid it will be quickly dethroned from its place. It is simple, but it's good to have a short map after two long ones (one of them specially long). Order of preference:

MAP10: Incinerate by Dragonfly Eviternity 1 had a couple of maps like this, usually closing a chapter, where almost all the action took place in a single arena with several waves of monsters to defeat. Incinerate follows their footsteps, with the map being confined to a cave with a curious structure in the centre. The map starts with you clearing the perimeter and the introduction of a new enemy: astral mancubus. He has three different attacks to choose from: a volley of small, golden projectiles, a burst of teal fireballs and pink homing missiles. I can already tell he's going to be an interesting foe to encounter. What follows is unlocking the central arena and the three waves of combat: the initial mid-tiers are followed by cacodemons (regular and astral) flying out of the central pillar, while a lot of imps and shotgunners come in from the sides. Also, a large part of the floor is now lava. Survive this long enough and a cyberdemon appears in the middle, along with three astral mancubi. I expected a lot of infighting with such set-up, but I couldn't pull it off and had to kill the big guys myself. The very final wave just drops a ton of zombies all around, which sounds fun, but it's easy to accumulate chip damage here. I think this is the first map in Eviternity 2 that I didn't enjoy, but that's more because of an outstanding quality of preceding levels.

MAP10: Incinerate. Played on DSDA v0.27.4, UV, PS. 277/277 K, 3/3 S, 5/5 I. Comp. time 20:33 Good episode closer, especially after the behemoth that was MAP32 - this was a sort of short and sweet map I needed, an underground lair of cyber and a new foe, some sort of buffed up mancubus, which I think were present in MAP32, at least I saw some corpses there that looked like these guys' remains. Coming off from Charge, this feels noticeably easier. The hardest part (and the highlight of the map) is when you lower the center area connecting two sides of the milieu together, and you are swarmed with minor foes accompanied with astral arachnotrons, revenants, hell nobles. The cyberdemon poses little threat - I think you're supposed to have him infight with the dark mancubi, but the blobs have hard time hitting cybie. Nevertheless, I like it. I wish I had found BFG secret sooner, but then again: would it have made the map too easy?

^ I read more or less this exact piece of advice when it was posted elsewhere a little while ago, and it is a huge part of why I'm still trying to map at all in 2024. Thank you. Some people become incredibly critical and harsh when it comes to individual maps, especially ones that don't stand out much on their own, which in turn makes me overly self-conscious and steers me away from creating. Slowly learning to consider the greater whole, as opposed to seeing each new map in isolation and straining to make it the best it can be, has been seriously beneficial.

The experience of a mapset as a whole is as important as the individual maps in isolation. Think of a novel: it's a story that is divided into chapters, but the chapters are mostly units to aid organization. Mapsets can be thought of in a broadly similar way. (Even grab-bag community projects and anthologies, where every map is only loosely related, are ultimately about the whole experience if you're going to play them start to finish.) People naturally get this when they're playing through wads to play them, because they're experiencing mapsets as an unbroken chain without fixating too much on any individual map. But some critical formats (like the map-a-day pace of the DWMC, or placing a megawad's maps individually on tier lists like I noticed today in one Discord server) sometimes cause people to hyperfocus too much on whether single maps, in isolation, are as good and interesting as they can possibly be, rather than thinking about how they tie into the whole. Sometimes a small nondescript pacer map (rather than even a small pacer map with a unique hook or concept) is exactly what a mapset needs most at a particular point. One way to be better at thinking about the whole in "single map" critical formats is to devote space to both individual-map commentary and "how this meshes and ties into the rest" commentary. And even in a first playthrough, you can comment on how a map relates to what came before.

Someone do Boaty McBoatwad 2 so that fewer people miss the boat lol

Map10 - Incinerate - Dragonfly Incinerate's slow lift descent into spooky catacombs conspires well with the midi treatment to give a sense of our trespass and perhaps hint to the supernatural retribution that is soon to come. Early on my main enemy is darkness as I scavenge for guns and armor around what feels like a broadly triangular layout that we'll continue to peel away at. We gear up slightly and go on a switch hunt. There is a loose revenant or three shambling about in the cobwebbed darkness. More problematic are these astral cacos just floating silently, ready to shout at you out of your peripheral vision and make a line like the world's chonkiest lost soul but being so grey and dark they don't even show like lost souls, anyway, scary, I died. Slowly we trigger the central walls in the triangular layout to drop and we get an assortment of friends to join us, some lava to demarcate and some blue armor and a lot of spheres, elevated, to motivate... The feeling is this central site is about to get reused for more slaughter than just 60 or so enemies we've dispatched so far. Some switches later a red key is ceremoniously dropped in the central lava triskelion and out come pouring the cacodemons, out come the astral friends, and from every sideway nook and cranny there's imps and sergeants overflowing and a center turret cyberdemon ready to snipe! We are introduced to a further eviternal update to the classic roster, a beefier mancubus with two types of attacks, one of which spams us, the other nominally hones on us... great... The thing with this fight is that both times I had to do it it ended up stalling a little in some corner where I tried to keep some vital space for myself and cornerpeeked a lot of dudes slowly walking my way. I don't mind it if that's how that fight can go but I suppose the spheres all up are meant to incentivise stepping out, too, so you end up in this situation where you want to leave the corner, you're waiting for the right moment to heroically leave the corner... but you spent most of the fight in the corner. Which is fine, and of course ymmv with 3d locomotion everyone plays different and may find themselves in completely different situations. And there might have been other obvious plays, but in a dark map I will miss even more than I usually do. Loved the space, the music especially, the music has been so consistently great throughout. Loved the atmosphere. Map also kicked my ass a little bit so by end of episode 2 things have certainly gotten a bit more severe, I expect it'll ease up a little bit now for the start of episode 03 and then escalate to a higher peak of absurdity each episode. footage

Map10 “Incinerate” by Dragonfly And we’ve reached the finale. Those of us coming from Charge get a nice wind down to finish the episode. Coming from Quetzalcoatl the perspective is more in line with episode 1, new enemy included. Incinerate takes place in a dimly lit triangular temple that is soon revealed to be a boss fight of sorts. We start by traveling around the walled central structure, opening the sides of the level and engaging in skirmishes (careful of the astral caco pair). Along the way we encounter the new friend that was foreshadowed at the end of Charge, an astral mancubus. He’s got the usual slow and tough big manc traits but also the intriguing ability to fire three different salvos of projectiles. The green one is hilarious (fires to the sides at like a 45-degree angle, you can stand five feet away and they won’t hit you) but the yellow and purple ones are deadly. A massive bullet barrage that’s game over if you take the brunt of it and these slower moving purple fireballs that seem to have some tracking capability (I *think* they change direction right after being fired to redirect towards your location at the time and are just regular projectiles past that). Anyway, after opening up the middle (and ideally locating a trapped BFG secret) we hit three switches to initiate the main set piece. Astralcacos fly out of the lowering central structure, kicking off a projectile dance against an array of ground fodder, cacos, astral cacos, and a cyber plus three astral mancs that provide elevated turret fire. Not a lightweight fight but also eminently cheeseable. If you head due south you can camp at the back of the entrance tunnel, which is shielded from virtually everything, cyber, ubermancubi, and all the ground forces thanks to a convenient monster block linedef. Even the vaunted astral cacos have a tough time getting to you, and if any do you have a straight line shot at them with the RL or secret BFG. Regardless of how you deal with this, once the cyber is gone you can grab the red key. A bunch of zombiemen spawn in but they’re just stress relief, the level is over. Incinerate does not grab me like Departure did but it doesn’t help that its following Charge. It’s a good “boss arena” episode ender and plays well in the map order regardless of whether you’re coming in from map09 or map32.

MAP09: Quetzalcoatl by Dragonfly Another medium sized adventure map, not too dissimilar to map07. However, where map07 required you to get blue key -> red key, this map is much more non-linear in that you can go to any part of the map at any point. I recommend going to the north-west side first since that area is fairly easygoing and you get SSG, backpack as well as even a plasma gun in a secret. Be on the lookout for secrets, because there are plenty of goodies such as even a BFG. But more importantly, the 2nd secret level exit is on this map. On the difficulty side, I find this map easier than the previous 2 maps, since there are generous amount of soulsphere and other goodies and plus this map doesn't have any big final locked-in fight. But that's alright since both Map32 and Map10 (assuming you didn't find the secret exit) have you covered. While I can't say much about the aesthetics of the map, apart from the fact that it looks gorgeous, I would like to mention the dedication towards the "slopes" (which I think are achieved by tiny 1px or 2px sectors) on the various platforms and the pillars/obelisks at the start of the map MAP32: Charge by Tristan Clark and Guardsoul If you are intimidated by the large monster count shown on stats, don't be. Most of the 2000+ monsters of the map are fodder variety (zombies, imps, pinkies etc.) and you get a chaingun and rocket launcher right at the start of the map. Definitely recommend folks to stick around and play this map. Why? Because this map SLAPS!!! (imho). Firstly, the visuals of this map. The map takes place around some sort of power-station or an industrial facility. You start in the outdoor area with lush beautiful autumn vista. Your goal is to make your way through the canyon area to get to the industrial facility, to power it up to gain access to the central building, and then enter the central building to get to the exit. Along the way, the map introduces kill-floors feature of MBF21 in an interesting way. Electrified water, that can electrocute you and enemies alike instantly upon stepping on it. The first fight that involves it is the blue key fight where it is used to limit your movement for a few seconds while you fight the astral cacos. But the real deal is the final fight in the central building. Right as you enter the building, you will see a dozen+ archviles, few cyberdemons and a bunch of imps, all standing on water and have their backs turned towards you. Fighting them head on is ill-advised. Instead, just press the switch in front of you and watch them get annihilated. This is a tutorial for how to fight the hordes that will start pouring into the arena by the hundreds. The electrical switches lower after pressed and you have to wait around.... 40-ish seconds or something before the switches come back. This turns an otherwise 1000+ monsters grindfest combat into a sub-2 minute fight. Once you are done with the final fight, go to the exit room and you will find corpses of what are some new enemy. Foreshadowing of what is to come pretty soon. The overall adventure isn't short, but never grindy. And you can find plenty of secrets along the way, including the whole red key sidequest. There is a lot to talk about just that sidequest alone, but I would just recommend to read the spoiler in TJG1289's comment if you really don't want to miss it. Definitely worth exploring (and not just because of the perforator).

Some FastDoom news! Doug Johnson has added VESA support for resolutions higher than 320x200 (both direct rendering and backbuffered rendering)

https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/obituary-jennell-jaquays-game-designer-passed-away-at-age-67 Jennell (Born Paul) was a designer at Id for Quake II and Quake III, though that was only one of the many things she worked on over her career. In addition to the Quake games, I most know her work from old RPG games, where her non-linear dungeon layouts still draw praise and serve as inspiration. (For a while people were even using the term "Jacquaying a dungeon" to mean dungeons that are non-linear both in terms of exploration space, and player interactions, though eventually this term was replaced.) I knew she was having health problems lately but I didn't know how bad they had gotten recently. The top link has a further link to a gofundme for funeral and medical costs, run by her wife Rebecca Heineman, another name familiar to Doom fans.

Map I'm making for Doom 2 in city only CP. More screenshots

Gonna also echo what Misty suggested, because if it's gonna be MBF21, maybe utilizing UMAPinfo to add another episode (or two even) could be on the table. Looking at the amount of people who barely missed the boat or signed up as backups, there's certainly room for it.

OCONC

Well, it'd just be criminal if the community project called Nova didn't have Nova on board. MAP29, please.

I see a lot of people here say that his maps would be fairly flat and uninteresting, but I don't believe that. Just look at the levels he made for Rise of the Triad and how experimental they are sometimes. "Rocky Plateau" especially gives me Doom 2 city level vibes, making it one of my favorites. It's a large, interconnected map where you can go anywhere you like from the beginning. It looks extremely basic, but has nice detail here and there in the form of waterfalls. There are distinct buildings and landmarks you can visit, with some buildings being entirely optional. It's very much like Downtown, Suburbs, The Factory and Industrial Zone that way. So I feel that if he had made Doom 2 maps, they'd be very similar to what we ended up receiving, just with nicer-looking buildings. Keeping the open-ended nature of them, but making them look more like real cities. I'd even argue that many of the more "out there" maps like Monster Condo, Tricks and Traps and Barrels of Fun would have existed as well, just not in the same form. Again, look at Rise of the Triad and how much usage they tried to get out of the moving walls and platforms, as well as the bounce pads and traps. I think people are judging Tom's maps based on what he submitted when the team was partially stuck in "Wolfenstein 3D mode". Of course they're flat, they had barely figured out the new tools. A ton of Doom 1 maps are very flat, they never did anything like the Chasm or The Pit back then. But with more time and experience, I think he'd have found his groove and combined excellent level detail (which was already the case in Wolf3D) with excellent gameplay.

no

I've been working on a second part of the original WAD set I released last year. As of the moment, I'm working on map 3. This one this time around will be- a bit shorter. It's more supposed to be a sendoff the original alongside and upcoming remaster of the original wad. I will share a few brief pictures, I'll see y'all whenever I have more updates. 💜

I've been thinking of possibly making one of those 'hub' levels that you see in some duel packs. I've got around 210 DM maps I can currently select from - it might be cool to make themed regions like in something like RAMP 2023 - this would only be for Zandronum if I was to do it. I've got tons of 'forge / furnace' levels, so I would make those accessible from some forge-themed portal map. I don't know the ins and outs of this yet - but I'm sure if I look at some examples I could get something going eventually. :)

You have done a great job for the motherland, comrade.

Looks promising. Good luck to everyone participating!

Boy do I have a gameplay mod for you

DOOM can be so boooring: enter map bangbangbangbang exit nextlevel bangbangbangbang exit nextlevel bangbangbangbang exit nextlevel blah blah blah Where are the chicks???

GZDoom/UV/Contiuous/Saves Write-ups from memory MAP10: Incinerate - Dragonfly After the long trek through MAP32, a nice short arena map is appreciated. This map takes place in a triangular arena which kinda reminds me of opening/ending of Eviternity I's MAP23, just not as purple. You go around the sides of the center arena in order to open it up and initiate the final fight. In order to do that, you've got a little bit of cleaning up to do, which isn't really too bad or anything out of the ordinary. But then you lower a wall and find a living version of those dead things at the end of MAP32. Yup, they're astral mancubi all right! These things are tough, with probably the biggest health pool for a non-boss enemy in the game. They're faster than normal mancs, and they have 3, count 'em, 3 attack patterns they can pick at random. Each one telegraphed by the color of their eyes. The green one is the easiest, just stand still and it won't hit you as their projectiles fire at a 45 degree angle. This can be an issue when other monster are around and you need to move. The yellow attack is basically the most OP shotgun attack ever that will probably one-shot you no matter how high your health and armor is if you get caught in its blast. The purple one is the most interesting. It shoots blasts to the side, that will change direction and home in on you once. No more hiding behind corners when this attack is used! Thankfully it's not continuous homing like a rev missile, but can take time to adapt to this attack pattern. It took me a minute at least. Just spam rockets at it if you have them. Once the center is open, you'll have to deal with the riff raff there. You can grab a BFG by shooting a switch, but I didn't find this during my playthrough. It would make the next part easier. Hitting the elevated switches will cause a giant teleport ambush. Cacos of all sorts spew out from the newly revealed red key platform, while tons of stuff come in on the ground floor. After a minute or so, astral mancs will hit the platforms by the switches, and a cyb will appear on the red key. The astral mancs are in a kinda annoying position, as they'll be on top of the soul spheres, meaning you'll have to use a lot of firepower to kill them to grab the much needed 100% health boost. Or, just get the cyb to hit them. If you get it to fight the astral mancs, they could take it out, especially if they use their yellow attack. Once you grab the red key, closets filled with lowly former humans will open up, which can be dangerous if you're low on health and used all the health in the area (just ask Vytaan). Just a few flyers and an astral manc are behind the red doors, and then we hit the end of episode portal. Overall, a pretty nice arena ender. Cool new enemy introduced, and it's a nice challenge. I do wish there was a little more to the map, but that's just me wanting to explore more of the episode's theme.

Sigil 2 box set

i'll take 32 if possible

I'm gonna come in with a bit of a different take on this. Everything is relative, and when you learn a skill, barring any previous experience with similar skills, you have no concept over what is hard, or what is easy. If your goal is to get better at a thing, you should pick an assortment of wads which are not all easy; you want wads which require differing skill levels to complete (comfortably). And difficulty levels are a thing! We as humans naturally consciously and subconsciously play up/down to our competition and if we only play easy things, easy things will become our norm. Playing stuff that's too easy is a great way to develop bad habits which can make plateaus appear more frequently and more insurmountably as one's learned behaviors come back to spell consistent doom. It's easy to say I haven't learned this yet, how do I do it, but much more difficult to analyze what one has learned to be good and helpful, but which is actually harmful. Additionally, playing stuff that varies in difficulty level and coming across something which is too hard for now is a great way to set up internalized progression checks: where you can come back to something later and see your improvement, not from collecting more upgrades but directly from one's own greater understanding of doing the thing. It also breaks up the monotony to switch things up, keeping the skill grind from feeling so much like work. Theres more that I'm not saying, but on that note and for the sake of brevity, my recommendation for good newbie friendly wads would be: 1: Wads which have had a great influence on others' works, such as the iwads, given that all our creations are off the back of them. 2: Wads which show off fun and interesting things in doom, to keep the imagination flowing and excitement for exploration alive. 3: Wads which test the player's knowledge and generalized skills. Don't shy away from these, but also don't be afraid to skip them and come back as a means of noting progression. Seeing one's own progression can be motivating and exciting. If the newbie's goal is to just casually play, then all of the above but on itytd. There's no shame in using that difficulty and some maps are just more fun with it... and fun is the overall name of the game so all of this has to be compared against what the goals of the new player are and what they find fun, though there should be some goal to get to a point where the average map is playable, so the new player won't be so limited on their choices for what to have fun with.

Template if anyone wants to mess around with it. https://imgur.com/a/Tzbb1hQ

Hard no. You could make a case for the early episodes and probably up to at least Map 19, but Episode 5 and beyond leave no survivors. I beat Scythe's Fire and Ice twice, yet MAP 23 was such insanity it made me quit the WAD. And even then, things only get harder from there. I feel Scythe has a less steep cutoff point for newer players and I could imagine less skilled players making it at least to MAP 28. But they're definitely not gonna "run from it" successfully.

Killing a puny 250 enemies takes you an entire hour?! Anwyay, the vast majority of slaughtermaps won't let you get away with that basic approach. Relative to the whole, the legitimately mindless one are the exceptions.

thanks, guys! and special thanks to @Walter confetti who leads the [howt community project] and made the [howt-source.wad] texture pack that i used to make the map :)

Every one complains about megawads being "everyone just makes magnum opuses" then turn around and complain that one map isn't as grand or as creative as this other well known/seasoned mapper's contribution a few maps back. Not everything needs to reinvent the wheel to be good.

Frog MAP10 UV Max in 7:04 frog10m704.zip Video: https://youtu.be/W_V2f9nBtBY