baja blast rd.

To clear something up, I started that thread because I felt I might end up wanting a place to dump off occasional reviews that I couldn't put on DW Files. (Anyone could have started a similar "all-purpose review" thread if they wanted to.) It wasn't designed as an "official replacement" and the opening line is just to prevent it from stealing reviews that would be better placed elsewhere. I don't think that it's a bad idea, because its existence makes nothing worse. I wasn't using Maribo's idea anyway (in fact I had forgotten about the earlier convo we had about the subject). edit: I added an extra line for clarity to that thread so that hopefully people stop framing it as a "DW Files replacement" (it's not quite that ambitious lol).

Good and bad is very subjective, and it's possible that many reviewers simply were not bothered by what you thought of as bad. After all there's no such thing as "objective criticism."

Bolded especially is unsubstantiated and not an accurate description of anything. Someone who pays close attention wouldn't fixate on a "flood of megawads" because the episode-length release is the dominant form these days; "boring" is very subjective; many/most vanilla mappacks are not interchangeable (I would never mistake El Viaje for Tetanus for Deadliest Demolition) and the past several years have exploded with conceptual variety and projects that have interesting hooks to them and that treat Doom as something to be heavily modded, which you can do even without GZDoom. The oldschool very vanilla-flavored wads are just one of a dozen+ different schools of mapping these days, and even within that ecosystem there's new ideas being tried, like the story-based community project Solar Struggle. Usually when people are inspired by existing work, they pick eclectic influences (I've seen work riffing on Ozonia in development, and that's been out for two years) rather than things that have been done a "hundred times." As a mapper myself, I'm actually kind of overwhelmed by how good people have become at "creative concept" and I've been trying to think of how I can keep up with all the lessons from all of that. Would not be the case if people were only doing the same old things over and over. Your observations about what people are releasing these days read with a lack of resolution and perspective, the way they do when someone has "checked out" of paying attention to anything that's not their particular niche. In fairness, that's common because there's so much to keep track of, but it's still the same old mistake.

Iron Forge by @Xaser and @Not Jabba Iron Forge is a standalone Heretic map made by Xaser and Not Jabba, which naturally means that Not Jabba could not review it for this thread without raising some eyebrows. I have some light parenthetical descriptions for people who have no familiarity with Heretic (without being too bulky for those who know their stuff), so I hope some of you read this too. Xaser handled Iron Forge's layout and map design, which remakes a Dark Souls 2 level, likely explaining the high emphasis on inhospitable architecture. Just about every major combat zone -- and a couple of "no combat" zones too -- features some type of platforming or environmental hazard, or uses the lava to greatly curtail your movement and make the enemies that much more dangerous. This emphasis on narrower combat spaces -- picture a long ledge that is about as wide as a door, with a lava drop-off on one or both sides -- suits Heretic's monster design very well. Melee enemies and monsters with straight-line projectile attacks, which is a lot of Heretic's bestiary, become a lot more dangerous when the player can't run easy loops around everything. Not Jabba handled the thing placement, and his approach reflects a good understanding of how to design to Heretic's strengths. This shows not only in the enemy placement, which regularly gets a lot of danger out of a modest enemy count, but also in the use of Heretic's items. There is a vicious early sandwich fight with a gang of saberclaws (fast, but not particularly sturdy melee enemies) on one side and weredragons (tanky, hard-hitting projectile enemies) on the other, which I don't mind spoiling because you won't see it coming anyway. :P You can get overwhelmed very quickly, but this fight is pretty much designed for you to quickly spam a bunch of time bombs (an inventory item that is like a grenade dropped in place) to fend off one side of the sandwich, while taking on the other with your weapon. The one very circleable arena in the entire map -- at least with respect to its core shape -- uses maulotaurs (Heretic's tanky cyberdemon analog, which has three attacks). One of their attacks is a powerful dashing charge that is easy enough to avoid but has this cool emergent effect of constantly moving the maulotaurs to the very edge of the arena, getting in the way of your circle-strafe lanes each time. (Okay there is one other very circleable arena but that is used for an amusing diversion where iron liches -- huge scary mask enemies of roughly miniboss strength that have multiple attacks -- use their tornado attack to pester you but inevitably send hapless minions hurtling into the air. Part of Doom's appeal is its more consistent undercurrent of humor -- but Heretic can be equally as funny.) Nearly every major setup really feels like it was the main idea behind its area all along, and *uses* the space rather than simply taking place in it. In one setup midway through Iron Forge, you're platforming on a knife-thin corkscrewing strip of iron in the middle of a lava pathway, and two disciples (flying robe-wearing wizards with a spreadshot attack) are released at you, which is terrifying. It's a very good setup to show off how the hellstaff (Heretic's plasma rifle lol) now has homing projectiles as per the Wayfarer mod's challenges, which allow you to take out the drifting disciples that otherwise might be a big pain to finish off. This platforming stretch has only a handful of enemies, and it's clear throughout how Not Jabba is very conscious of letting some areas breathe and serve more of an ambient role. Breaking up the combat with silence is a good, natural choice because Xaser's striking visual setpieces call for moments where you can slow down and appreciate the design, instead of constantly being preoccupied with survival. The overall look of Iron Forge is very appealing and plays off of Heretic's fantastic palette. My favorite color in Iron Forge is the cherry red, which is in the sky, more surprisingly in the lava falls, and less surprisingly in the opulent velour or marble or whatever material happens to be inset in temple facades. I also love the stained glass windows that glow a luminous blue, and the way this blue is the same color as the dragon claw orbs (an ammo pickup). The way I've described Xaser's design in the past is that he is a conceptually cohesive author -- yet he uses very different methods from the more dominant Scythe 2 style, which involves building the whole map around a limited palette of materials and detailing ideas. The way this plays out in Iron Forge is that most new areas introduce a new visual motif or type of material to the mix, while retaining a selection of some already established ones -- so it's naturally, it's not that "'90s beginner map" feeling of walking into a completely different map with every doorway you pass through. It's like the map's identity is created through the design of individual visual-concept setpieces, and is rooted in the emergence of how such areas play off of each other, rather than following a predetermined plan. The detail level in any given space tends to match the 'type' of the environment and its underlying character. Chapels and temples are inset with geometrically precise recurrences of stained glass windows, or are wrapped in interlacing sheets of baroque architecture, or are embroidered with other ornaments (which are usually done through texture choices rather than microdetail). Whereas the ruins, the claustrophobic iron torture gauntlets, and the precarious lava-worn places tend to be pretty bare, undecorated walls doing all the talking, which is something Xaser isn't shy about doing, and runs counter to the idea that you might want your maps to be decorated at the same consistent visual complexity everywhere. With the striking use of red and orange-red throughout, it's delighting that the map ends on this large fire construct that juts out of the exit of the Forge. Just about everything in the level is strongly suggested to be "human-made" rather than surreal, so this is the feather on the cap of a handful of constructs that establish the in-universe designer of this place as kind of a nutjob. In late 2018, when this map was released, the modern resurgence of Heretic interest was about to take off, but since then we also have The Wayfarer, Faithless Trilogy, UnBeliever, Quest for the Crystal Skulls, Sold Soul, Blasphemous Experiments, Quoth the Raven, and more, which means a lot of potential starting points if you want to get into the game. Try one of those or I'm going to morph you into a chicken.

map02 max in 1:01 no202-101.zip

Maribo you might also want to check out this, which seems really up your alley.

Reminds me: Community reviews would ideally have a "no rating" option for those of us who prefer not to use numbers at all. Average scores (of everyone's votes) are usually noise that doesn't convey much. Individual review scores aren't much more informative and are simply worse versions of "tl;dr: blahblahblah" and losing them wouldn't do much even for people who want to give scores because you could write them out in text.

With ordered, ranked lists -- the kind like "top 100 games of all time," "top 50 players of season in a particular sport," or whatever -- a common mistake readers make is interpreting the feature's underlying assessment as conforming to a linear slope. A linear slope would mean that if #1 is said to be the best, and #100 is the last one that made the cut (which is still very good), then #50 is suggested as the midpoint (the way 9.5/10 is the midpoint of 9/10 and 10/10). This seems to be the most common assumption based on how discussions about those play out. It's a bad assumption. If you have no other information, you should expect there to be a curve instead, which starts with a steeper slope near the very top (#1) and then flattens out as you move down. The shape might look like green here rather than red (I'm not good at drawing with a mouse lol). There's no special insight you need for that. All that does is treat as a basic axiom that the better and better the quality you're considering (or "how much I loved this," or whatever feeling or measure -- it doesn't have to be quantifiable), the rarer it is for something to be at that level. And that's generally true for the types of things that it might make sense to put on a Top list. So the highest spots are likely to be more spread out since they are in more rarified air, and then the rest are closer and closer to each other. (The linear slope implies that everything is equally common, which usually is very unrealistic.) The most common thing people get wrong when they don't realize this is treating "spots" as a stable measure of some kind, like "I can't believe #71 is 10 spots above #81!" (when those spots might be extremely close to a "tie" in how good they must be). People sometimes realize this intuitively, but don't immediately connect it to other implications. (As an example, the Cacowards are not ordered, but some people code Golds and Silvers as two comparably sized tiers, which is wrong because 12-15 Silvers unavoidably means a much smaller range of "combined panel opinion" than 12 Golds.)

After 2010 and it's not particularly close. The quantity and stylistic diversity of the last decade makes this very easy for me even without increased mapping ability being factored in. Recent years even beat the older years out when it comes to the number of good oldschool mapsets. (There's a chart I've seen passed around, but # of wads uploaded to idgames is not a good measure of quantity of maps.) The "after" cutoff date I'd take is probably quite a bit after 2010, even if I have to leave some more all-time favorites behind. That's because "Do more of my all-time favorites come before Year or after Year?" isn't the real question. It's more like "Would I expect to find more wads on that level before Year or after Year?" which takes into account what we haven't played. As another hypothetical, I'd also take the single year 2023 over all of 1994-2007.

It's not overprecision that would be the problem. The way I'd put it is the fundamental assumption that averaging is the function that relates two or more subscores is already unsupported and usually wrong. It's something people roll with on autopilot without really thinking about it much, but there's nothing about "map01 = 6/10, map02 = 10/10," as an example, that directly leads to "overall = 8/10."

0 lol backlogs and to-play lists encourage superficial skim-like playthroughs, going through the motions just to tick off a checklist, and quantity over quality, and I'm pretty suspicious of them

MAP13 - “Colossicus” by Dragonfly One cool thing about this wad is how the themes aren't just about assets or even settings, but they have other motifs baked into them. The brutalist architecture in many of these Petrified maps is really tall and grandiose, which you can see in "Titan" but also here. "Colossicus" is full of setpiece encounters, but it ends up flowing very fluidly anyway because almost nothing prevents you from simply leaving the setups. Most are softly enforced at best, by dangerous enemies near the way out. This lets you pretty much play the map like you want to. Don't want to mop up the surviving HKs in the first encounter with shotgun and chaingun? Just go outside and get the SSG. The chaingunner, revenant, and astral manc setup on the east side would be one of the most demanding encounters in the map if you had to stay put, but you can simply drop down into the water, at the expense of likely triggering the next fight while revenants from that setup can potshot you. Dropping off from either of the ledge-based setups is punishment enough since you have to navigate back up, so there's no point in enforcing a lock-in there. This philosophy is my favorite when it comes to easy (relative to the standard of the mapset) set pieces. If a fight isn't really all that hard relative to the wad, there's no sense in forcing the player to stay; you'll do better letting the player seek out their own fun/danger, such as by multi-tasking. Also I enjoy how revenants left alive will snipe at you through windows. The view into map14 is fantastic, one of my favorite previews up to this point. In this video I punch an astral manc, and despite the teal spread attack offering a good opportunity for that, astral mancs are simply not worth it to punch if you care more about survival, because the yellow spam will one-shot you easily and the margin for error there is so narrow. So I don't think using the teal attack is a "cheese." Punching these is still super dangerous. At the end of this video the last two [spoilers] jump-scared me because I thought I dealt with all of them already. :P

If you're doing a review format that involves both an overall rating and individual subscore ratings, the best way to do it is to come up with the overall rating and the subscore ratings separately by yourself*. For example: attribute A = 10/10, attribute B = 4/10, overall: 8.5/10 What you don't want to do come up with subscores and then average them out into the overall rating. While that might seem like a completely natural thing to do, it's fake math that will spit out nonsensical output and buries a lot of unchecked assumptions. A lot of review sites have done that, and I have seen the "average subscores out" approach in Doom reviews too. *(The Dean of Doom series is a good example of doing this well, because the overall megawad grades are not an average of the individual map grades, which would have been pretty silly.)

A lot is interconnected here. You already got suggestions about thing placements, so I'll ask about your layout design. There's a certain type of primitive layout made mostly of flat rooms and corridors, which simply dumps roaming enemies in the layout -- and that style of mapping is basically tailor made for the player to be able to coast on SSG. Not only that, but a lot of the typical ways of encouraging other weapons don't easily work in that layout. Want to set up some mid-range combat that encourages SG/CG/RL/PR? Well in that type of layout there aren't many reasonable spots to place mid-range ledge monsters or turrets or monsters kept organically further away by height variation; everything will allow the player to get closer. Want a brief moment of urgency the player has to quickly react to? They just flee to a chokepoint and comfortably SSG camp, instead of having to lob a rocket or two or quickly take out the major threat with plasma or painstun something with the shotgun/chaingun. Want to design a dead drop the player gets spooked by and so pulls out the chaingun or plasma rifle as a ready weapon for their pain-stunning capabilities? Well the layout is flat so you have no dead drops or lift rides up to the unknown; there's no dynamic architecture so a lowering floor will never drop the player into a fight. Even rocket spam won't work as well because the player can still flee to the nearest door and SSG camps it anyway. So it's an indirect answer but "better layout design" already helps quite a lot. (The causality doesn't work the other way. SSG-centric gameplay does not imply that a map's layout is primitive. But that sort of primitive layout, unless you spam so many enemies the player has no choice but to use bigger weapons, usually allows this type of SSG coasting.)

Nova II was the one exception. Those Nova III authors were not experienced at the time they started working for it, which is the only fair way to look at that.

With MBF21, stronger chainsaws can become a more commonly done thing, since you can avoid the older downsides of those. Hovercab Station has one and it feels very fun to use.

There are a couple other authors who've each been steadily active since pre-2020 who I don't think most people would consider even "intermediate" (they also have Cacowards features). I'll let them point themselves out but they make really good maps lol. (I still thought of NiGHTS as a newcomer, despite being pretty active in 2023, but if you want to draw the ~5 maps maximum there are a handful of other authors that are above that and similarly active as NiGHTS.)

fuck yeah I was hoping for the "I practice chainsawing barons" poll option I only ever want to chainsaw monsters that are inappropriate to chainsaw though...pinkies I'll skip

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

Just as a heads up, you also have two claims for map17 (and added the second one to the list).

"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.

Well that's not a good way to do it lol.

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.

Antares made the Struglge map30 boss which automatically means he should contribute to every wad.