Hordes full of dumb or even fairly smart monsters have their place, and are fun to wipe out as long as the player can get the resources to do so. 

I love hords to :)

always fun if there are good weapons like sng or Gl 

I don't think there is anything wrong with horde style combat (aka doom) but my complaint is about skill levels. They are an awesome way to tailor the map experience and should not be overlooked. It maybe a pain to setup multiple encounters for the same location but ultimately it will be more rewarding for the player to experience the map in different ways. Save the crazy horde style for higher skill levels like hard/nightmare! :P 

> Hordes full of dumb or even fairly smart monsters have their place, and are fun to wipe out as long as the player can get the resources to do so.

Yes. That I can agree with. I'm the guy who made armytest.bsp, an RMQ testmap where you slaughter about 100 knights and a couple dragons with quad SNG.

Hordes have their place. ^^ 

Different maps, different styles.

I understand where you are coming from, but in some ways it's the equivalent of saying "I don't like water because it's too wet." ARWOP is a ridiculously over the top horde map. That's just what it is, and it's not trying to be anything else. Not all quake maps are (or should be) perfect paragons of balance, scalable, accessible gameplay.

Play Travail next, I remember some good non-horde gameplay in there. 

different skills, different people.

I think you have missed my point, I do like horde style maps I just don't find dying all the time that much fun which is why I like to choose different skill levels. This map does not atttempt to resolve this problem and I would say a fair amount of modern maps have missed that point as well. Sure if the Q1 community has gone the way of hardcore gaming with excessive skill levels then fine.

'I don't like muddy water I prefer something clear and drinkable'

Not all parts of a lake are the same, some are murky while others are clear. When I first start a map, I prefer to try out the waters edge, not drown in the middle of the lake. 

most new maps on medium are fine to me.

I guess a simple solution for catering to seasoned players and those not so used to playing quake sp over the years is to leave normal and hard as they currently are (ie hard and extra hard practically) and make sure easy really is easy (rather than normal practically).

There are better solutions, and sock has outlined quite a few (different routes and progression for different skill levels as well as changes in ammo/health/monsters), but I imagine they would take a fair bit more time to implement for what is really not much of a bigger audience outside the regular quake players. 

I always play map on hard, and I rarely died but some are to much for me... tronyn map use to kill me a lot :) 

In regard to the Hell mode save bug- I switched to Fitzquake (I was using aguirRe's), and it works fine in loading the mode from a save file.

About the difficulty... I'm wondering how many is too many deaths to be fun. I'm having a "hell" of a time even getting to the gold key on the first level, but it'll only be sweeter by the time I finish it. I'm used to running levels without saving partway, so dying is even worse than normal. But it makes you learn how to deal with enemies. 

i think we mostly agree actually. diversity is good.

also, thanks for taking the time to play q1sp maps, i enjoy your perspectives. 

I'm also interested in Sock's direction now - never look at Q1 again or want to make maps for.

Not sure I can explain how I feel about Quake. It's like all day I'm drinking coffee, and then I get home and I can drink a stomach settler. 

 

My contract says level designer on it. 

Fuck off ijed and get a real hobby. 

ijed, drinking kills. 

yes, it does. 

kills the bugs inside of you! 

awesome posts ijed I totally see what you're saying. 

Ow my head. 

 

Tronyn wrote about the making of this: http://www.quaddicted.com/other-quake-news/a-history-of-a-roman-wilderness-of-pain-1999-2009-by-tronyn/ 

Just played this again. What a blast - great fun. I totally see where the Doom references come from. Many weapons, plenty of items, hordes, lots of gibs. Didn't bother with the boss fight (not least because I didn't set a higher heapsize so the game slowed down to a crawl once the summoner and his gang showed up). I regret not having played on Hard this time AND record a demo. I think it totally would have shown how much I enjoyed bouncing through the maps producing gore. Playing a fast DnB mix in the background added to this.

Thanks again for this excellent release, Tronyn and PM. I consider it one of the milestones of Q1SP - in combination with NSOE, which I'm going to play next. 

did tronyn ever say how long it took to vis? the last map in particular must have been brutal. 

Checked out the roman scraps. It's very nice to see how this developed from all the individual map bits to the final ones, how areas changed appearance and were pierced together. Amazing construction even back then. Some of the unused or unmodified scraps are still salvagable.
Bigrome is impressive, almost marcheresque. Kind of makes me want to mikewoodham it.

Also, at the risk of repeating myself, I love the ARWOP style, the texture theme and general vibe. Quake in all its (bloody) purity. 

So I'v played the other maps. Wasn't extremely hard except for the god damn tarbabies and the ENDING.
The amount of hp\armors is pretty much excessive so the difficulty is fine for hard skill, didn't die much even though I was playing badly meleeing 50 scrags and doing other silly things.
The tarbaby is just a bad monster design blowing up 100 damage in your face, and it was pure sadism to paint them red making harder to see and put in the red water where its harder to avoid them. Or on a ledge above\behind a player. Or 5 in small locked room. Yeah!
The rest I didn't find unfair. Maybe the start is too harsh. Map2 was easier.
Now the ending was unbeatable cause I arrived with no cells ... GG (I tried with cheats and it took max cells and max spikes and then some more to take the cyberdemon down).
Or is there a gimmick or an unmarked secret quad\penta?

The construction I'm not a fan of this style and some parts were really hard to move around (you'll see in demo) due to stairs\ramps\floor details\narrow paths.
But cool planning and layout.

All demos http://www.quaketastic.com/upload/files/demos/rome3.7z
Hard /1st playthrough. First demo pauses closer to the end and wont play after that, but you can timedemo watch it if you want to see it all.

Playback works only in DP http://offload2.icculus.org:9090/twilight/darkplaces/files/darkplacesengine20100528beta1.zip or earlier (later versions have bugged lightmaps making the maps look fugly)