Your talent will only be recognize after your death, like for all geniuses....

As I already said: fuck purists !!

BTW: The map is passing well on FitzQuake 0.80, with more than 30 fps, if you have a proper PC setting, and nothing else running ;) 

thanks for the forwarning guys. skill 0 here i come! 

 

11:42, 61/72

fun map, wasn't a massive challenge on skill 0 (heh, no shit) but there were enough moderately tough moments to keep me entertained.

call me old fashioned but i think hard should mean hard (yes, that does mean unbalanced & unfair) so that beating it presents a proper achievement. for those wanting balanced yet challenging gameplay, skill 1 is there for a reason! (although by the sounds of it skill 1 was pretty hard in this map too :p )

i didn't really like the appearance of this map. the rooms were nicely crafted with a good eye for detail but i really don't like those textures ported to quake; they look kinda plastic and not gritty enough. also i'm completely at a loss how people are saying it was too dark; i thought it was too bright if anything! must be my gamma settings.. but other maps look fine enough.. *shrugs*

the sounds were excellent. i noticed spectrasonics atmosphere in there too ;) 

..i noticed no subnormal framerates, and i'd hardly call my pc cutting edge (opteron 2.1, 768 ram, geforce 6600). this was using aglquake though 

excellent detail level, very atmospherical (especially with the fog), perfect brush work. too bad I was experiencing some heavy slowdowns during gameplay (probly when D3 ambient was playing?). thanks for allowing not to pickup the flashlight. very nice and enjoyable map. 

For me it was a great map. The architecture and details were excellent. It wasn't too dark for me and the textures are acceptable in my opinion. Sounds and light effects were very nice and the whole map had a great atmosphere. I have decided to play on skill 0 after reading the comments and it was a good choice. The gameplay felt ballanced and fair on this skill. I liked most of the combats. Maybe some day I will try it on tougher skil settings. I have recorded a demo - the start is pretty boring because I couldn't find the way out of the GA area:
http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/dis06_ankh.dz 

This was extremely nice!

Good taste and attention to detail and everything.

Some combats were a little annoying. If quoth2 only had made some monsters (vorelings!) have less health.

Top Class distrans!

I didn't know how to use the flashlight, it was on until it was off... 

Will get later. 

The command to toggle the flashlight is "flashlight". Bind it to a key like normal.

A full list of quoth2 commands can be found in the tutorial(although flashlight is really the only one you need)
http://kell.quaddicted.com/quoth/quoth_tutorial.html#cheats 

Personally, I would have made vorelings with less health - somewhere around a grunt, so two shells would be needed. But it would be unwise to make sweeping changes to stuff from the original version. So vorelings are fixed as they are, being mid level enemies that just look small. 

not possible to release tgas of textures? 

but it's fucking hard...

I thought the Shambler ambush was cool, but actually I was just god moding through it by that point.

I'll probably try playing it properly when my patience is feeling up to the job :) 

stop stealing textures from other games! 

is free :( 

a bit bright though, and combat was very tough,
couldn't complete it on skill 3 yet :(

>I didn't know how to use the flashlight, it was on until it was off...

the same deal 

...thank you one and all, and thanks for sticking at it Ricky...given your understanding of Qouth(2) I thought you'd eventually come round.

A word about skill levels - with the introduction of Quoth2 and the attraction of hardcore DM players back into the single player fold, the Quake level designer now has more choice and possibly even more responsibility with respect to setting skill levels. Gone are the days when one could even say the range now starts at 'normal' and bumps everthing up linear fashion from there. 'Hard' under this regimen makes the likes of sielwolf, UWF and bambuz nod off while playing.

In setting the skills for this level I made a conscious choice to set 'skill 0' at 'original Id easy with the occassional extra challenge'. Precisely because I didn't want to put off peeps wandering into the game for the first time in years to come. 'Skill 1' is 'current hard with a sting' so that good players can enjoy a challenge. 'Skill 2' caters to the growing number of Uber players who appreciate the extra challenge of Quoth2.

A word on gameplay - the Quoth bestiary is here to stay, given this I've done a bit of work exploring the play patterns of each...you know, the sort of thing we all did when Quake came out. There are some really useful habits in this bestiary, for instance if one has a decent armour on one can stand directly in front of an enforcer_pyro and suck up flame as you pump him full of shot, all the while losing little or no health...then voila he gives you back the little health you may have lost anyway. Polyps are unnerving...but stupid, unless you move a fair distance they always port back to the same spot and they give you a big hint before they use their push attack. Once again, standing your ground and auto pumping shells into the thing OR the space where it was while being mindful to wide sidestep when the push attack winds up (all the while holding down the trigger) works a treat. You can actually fix the thing in place if you can keep a steady stream of tin hitting it.

Learn to love the new kids on the block (as we did the original bestiary), or don't bother with Quoth driven levels.

If you insist on trying to run and gun this level then the skill level required to survive it ramps up exponentially and the gameplay has the effect of becoming suprise rape. If you keep your cool, look around, explore, treat the level with respect (i.e. don't get lazy), and use your commonsense then none of the situations are unfair or unsurvivable first time round on skill 1. 

...because I respect him so much.

I did not try to do DooM3 in Quake. Let it go friend!

The cramped areas in this level contain no enemy, unless you are referring to the ledge under the initial teleporter in which case "What kind of idiot tries to take down a polyp while walking a thin edge above slime." Machismo is deadly in this instance, learn to run away and take the fight to an area that profits you.

Your demo exposes why you believe the gameplay consists of ambush rape set ups...you expect everything to just fall to your hand and don't bother to even casually glance around your environment, it's just run run run to the next encounter. As to the shambler trap...during it you exhibit some of the laziest quake play I ever seen, in fact your game has become very lazy in general (I still have a blindingly good demo of you completing pdbq_sp1 from 2001). You don't seem to take the task seriously until you drop well into the red (in which case your brilliant skills kick in again). You make odd choices, like equipping yourself with a low powered weapon (rather than the charged LG) when you are about to open a door behind which you can obviously hear an Edie. Why anyone would be surprised by the appearance of two 'bobs' while standing on a "security bridge" with a MH at the end of it is baffling. Unpredictable traps?

There are no gameplay jokes here, your prejudices and deficiencies do not allow you to put words in my mouth.

I've contemplated mapping for Q4, and may do so when/if time ever permits.

Thanks for the comments, I obviously think they are misguided but they are yours and thus I respect them. I'm glad to have encouraged such an empassioned response from one of the games best. 

since, it's easier to find news threads in the archives when the map name is there.

Now, to actually install and play it.... 

I thought the Shambler ambush was cool, but actually I was just god moding through it by that point.


Best gameplay feedback EVAR ^_~ 

then none of the situations are unfair or unsurvivable first time round on skill 1.


Did you design Skill 2 so that some situations would be unfair or unsurvivable first time around??

That is not necessarily a problem, but it is a totally different style of gameplay (maybe that's what you were going for) and as such it should be mentioned as such. E.g. "Here is a map I have designed specifically so on harder skills players will not be able to complete first go and will have to learn the tactics required" (as I say, itself not a bad idea for something different).

Very hard is not equivalent to unfair / unsurvivable first time 

and died a lot, generally due to lack of health (i suppose that's obvious) but i don't think the enemy/weapon/ammo balance was off. Just the shortage of health. Ambushes didn't seem unfair to me, as i died the same amount in ambushes as i died from random fire from bad guys in non-ambushes.

There were definitely 2-3 cramped combat situations. I disagree that you could always lead enemies to nice open combat areas.

Map was quite bright due to the fog. I tried some darker, thicker fog, and thought that actually looked moodier and had less banding problems. (i think it was density .05, color .1 .1 .13 or something like that)

Nice geometry, good pacing, and i was happy to play a map that has under 100 monsters in it. Those are less common nowadays.

As for the type of gameplay, i don't think it was "doom3" gameplay... felt like standard quake to me, and played like a lot of other custom quake levels. I definitely died more on this one, but the level was small enough that i didn't mind replaying sections a couple times. Aside from using the ripped-off doom3 textures, this really felt like a middle-to-old-school custom quake level. 

and there were some ambushes that felt a bit unfair and resulted in load cycles, but on the other hand, if you don't spawn enemies behind the player, he could always just retreat and spam. It's a quake gameplay problem because the monsters are so stupid it's so easy to just shoot-duck-shoot if you have a secured rear sector.

Vastly simplified, you can either close the door behind the player (arena combat), spawn enemies behind the player (surrounded), make him have to use a weapon that only works at close range (ammo choice). All have their "meh" side.

I didn't mind the crampedness at all. I never got stuck on anything. It was very well done. I noticed a clip in a few obscure places but nothing annoying.

When the new Fitz comes I can play with 85 Hz and dinput and then aiming works better again.


***SPOILER***
I killed the polyp from the vent, he was stupidly floating there in front and slightly above, not hitting me very well at all, I've noticed some flying enemies are often like that...

I still think the voreling should die of one SSG hit. It's tinier than a rabbit ffs. 

.. from the discussion in this thread alone. i don't play a lot of singleplayer quake but this should be worth the download. will report back later :) 

This map is very well done.

I played it with GLQuake. How do you activate the exit elevator ? I had all the keys, but I was unable to activate the final elevator.