I'll just skip to the 2nd map and see if it's any good.

yeah, the follow maps are pretty impressive, 'specially 3,4,5 

the awesomeness and evilness of 2 and 3 is epic. Pulsar's map is the best so far. 

ADD is a terrible affliction. 

loved it, last 2 maps also great but Pulsar's still the pick for me. 

I'm on Arcanum 3 now, and it's pretty much blowing my mind how good it is.
Great to see a Pulsar map too! Well done dude. 

<yawn> 

I guess you're trying to say, in your crippled way, that my complaints are not valid, maybe because I am using the wrong tone or whatever. But does anyone really like that rain? It doesn't even remotely look like rain.

Ok, I just checked, now I see that there's a second door behind the right cellar door which opens after you killed the zombies. There is no message though, and frankly, I simply couldn't see that because it's too dark. I would guess that the darkness is related to me using a Mac, but I can see on the screenies that the map(s) are really this dark. I find that very annoying. I have nothing against dark corners, but I have something against areas that are so dark that you can't even make out where you are supposed to go.

The music sounds horrible on my machine. Maybe it's better if you use another engine or -sndspeed 44100 in QS, but the way it is, it is very much like noise to my ears. And yeah, I really liked the warpspasm soundtrack, so the music style is not the problem. It's the horrible quality.

But yeah, I guess I should look at the other maps. But I have to say that I find your comment really really stupid, and you're quickly moving up on my personal func idiot list, which you weren't even on before the whole RMQ fiasko. It's one thing to criticize my tone, which was indeed inappropriate, but it's another thing to simply invalidate my comments like that.

Still, I give you massive props for warpspasm, which I think is the best Quake release I have played since marcher.

God, what a fucking rant. You must have hit a nerve. 

I think with Drake, impulse 117 turns off music. You're free to find the first map frustrating with all the close combat, and the rain effect is subjective though I thought it added to the mood. As for the darkness, it sucks but it varies a lot from system to system... all I can say is it looked good on the systems I tested on. Thanks for the comments so far. 

and of course giant thanks to Necros for releasing this, as I'm across the country now and won't have internet access after tomorrow for quite a while. And lol, Pulsar, thanks for your patience! 

The darkness appears to be deliberate because all the screenies look very dark, too. But yeah, it's still problematic to get it right across all systems.

The rain... I can't get over that. Seriously, am I the only one who thinks it looks like some throwing nails from the sky? Well, that's just a minor nuisance, anyway. I'll try the other maps later on. 

as one of the guys here who's notorious for saying 'i see nothing but black and a few points of light' when commenting on screenshots, the darkness in the engine didn't seem to cause much problems for me.

i think i nudged quakespasm brightness up 1 or 2 notches and i use the wand for illumination (which is the intent, i believe?).

in some ways, i think it's unfortunate that arcanum1 is the first map. it's decidedly less impressive than the last 4. that said, i'm not a fan of the rain either. it's clearly falling in huge clumps and there's no rain sound. o.0
and yes, i deleted the arcanum1 music. it's not even that it's THAT annoying, but that the clip is so short, so it repeats very obviously.
the other ones were fine (and, apparently, some maps use the warp music AND cd track music, and they blend well together).
concerning that locked door after killing the zombies, when i was testing this again, i didn't pause on that one very long. i played arcanum1 like a few months ago i think, when tronyn released it as the arcanum demo so i already knew where to go. i should have hacked the counter to say "basement door has opened" or something though. that's my bad, as tronyn asked me to make any last minute h4x0r changes i felt were needed and i missed that one. 

Played maps 1 and 2.

Gameplay in map 1 is meh.

Spiders are meh.

Faggot wizard dudes are just nonsense. Boss one even worse.

Footsteps are annoying but get in enough combat and it's easy to forget them.

Music is an instant OFF.

Gremlins are welcome back!

New SG and SSG are good for combat BUT need new models.

Ruby wand is gay as fuck model BUT is excellent in gameplay. Charge up is fine, pushback is cool, lighting effect is very cool. A definite enhancement to gameplay and vibe being able to light up areas.

Rain is fine, best Quake can do.

First map is okay.

Second map is excellent and full of impressiveness.

Gameplay so far is....generally all good in the second map. Lots of variety, lots of action, lots of balance. 

It would be tremendously helpful to have a standard brightness/contrast/gamma test map. With both stock Quake textures and replacement textures (engines might handle them differently), if possible viewable at the same time (eg one half of the screen).
One or more spawnpoints that can be used to test specific things.

That way one could make people adjust their monitors or Quake settings according to Quake. Obviously the map and the guidelines would need to be created on a perfectly calibrated monitor and by someone who knows how to provide a good testing environment. 

You must have hit a nerve.

I agree with some of your comments, but yeah, the tone was pretty rude considering the effort put into the pack by everyone who worked on it.

My default opinion on anything that comes out is 'good' but this is better, at least so far.

The RMQ fiasco continues, don't worry. 

isn't indicative of later maps, in my opinion.

I like it just fine though - I think the rain, along with the trees, the lighting, the gameplay - it's less about lack of quality or polish and more about reaching towards a certain aesthetic, which I like. It's like playing an ambitious map from 1997 or something, with much of that wild creativity still intact - just much higher quality. Kind of like CZG03, but more E4... maybe that's a bad comparison, but you get the point.
Definitely though, it is less impressive than the later maps - and I really do prefer the more ambient, less overtly low quality music in those levels.

Also yeah, spiders were meh, compared to some of the others - I'm thinking Travail - I remember liking those notably big and tough spiders a lot. 

one thing that's good about the spiders is that they are very slow and not very dangerous at all.
i like that it's not psycho-quick and impossible to hit. 

is it possible to replace my map with newer version and upload a new pak? it has some visual bug fixes and minor ballance changes (also there are places that you can walk/jump easier. 

tho i haven't heard any flaws so far =) 

props to tronyn and everyone for for this impressive release! I'd been looking forward to this since seeing the original arcane wizard screenshots and it was awesome to see it happen.

map 1 was the weakest IMHO but still good. I got stuck at the same place as when I played the demo (took me ages to find the silver key room when I first entered the basement- I think it was around a corner that's really hard to see.) Also I couldn't fit though the hole in the floor at first. I wouldn't mind more maps using bolder music like this, especially over-the-top doom inspired ones. It reminded me a bit of some of the music in the DVII doom mod.

map 2 was really sweet. solid knave map, really polished. restrained compared with what is to come!

map 3 & 4 started to get insane. I felt each could have been the finale of any other pack. The blue theme looked great. These maps may have had the most buttons/doors of any Q1SP ;) In places the visual or gameplay polish wasn't up to the standard of the best recent releases but the awesome scale and atmosphere made up for that for me.

map 5 wicked theme. satisfyingly over the top conclusion. I have to play it again because I couldn't quite make it through the end battle.

the drake mod is pretty cool - I like the beefier weapons (chainsaw, riot controller, although it would have been cool to use the zer model for that). Did the SNG have an even higher fire rate? Probably too much normally but it worked here :-). 

Continues the general greatness (+annoying wizards) of map 2. Still a bit dark to fully appreciate the designs tho. Some classic gameplay moments there. 

I've been trying to finish this all day. Though the gameplay in these is somewhat restrained by Tronyn standards, that final fight is basically impossible for me at this point!

I think the riot controller actually was in the original Arc Demo - definitely different than the drake shotgun which is merely 2x as powerful (I think). I would have preferred the riot controller though - it's my favourite since it does the double tap thing, allowing you to juggle between enemies - really fun to use on groups of less powerful enemies etc. 

just tried again, but something weird is going on. when I try to load my saves all the models are screwed up - the invisibility powerup is a lightning gun, and all other models are wonky too - any idea what's going on here? 

sounds like a bug in the drake mod. i dunno if PM is hanging around these days, but he might have to look into that.

this kind of thing happens when models and sounds aren't precached in the same order. basically, the engine just assigns a number to represent a certain model or sound, but these numbers are set incrementally as the engine sorts through the progs and sees a precache function call. if the precaches are not being loaded in the same order, then the saved precache numbers won't match.
...... i think.

so yeah... i guess i'm not all that helpful here, sorry. afaik, there's no way to fix that kind of thing once it has. 

I must say I had no issues with the pak being overly dark, never once used the wand for illumination.

As for the rain, it fit into that particular map's aesthetic as someone else said. Not to be used universally though.

Maps 2-5 are seriously special IMHO. 

if anything's broken, it's certainly not noticeable.