Alright, what would you gentleman rather have:

1) A level that is almost completely free-roaming, with the potential to get wildly lost, but has some kind of "map" or other guidance system that the player can activate when stuck in order to give him a gentle nudge in the direction of the various "objectives".

2) A map with traditional quake-style progression i.e. semi-linear with your typical "follow the trail of carefully-placed monsters to find the way forward" stuff. 

Well no one has seen 1) yet, so we can't really know if it's any good, can we? 

you know what was great? The dreamcast version of Soul Calibur's mission mode, you went from area to area doing different battles, it had branching paths etc if I remember.

Having an actual map that you navigate and go to different areas is really nice IMO. I doubt you could do it with Quake without some redesign but it would be fun. I also love the way that Thief 1 and 2 did maps, you find or use hand-drawn maps that are usually incomplete in some way. Really adds to immersion. 

czg: well the most conservative thing to do would be to extend Quake's arrow-on-wall err "system" to make it more context sensitive - I'm sure people already do this (they trigger the arrows to turn on and off).

But what if you are at a hub with 5 possible routes you can take, which can all lead to different simultaneous objectives in the map? Could you have a multi-arrow design in the hub where individual arrows can turn off when the player has pressed a particular button / found the witch's merkin / whatever? Would be easy to do.

But in a really free-roaming map, full of loops and swiss cheese, you start to realise that almost every room is a hub. It would be a case of switchable arrows everywhere and I think it would be difficult finding the balance between signposting that dumbs it down too much vs. not enough signposting so the player keeps going round in circles. 

I did a 1) type map for Doom 2. It was a fairly well received level, but I know some people got frustrated with it. Maybe I made it a bit too big. 

Not a mapping or guidance system.
Just have people print out a pdf or something. 

Ok so here's my utterly retarded idea:

Dotted throughout the map are funny little nests. If you leave them alone they do nothing but if you shoot/hit a nest, little glowing creatures pop out and quickly scurry off in all directions that lead to unfinished player objectives. The glowy creatures are quick so you can't keep up with them but it gives you a good start.

Bonus retardation: the colour of the creature can indicate the type of objective. 

 

There is one. The one i made for mapjam2 would suit that description more or less even if small. And we know what happened, it happened the same as like Rick's: leaving aside monster/ammo placement, people got frustrated of being lost and guides and hints provided weren't obvious enough, apart from some issues that weren't fixed (the door that lead to the GK's sound not being well heard enough for example, from what i remember).

If a map like that where to be done, it would need to tell the player before loading the type of map it is or showing it to the player on some way on the map itself, to prepare the player for what's coming and reduce the frustrations.

On the idea of the map for orientating, i am doing one that has something like that, that shows you the parts you visited already, but as the map is fairly the leading type there is no real need for it for orientating, so i am putting it as an easter egg for the fun of it. 

A retarded idea for the pile ... it would be neat to have timed barricades that would close up as areas of the map became unnecessary to complete the overall objective.

So if the player is lost, as they are wandering around non-essential areas will start closing off with gates or whatever so eventually, if you're lost long enough, only the golden path remains. But if you figure it out, you can just jam ahead and feel smart... 

WarrenM, that or something similar sounds interesting and has the advantage of being possible without custom progs.

I personally would prefer to keep the map open all the time though so that the player can wander around and go secret hunting at his leisure. 

Maybe this map, showing visited parts and player position, would be integrated into the environment. A base map would have several computer rooms at key points, where the player would see the map on a screen. 

Start by helping the player keep their bearings with strong, unique environment art. Styles, shapes, inside, outside, water, lava, up into the tower, down into the bowels.

Your level can signpost itself with its own form language. 

what lunaran said 

You progress through your typical quake map, you notice a big door that's locked, so you go on. You make it at what seems to be the end, but said exit is destroyed and a self destruct sequence appears as more monsters are spawned throughout the levels: Said door is now unlocked and you have to exit the level through here before the timer runs out.
The biggest challenge would be to 100% it, as some secrets would be unlocked (the same message played at the big locked door would appear before the countdown) and the biggest portion of monsters would appear. 

I really hate time pressure countdown levels but that's a personal preference. 

just this... as a game, doesn't even have to be quake -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBQL4zsyKLk 

had something like that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orqXw9AeUgI

but instead of a dungeon master it was a mage doing the guiding.

I loved it back then. 

Ariadnes Thread, in a maze, vertical and horizontally. With demons snapping parts of and you have to find a way back through all those candles that have been blown out suddenly.. Chasms reaveal under broken stairs..
Much Kellness, books and blood.

Piranesi and all that.

Im not sure, but there are pages to be found, ripped from an arcane manuscript to mighty to be left intact, but you knew that maybe :P

I call it geocities, "What once bloomed is now dead"
or some other weird net reference, maybe the "big bubble burst of 200800" idk really.

The actual "ariadne thread thing" is only a hook to get into the map i'd say now. Maybe too error prone to switch bmodels on and off again for thread parts to re/disappear.

The actual map flow would be more quakey to the end.
Thats why we are here, right?

Go map! 

Someone should take the can-do-everything deep learning hype and make it process all the Quake maps to be able to generate new maps from it.