but then the game becomes a tedious job. There is one way to do it with minimum danger (wank the corner) and you up the level of difficulty until even that optimal way is sufficiently hard.

Also, the gameplay involves no decisions since you know the optimal strategy and can always employ it.

If wank the corner is not demanded, then other choices are done purely out of *laziness*, to get through the level faster, even when they are harder to survive. That means the level is too easy in a sense. 

or do something else that I proposed (just for the sake of argument), then the player has to make some decisions, often fast ones, and can not retreat to some beforehand picked always the same optimal strategy.

And that's why people play games, because they can effect the outcome of the game by their decisions.
If you discover an optimal strategy that works and is immediately obvious every time, then it's just repetition and refining that one thing, not a game anymore. 

Got to 69/89 on my first Nightmare attempt. Not that difficult after the start. Failed by falling down a hole into the lower level in the GK room and getting trapped by Plasma Cunts.

Don't think it's much harder on Nightmare to be honest.

I managed to lure the Shambler out of the room - but then after killing him the door closed with me outside it. 

Done, second go. 22:45. Speeds I sent you a demo to speeds[at]bk.ru , feel free to post it up.

All of it went fine EXCEPT the Shambler conflict (which I didn't avoid this time) which is pretty unplayable on Nightmare. I went in with 120+ health and enough GA after having done well with the crappy drones, and the Shambler just stood there and fired (with nowhere for me to hide). Took 120-150 health off and left me with about 10 armour and 2 health. 

ok ok finally play it! didn�t record first demo because was to short...

well brushwork is fucking great 10 of 10!!!

game play boring and crappy hate it 1 of 10!!!

maybe Quoth2 made it like this, but you also have abused of spawns... :( i think this map is not pure Quake because game play in boring and slow! honestly i hated sorry but at least brushwork is fabulous!!!

or maybe i�m a shit player and suck a lot ;)

Who knows?

Anyway nice work ;) 

 

upload the demo!*

*please 

I agree with bambuz. Quake isn't a game about tactics or hiding and sniping from a distance, it's about being in the thick of close range combat, bobbing, weaving and shooting in fast-paced melees and negotiating encounters in a primarily reactive manner, so therefore ambush and arena oriented level design works best. Given the limitations of the game's AI and the design of the monsters with their typically slow projectiles and melee attacks, allowing the player to retreat all the time just causes the gameplay to devolve into a borderline passive state, as the player hangs back from a safe distance and picks off enemies with ease.

In any game, whenever you give the player additional options for dealing with a scenario, you also create the potential for them to make it boring for themselves. While the open-ended approach works well if you have a design like Crysis or Bioshock or Deus Ex, where the player has a number of nuanced and highly divergent means of tackling problems, it is less effective in more minimalist games where the player has a limited toolset at his disposal. That's why in linear, tightly focused action games like the Half-life and Call of Duty series, the developers greatly restrict the player's options in the vast majority of situations. I remember Gabe Newell saying something along the lines of "we don't want to just throw players into a level and say 'go have a game experience'", referring to their desire to ensure a tightly choreographed gameplay flow that hopefully sends the player along an exciting rollercoaster trajectory that has been carefully orchestrated through planning and testing, as opposed to just throwing a series of gameplay elements together and hoping that the player takes decisions that enable them to have fun.

Of course, that word 'playtesting' is crucial if you're taking a more deterministic approach to game design, since if you're implicitly creating a system that is virtually unalterable by the player, you must ensure you have methods in place for catering to different player abilities.

In the absence of a professional developer's resources for testing, the most obvious method is skill levels and I think megaman's frustration stems partly from Quake's limited range of these. It's a pretty difficult task to cater in a precise manner to the entire talent range of players via just 3 skill levels (Nightmare doesn't really count since its fairly crude method of upping difficulty produces unpredictable, non-mapper controlled results that don't smoothly increment in the manner easy, normal and hard can. For example, a battle against 3 ogres will become dramatically more difficult on NM due to their increased fire rate enabling them to fill the area with grenades, whereas a battle against a melee oriented monster like a fiend won't change much from hard difficulty).

This map exacerbated this problem due to the fact that even easy contains scenarios that are equivalent to what one might expect on hard in other maps and arguably even beyond that, such as the shambler ambush with no cover requiring players to use the old shambler shuffle technique, a method likely to be known to only fairly hardcore players. In a map like this, I do think it's preferable if news posts and the readme have additional explanation about what the various skill settings entail, as distrans has suggested.

The best solution, of course, would be additional skill settings to begin with. I really think every game should have at least five, with two, three and four being similar to easy, medium and hard in Quake, then the bookend options would be designed to cater to fringe players, with one making it almost impossible to die and basically being a means to ensure that anybody can at least see the whole game, regardless of ability, and five being a means of ensuring that the most elite gamers have a challenge suitable for their talent. Maybe this is something the Quoth developers would consider in future. It would mean extra effort for mappers, but more gameplay for players and more ability to tailor the experience to one's liking, as megaman seems to desire, only without having to resort to approaches in-game that distort Quake's strengths.

As far as the map itself goes, it's inevitable it will divide opinion given the factors mentioned above in this post and fact that it experiments in other areas too, such as the aesthetic style. Overall, I thought it was excellent. The combat was well-choreographed, playing to what I consider to be Quake's best features, with difficulty always being high yet fair. The map was certainly cramped, even more so than the original Id maps and I found this refreshing given the ever-increasing size of Quake levels, a pattern that fails to acknowledge that combat in Quake, as in most games, gets increasingly one-dimensional the larger the spaces. 

The main difficulty in making smaller architecture is the increased attention to clipping required, and this map slipped up on that to some extent. The general rule should be that if a piece of geometry protruding from a wall isn't large enough to seek cover behind, it should probably be clipped off, or at least have a 45 degree clip brush placed alongside so the player slides off it. Generally this map followed this rule, but there were a few places that did not adhere to it, and thus occasionally one ends up adhering to the wall instead, crucially in some parts of the final arena.

Clipping aside, however, that particular section of the map was excellent, specifically the varying heights and different routes through it, making it more interesting than the standard big-box-with-a-few-pillars arenas typically used for climactic encounters and also the way in which you get to walk through it and familiarise yourself with it in peace on the way to the gold key, then fight your way out once it is acquired. Really intelligent design (not the religious kind) that actually does allow some tactical variation on the part of the player, while keeping things aggressive enough to ensure the pace doesn't drop.

With regard to visuals, the results are a bit more mixed. I agree with those who believe that the Quake palette doesn't support the colours found in the Doom 3 textures particularly well, with the white and blue textures often looking excessively garish and smeared by the conversion from their original format. On the plus side, geometry was fantastic and impressively faithful to D3 and the lighting, along with that found in RickyT23's recent maps, should settle in the affirmative the argument about the worth of colour in Quake's lighting. 

Don't have anywhere to upload it to. Spds has it, can email to you if you want. It's not hugely interesting: 22 minutes of me twatting around ;) 

upload to shub-hub, it's made precisely for this kind of stuff.
Somebody can e-mail you the password. (Don't mention it here as people will google it.) 

Nice posts 

I just thought it might be a nice idea not to have it right on the site (don't ask me why, heh).
It's ilovetheshubhub 

Quake isn't a game about tactics Orly?

allowing the player to retreat all the time just causes the gameplay to devolve into a borderline passive state, as the player hangs back from a safe distance and picks off enemies with ease.

My point is: the educated player, who actually wants to have fun playing the damn thing instead of 'to finish it' (and hello, we're playing a game 12 years old, we're not the guys who play a game/map 'to finish it'), will use the freedom to his advantage, to have the most fun with the map - appropriate to his favorite playing style.

Example: half-life soldiers. I played some of those scenes about 20 times, just to try different tactics, to see how the ai behaves, etc.

Example: the whole game of descent 1/2. you're totally free to choose your style: you can very carefully snipe around corners, or crash into every room and try to avoid the projectiles. heck, on the lower skills you can even just crash into the room or wait for enemies. I still have the most fun ever playing it - because i have to approach every fight a little different, because i can try new strategies everytime, or just enjoy the one that's the most fun to me.

And Descent even has (few) monster trap doors, but you can find them: if you shoot them, you get a "You cannot open this door" message, and there's a probability there's baddies behind them that come out if you grab that yellow key in the corner. The thing is: with careful inspection you can find out there's those doors, and the designers actually gave you arsenal against them: bombs/mines. Additionally, the sparcity of the trap doors make them much more immpressive/frightening. It's like d3: spawning monsters aren't interesting if they're at every item you pick up. They are, if you use them a few times a (30-90min) level, and use them in interesting places. spawning enemies somewhere along the path to the exit (when you have ~30secs to get there after the reactor is destroyed..)...

Granted, descent has better ai, and better, more varied monsters. But to some extend quake has the same properties. I often try to gun down fiends or wizards with apples, just for the fun of it. i delibaretely switch to the gl, even though it's (most often) nonsense. But i have more fun that way. Recently i have been finding myself trying to axe all kind of knights instead of shooting them. I need levels that make experimentation easy, that allow me to apply my style, that make me hit the sweet gameplay spot. And doom3 style spawning doesn't.

That doesn't mean I'd be most happy on a flat surface with monsters around me - as in descent - the environment is quite important and fun if you can use it to your advantage. Again, spawning enemies don't even make me try to use architecture to have more fun, the maximum response would be trying to exploit the environment (which is what bambuz and mccoy complained at); but mostly I'd just shoot the damn spawners in the face. fun once or maybe twice, boring after that.

interesting is: if you have played the map once or twice, you can actually see where the enemies come out of their trap doors (not the 'just spawning' ones though), but the first time, that's not really possible.

I think megaman's frustration stems partly from Quake's limited range of [skill settings].
[skill settings] would mean [...] more ability to tailor the experience to one's liking.
I hope my post makes clear that this isn't what i want. 

http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/dissp6_nm.dz

I quite like the very end tho. 

If you're a fan of what one might call 'expressive combat', megaman, Quake seems a strange platform on which to practice it. Compared to certain other games out there, it seems like it has a very limited range of possibilities for being creative in how one approaches fighting, a variety which gets exhausted pretty quickly and which can't really be extended in a meaningful way by new maps.

A game like Crysis excels in enabling players to try a multitude of different approaches in combat, since there are so many systems that the player can exploit in order to experiment - from stealth, to physics, to vehicles, to weapon customisation, to physical ability alteration and so on. In Quake, the possibility to get creative goes about as far as "will it be the grenade launcher or the shotgun?" That isn't a criticism of the game, simply a reference to where its strengths don't lie. Given the limited possibilities there, it seems more sensible to focus on what the game was clearly designed for - reactive, close range combat. 

you have some patience hehe. well done 

and loads of monsters to shoot = fun!!!

The Shambler in the corridor kills me every time on nightmare. There is only one thing left to try for me which is to run past the Shambler when I first see him and try and find cover at that end of the corridor.

The thing is that it really sucks in that one place because there is no armour and no cover, and on skill 3 you can't escape the shamblers continuous lightning attacks.

I can enter the corridor with 100+ health and say 70 armour (blue armour, bah) and he'll still kill me, even if I fire nails at him constantly.

I don't care what anyone says - that part of the level is unbalanced on skill 3

Distrans - I hate to say this, I really do because I feel like im looking a gift-horse in the mouth, and I feel like I'm being cheeky to a very talented and renound mapper, and also Sickbase was just as bad, BUT:

Test your fucking maps at skill 3 - if you can't do it at Skill 3 it's too hard!

I like this map, and I will continue trying to record a skill 3 demo (which is what I have been trying to do) but when you get to that Shambler with enough ammo and high health/armour levels and it kills you, after the 3rd or 4th time you just get pissed off!

I mean blah blah blah. You say "well im not a massive skilled player so I test at skill 1, and get testers to help with the testing"

Bollocks!!! Rubbish! Tosh.

No other part of the map is too bad. Repetative - yes. Monotonous - yes. Encouraging of a "reserved playing style" - yes (i.e. hiding behind a corner and slowly chipping away at those flying polyps with a shotgun) but not impossible. But what - theres one report of someone JUST managing to beat the Shambler on skill 3, apart from that theres no-one else (except Sielwolf who doesn't count (soory Sielwolf - your too good))

Im being quite harsh I suppose, but I would have loved this map a lot more if it wasn't for that one single combat. I would have put some yellow armour in place of the blue armour, if only on skill 2 (where the dog ambush is), or an extra health pack next to the large box of nails next to the Shambler. That would have done it! If you had done that, the map would be free of the one single shitty combat which is ruining it for me.

I like everything about the map except for that. The textures I think are fantastic. I mean the palette shift doesn't help, but your obvious painstaking work in positioning and arranging the textures is nothing short of phenomenal! (WC1.6 - ughh - well done!) and the lighting is also really good! The general design of the entire map is brilliant - the best representation of Doom3 that Quake has ever seen! Probably on of the prettiest maps ever IMHO! Which is why I will keep trying to record a nightmare demo... 

Did some checking of this on Nightmare skill, quicksaving before that room with 35 GA and 100 Health (which would seem a fair start).

It is possible to survive fairly consistently, but you always take a LOT of damage. The least I managed to get was 70 damage taken, but 90-120 was far more common. The Shamb isn't consistent with his behaviour, sometimes he will lightening even when you are right next to him.

The best I could manage was to go right up to him (firing NG all the time), circle behind him (taking 30 L damage), circle out again when he tried to melee, this leaves him further towards the vent so you can get cover from the corner for the next L attack, then he moves out and you take another 30 L damage, and then 10 or so from his final L attack when he dies.

It is also possible to alert him, run away, shoot a bit while he can't L you, then move into the room and take a bit of damage - but there's no guarantee you won't end up on the wrong side of the closing door. 

was about to say: shmamblers demo actually reinforces my point, i think. All he's doing (and he's forced to!) is exploiting map/geometry and monster ai.

when i played it (skill 1, though), i found the shambler, the flying bat drones and the turret drones to be easiest ;) 

Time for some sense about this map.

Firstly, there are some obvious genuine problems:

1. The Shambler combat is broken. It doesn't work. End of story.

2. The start is unbalanced because you don't have enough options / supplies yet.

3. The final slime room is unbalanced because you're trapped and without knowing what's going to spawn where, it's unfair.

Those could be fixed easily: Couple less spawning monsters at the start, replace the Shambler with one of those Quake2 nail/saw mutant walker things (this is very obvious), slower Plasma Cunt spawns in the final slime room.

Apart from that the map is good, and this is why:

I've realised Distrans is doing what I was talking about before: Exploring new types of Quake gameplay. This is a low supplies / low power / limited manouverability / ranged enemy / exploration essential map. It is different to normal Quake but that is a good thing. Okay it needs some custom enemy to make that difference but those custom enemy are not that esoteric. But he is exploring new gameplay, just as Speeds Cogs map did or Warpspasm did.

Watching my demo made me realise this: It's very cautious, very patient, and as mega says, using geometry and AI to best effect. Because that's what the map demands. Most of the combats are actually fair if you play in the way the map demands (not all of them tho).

So, although it is obviously flawed, the concept is still a good one. Like Cogs, like Warpspasm, it's trying something new and it's a good start. What it needs is for people to be aware of the different gameplay and what it requires (just like, say, the requirement not to try to complete a Warp map in one sitting).

(Oh and this is not even considering the "This map is not designed to be completed first attempt" concept - I believe that initially *seemed* to be the concept in this map because of the few unbalanced combats that skewed the impression of the map overall - that concept could still be explored a lot fuller (yes, a whole map as "fun" as the start / shamb room / finish of this map....:S)). 

not complete, one lagged to death, the other died at the laser beams (fried!?)
http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/dis_sp6-again.dz

http://shub-hub.com/files/demos_singleplayer/dis_sp6-yetagainheapsize.dz

if someone's interested in my style :P

(it's probably similar to shamlbers,this map.. well, you know the story :P) 

YE it�s not all Distrans fall the game play...
scragbait, JPL, negke and sielwolf forgot to make a proper gameplay test in nightmare... 

is right.
slower plasma cunts please, that was my doom... 

this map reminds me of "Corporal Punishment II" sort of.