Fun map, here's my first playthrough on Hard.
http://born-robotic.net/stuff/qstuff/demos/dreadbase_bal.7z

I liked it overall, was pleasant to play, lots of space to move around.
A couple things :
- The wooden crates at the start feel a bit out of place with the rest of the textures.
- I felt the nailgun should've been introduced a bit earlier maybe, it's 100% shotgun gameplay for quite a while at the start.
- Some of the colored lighting was a bit saturated, should try to be a bit more subtle with it, or to mix the colors more harmoniously.
- Ending felt a bit anti-climatic, gold key room fight definiteyl the climax for gameplay.

Congrats on the release! 

Looking forward to playing this after checking out your beta releases. Looks like it really came together nicely. Congrats! 

Although I'm not a big fan of hitscanners in large open areas, the health supply was good enough to keep me alive. Crates and different points of vantage provided some cover as well.

Nice texture usage and curvy geometry. The map is very horizontal, it feels a bit like Doom. I found 3 out of the 4 secrets and 2 of them were very surprising. I'll play it again and find the last one, and try to record a demo. 

Thanks for playing and for the feedback!

Always looking forward to demos! 

I should've been able to tell from the list of Freedoom WAD credits packed in with the map how Doom-inspired this map would really feel. If you told me this was a recreation of a Doom WAD, I'd believe you. Some notes:

* The Doom inspiration is both a blessing and a curse for this map, honestly. It definitely has a unique look to it, thanks to all the custom textures, but it's also a really horizontal map. You're pretty much always fighting enemies on your level, and given the fact that it's pretty consistently a shotgun fight until the third arena area, it gets a bit dull.
* Room shapes and detailing are generally varied and interesting, and the crates (and later, buttons) provide a good amount of cover.
* Scale is perhaps a bit too large. Hitscan enemies like the grunt are a bitch to fight at a distance because of their accuracy and numbers. This one took me a few tries to beat for sure. Good challenge.
* On the other hand, ogre placement was consistently excellent. Getting them the proper distance to throw grenades directly at the player is always a challenge, so kudos on that.
* This is less of an issue on GL/DX engines it seems, but on software engines (my run below was recorded on Mark V Winquake), a lot of the map was surprisingly dark. If you see me firing my shotgun into walls, that's why.
* The map really should've ended at the gold keycard room. The fact that I had to backtrack through areas of newly spawned enemies to get to the end lift felt like padding.

Demo below. Skill 2, 10:08, no secrets, 103/109 kills. Watch the end, where I bang my head on the lift, watch it go all the way back up and then come back down.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/0bfdix92wqfyhqx/mx_dreadbase.7z?dl=1 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sn03rxgpbmucrsz/dreadbase.dem?dl=0

I found the first secret by accident. 

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/h_dreadbase.7z

I don't usually write feedback (I'm not sure if I'm actually helping) but I haven't played a base map in forever and found this refreshing.
Areas were quite flat but flowed well (except perhaps the ending but I'm unsure if that's partly my fault).
I don't think the scale was a problem but the lack of verticality (or details) that could obscure sightlines & create depth was to some extent. This could be solved with a few pillars in the right places or ceiling details?
Monster choice & placement were overall very good (ogres/scrags especially) but I would've liked to see a couple more in each room given the space available to move around. The monsters in the GK room could've ramped up also.
Varied colours & very good lighting, all very consistent and welcome over the standard peanut butter base maps.
Really enjoyed what you did with the secrets; having special areas w/ a couple of monsters/challenges. This is how secrets should be imo.
Cheers, looking forward to more. 

Thanks for the demos and the written feedback - yes, this is useful, so I very much appreciate the time you've spent providing written feedback!

Seems I need to up my vertical ;-)

This map originally was/is intended to be the introduction-map for a mini-episode (thus: base-themed) I'm chewing on with very very slow progress since 2014. I guess - apart from the Doom influences - this might contribute to the mostly-horizontal aspect. Now I felt like "release it - or scrap it" and I opted for a release. 

Oh, I see that in your demo, the flow was interrupted by a glitch: After the shambler fight the gold key is supposed to lower. Instead, for you, the platform just stayed elevated, so you had to resort to a grenade jump. This certainly is not intended and I never observed such a problem in other demos or my own gameplay. Apparently things break if you block the platform as it lowers - it'll return to its original position and stay there. :-(

Other minor glitches: The big elevator caused some strange sound effect (collision sound?) and the intermission camera just wasn't correct.

Thanks for keeping playing! 

I updated the ZIP archive with a version where the gold key should never be stuck in an elevated position, so the glitch described above should never occur. 

I pretty much agree with the above feedback. A couple of pillars or such and a few more baddies here and there are the only things that might add to the map.

Overall, I loved the look and atmosphere. Those textures look great in Quake. I wanna see more!

Great job. :) 

This was a fun map to play through, and a good challenge for me! Here's the demo I recorded on my second attempt (skill 1): https://www.dropbox.com/s/73piba9yp45dh3q/dreadbase_yoder.dem?dl=1
(my first attempt ended in the room after the grenade launcher where I rushed in and gibbed myself with a bad grenade)

A few notes that I didn't see mentioned above:
1) The lighting mostly fills the space rather than assisting with direction. I misread a lot of the wall spotlights as potential secrets, but then important things like staircases were solid black. You'll also see in the demo at one point in the return trip from the gold key I take a left turn into a dead end because light was coming from that side.

2) As a result of the large spaces and the limited line-of-sight blockers against ranged enemies, I found myself fighting from the doors alot. In the room with the locked gold door, I decided to rush in since door-fighting is boring, but I nearly died as a result. Offering some inviting "foothold" cover into these combat spaces would help.

3) On entering the blue-key room on my first attempt, my eyes immediately went to the long-range grunt (high priority!), and I didn't even notice the blue key. The level flow still worked out that I got to the key, but it might help to split combat and non-combat information reveals, if that makes sense?

Oh I also got a bug with a static invulnerable enforcer, but I think that's a bug with Quakespasm 0.93, not your map.

Looking forward to more maps in the future! :) 

Nice, usually I presume any bug is caused by playing at high fps (unfortunately I keep forgetting to add a disclaimer about that with the demos).
Yeah the sound is the shambler corpse bouncing due to the fps iirc.
I'm glad you released it, if only more mappers would do the same in that situation. 

I've recorded a new playthrough:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0f650xWpiQE

I played the beta version, so i already knew what to do and where to go, but this time i killed everyone and found all the secrets =D 

http://x901.net/quake/misc/dreadbase_rj.zip

I managed to miss the nailgun :-( would have probably enjoyed picking off long range grunts a bit more if it weren't for that.

Still a fun map, balance felt good for skill 1. Pretty unique look for Quake and well pulled off, quite consistent. I actually thought the coloured light worked; it was strong but there wasn't too much of it. I liked the scale too, but didn't think it helped the monsters as I rarely felt they had the upper hand on me

Agreed with others the GK area was the highlight, perfect mini-arena set up

Good job :) thanks for releasing it! 

The textures work well in Quake. The level looks okay, some good base-y detail, though the design itself is a bit simple: basically a bunch of large open rectangular rooms. There is some height variation, but it felt like the whole layout could have been more compact or, at that scale, more intricate with multiple layers and means to traverse the space (e.g. walkways) at different heights and directions.

Gameplay suffers a bit from the spacious nature of the level. It's isn't bad, but it seems you often end up picking off enemies from a distance which makes the encounters less tense.
The secret portals are a neat idea, rewarding the player with a change of scenery in addition to the items. I failed to find them in my first run, however.

On a technical note: careful when rotating items. You only rotate the visual part of the ammo/health box (along the bottom left corner) while the touchable bounding box remains unchanged. This can make it somewhat awkward for the player, because touching the visible box doesn't always mean they'll pick up the item - or they might pick it up by accident believing they walked past it. I recommend using only very low angle values.
As for the packaging, please try to keep it simple for the player. Just levelname.* in a zip; no folders or anything that's not required. There's no reason the map has to be run as a mod like the zip suggests.

Demo (protocol 666) 

Thanks for playing and commenting!

I'm glad that overall some fun had been had, despite the problems mentioned. I certainly agree that the rooms (while, of course, interconnected) are not really intertwined, and I guess that the prolonged timespan of on-and-off development process led to the addition of further stand-alone areas that don't mesh with the pre-existing structures.

It's been remarked that the textures work somewhat well - I'm curious, of course, if other mappers can make even better use of those. Overall I wished something like FreeDoom would exist also for Quake.

As for the packaging: Well, technically speaking this map is ripped out of an (as of yet) incomplete mini-episode, so I guess I just kept the structure as-is. I also needed a proper place to add the necessary texture credits. I hope this wasn't a major inconvenience. 

Btw, regarding the prolonged development development process... here's a snapshot from November 2016... (yay for git version control):

https://maikmerten.de/maps/olddreadbase.zip

For me, it's interesting to see what areas of the map made it to the final release and what ideas ended up being removed.

I feel that my submission to SM181 in some ways ended up being more "satisfying" (more map created per spent mapping time)... 

I'm finally gonna play this today after playing your beta a while back. Congrats on the release. I understand your point about this map versus the SM181 map feeling different. I had the same issue with a map of mine that I worked on off and on for 2 or so years. I'm focusing on smaller less ambitious maps moving forward as a result. 

hth 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/250985799

In short, nice map, shame about the wall textures. 

Did you say you had been on-off working on the map since 2014? O: And here I was thinking one year was a lot of time on my side! xD Well, the long build time does show in the general polish and thought put on the map. :) You can read my main review and watch my 100 % run on Quaddicted, but you can download my first blind run demo below:

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/dreadbase_esrael1.7z 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUS7hN7bXEk&t=2246s

We chatted a bit on youtube already SavageX, but overall great job on this!

I really like the custom textures and there are some fun fights in this one too.

My only real critique is with room size and enemy agro. In a few rooms in this one, you'll walk in and trigger the whole room to come after you. Normally this isn't an issue but when the room is that big, it always makes for an odd fight.