Huge thanks to Greenwood for saving this one from the scrapheap! 

Thank you for this! 

1st play demo. Would have streamed if I could. Played on normal difficulty. Can't remember all of this stuff being in rubicon 2, like the knight re-skins for example.

http://www.quaketastic.com/files/demos/5th_circulation.zip 

Well, some stuff is not from the original Rubicon 2. For example, I added that reskinned/reworked hellknight model from The Lieutenant's mild mod, Ad Infinitum, and that ogre is aDaya's "butcher" reskin, from his Mod Jam entry. These are mentioned in the read me file.

I wanted to slightly expand the roster with a few mild custom touches. The helknight adds a nice melee element & that ogre reskin simply looks good in the Base theme.

Glad to hear that you enjoyed it! :) 

Go play this. Even though Greenwood was screaming at his monitor watching my playtest I had a blast.

It's the first map in a while I wanted to play again right after completing it. Looking forward to this final version. (now that I know where the exit is) 

It feels like Rubicon 2 mixed with Concentric Devastation!

This is my demo: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mjBsrJ9bJQmcCv_4RvsUmqgJ3ESetnsh/view?usp=sharing

I've died twice... I will try again tomorrow! 

Hey, a nice surprise!

I love the dedication to making the monsters look like "base theme" monsters, and Markie's music track is spot on. The brushwork is good eyecandy -- and yeah reminiscent of Concentric Devastation.

I would say that it feels quite linear, and also with paths just kind of glued together with teleporters occasionally. I didn't feel like I was making any choice about how to get to some necessary destination, or even choices between interesting paths at an intersection. I think that lets down the potential of the place a bit.

But there's certainly a few nice setpieces... I particularly liked the first big room with boxes and conveyor belts, and actually I think the map as a whole "picked up" after that room.

Random observation: the lightsaber noise for activated hellknights makes it kind of fun when they get backspawned on you. :-) The hellknight attacks and AI make it not too bad to deal with as a backspawn, if you know it is there, and the zzzzzow noise is a good clear announcement.

(BTW I think that right before the button that opens the exit gate, the pit that a box rises out of is an inescapable hole if you fall into it.) 

Glad to hear that you enjoyed it!

I agree that the map is rather linear; however, most of the teleporters in the map are shortcuts; either to recover from the result of a fall, to get back on path after discovering a secret, or to aid in progression. Being a giant map, the player would have to do a lot of retracing if otherwise. 

Yeah, it's definitely too linear, this was actually my second actual single-player layout, I didn't play much SP at the time really and that shows.
Fortunately Concentric Devastation wasn't out yet or I would've scrapped it much earlier. :D 

I'm one of those who have a hard time finding base maps that I enjoy so this was a pleasant surprise. custom enemies and a pleasing visual style makes this a joy to play. I also enjoyed some of jumping puzzles and the bit with the laser beams.

The part that was outside was a nice change of pace from the indoor areas before it. If anything I would have liked the outdoor to be even more contrasting to the indoor to get more of a wow feeling when going there. Not sure what was up with the rocket towards the end but it looked cool and I guess it's kind of an old school shooter trope :D 

Yeah that was a nice old-school kind of showoff ending. :-) 

Very linear as everyone else said, but good in all other categories.

First run hard skill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDUevk-ZtLU 

why linear is such a bad word in game design. How specifically would making it less linear make it a better experience?

I can understand multiple routes to the same "gate" but what does that add and why is this more fun? 

When people complain about linear maps, it's less that there is only one route from A to B, and more than the path from A to B doesn't intersect with eachother.

If you'll think about czg's Ceremonial Circles you'll remember a twisty turny map where you get to do a lot of revisiting of past areas from new angles... but you don't really have much choice in where to go to progress. 

doesn't intersect with itself 

For me it's more about whether there is any consideration involved in making my way through the map. Most Quake maps don't actually have a lot of interconnectedness, but they do often make you think just a bit about where to go next or how to get to some place that you see. The engagement from that bit of thought makes the whole thing more fun.

It's quite possible for a game to NOT do that and still be fun. A game can't do everything, and there are many other things out there that games can do well that I enjoy. However for me the "routefinding" thought is a lot of the fun in Quake specifically, and since Quake is kind of a mechanics-lite game, if that aspect is missing there's not often something else cool that makes up for it. 

You make more sense drunk than I do sober! And I do get what you mean there. Overlapping areas, seeing the same places from different vantage points - check. By this definition, this particular map is fine then.

Joel, I suppose giving the player multiple paths like the split above the elevators in Gloom Keep comes to mind in your example. A simple left or right for either key and "what's around this corner" makes it more exciting. 

A pretty solid map that feels like it's from the early 2000s.

The map has too many hallways and not enough rooms, especially the early part of it felt that way. The hallways mostly looked cool though, good solid brushwork.

The conveyor belt rooms were my favorite parts, very cool traversal puzzle and the conveyor paths weaving in and out of the rooms were fun to explore.

Other cool aspects were the layout being built around the two big missile launch tubes, and the outdoor area with the orange/red lighting.

I also liked that one of the outdoor light sources was just a flashlight someone dropped on the ground. And the missile launch during the intermission camera was a nice final touch.

Oh yeah, and the first time I played it, I just rocket jumped over the gate. Then I played again by actually getting and using the gold key, that was more effort :) 

Thanks for playing and giving feedback everyone!

Yeah I do think the map is a bit too linear.
The parts that feel a bit less linear (the conveyor room, and the outside area at the end) seem to be what people prefer (me included).
I think the linearity is at its worst when you get the silver key and end up towards the start with a teleporter that leads you straight to the silver key door, this is a very contrived setup and doesn't feel natural at all.
The overuse of hallways definitely doesn't help. :)

Still quite happy with how it turned out after all these years, Greenwood did a great job bringing it back to life. 

Yep!