Valiant.wad - now on /idgames!

mouldy said:

I think the issue I have with the imp fireballs is that when you are sticking imp snipers up on shelves, at the old speed you could afford to ignore them at the cost of dodging a constant harassing fire while you deal with other stuff, whereas at this speed they feel like a high priority threat and must be cleared out asap, which kind of slows things down for me.

For me, it makes the combat generally more hectic (requiring me to move more often and have quicker reflexes), and I enjoy it a lot.

Personally I don't enjoy -fast or Nightmare, everything moves too fast. It feels like having a nimble kid hit me on the head over and over with a fly swatter, hopping away before I can react. Those faster imp fireballs conjure the same kind of experience for me. But, and hopefully that's enough me me me to get that particular point across, that's just me. :)

Learning curve sounds about right. 20 years of instinctive expectations and muscle memory to overcome. There's no hard rule saying imps have to be slow. If nothing else this kind of change warrants waiting a few weeks/months for everyone to give it a fair shake.

The pyroknights seem easier to handle due to their smaller numbers, although close range can be brutal. Still a wee bit faster than I'm comfortable with, but, again, don't listen to the man playing Doom as a power fantasy. :)

Shadow Hog said:

My only experience with this WAD thus far was launching headfirst into Episode 5 on Hey, Not Too Rough. It felt like I'd accidentally selected Ultra-Violence. My own fault for starting with the very last episode, of course (I wanted to see the lightbridges in MAP28 :<), but the point here is that yes, the later stages really are going to be plenty challenging.

even on the lowest skill level. DX

speaking of those pyro-demons (or whatever they're called) how the fuck can you dodge those ditzes at close range? I have too much trouble dodging them even at long range and they feel horribly overpowering despite having about the same health as the hell knight.

MAP10

I think it's actually a bit bland to be honest, especially given it's mancubi-chaingunner-imp-cacodemon approach for pretty much the main area. the damaging blood plus the thin ground don't help much either. did a lot of camping and shooting with the single shotgun to weed out invaders. the one cyberdemon fight I had was too tight and it's impossible to avoid splash damage.

MAP11

open-ended affair which turned out to be pretty good after taking out those fucking annoying pyro-demons. there's a secret teleporter where you can telefrag those troublemakers and get a BFG, and much of the level was easily cleared after that.

MAP12

I liked it. rather low monster count but it's pretty dangerous and fun at the same time. blue key trap was pretty notable as were the caged chaingunners close to the exit.

edit: MAP13

and this large level is our episode ender. I don't like the fact that I'm right next to damaging blood again. there are tons of imp and mancubi snipers again which proved very annoying, but not as much so as the end battle against the tons of imps and caged hitscanners. thankfully the imps attack them too. much of my time here was spent slowly and methodically as possible. the YK area was pretty neat. an okay map.

Phml said:

Personally I don't enjoy -fast or Nightmare, everything moves too fast.

I agree, but my main problem with -fast is the drastically increased aggressivity of monsters. Fast projectiles of basic monsters are less of a problem for me, if I take them into account.

Phml said:

Learning curve sounds about right. 20 years of instinctive expectations and muscle memory to overcome. There's no hard rule saying imps have to be slow. If nothing else this kind of change warrants waiting a few weeks/months for everyone to give it a fair shake.

Easily imagine that they're not imps. They're, say, "Devils" (that's how the R667 monster is called). A new monster type. The new sprites suggest so, too. Classic imps exist, but elsewhere. Now you have to learn fighting this new monster. It's not that hard, actually - neither fighting the monster, nor learning about its projectile speed and remembering it. You don't need to overcome your experience, just pull it aside and make a new one. I can personally adapt easily this way. And as I said, the new appearance of the new enemies helps. If the Devil looked even more distinct from an Imp, you'd have it even easier.

Agreed, I don't really process the new imps as imps in my mind anymore.

I'm only in episode 2 right now but I personally like the fireball speed.

I'd like to cast my vote in favor of the fast Imp fireballs. I actually enjoy playing Imp-heavy maps on -fast, so for me it's not a real problem. However, I agree with mouldy that using too many of these Imps as ledge snipers can be problematic and lead to camping, as it did for me in Map02, and that was also because the Imps were joined with lots of hitscanners. When I encountered the fast Imps in the open field of Map01 they were a lot more fun. I think everyone needs to be a bit careful about overdoing ledge snipers. That was one of the main issues I had with BTSX E2 was the damned armies of snipers, so that you end up spending too much time plinking at turrets and not enough open-field combat. That's how my tastes run, anyway.

Haven't met the Pyroknight yet, so color me pre-intimidated. ;D

I tried making a PrBoom hack so that the -fast setting would affect a certain monster. The results were... horrifying...

I'm ok with the imps and the fast hell knight monster things. You do get used to the imp speed.

I'd say my biggest issue is that the easier difficulties are still really fucking hard, and many of the fights are essentially the same regardless of difficulty. For example I'm stuck on map 9 right now. Going from UV or HMP to HNTR doesn't really change the intro fight (other than the CG, but he's kind of secondary to the fight - he might get a single kill on you but once you know he's coming he's a quick disposal), nor does it change the fact you're facing sequences of 2-3 AVs throughout the level, or dealing with flying swarms over blood floors while using infinite monster height. Dealing with 8 revenants in an enclosed space isn't that much harder than dealing with 4. I'm not sure it should be that much easier anyway - slaughtermaps are basically UV or bust, and I still enjoy poking at Sunder on skill 1. It's just strange to see that in a more traditional level set, especially so early on.

Alright, here's the final batch of FDAs, for maps27-30. And here's a zip with all 32 demos.

My impressions overall... It's certainly a masterfully crafted mapset. The wonderful dehacked work adds a lot new things to the gameplay and for the most part feels totally consistent with the iwad content. The visuals are very "professional", impressively clean and polished everywhere.

But quite a few parts felt like a chore to play through. Various things contributed to this factor. Sometimes it was the low ratio of "important" fights to simple filler fights and cleanups, other times the battles felt recycled and lazy. I saw lots of arenas that were just circles or squares with some pillars, they were giving off an unpleasant lazy speedmap vibe. Many traps seemed just not dangerous enough, often with surprisingly easy escape routes.

And a few more words about the design. My problem is that many maps basically take one structural\visual idea and repeat it again and again. Like you appear in a black rock area, it is beautiful and everything and you're impressed. But then you realize that this is pretty much all you will be seeing in the level, just with slight variations. I think that is really bad and discouraging. It's perhaps the main reason why playing often felt like a chore to me. The maps just didn't offer enough NEW things to me, instead they offered one stylistic idea and then kept reusing it to death.

I wish there were more COOL things like these beautiful railings on map28. The map was yet another moon base thing but it added the railings and they made me smile. They made this map stand out from the rest. Unfortunately, this was only one of the few maps that had such a unique feature to them. So that's my beef I guess. I'm complaining that one-man megawad is an one-man megawad, with inevitable repetition and similarities in style. But hey, I still finished it in a day and a half. I like it. :)

Linguica said:

I tried making a PrBoom hack so that the -fast setting would affect a certain monster. The results were... horrifying...

That is some extreme gamma, dude.

SteveD said:

That is some extreme gamma, dude.

OK I made one just for you then

That totally should have been playing Linkin Park in the background.

Linguica said:

OK I made one just for you then

Way cool! Thanks. :)

just found this now... wow. i love those new enemies, especially the doom3 style pinky and the arachno that floats out of its mech when shot.

Started playing it today.

Memfis said:

My impressions overall... It's certainly a masterfully crafted mapset. The wonderful dehacked work adds a lot new things to the gameplay and for the most part feels totally consistent with the iwad content. The visuals are very "professional", impressively clean and polished everywhere.

But quite a few parts felt like a chore to play through. Various things contributed to this factor. Sometimes it was the low ratio of "important" fights to simple filler fights and cleanups, other times the battles felt recycled and lazy. I saw lots of arenas that were just circles or squares with some pillars, they were giving off an unpleasant lazy speedmap vibe. Many traps seemed just not dangerous enough, often with surprisingly easy escape routes.

And a few more words about the design. My problem is that many maps basically take one structural\visual idea and repeat it again and again. Like you appear in a black rock area, it is beautiful and everything and you're impressed. But then you realize that this is pretty much all you will be seeing in the level, just with slight variations. I think that is really bad and discouraging. It's perhaps the main reason why playing often felt like a chore to me. The maps just didn't offer enough NEW things to me, instead they offered one stylistic idea and then kept reusing it to death.

This sums up a lot of what I feel.

It might just be that it's a single author megawad, but I feel it has a lot of the things I dislike about modern Doom maps. Most notably the fact that absolutely everything is a trap. If you touch anything enticing a couple dozen monsters to jump on you every time. When this is done sparingly it's not so bad but when it's happening more than 3 times in a level you start to expect it which sucks the fun out of it imo.

I'm on map 6 now and I'm starting to get frustrated. Having 100 monsters sniping you from every point along a huge city scape with little to no way to retaliate is not my idea of challenging gameplay. It's really just irritating.

I guess it's not my cup of tea. I will say that I can appreciate all the work that must have went into detailing everything. I know that isn't easy. Even if someone doesn't care for the gameplay you have to admire how one person made a megawad.

^not only is the megawad trap-centric, it seems that this wad, along with other recent megawads that impressed many people, force you to get weapons by heading past a lot of monsters alerting a lot of enemies to your location. I'm not into the "modern style" of coordinated teleport traps and ideas either. it makes mapsets very hard even on the lowest skill level.

but I'll still play this because I want to see all the maps. :p

I haven't played it yet but that sounds like a real turn off for me.

I played on HMP the whole way through over the last 3 days. Hoo boy was that a blast. Haven't had that much fun playing Doom in a long while.

I wish I could make stuff this architecturally robust and epic, and give my maps such an acute sense of setting. The maps all feel like properly-scaled actual places, crafted to perfection. They all deliver in terms of gameplay versus proportion, too. You revisit areas often, find plenty of optional new places to explore, and none of the maps outstay their welcome (apart from the ones where I died a whole bunch - looking at you, MAP20). The only times I got stuck were due to my own stupidity ("oh I have a blue card, I should use it", etc.), although on a few maps, namely MAP17 and MAP26, I managed to kill a good 90% of the monsters before finding any keys.

Mega props for using the blur spheres on multiple occasions for actual purposes, even if MAP10 was a rather sudden and punishing introduction to the concept for me. :V Gotta love mowing down hordes of helpless hitscanners that would otherwise rip me to shreds in seconds.

The gameplay changes are great. Yay the pistol is actually useful. Yay the imps are rather threatening now. Yay the... okay, pyro demons can go fuck 'emselves. (At least they have only 500hp :V) All the gameplay changes are to the game's benefit, and frankly I'm staggered that you managed to get that many custom monsters in there. I would say only the suicide bombers felt superfluous to requirements. All that said, maybe the difficulty felt a bit choppy in places, i.e. some maps felt too lenient, others too punishing, just in terms of the way they were placed in the map roster. (Too easy: MAP22, MAP29, - too hard: MAP04, MAP08 (it's the first in the episode!), MAP18, MAP20.)

There were things I can say I wasn't a huge fan of: the abundance of sniping monsters which has already been raised here; the damaging-floor-heavy maps that often feature a lot of tightrope walking to navigate (usually involving aforementioned sniper monsters that are easily able to knock you off from both sides) - MAP08 and MAP17 were the greatest offenders here; and occasionally the map geometry got the better of me - I found myself slipping off ledges a lot and being unable to ascend steps from a certain angle because of the way they were shaped, particularly in the lunar maps.

This really is my ideal mapset: perfectly sized, insanely well-balanced, epic in scale, and a shit-ton of fun from start to finish, offering lots of fantastic new challenges, obstacles and gameplay elements that make it truly an adventure. Like any mapset of this size, though, it has its few flaws which I've already mentioned, so it's 9.5/10 from me.

Maybe I should play on UV now. :V (My arms and arse are about to fall off though so maybe later.)

Small bugs in MAP04:

Visual glitch here:
http://i.imgur.com/cZbRyxu.png

This caco that you can barely see above the cliff is stuck:
http://i.imgur.com/mRonSqb.png

FDAs for all maps, including secret ones, all finished (I'm too lazy to make a table like Memfis, so in case someone cares how muck I suck - didn't die on 01-11, 14, 31, 32, 16, 17, 22, 24, 25-29).
18 & 19 were the worst maps of this whole mapset for me, gimmicky crap turned everything into unfun mess.
Mastermind room and archvile corridor in 21 were also huge no-no. Wtf, was a good map up to that point, and then this...

Overall I liked E1, E3 & E5; E2 felt a bit meh but still okay; and E4 isn't really something I'd like to play (liked 22, 20 was fine, didn't care for the rest).

In the end - I liked Valiant and definitely had fun with it, some great maps to be found in here for sure. Impressive dehacked work to say the least, tables have turned on the player in many aspects. Unlike Memfis, I have no problems with design here, skillsaw's trademark style and tasteful approach are surely present to create some lovely environments; it was also cool to see ideas from Vanguard and Lunatic recreated in a new fashion.
...But - I wouldn't call it a masterpiece. Author's quest for variety has brought in some things that are highly questionable for me, some means to achieve higher difficulty seemed rather irritating, and on top of it all - I have to join those who think that ledge snipers are greatly overdone here. At first, I didn't care much; but when this feature began to reappear time after time after time until the very end - it has become really tiresome. I think I've spent most of the playing time picking all those fucksies off their eagles' nests. Not the most entertaining activity, to say the least...

Still - solid and innovative work, props for a good job.

3rd episode now:

MAP14

with a name like that I expected explosive stuff, and it delivered, the barrels provided extra kills which helped and the map was pretty good. with that there is yet another new monster, the suicide bomber. I think he sucks though, never found him to be a decent enemy. the archvile-bomber ending area was really bad for me.

MAP15

a bigger affair with a nasty start. yet there's still as more imp snipers than usual. kinda typical to be frank after that and I took it slow without much trouble. a kinky zombieman-bomber ambush at the yellow key. the blue key area was annoyingly tough with chaingunners. I got to the secret exit, and there better be a BFG in this one.

Map03 – Kills – 100, Items – 100, Secret – 100. End Health – 200, Armor 0. Death Count – 4. Bullets – 5, Shells – 18, Rockets – 1, Cells – 40

Another pre-breakfast blast. This map was so much fun. That line of health bonuses might as well have been a neon sign saying, “Rambo Me,” so I did. Of course I died a few times at the start, but this is to be expected as I probe the defenses while dying my way to victory. Lots of ledge snipers, their arcs of fire as lovingly thought-out as the WW2 anti-aircraft battery of an Iowa-class battleship. I had no issue with the snipers. They put a lot of pressure on me and helped make the action fun.

I'm really loving these Imps. They are a real factor in these maps and swarms of them accounted for my final death after getting the red key. Please, please, do not slow their fireballs down. Well, this is what I say while the maps are still easy, anyway. ;D

Once I gained a foothold, the action became very manageable. I was able to use the limited cover for a bit of corner-abuse and camping, but there's no need to cry about the camping here. Those Mancs were in really dangerous positions, and they made it hard for me to clear the ground monsters, so I had to take those into account when attacking the Mancs. Thus, corner-abuse is just a valid tactic in heavy combat like this. There was also plenty of open-field combat. I have zero complaints about the gameplay here, except that it ended too soon. ;)

Action was so fast and furious that I had already killed everything before I realized the red and blue keys only opened the exit. So I went back and collected all the secrets. It took me almost as long to figure those out as it did to fight the map. ;D The Plasma Gun jump was a bit awkward. Okay, there it is, my only criticism.

I really liked the way you used the non-playing area for detail and to improve the sense of place. I first encountered that type of design in BTSX E1, and I really like it.

Also, it has to be said, those trees are awesome!

I wish I could play through this as fast as Jimmy, Demonologist and Memfis did. Won't be possible, alas, but I look forward to Map04 to see if it's as tough as they say it is.

So far, as I mentioned in another thread, this mapset is like Doom heroin.

SteveD said:

I wish I could play through this as fast as Jimmy, Demonologist and Memfis did. Won't be possible, alas,

Not if you stop after each map to write an article about it. :)

scifista42 said:

Not if you stop after each map to write an article about it. :)

LOL!

Too true. ;)

secret maps, oh noes!

MAP31

crazy ass slaughtermap. I hate the TRON setting though because for me it's hard to see projectiles and there's plenty of that being thrown around. speaking of which, a new type of mancubus is here in this map with more fireballs than the ordinary map. two different settings, the TRON setting and the regular base setting, and what's cool is I revisit both of them to unlock further areas. the TRON setting has the harder combat IMO, as there's not many invulnerabilities plus the damaging floors make radiation suits a necessity. combat could get freaky at a lot of points above the liquid as well. the worst bit is that platforming bull near the exit, particularly with the arachnotron wall and chaingunner wall, and especially the goddamned pyro-demons at the friggin' end

the second part of the map is a little better with a little more slaughter goodness, but I don't like it too much because of the trenches. oh god, those fucking trenches were so awfully hard to avoid. I had to go around and ride a lift back up and then jump off a side to get back, as those are just voraciously huge gaps there. although the invulnerabilities on the lifts make things easier, not being able to tell where the trenches are make it so much harder (and practically waste invulnerability time). Ultimate Dick Move.

SteveD will accept this nasty challenge of a map for sure though when he gets to it.

MAP32

and now in Egypt all of a sudden with this more laid-back map. cool to see those modified mancubi again. the alternative gray part of the map was super cool with ghostly monsters, including revenant spectres! I didn't like the imp ambush+suicide bombers upon returning though, nor did I like the "one archvile spectre-at-a-time" exit area. but it's still a cool map.

Wow, this is insanely buggy in prboom-plus -complevel 11. About half the time it crashes when you release the imps from the first trap, random weapon sprites constantly appear through the ground for no apparent reason (?!?!?!), and the imp sprites flicker like crazy and also occasionally transform into other things for a split-second (I've seen them become Cacodemons, Marines, and Barons).

I know that you list ZDoom as optimal, but you also have prboom-plus as supported; however, this is almost unplayable.

Cynical said:

Wow, this is insanely buggy in prboom-plus -complevel 11. About half the time it crashes when you release the imps from the first trap, random weapon sprites constantly appear through the ground for no apparent reason (?!?!?!), and the imp sprites flicker like crazy and also occasionally transform into other things for a split-second (I've seen them become Cacodemons, Marines, and Barons).

I know that you list ZDoom as optimal, but you also have prboom-plus as supported; however, this is almost unplayable.

Are you on 2.5.1.4?

No idea. How do I find out?

EDIT: No, I'm 2.5.1.3. I'll see if updating helps.

DOUBLE EDIT: Where the hell is 2.5.1.4 available? The latest version on the sourceforge is 2.5.1.3, and google searches aren't turning up download links for the newer version.

Read the first post.

Upgraded; still get crashes most of the time. This is still unplayable in prboom-plus

"I_SignalHandler: Exiting on signal: signal 11"