The Dean of Doom series (companion thread)

I must admit that for the most part I agree with the review. I know that Hell Revealed hasn't aged well, however there are some very good maps buried within this, whose ideas have been replicated numerous times (Map22 and 24 for example). I don't really get that feeling from Hell revealed 2, yes there are some cool vanilla tricks but they don't tend to offer that much where it counts. Many of the maps are very grindy and making the wad more difficult only exacerbates this feeling. 

Comparing some of the maps where Hell Revealed maps are clearly used as inspiration.

Map09 - I must confess that I think the grade was harsh, sure Siege 2 is not a good map, but at least it fits the name unlike its predecessor and that gameplay is certainly different. I guess the biggest criticism is how lazy the execution of the idea was. I think Map24 and 28 are far worse maps.

Map13 - An example of where the map it homages (Dead Progressive - HR map25) is better. The HR map is fun and breezy, this is a slog.

Map15 - In fairness this is a significant improvement and is one the poster childs for HR2.

Map31 - I guess the post descent part is better, it still sucks though.

Map27 - Another example of where the HR original is better.

I think in the end, Alien Vendetta was released a year or so prior to this, and is quite simply a better product. 

Just watched the HR2 episode, and I'm reassured to see he disliked it as much as I did. 

It was the megawad being played as part of the April 2020 Doomworld Megawad Club the one time I decided to try joining it, and what a rough experience that was.  I was so ready to enjoy it and write about it every day, and it just turned into a massively disappointing slog.  The maps were badly designed, the gameplay was either mean or grindy, and I realized after a while I just wasn't having any fun.  I think I lasted until Map 20 or so and then gave up.

Reassuring to see I didn't miss much after that!

On 5/23/2021 at 2:16 PM, Doomkid said:

Personally, I think HR2 looks damn good for the most part, though that map with the huge blank grey wall and FWATER still looks pretty 1994, but it's the exception rather than the rule imo.

yeah, same here. while i can see why people would hate the gameplay (although i've never played it myself) it looks perfectly fine.

then again, our standards of "visually pleasing" are much, much lower than most people :p

Commenting cuz I frigging love Dean Of Doom and I wanna be part of the discussion for the next review ^_^

On lundi 24 mai 2021 at 12:14 AM, Doomkid said:

Well, for players of a greater skill than myself, that generalization may not be the case.. but to try and expand on the idea, slaughtermaps with huge arenas and numbers of enemies tend to be much more popular than "standard Doom maps" in the realm of cooperative/MP Doom in general. Without tooting my own horn, something like Ray Mohawk 1 is a fun little hour-long campaign with some genuine ebbs and flows when played in SP.. but when it comes to co-op, forget it - it's a 10 minute little pushover by comparison. Maybe still enjoyable for a very small crew of 2-3 people, but it's a cakewalk ultimately without the gameplay restrictions SP causes.

Well there's two massive differences between coop and SP. The first is that, unless playing survival or something, if you die in coop, you just respawn. The enemies don't, so eventually, victory is guaranteed.

The second is what is called the action economy in tabletop games.

Quote

Many people would define an economy as an exchange of money. That’s a misconception. The definition of an economy is a system of production, distribution, or consumption of limited goods and services by agents in a given geographical location. Let’s dissect this definition and apply it to [Doom].

• The “system” in the action economy is combat [snip].
• The “agents” who produce, distribute, or consume goods or services in the combat system are [players and monsters].  The geographical location is the [map].
• The “limited goods” being produced, distributed, or consumed are actions in combat. (Services are not applicable in the action economy.) 

In short, we can define the action economy as the production, distribution, or consumption of actions in [Doom] combat by [players and monsters] on the [map]. A definition like that almost makes you forget that you’re playing a game, eh?

The rest of the aforelinked article is less relevant because it goes into illustrating the concept with game mechanics that are completely different from Doom's, but the basic principle remains. A map that is designed to be a fair challenge against the action output of a single player is going to be a lot less challenging against the action output of two players. Or three. Or four. Or sixteen. Simply put, more players means more shooting. If it takes one minute for a player to kill a boss monsters, it's gonna take 15 seconds for four players.

Now you could balance that by increasing the amount of monsters, but there's a problem with that, too: if the level isn't designed to let monsters efficiently threaten the players, more monsters mostly means more infighting, which ends up making the level easier instead of harder. Just taking E1M1 and copy-pasting all the monsters in it a few times is not going to be a good challenge for a coop team. While players are smart, monsters are stupid. Monsters cannot do things such as aiming elsewhere or moving if another monster is in their line of fire. Monsters also move slowly and don't fire as fast as they could while their have players in their line of sight (nightmare mode changes that a bit, but even then, they're still slower than players). Monsters also don't move to find a better angle if all their projectiles end up colliding with some geometry instead of hitting their target.

And it's not just shooting! With several players, you can cheese levels more easily, too. Take a basic arena trap. The player enters the arena, then after crossing an invisible line, the door closes, keeping the player stuck in the arena, while monsters spawn everywhere. Now make it multiplayer: one player enters the arena, while another stays in the doorway. The player crosses the line, then retreats through the door that the other player is keeping open. Now both players have partial cover to shoot at the monsters that are spawning in front of them.

So more players can do more things more quickly than a single player. If the level is actually easy, you risk getting in a situation where the fastest player basically clears the level on their own and the other players just follow around, getting bored. You need a very difficult map with a lot of monsters just to make sure every player can have fun blasting some monsters.

I'm right there with MtPain when it comes to both HR megawads, and frankly I think they're some of the wads most undeserving of their "classic" status. They're just not fun to play, only remembered for how fucking difficult they are. I don't even think they look that amazing frankly.

11 minutes ago, CasualScrub said:

I'm right there with MtPain when it comes to both HR megawads, and frankly I think they're some of the wads most undeserving of their "classic" status. They're just not fun to play, only remembered for how fucking difficult they are. I don't even think they look that amazing frankly.

The reason they are classic megawads is because of the influence the first one had on the mapping scene I believe.

I was just playing through Alien Vendetta and thinking MtPain has a point with respect to Map 06. There are certainly some fun parts and aspects, but throwing masses of Hell Knights and Cybderdemons at you without giving you the supplies to make their killing efficient....is rather unpleasantly reminiscent of Hell Revealed...and I'm playing continuous.

Dean of Doom's been a great way for me to be more thoughtful of the WADs I'm playing.

new video is up

ayy, just in time to finish off the month

I gotta say as someone who's a doom scrub (I usually play on HMP or HNTR if a wad is really hard) MTpain did a really good job selling Scythe 2 despite having no interest in Plutonia 2 and a lot of the other super hard wads he plays

I've been eagerly waiting for this one all month. :)

2 minutes ago, AnonKaiju said:

I gotta say as someone who's a doom scrub (I usually play on HMP or HNTR if a wad is really hard) MTpain did a really good job selling Scythe 2 despite having no interest in Plutonia 2 and a lot of the other super hard wads he plays

Me too, I suck at Doom yet Scythe 2 has been sold to me, not sure if I'll play it for that reason that I suck even if the hard ones are at the end

25 minutes ago, 1Destro3456 said:

Me too, I suck at Doom yet Scythe 2 has been sold to me, not sure if I'll play it for that reason that I suck even if the hard ones are at the end

i'd say to maybe wait a little before playing it. i tried playing it earlier this year and jfc i got my ass kicked, and i'm only now gonna try to finish it now that i've beaten speed of doom and plutonia 2

you should definitely play it tho. it's absolutely freakin fantastic, even if i do hate its custom enemies

Great episode! With the exception of three or so maps, I agree with MtPain's grades. The soundtrack, for me, is what boosts Scythe II from simply a great megawad to one of legend - much like Sunlust or Valiant's OSTs, they're a perfect match for the levels' atmosphere and action.

That statement about Death "sticking in your mind for a long time, whether you like it or not" is so accurate that it hurts. I first played Scythe II around three weeks ago, and I still think about MAP26 and its music when watching Doom videos or mapping. That level changes anyone who goes through it, and the rest of the hell levels further cements said change.

(It's pretty funny watching decino's all-ghosts analysis video and this episode back to back, because I got the bug to happen during Haunting Dreams' arch-vile assault.)

1 hour ago, 1Destro3456 said:

 

new video is up

https://tenor.com/view/the-lion-king-lion-king-monkey-talking-rafiki-gif-17580008

This Dean of Doom makes it very difficult to decide whether to be satisfied with having played through Scythe 2 Map22 (after which I gave up) or play through maps 23-30 on ITYTD because there's no way any higher difficulty is feasible at my skill level.

Great review for a great wad. I was particularly excited to hear him speak about MAP26. It's a map I've always been strangely fascinated with and I recalled his note where he mentioned being stuck on it in the past. Has to be one of the most brutal maps I've ever seen with a monster count under 100 (a number it doesn't even come close to IIRC).

I think this was my favorite episode of dean of doom so far. Scythe 2 is one of my 3 favorite megawads and I requested it for him to write down when I first saw his videos so I was anticipating this and it did not disappoint. It exceeded expectations by a lot.

I might play this one day(unlike Plutonia 2, probably at #12 in my megawad list)...but probably with mods for the last 8 maps because while I could probably get through 21-24 with a minimum amount of tries, I know my limits and feel like Death would be impossible.

I really like map29, for similar reasons as Demon of the Well here.

It is a very clever austerity map, and the scenarios that can arise are fun and panic-inducing and even occasionally hilarious.

In isolation, it wouldn't be my favorite Scythe 2 map, or I think even top-3. But a lot of what makes the rest of Scythe 2's back third fun and good isn't too hard to come by among slaughtermaps released in the dozen years since it. So I have BFG spam maps I like better, encounter-based slaughter I like better, "zone of influence" slaughter I like better, pure Tyson maps I like better. But the scarcity approach of "Dust to Dust" is a lot rarer in many ways: it's a combat puzzle, a resource puzzle, a routing puzzle, and a "herd things halfway across the map" puzzle; it uses odd tropes for modern palates, like terrain that is punishing through being awkward and obtrusive, rather than full of inescapable pits or heavy on platforming; it delights in blurring the lines between what looks like progression and what looks like breaking things; it delights just as much in breaking the rules ("don't put the early SSG in a secret!" Alm, mishearing: "good point, I'll make it a vilejump secret!"). Overall I think this still stands up as a brilliant, model example of uncompromising "doing a lot with a little" design. 

Also I find a lot of the nonsense in it mechanically fun to do too, which is incredibly important to me enjoying it. This is a bit of a digression, but I didn't realize for a while that many people assume anyone who likes a hard map (especially of this sort), or anyone who likes practicing things like cyberdemon two-shots, does so primarily for abstract reasons, like strategy or "skill testing" -- rather than enjoying the mechanics and feelings involved on a very basic level, just as one might enjoy gibbing fodder with rockets. As someone who likes both, it's basically the same for me. So I'll point that out too because I spent the whole last paragraph praising abstractions.

When I saw this video pop up, I decided to play through Scythe 2 (for the first time) before watching it. I can definitely see why it's considered a classic. The architecture is impressive, and it manages to accomplish a lot with relatively few textures. The levels look great, even if maps within an episode tended to blur together (probably also because I've only played them once).

I enjoyed the earlier levels, as well as the more leasurely slaughter of maps 28 and 30, but I found some of the hardest maps also the least fun to play. Most modern combat puzzle maps I've played will provide you with everything you need to solve them. In Scythe 2, I frequently felt like I was being punished for not knowing the map ahead of time. Saved after a tough fight left you at 40 health and no armor? Too bad, the next fight is even harder and doesn't give you any resources. The most frustrating encounter by far was the one at the water pit on the yellow key path in map 25. Mt. Pain highlighted it as one of the hardest, and he had a BFG. The only way to get the BFG is to do the red key path first, but there's no way of knowing that beforehand. The area instantly fills with enemies, including evil marines and chaingunners that can shred you in seconds. The way enemies teleport in is also completely random, so retrying that fight over and over felt less like I was getting better at it and more like I was just trying to get lucky. These kinds of situations left a bad taste in my mouth even though overall I had a good time with Scythe 2.

This is probably the kind of wad that gets better if you play it multiple times. Once you know what to expect and where the secrets are, you can plan accordingly and it will feel a lot more fair. Although I don't think I'll ever come to appreciate the evil marines.

Also, I found a many of the music tracks grating. It made me realize how spoiled we are nowadays with tons of great made-for-doom midis. The music's not bad, but some of the tracks were just too short or repetitive. I didn't think I could dislike Dancing Mad, but after an hour of listening to the first part of it on repeat I was desperate to get the map over with.

:D

On 4/3/2021 at 9:45 AM, a.a.i. said:

Great channel. I liked the episode on Scythe very much in particular. I found his closing remarks quite interesting. He calls it the "SAT of Doom WADs" and says if you can beat it, you're in the top 1% of Doom players worldwide. What are people's thoughts on that? 

Adding to what rd and others said, in the newest episode (Scythe 2) he mentions that it’s like Scythe 1 in the sense that if you beat all the levels with ease you’re in the top 1% of Doom players, so he really meant with that “knock out of the park” to do those last levels easily

And I was just gonna jokingly claim that he ought to be added to "most promising new members whose claim to fame was cut too short...

I was literally rewatching some of his videos yesterday hoping that he'd upload soon.

That was a treat to watch, so glad he enjoyed them on the whole. Entertaining as always!

This rant is a diversion from the purpose of the thread, but - as salty as I was when IcarusLives pooped on Doomed in Space back in 2018, I’m pretty thankful now. The one thing that really stuck with me was how he said the weapons had lame sound effects and felt weak. It’s part of why Rudy and Ray ended up with the arsenal they did, for their second episodes anyway. And I think it can go further without breaking the game, so I’ll have to play with that idea in the future..