The Dean of Doom series (companion thread)

On 10/14/2022 at 9:57 AM, Firedust said:

Oh, how I wish someone took over the reins on ED V...

Chris Couleur came here some months back and said he would try contacting Rex and Adam to see if they'd be ok with re-starting it. It's hard to say if that's going on or not.

On 10/8/2022 at 3:26 AM, Firedust said:

Real shame Scythe X will never get finished.

Not keeping my hopes up, but Mouldy also gave absolutely zero signs of interest in Doom for years (even said in their own Overboard thread that they played pretty much no Doom for who knows how long) and here we are, with a new mapset. Insane_Gazebo went MIA for a decade before continuing Sunder.

You never know. 

Good takes from Mt Pain again. PRCP is probably my least favourite Plutonia PWAD by quite a margin. The sequel is miles better in every aspect.

Halloween has been nothing but bangers so far, so I'm excited to see what we get this time.

7 hours ago, Thelokk said:

 

Not keeping my hopes up, but Mouldy also gave absolutely zero signs of interest in Doom for years (even said in their own Overboard thread that they played pretty much no Doom for who knows how long) and here we are, with a new mapset. Insane_Gazebo went MIA for a decade before continuing Sunder.

You never know. 

Anyway, what Alm's brother said was that he was too busy with his job to really bother and I'm sure that's especially so these past 2 1/2 years. Honestly, he probably has less opportunity than Dario probably has to spend time mapping or whatever.

You know i have played this megawad when working on my plutonia wad. All i'm going to say is this: Yes it maybe a megawad from the era where you got your ass handed to you...but i feel like it lost it's chance to stack up to it's.....what did mt pain say? Oh yeah it's weird and kinda all over the place, unlike it's 2006 brother.

But overall i never finished it because i lost internet in after map 10. I mean not saying the mappers are bad, i'm just saying that this is what i mean by your killing gameplay for more cool stuff you can make with linedefs and such. Creative linedefs dose not equal good gameplay.

I feel i need to toss a disclaimer in for this, only because i feel like this will get taking out of contexts and such...

This is my personal option on the subject at hand. No i did not just say this because i wanted to, i've played this before he made a video on it and after watching this i do agree that it kinda, i word trashy is too harsh so let's just say the mapset is odd and confusing.

Not saying there aren't any good maps in this but like i said before making stuff look really cool with linedefs dose not equal better gameplay. Hell i'll take a step further and say that i don't care about making a map look like really detailed and have a ton of whatever i'm think of at this moment of typing. For me as a mapper i've learned that making maps is more then "oh look what i can draw/make in a doom editor" it's more of "what dose the player want from this? How can i make the player sweat bullets?" and the most important one is this "Will they have fun playing my map and enjoy it and not get bored of it". 

And as the dean of doom once said "At the end of the day. It's about spreading the joy of doom".

PRCP seems to mostly all blend together for me. My attention actually lapsed during that video due to so many maps looking near identical that I had to go back a few times to stop my eyes glazing over, I still cant remember anything about what he said about Map 18, and he named that the best in the set!

Only his criticisms of Xaser and Whoo's maps still stay in my memory, and that's immediately after watching it.

Speaking of Whoo's map, has there even been a bugfix for it at all? Be nice to have a tie breaker for the dunce cap after all. :P

I've been seeing a reccuring theme with the recent Dean of Doom episodes and thats "Your favorite wad/that wad everyone likes, Isn't as good as you think it is" and how many people agree with his sentiments.

Don't know what to make of it, but thats just something I observed. 

Player Tastes change over time i guess. Let's see if im around long enough to see the "Going Down and Eviternity are bad actually" takes 10 years down the line from community members.

Agreed with Dean regarding PRCP. Since I have a fairly recent memory of playing both PL2 and PRCP, I vastly prefer PL2. PRCP felt considerably less polished and not as consistently good. Plus I really hated Map19 to a point where it almost singlehanded drop PRCP, though thankfully I didn't. Though one thing PRCP does better than PL2 is that it's maps on average feel much closer to Plutonia's spirit than PL2

and with this he has now reviewed 3 (TNTR, PL2, PRCP) out of 4 popular Final Doom community projects..

TNT2 when? ;')

47 minutes ago, Delfino Furioso said:

and with this he has now reviewed 3 (TNTR, PL2, PRCP) out of 4 popular Final Doom community projects..

TNT2 when? ;')

 

Not until all the maps completed. 2024?

13 minutes ago, Firedust said:

Not until all the maps completed. 2024?

*2224

1 hour ago, Delfino Furioso said:

and with this he has now reviewed 3 (TNTR, PL2, PRCP) out of 4 popular Final Doom community projects..

TNT2 when? ;')

 

Don't forget PRCP2 which recently released!

I'm still hoping he'll review No End in Sight and some other classic megawads oddly missing from his show, even though he tends to rip the old classics a new one, ha.

Looking forward to the Plutonia 7 review!

12 hours ago, xScavengerWolfx said:

You know i have played this megawad when working on my plutonia wad. All i'm going to say is this: Yes it maybe a megawad from the era where you got your ass handed to you...but i feel like it lost it's chance to stack up to it's.....what did mt pain say? Oh yeah it's weird and kinda all over the place, unlike it's 2006 brother.

 

But overall i never finished it because i lost internet in after map 10. I mean not saying the mappers are bad, i'm just saying that this is what i mean by your killing gameplay for more cool stuff you can make with linedefs and such. Creative linedefs dose not equal good gameplay.

 

I feel i need to toss a disclaimer in for this, only because i feel like this will get taking out of contexts and such...

 

This is my personal option on the subject at hand. No i did not just say this because i wanted to, i've played this before he made a video on it and after watching this i do agree that it kinda, i word trashy is too harsh so let's just say the mapset is odd and confusing.

 

Not saying there aren't any good maps in this but like i said before making stuff look really cool with linedefs dose not equal better gameplay. Hell i'll take a step further and say that i don't care about making a map look like really detailed and have a ton of whatever i'm think of at this moment of typing. For me as a mapper i've learned that making maps is more then "oh look what i can draw/make in a doom editor" it's more of "what dose the player want from this? How can i make the player sweat bullets?" and the most important one is this "Will they have fun playing my map and enjoy it and not get bored of it". 

 

And as the dean of doom once said "At the end of the day. It's about spreading the joy of doom".

This is a really strange post because well over half of PRCP is at best serviceable aesthetically, or even bare/ugly, and those maps way outnumber anything that is consistently pretty. And even when it's pretty, it does so with minimalist design rather than "using lots of linedefs." And there's no evidence or even correlatives with it sacrificing gameplay in favor of aesthetics. The (universally) worst maps of PRCP tend to just lack quality across the board. 

"what i mean by your killing gameplay for more cool stuff you can make with linedefs and such. Creative linedefs dose not equal good gameplay.

." / "linedefs dose not equal better gameplay" just reads like a weird strawman of PRCP's failings. (I'll admit I don't like PRCP either.)

There is this pattern (I'm speaking in general here now, rather than about PRCP specifically) where many people are easily impressed by aesthetics (or "technicality"), so then pair that with their own subjective dislike of the gameplay, and incorrectly assume that visuals must have been way more the wad's design focus than it probably was. But it seems like people are not accounting for the perceptual differences of visuals vs. gameplay: 

- gameplay preference is always very subjective/personal (there are vanishingly few wads of any length that >50% of people will finish and  enjoy -- even Valiant has lots of people bouncing off it -- and it's not because people are worse at designing gameplay)

- visual design is extremely easy to appreciate as "good"/impressive even when it's not your cuppa (the peak here is well over >50%) 

- that usually isn't the case for gameplay at all 

- visual design is often very easy to abstractly overrate, because unless you're an experienced mapper, you don't really know the 'tricks' that someone can use to make, like, idk, serviceable/decent or even good visuals surprisingly quickly. and one 'trick' good design plays is that maps often look higher detail on inspection than they really are (see: all the people who every year call Valiant or Ancient Aliens "high-detail" when (outside of some AA guest maps) they are modestly detailed / pretty economical).

- gameplay design effort is easy to underrate, because nearly everything that goes into it is "invisible work" like testing, tweaking, whereas visual design effort is always there (although kind of easy to overrate or underrate in certain ways too)

So sum that up and a lot of people (who don't realize that's going on) read wads that are balanced between visuals and gameplay as having clearly emphasized visuals as a virtue -- and I've seen that as a pretty questionable take about a lot of wads now. 

Like it's fair to simply say, "I liked the aesthetics but not the gameplay," which is always true in the sense that people are right about their own subjective experiences. But when you get into "you cared more about the aesthetics than the gameplay, don't do that" type dogma you need much more perspective to be making accurate claims (not to mention telling people what to care about while mapping is more than a bit overbearing lol). 

11 hours ago, jazzmaster9 said:

I've been seeing a reccuring theme with the recent Dean of Doom episodes and thats "Your favorite wad/that wad everyone likes, Isn't as good as you think it is" and how many people agree with his sentiments.

 

Don't know what to make of it, but thats just something I observed. 

Player Tastes change over time i guess. Let's see if im around long enough to see the "Going Down and Eviternity are bad actually" takes 10 years down the line from community members.

Player tastes do change, but this just seems like more of a sampling thing. People see video and vent about That Wad They Hate, whereas people who like it are like "eh whatever it's just one person's opinion." Comments for one video are only a tiny  % of the total community. I have read  a lot of negative criticisms about these recently featured wads dating back several years, so that's not a new thing at all. Also there is definitely a vocal crowd of people who dislike Eviternity and Going Down right now. (Eviternity for one has one of the most memorable rants, on ZDF.) So if a video by popular Doomtuber Habitat22 came out and gave either of those a B with a negative tone and took Eviternity to task for its emphasis on pretty design and theme over gameplay, and Going Down for its emphasis on Doomcute and elevators over gameplay (see how easy that pattern is), you'd get a ton of comments springing up in "solidarity." 

11 hours ago, jazzmaster9 said:

I've been seeing a reccuring theme with the recent Dean of Doom episodes and thats "Your favorite wad/that wad everyone likes, Isn't as good as you think it is" and how many people agree with his sentiments.

 

Don't know what to make of it, but thats just something I observed. 

Player Tastes change over time i guess. Let's see if im around long enough to see the "Going Down and Eviternity are bad actually" takes 10 years down the line from community members.

 

i think he just doesn't like the Xaser older works on newer episodes, and i can respect the distaste, though i don't think calling Xaser "pretentious" fits him either, the dude's work on doom mods and music shows to be quite good on those front.

In recent times i see him being picked as the go to guy if you want some help with weapons or other wild stuff and whatnot, which i guess it's fits his work better, if anything the fact that he is a jack of all trades shows his limits, that isn't to say he is immune to criticism or he can't improve.

That being said MTPain did like his eviternity entry (map26, he gave it Both A in grade and difficulty) but he did say the combat was somewhat weak.

As for Eviternity Dislike, I can see why it can be hated, The new monster types, lenghty maps (I personally find the final chapter to be tedious but that's just me), otex but at the end of the day, it's a bloody set of maps for a soon to be 30 year old game, that after a year of it's release it got a forum recommendation for being of good quality, we are bloody human here, No matter what, it's just an opinion.

In summary: it's litterally what MTPain writes on how the show works

Quote

Caveats:

- I'm an experienced player but not a doom God

- We won't always agree :(

My overall opinion on the Dean's videos is that he does his best work when he actually enjoys the wad, or finds the wad good from a critical stand point. In contrast to a reviewer like Civie11 who is at his best when he's reviewing "jank", the Dean's excels at positive reviews.

He just sounded bored in this last video.

MAP05 from PRCP is probably the worst Plutonia map ever made and aside from the texture theme, it has nothing to do with Plutonia. It certainly does not feel like an outtake neither Milo nor Dario would make. 

Awesome episode! I hope Lainos comes back one day. He made some legendary levels.

Comatose is one of my favorite maps to play with -nomonsters. Even though I can't stand the spectral enemies to the point where my only full playthrough with monsters was using the -nodeh parameter to strip out the DeHackEd, I still love the map. Hope the Dean covers 5till L1 Complex someday.

Russian mappers are a proof that using mp3/ogg tunes in maps is criminally underrated. Comatose is an exemple of atmospheric masterpiece but I can also mention more maps from the russian community known for their powerful and captivating atmosphere using a non-midi soundtrack :

- Map 02 "Doxylamine Moon"  by Lainos from Sacrement

- Map 15 "Floating World" by Dragon Hunter from Whitemare 2

- Map 04 "Warp of time" by Eternal from Hell ground (already feature in DoD)

- Map 11 "Controlled System" by Beewen from Sacrement (That one is maybe my favourite)

And I forgot many others.

1 hour ago, Shepardus said:

Comatose is one of my favorite maps to play with -nomonsters. Even though I can't stand the spectral enemies to the point where my only full playthrough with monsters was using the -nodeh parameter to strip out the DeHackEd, I still love the map. Hope the Dean covers 5till L1 Complex someday.

I definitely like this way of making spectral enemies more than the zdoom stealth monsters.

Comatose is deliciously unsettling even with NoMo.

Wormwood's rocket gimmicks are so creative. I never knew your own rockets would just pass through you.

The mappers from Ukraine and Russia make some of my favourite content. Da Will, Sacrament and ALT in particular are unforgettable. Wish that clan didn't break up during ALT's development, I want to see more stuff by Azamael(?)

Lainos and Eternal in particular make great stuff.

Really hope DoD covers the BoS wads down the line.

Something I would really like to see mtpain do is re-upload some of his older videos with footage that is either re-recorded or re-edited so that the footage isn't resampled. I still like those older review videos but the ugly resampling filter gives me nausea and makes episodes 1 through 7 or so pretty much unwatchable.

I wonder if/ when he's going to do the other Community Chests. CC4 in particular would make for a good episode, I think. 

I never hear anything at all about CC3 aside from how good Black Rain supposedly is. The rest is never spoken of. The other three all have good and infamous maps in them, or textures in 4's case, so its kind of amusing.