Behold! A Peak of Doom level design
How TF this could be a peak o level design?
This toilet is not enclosed at all! Whoever design this bathroom is a moron.
Behold! A Peak of Doom level design
The shit am i doing wrong?
... with cross in signature? Dude, put there something about virgins in afterlife.Converting to Islam
Well, it didn't go like that for me. I found that the mod doesn't try to pressure you: you don't have to fight big groups of enemies; you are not put into tight spaces, where your movement is limited; the encounter design itself is "meh" in general. The levels are pretty big and offer some freedom for you to explore, but due to the lackluster gameplay going through them feels like a slog, you can't even go fast, because it's not always clear where to go and you also risk missing important items. The weapons, the new enemies should've been introduced earlier, the difficulty should've been higher from the start, the mod is only 9 levels long, there is no time to drip feed the player. It's also unclear wether the levels were designed for pistol starts or not. You can find mushrooms in secret areas, those mushrooms are supposed to open another secret area that containts a secret weapon and a secret boss, but it's not implemented as of yet. Obviously you can't keep the mushrooms if you decide to pistol start, but the weapon and ammo placement suggests that the levels were actually designed with pistol starting in mind, so what is the actual correct way to play this mod?I complete it & I enjoy it.
From what i remember:
Quite difficult. The ammo is too scarce, if you dont find some secretes. All items are valuable. not sure about weapon balance, because I was using what I have. I remember constatly escaping from enemies. One level I could not clear some part of the map to search for secrets to increase supplies. So I complete this map only with sword (taking only fights that i can win), because I find regeneration sphere, and after each battle, I was going to make myself tea :D .
First maps are okish, but the further I go, the better the map become (bigger spaces, more epic, more details, architecture was more interesting). And stronger monster you face. Also there are new bosses, that looks great (and you can just escape the fight with them - that was brilliant touch).
So I've been playing some Build Engine stuff recently. I remember some guy saying that you can't really create any unique encounters with Duke Nukem 3D enemy roster, their purpose is to look cool and die with some fancy visuals. This is what I've experienced pretty much, there's no real drive to the combat like in Doom or Quake, you won't be maneuvering around hundreds of enemies using their bodies to hide from chaingunner fire or revenenat rockets, you won't go through crazy shit like archvile carousel from sunlust or mancubian candidate from valiant, or solve enemy puzzles like in cyberdreams, you won't be getting that sick Quake movement and it's weapon switching combos either, that's all because the Build Engine games weren't designed to support that. That applies to all games from the mighty trinity: Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior, Blood. So you end up going through levels enjoying pretty visuals while doing some trivial combat from time to time, I guess you can say that cinematic shooters really started with Build Engine games, even before Half Life came out.
Sure, but I believe that you can deliver both strong combat and good visuals with some interactivity, theoretically at least. I still enjoy playing Build Engine games, but it's pretty sad to realize something like this.Duke 3D was probably one of the first big "Set piece" FPS. You had lots of fancy stuff going on in the environments, like buildings being demolished and "cinematic" changes to the maps.
I don't think Duke can be blamed for that. No matter what happened the more realistic shooters would have always killed off good enemies. What I think it can be laid at the feet of, is the supposed continuations of "classic" FPS design from the early '00s, like Serious Sam and Painkiller. For all their praise they seemed less like shooters of old, even compared to console FPS campaigns, and more like a different kind of decline. They had nice-looking levels, but with little regard to actually fighting enemies. While the realistic ones kept a good hand on their level design in relation to enemy placement.Duke 3D started the of game designers not understanding how to make good enemies. Difficulty ends up comes from lots of hitscanners with too much HP that just surprise you and shoot. Chaingun guys in Doom 2 were hated for this reason but at least they were very fragile, easy to stun and useful for triggering infighting.
I don't think Duke can be blamed for that. No matter what happened the more realistic shooters would have always killed off good enemies. What I think it can be laid at the feet of, is the supposed continuations of "classic" FPS design from the early '00s, like Serious Sam and Painkiller. For all their praise they seemed less like shooters of old, even compared to console FPS campaigns, and more like a different kind of decline. They had nice-looking levels, but with little regard to actually fighting enemies. While the realistic ones kept a good hand on their level design in relation to enemy placement.
Blood is better than Duke, but dynamite being a staple weapon is just a work-around to the fact that cultist hitscan is ridiculous so you just bounce dynamite around corners constantly.I would say combat in Blood 1 was still good, but maybe its because of the glorious dynamite.
I don't argue that most games failed to use hitscanners wisely, but rather that the true decline in enemy quality is that developers don't give a shit nor do they need to. I don't disagree that Duke's hitscanners are unfun to fight, I never finished the game because they kill my enthusiasm that hard. The thing is that anyone designing their game isn't just going to be playing Duke, they'll be playing Shadow Warrior and Blood too, which had their hitscanners treated as the killing machines they are. I'd even go as far to say those two games had monsters to rival Doom, except all the human monsters are just the same sprite recolored. (although SW's invisible ninja definitely makes an impact the first time you fight one) I have to agree, at this point, that there are no successors to Doom that has as good as monster selection. Key word, successor, Catacomb Armageddon and Nitemare 3D have as good monster selections, but are very much not successors.I don't think Duke can be blamed for that. No matter what happened the more realistic shooters would have always killed off good enemies. What I think it can be laid at the feet of, is the supposed continuations of "classic" FPS design from the early '00s, like Serious Sam and Painkiller. For all their praise they seemed less like shooters of old, even compared to console FPS campaigns, and more like a different kind of decline. They had nice-looking levels, but with little regard to actually fighting enemies. While the realistic ones kept a good hand on their level design in relation to enemy placement.
I'm not objecting to the fact that hitscanners exist, but rather that a lot of devs clearly completely fail to understand how to use them. Take Duke3D for example:
All non-hitscan enemies: a complete joke that are effortless to kill and only rarely manage to harm the player unless by a surprise hit in the back. This includes really unique, awesome looking enemies like Octabrain and Assault Commanders.
Enforcer: Takes off half your health before you look at them. Also has ZERO pain chance, despite pain chance being the obvious thing you should be giving hitscanners.
Battlelord: Takes off 3x your health in under a second, unless you are lucky and it uses its non-hitscan attack which is non-threatening
Every boss other than Battlelord: complete joke that you'll probably never take damage from.
It's like no-one spent even a modicum of time understanding how Doom worked or how to balance their own game. It seems like Doom was either an inspired or accidental genius on the first try. I can't think of a successor to Doom that has a similar level of every monster feeling balanced, unique, and impactful.
It's also noteworthy that very few games take the same route as Doom to difficulty: NO HP CHANGES. NO DPS CHANGES. JUST GIVE ME MORE SHIT TO KILL. Instead we see the lazy "just give everything 50% damage on easy and 200% damage on hard". Doom didn't do any of that except on nightmare, which was originally intended to be impossible. Indeed its a testament to how good Doom is designed that playing with Fast Monsters is fairly common nowadays and the gameplay holds up both on normal and fast monsters.