The Monastery of Mount Cinburron

Some imaginative, fun setpieces in here!

Weapon/ammo loadout in the back 1/3-1/4 or so of the map is at "full power" (skill 2; only found 2 secrets) but honestly in a map with horde-style fights I'm pretty ready for that to be the case once I have a few hundred monsters under my belt.

Good stuff.
A mini-episode-worth of maps condensed into one level, full of nice architecture & suprisingly original & meaty arenas in different themes. This is one of those rare maps that allows you to go trigger happy with the rocket launcher for most of the map in a way that doesn't nerf the challenge, a rare joy.

Unlike Mazu I really loved the fiddly brushwork. Such a variety of environments and beautiful intricate shapes everywhere, but never in such a way that clashes with the id1 texture set. The secrets are delightful and the variety of themes is fantastic.

The gold key arena is really nice: the vertiginous height, the sniping points, the triggers… The format is heavily telegraphed in a delicious way. Agree with Mazu that the waves can become dull here: my instinct was to rush up to one of the four corners, at which point you're pretty risk-free for the duration. But eg the dark blue arena, I really enjoyed how long that went on — there's a feeling sooner or later you might run out of ammo or a new configuration will spawn and you'll be whittled down by it. Very neat use of buttons and spawns: it's easy to get sick of those really quick but they were used in volume very judiciously here.

One thing that rankled a bit was the scripted text, after hitting the series of switches in the antechamber to the room in screenshot cin2.png, referring to 'sewage works'. It's IMO always a bit off to have 1 unique flavoured location reference in-game without a body of text referring to others, but especially with the glorious variety of environments in the map, just the one reference to 'sewage' kind of spoils the mystique a bit.

All in all this is seriously impressive work. So many areas had really vivid personal charm, you get a real sense of wonder: combined with the delightful secrets, puzzling, and fresh & meaty combat, this is exceptional stuff. Look forward to seeing more of your work!
Very meaty gameplay map that asks you to perform well in encounters. Features a lot of lock in arenas which few of can feel quite repetitive as same monster balconies are being filled with exact same monsters on every wave. Final encounter was pretty nice rush though.

Some of the brushwork is a bit too detailed with weird 2 unit thick "texture work" and some stairs that are 4 units tall. Some areas are a bit too dark as well, so hard to see walls and enemies. Final note about brushwork is that some of the cave floors are hard to move or easy to get stuck in, that type of rocky floor never works well in Quake.

Secrets were mostly really creative and I liked them. However I ended up finding way too much cells instead of LG, which bummed me out a bit.

All in all really nice map if you like arena encounters and gameplay instead of insane visuals.
ExaByt
ExaByt
Yeah, the 'cell stash' secrets were kind of a holdover from a previous version of the map where the LG was in the final room and all the cell stashes would lead to 100 cells in the final area. I can probably replace at least two of these cell stashes with early LGs as that whole thing seems a tiny bit redundant now, in retrospect.

And ye, I'm planning to flatten out the cave floor a touch bit more, it is on a list alongside some other relatively minor changes (stuff I noticed post-release but couldn't really change due to having to go on a trip for a few days).