A large prototype-textured map with non-linear progression, slaughter fights, and trick jumping. Runs on the Copper mod, which is included. Originally intended as an entry for SM224.
Requires up-to-date Ironwail or vkQuake on Protocol 999. Quakespasm will encounter bugs.
Please play one difficulty lower than you normally would; hard and nightmare are intended to be impossible for the majority of players.
*****Despite my wall of issues this concept is sick, I like it a lot, and I hope to see others attempt something similar. Most of my complaints IMO are tuning issues for not-Nightmare and not-Comfy levels of being good at Quake!*****
(I have edited this post multiple times)
So I am going to jump onto the, "Normal might need some tuning," bandwagon. From my first attempt, I current possessed a super shotgun and a regular nailgun (with next to no ammo). And was looking at... this.
I had cleared the room around me, but it refilled while I was off elsewhere apparently. This room specifically had respawns multiple times. I ran into this again on my second run, but was able to clear out most of the fiends with the help of the ogre grenade spam and the crusher.
I like the "pick this knot apart" aspect of the map. Having to pick and choose what you engage with is interesting.
The secrets are great and useful (and occasionally "secret" while not being "helpful" ). Nothing shitty or lazy.
Health is a little tight but I can manage, falls into, "manage your pickups," territory.
However, having no ammo or weapons and being surrounded by bullet sponges usually turns into, "I run out of patience and go play something else." Little spurts of this is fine, having it happen constantly is tedious.
Some other things I've noticed:
- Having the center of the map constantly getting refilled with nerds on Normal feels poopy (comfy talked a little about this on her discord. Not having that felt boring and too safe for her in testing, but she's also a hell of a lot better at Quake than most people especially me).
- I don't know what I'm supposed to do in the encounter on the roof and die near instantly to bouncing shambles. I need to get more "stuff" before I attempt it again. Vores + Shambles + electric spinny thing for 2 keys? Not worth it IMO. I figured this out. It's rough but it's fine. You don't need to be able to see to do what you gotta do and it's a good "do this when you have the resources" fight (which doesn't need as much as you think, I had like 100 health, 100 armor, and middling ammo.
- The encounter behind the giant portal isn't complete-able with the ammunition provided if you go in low, though I only had a regular nailgun the first time so that contributed. A few extra rockets there would help on Normal. edit: I went back with the super nailgun and, with what I had and the pickups in there, had about 40 rockets and like 30 health and completed it. It's definitely a "plan for it" fight but that side of the map is *rough*)
- This encounter *might* be a bit much. There is cover but it is very far apart, extremely thin, and humped by Vores. The shamblers also spawn in the middle pretty much always in hitscan range. Maybe 1 or 2 less shamblers or a Pentagram? It IS optional so it's not a huge deal:
This is right after a bunch of turret stuff and 3 or 4 Shamblers. One of those I think is pre-encounter who got stuck on a sconse at the top of the stairs. I "could" have tediously shotgunned him from range while repeatedly dodging the turrets, but that's tedious. I'm curious how this encounter will go on my next attempt.
- A smidge, just a tiny amount of ammo in the back end of the maze would do wonders. A single box of shells by the armor pickup would do it. You're fine once you're on the wall but there's nothing the entire time you're below it and those stairs are rough.
- Fiends regularly fly into the stratosphere when they hit bottom of the stairs in the market area. This is intended to help them follow you up so there's unlikely a easy fix.
- I will also echo one of the reviewers in that I was confused on what progression was. I found a button I think is half of it but the other half is a mystery (though there's an area I didn't spend a lot of time in due to some shambler shamnanigans that might be it). I ended up sequence breaking and finishing the map by accident.
Speaking of which, I did finish and will be going back for round 3 on 1.1
During my second attempt I ran into a bug exclusive to Ironwail:
So "technically" you should be able to take the pentagram, grab the spicy dip secret, then jump in the fish pond and one shot the 300 freak'n fish in there with the thunderbolt without dieing. Ironwail has other ideas:
If you run into this, boot the map up in vkQuake just for this part as it's a port limit in Ironwail (thanks bmFbr from the mapping discord for letting me know)
*****Despite my wall of issues this concept is sick, I like it a lot, and I hope to see others attempt something similar. Most of my complaints IMO are tuning issues for not-Nightmare and not-Comfy levels of being good at Quake!*****
(I have edited this post multiple times)
So I am going to jump onto the, "Normal might need some tuning," bandwagon. From my first attempt, I current possessed a super shotgun and a regular nailgun (with next to no ammo). And was looking at... this.
I had cleared the room around me, but it refilled while I was off elsewhere apparently. This room specifically had respawns multiple times. I ran into this again on my second run, but was able to clear out most of the fiends with the help of the ogre grenade spam and the crusher.
I like the "pick this knot apart" aspect of the map. Having to pick and choose what you engage with is interesting.
The secrets are great and useful (and occasionally "secret" while not being "helpful" ). Nothing shitty or lazy.
Health is a little tight but I can manage, falls into, "manage your pickups," territory.
However, having no ammo or weapons and being surrounded by bullet sponges usually turns into, "I run out of patience and go play something else." Little spurts of this is fine, having it happen constantly is tedious.
Some other things I've noticed:
- Having the center of the map constantly getting refilled with nerds on Normal feels poopy (comfy talked a little about this on her discord. Not having that felt boring and too safe for her in testing, but she's also a hell of a lot better at Quake than most people especially me).
- I don't know what I'm supposed to do in the encounter on the roof and die near instantly to bouncing shambles. I need to get more "stuff" before I attempt it again. Vores + Shambles + electric spinny thing for 2 keys? Not worth it IMO. I figured this out. It's rough but it's fine. You don't need to be able to see to do what you gotta do and it's a good "do this when you have the resources" fight (which doesn't need as much as you think, I had like 100 health, 100 armor, and middling ammo.
- The encounter behind the giant portal isn't complete-able with the ammunition provided if you go in low, though I only had a regular nailgun the first time so that contributed. A few extra rockets there would help on Normal. edit: I went back with the super nailgun and, with what I had and the pickups in there, had about 40 rockets and like 30 health and completed it. It's definitely a "plan for it" fight but that side of the map is *rough*)
- This encounter *might* be a bit much. There is cover but it is very far apart, extremely thin, and humped by Vores. The shamblers also spawn in the middle pretty much always in hitscan range. Maybe 1 or 2 less shamblers or a Pentagram? It IS optional so it's not a huge deal:
This is right after a bunch of turret stuff and 3 or 4 Shamblers. One of those I think is pre-encounter who got stuck on a sconse at the top of the stairs. I "could" have tediously shotgunned him from range while repeatedly dodging the turrets, but that's tedious. I'm curious how this encounter will go on my next attempt.
- A smidge, just a tiny amount of ammo in the back end of the maze would do wonders. A single box of shells by the armor pickup would do it. You're fine once you're on the wall but there's nothing the entire time you're below it and those stairs are rough.
- Fiends regularly fly into the stratosphere when they hit bottom of the stairs in the market area. This is intended to help them follow you up so there's unlikely a easy fix.
- I will also echo one of the reviewers in that I was confused on what progression was. I found a button I think is half of it but the other half is a mystery (though there's an area I didn't spend a lot of time in due to some shambler shamnanigans that might be it). I ended up sequence breaking and finishing the map by accident.
Speaking of which, I did finish and will be going back for round 3 on 1.1
During my second attempt I ran into a bug exclusive to Ironwail:
So "technically" you should be able to take the pentagram, grab the spicy dip secret, then jump in the fish pond and one shot the 300 freak'n fish in there with the thunderbolt without dieing. Ironwail has other ideas:
If you run into this, boot the map up in vkQuake just for this part as it's a port limit in Ironwail (thanks bmFbr from the mapping discord for letting me know)
Ty for the writeup! Will keep fixing issues as they pop up. The "easiest" way of doing the red laser encounter is telefragging while dodging the lasers, but you can also just overpower it - I added in a teensy bit of ammo and a megahealth on normal in the last update though, which I hope will help a bit.
- Added messages to the two progression switches to make it clear what they do/what the player is looking for
- Added a verrrry tiny bit even more ammo/health on all difficulties
- Added little lights to all the silver key switches in the market. Thanks Koren!
- The trigger area in which the smooshy func_doors go up and down has been widened
- Added two unlockable shortcut teleporters in the market that lead to the ends of each wing
- Reduced the lightning barrier from two to one in the center ring fight, for added visual clarity and no invisible LG beam bug
- Added one extra health pack to the red laser fight on hard/nightmare
- Fixed a softlock near the surfing section. Thanks Fairweather!
- Added 1 key to the portal slaughter fight to make it a more viable early option
- Changed orientation of the megahealth hit switch secret under the stairs in case Joequake can run this in the future. Thanks Koren!
- Added a clip brush next to the 'fall from the sky' backpack secret to prevent people from getting stuck. Thanks again Koren!
- Added more resources on easy mode to problem areas. Thanks aoanla!
- Fixed a bug where the player could get stuck with the red armor in the jump/surf area
- Fixed a visual bug in the moving staircase room
- Added some more quads/health/ammo throughout on easy mode + 1 more easy mode pent in the final fight
I feel like I should write something in this thread, because I've not written a review of this map, despite spending more time on it than a lot of other maps I have.
The thing is, I'm not sure I know how to give this map a score.
On the one hand, I'm almost certainly never going to finish it, even on skill 0 (although maybe I should go back and have a look at v1.6), and my last save is sitting in a spot where I've tried more than 130 times to make a jump without success, which I feel kinda summarises a lot of the harder aspects of the design.
On the other hand, it's a beautiful map (despite/and because of/ the very limited palette and geometry), and it's packed to the gills with more interesting ideas or iterations on ideas from the best of Quake maps from the last 25. And Comfy poured a lot of intent, and soul into this thing (much as I can see she is with the it-will-be-done-if-only-because-it-reaches-some-fundamental-map-limit The Immortal Lock)...
...but, still, it's punitive.
So. I can't review this map because I can't reduce these thoughts to a single value from 0 to 5.
- Updated to Copper 1.30
- Fixed z fighting issues in a number of places
- Added slightly more ammo on all difficulties, and even more on easy
- Added an extra red armor on normal
- Added one pentagram to the final fight on normal
- Added two pentagrams to the final fight on easy, and made the central pentagram and red armor respawn every 30 seconds
- Added a couple func_walls on easy and a lesser amount on normal to make jumps easier
- Increased the size of the platforms leading to the jump...
I've played this map for hours and hours. Completed it four times, think I might be within range of a single segment run! Incredible work Comfy — this is a historic landmark in Quake mapping.
There is so much to say about it, and reviewing it always feels premature because there is so much depth to the experience, and the requisite gitting gud transforms the subject. I intend to publish a review that does it justice at some point, but I'm not there yet!
In the meantime, a couple of definite nits:
1. "I hope you fell from the sky" is one of the defining memorable moments of the map IMO but its poignancy is undermined by gnarly geometry: if you fudge landing trajectory slightly there's a significant chance you'll end up short of the backpack platform, in the crook of the slope. The angles here conspire to make movement dysphoric: you can climb up to get the backpack, but it feels hacky, frustrating, like maybe you shouldn't be able to and you're cheesing it. I strongly feel that this whole secret area should be one you either cleanly get, or you cleanly miss, and that the sharp convex angles should be taken out. Another permutation of this is if you screw further descent and end up stuck in the edges of the arch frontispiece: at this point you end up stuck in that glacial movement where you can't even jump and have to slowly crawl forward / outward in a straight line while wandering Scrags saunter down to snipe you. That part qualifies as a definite bug IMO.
2. In the crescent moon wing, there's a similar fall-from-sky rooftop exploration bit where you're encouraged to walk around the circumference ledge. On the opposite side to the final door unlock switch, if you look down, a platform is visible jutting from the bottom of the structure. I'm compelled to jump down onto it, but when I get there it quickly feels very unintentional, like these brushes might just have been an oversight. Maybe I'm missing a secret (I think my high score is 35), but if so the architecture of the thing could do with a bit of elaboration to emphasise its intentionality.
3. One of the main atrium rooftop corners features patrolling Enforcers, a waterfall of Fiends, and a crew of Shambles, and very nearby, a secret key. Every step up to that secret is positioned so that you can't overshoot — except the last one — and unlike all the other dexterous jumps on the map, missing this one is purely frustrating, and quickly saps immersive momentum. Ideally the steps would be arranged such that the last one is flush with both corner walls.
There's also a part which just baffles me on every run, and makes me wonder if I'm breaking the map or unwittingly cheesing a crucial challenge: after the underwater section and turret tunnel, you can turn left to face the awesome turret + laser arena challenge, or right to face … I dunno lol. I go up the stairs, run past the Shambler, see all the Spawns fly over my head, stand behind one of the pillars so the turrets can't hit me … and then I turn around and just hold down fire as the mobs slowly make their way back up the strip before being catapulted back to the bottom over and over without being able to ever touch me. There's a comically huge arrow here so maybe the whole setup is a joke that contrasts zero challenge with the devilishly difficult arena on the other side? But each time I play it I get the feeling that I must've skipped a line def or something because there's clearly a lot of stuff intentionally positioned and scripted here but … you just breezily walk to the end and turn around and nothing can hurt you, I don't know how else I would approach it. Maybe the monster jump volume should be shorter and closer to the edge, so that there's a slight risk? I dunno, idgi.
Also thanks for updating Copper within minutes of my bringing it up on Discord — this honestly does so much for general sense of progression & managing the final arena, it's like 1.30 was designed for this map.
Wanted to express sympathy with the others who mentioned the unfairness of the pattern of backtracking to would-be safe spaces only to find them repopulated with top tier mobs. I gave up on my first couple of playthroughs because of this — if you're retreating specifically because you're out of resources for the challenge ahead and need to restock at the market … and then you have to panic buy and spend everything only to end up worse off (or more likely: dead) than when you elected to turn back, it's mortifying lol. But ultimately I think the punishing brutality of it is a cohesive part of the experience, and I agree with the assessment that not having it would quickly fill the critical path with way too much dead time. Introducing extra shortcut teleporters would simultaneously introduce too much strain on the mental model of navigation (which is incredibly judicious) and undersell the necessity of experiencing the vast environment holistically. Doom slaughtermaps don't suffer a fraction as much from this dilemma because movement is so ridiculously fast in that game, but even the historic greats in that domain undermine themselves with too many shortcuts in necessarily vast places.
For the fishpond, if you jump in with the thunderbolt/pentagram and ironwail crashes when you try to one-shot the 300 fish in there it's a limit that's bumped in vkQuake and a couple other source ports, but not ironwail.
I generated an ironwail build from master with a fix from quakespasm/vkQuake for sm227's colossus map and attached it in that thread. That build also fixes the fish issue here.
spootnik submitted a new resource: SM227 - Thunderbolts and Lightning! - 9 electrifying maps with 3 miniature powerups! SM227 brings you Thunderbolts and Lightning! Thematically open to interpretation, the jam had just one rule: maps must include a Thunderbolt (aka Lightning Gun)! This...
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). Nothing shitty or lazy.
www.slipseer.com
