Panegyric - An Episode 1/Romero tribute map

[Graf Zahl]

unlike that damn hardcore stuff usually produced today

Indeed. With most of the stuff that gets made over at Doomworld I normally end up playing on HNTR with a few 'adjustments', mainly to counter the Revenant spam in modern maps and deactivating their homing missiles with a small Dehacked patch, sometimes I even use monster replacers to map Revenants to the Dark Imp from the old monster pack and the Arch Vile to the Revenant. This often massively increases playability of these hardcore mods.

[Enjay]

Thank you for the comments. From the feedback I have received, I'm happy that the difficulty, progression and the general decisions I made about the map turned out to be pretty close to what I wanted to achieve with it. I'm also very happy that other people are able to enjoy it like that too.

I'm pleased to hear that the secrets, for the most part, are quite easy to find. They are not essential for getting to the exit, but finding some of them (especially things like a nice early chaingun) can make a difference to how enjoyable the map is to play. I tried to pitch it so that a little bit of sharp-eyed navigation would give some nice rewards on a mostly "little but often" basis. The fact that most people seem to be finding most, but not all of them seems about right to me.

[Rachael]

I can see why this map is getting so many positive comments.

The only real critique that I have is that it is pretty sprawling. But in true Romero style - there's a lot of backtracking, too, so I guess that's intentional. Also some of the secrets were pretty challenging to find. I really like it - it still reminds me of waterlab in a lot of ways too, so it's definitely got the "mark of Enjay" on it.

[Enjay]

Thanks. Very much appreciated.

The sprawling nature was only semi-intentional. I knew what I wanted to do with the map, and the main elements that I wanted to include, but I had imagined that what I wanted would turn out smaller (my lack of available time seemed to be dictating that I couldn't make anything particularly big). However, by the time all the main elements were there, it was bigger than I initially expected. At the start, I certainly hadn't envisaged it as a map that would take 1 hour+ to complete.

Backtracking (or rather, looping round on yourself, I guess, rather than strictly backtracking a lot of the time) was always intended, as was ensuring a number of ways into/out of each major area was possible. That way, there are a number of paths that can be taken to visit everything (I'm still not sure what the optimal path is) and although you can end up passing through some of the same rooms a few times, you might do it from a different direction each time - depending on the route choices that you make. I guess the idea was meant to be "Oh, I'm back here again" rather than "I need to get back to that place again, I'd better retrace my steps". The obvious exception is the big room beyond the yellow doors with the to-ing and fro-ing to flip the switches. That's pure backtracking, but in a reasonably contained area.